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Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

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Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I can guess which, and I implore you to do some reading from actual medical professionals and groups on this. And if you’re still opposed to it, the solution is regulation - not criminalization.

> I implore you to do some reading from actual medical professionals and groups on this.

Reading their comment charitably, one might want the trans youth to also get their information from actual medical professionals and groups rather than random internet strangers.

Analogously, sharing information about DIY at-home abortions with people on the internet is also dangerous as hell and will hurt people. In the world we currently live in it may be better than the alternative, but in a better world both of those are not pieces of information that anyone should need to find online.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it everyone else's responsibility to keep it out of the hands of 10 year olds by being 24/7 surveilled by the government, instead of the parents' responsibility to regulate internet access for their 10-year old? Not that gay erotica seems that harmful, even for a 10 year old. They probably don't seek it out as much as you thing they do. If they do, it is probably a beneficial step in their development given wh…

[flagged]

> I pray that you will find God and recover from whatever trauma you have been through.

This is not an acceptable comment on HN, as it's a disguised personal attack. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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> Fucking troll.

That comment was unacceptable and I replied to them to say so, but it's also not OK to comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to. If we want others to be better we need to be better ourselves.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#554
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. But there won't be. Because the ultimate purpose of laws like this isn't really to prevent minors from accessing porn. Ultimately, it's to 1) outlaw porn for everyone , because it's "sinful", and 2) outlaw disc…

You’re getting downvoted, likely because the people downvoting you dont realize that Project 2025 explicitly calls for the complete outlawing of pornography and the imprisonment of anyone who produces it. They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.

Here's the quote about their plans for transfolk:

> Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate "transgender ideology" to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself - effectively erasing transgender identity from the U.S.

Source: https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/project-2025-lgbtq-rights...

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really hasn’t and there’s absolutely no evidence to support this at all

[flagged]

I imagine they were referring to the behavior of cis men

Secondly, it's not clear which group you're bigoted over—trans folks or drag queens

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#559
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a thread on reddit asking the other day what about the modern world bothers you the most I actually considered this question and after thinking about it, despite everything going on, I think it boils down to lack of privacy as my biggest gripe in the modern world It’s such a tough concept to explain to the if you don’t have anything to hide crowd, but if someone wants to disappear, I don’t care if for good…

I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together. Its nice to have a little space, and to have your own thoughts and opinions, but not at the expense of civilisation. People should not be able to use privacy to evade responsibility or debts. We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility. Final thought is that this is precisely why government and politics is not a…

> We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.

Sure, but is this a measure that appropriately balances it?

I think the traditional view is that the balance should be: your rights end where they start stepping on another person's rights.

We aren't really talking about someone else being harmed, we are talking about (at worst) someone harming themselves. There is no other person being harmed.

On the other hand, porn habits are a great way to blackmail people. When the identity data gets leaked, it will very easily ruin lives.

From a balance perspective, i don't really think it follows that the benefits are worth the potential harms. I think civilization is best preserved by not doing this.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#560
post #82

Others have said this, I'm sure, but this will move past porn _quickly_. Once there is agreed-up age verification for pornography, much of the professional internet will require identity verification to do _anything_. This is one of the bigger nails in the coffin for the free internet, and this true whether or not you're happy with all the pornography out there.

And honestly, with the advent of AI spam everywhere, I'd be quite happy to visit a version of the internet where everyone is a certified real person

GAN style training is only going to get cheaper and easier. Detection will collapse to noise. Any ID runes will be mishandled and the abuse will fly under the radar. Only the space of problems where AI fundamentally can't be used, such as being at a live event, will be meaningfully resistant to AI.

Another way for it all to unfold is maybe 98% of online discourse is useless in a few years. Maybe it's useless today, but we just didn't have the tools to make it obvious by both generating and detecting it. Instead of AI filtering to weed out AI, a more likely outcome is AI filtering to weed out bad humans and our own worst contributions. Filter out incessant retorting from keyboard warriors. Analyze for obviously inconsistent deduction. Treat logical and factual mistakes like typos. Maybe AI takes us to a world where humans give up on the 97% and only 1% that is useless today gets through. The internet's top 2% is a different internet. It is the only internet that will be valuable for training data to identify and replace the 1% and converge onto the spaces that AI can't touch.

People will have to search for interactions that can't be imitated and have enough value to make it through filters. We will have to literally touch grass. All the time. Interactions that don't affect the grass we touch will vanish from the space of social media and web 2.0 services that have any reason to operate whatsoever. Heat death of the internet has a blast radius, and much of what humans occupy themselves with will turn out to be within that blast radius.

A lot of people will by definition be disappointed that the middle standard deviation of thought on any topic no longer adds anything. At least at first. There used to be a time when the only person you heard on the radio had to be somewhat better than average to be heard. We will return to that kind of media because the value of not having any expertise or first-hand experience will drop to such an immeasurable low that those voices no longer participate or appear to those using filters. Entire swaths of completely replaceable, completely redundant online "community" will just wither to dust, giving us time to touch the grass, hone the 2%, and make sense of other's 2%.

Callers on radio shows used to be interesting because people could have a tiny window into how wildly incorrect and unintelligent some people are. Pre-internet media was dominated by people who were likely slightly above average. Radio callers were something like misery porn or regular-people porn. You could sometimes hear someone with such an awful take that it made you realize that you are not in the bottom 10%. The internet has given us radio callers, all the time, all of them. They flooded Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. They trend and upvote themselves. They make YouTube channels where they talk into a camera with higher quality than commercial rigs from 2005. There is a GDP for stupidity that never existed except as the novelty object of a more legitimate channel. When we "democratized" media, it wasn't exclusively allowing in thoughts and opinions that were higher quality than "mainstream".

The frightening conclusion is possibly that we are living in a kind of heat death now. It's not the AIs that are scary. Its the humans we have platformed. The bait posts on Instagram will be out-competed. Low quality hot takes will be out-competed. Repetitive and useless comments on text forums will be out-competed. Advertising revenue, which is dependent on the idea that you are engaging with someone who will actually care about your product, will be completely disrupted. The entire machine that creates, monetizes, and foments utterly useless information flows in order to harness some of the energy will be wrecked, redundant, shut down.

Right now, people are correct that today's AI is on an adoption curve that would see more AI spam if tomorrow's AI isn't poised to filter out not just spam but a great mass of low-value human-created content. However, when we move to suppress "low quality slop" we will increasingly be filtering out low-quality humans. When making the slop higher quality so that it flies under the radar, we will be increasingly replacing and out-competing the low-quality content of the low-quality human. What remains will be of a very high deductive consistency. Anything that can be polished to a point will be. Only new information outside the reach of the AI and images of distant stars will be beyond the grasp of this convergence.

All of this is to say that the version of the internet where AI is the primary nexus of interaction via inbound and outbound filtering and generation might be the good internet we think we can have if we enact some totalitarian ID scheme to fight against slop that is currently replacing what the bottom 10% of the internet readily consumes anyway.

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