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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

#561
post #117
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ADA compliant bathroom is almost 200sqft. And they will need at least 2 of them. So now that 1000sqft is now 600sqft. And they still need a place to store and process books, reading rooms, etc.

Also there's a big difference between a general "children's room" and strictly enforced "adults only" and "for children" section, with risk of costly lawsuits if some extremist parent thinks the kid saw something "obscene". My library had a children's section and even some toys, but I could walk in and go anywhere. Since I'm not American I don't have a good idea of what 1024 sq feet is: it's about 95m². I laughed out…

I've lived in several houses that had 2 bedrooms, a bathroom (with tub/shower), a kitchen, and laundry closet that were 8-900 sq ft, so to me it seems profoundly unserious to suggest you can't fit a small adult only room (think more like a walk in closet) in that space.

Ignoring that, they don't even need a room. They just can't let kids access it. A locked armoire near the checkout ought to suffice.

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

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting argument. But I think cancel culture often has more in common with a lynch mob than a boycott.

A lynch mob is a boycott, especially when they aren't lynching. Lynch mob used to mean something literally, when people did lynching. Now it just means "a bunch of people don't like someone and don't financially support them". That's a boycott.

People still get actually lynched.

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

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo. I like this point. I feel like the tech community just figured politicians would forget about the issue. Instead of working together to develop a solution.

Are you assuming the "tech community" doesn't have the right to argue this on morality and thus refuse to provide technical means ?

No. The tech community absolutely has the right to refuse to provide technical means and argue any views they want.

However we're seeing what happens next. Politicians write laws anyway forcing the tech community to do what they want.

I am just saying that in hindsight a bit of cooperation may have resulted in a less privacy invasive solution. I guess with the supreme court ruling it's too late now. The politicians have already won.

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

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more people you give your personal information to, the less personal it becomes. The servers storing this information have been hacked in the past and it will happen again in the future. The fewer places your ID lives, the lower the risk of it leaking. Even if you don’t view the data as sensitive, it still associates a person with a website. Depending on the site, that can have negative ramifications in a person’…

Where I'm from we sorted this out with laws. It's not hard to figure out if one of your workers are associating with a union, but you're not allowed to treat them differently based on that. Laws make sure you don't, even though you technically could.

The tricky part is proving you’re being treated differently and that’s the reason why. Trying to legislate human behavior at that level doesn’t seem to work well.

My company has rules against retaliation. Good luck proving that’s the reason you didn’t get promoted, or were left off of a project. People get left off projects and don’t get promoted all the time. Keeping your job because the company is legally obligated to sounds like an uncomfortable working environment.

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

#565
Unfortunately, these laws are working exactly as intended. If they discourage all forms of sexually-explicit material, the laws are working as intended. They are not really about "protecting the children." They use that as an excuse to make it too legally risky to publish pornographic/sexual material under any circumstances.

If I was a publisher, would I trust an age-verification system to protect me from 15 years in prison or an "investigation" that results in nothing but destroying my life? Nope. So eventually the legitimate website operators just give up.

Or how about the ISP who now simply refuses to do business with any website that publishes sexual material just to avoid legal consequences for themselves?

Working as intended.

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

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they are! but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one. For example: a) you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but b) it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes and c) Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents Maybe something around only collecting minimal data, too. Some of the first eager cust…

> but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one. If the people writing the law cared about privacy they wouldn't have passed that one, and anybody who does would be repealing it rather than trying to find the best shade of lipstick for the pig. > Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents This is the part you don't need a law in order to do because the user can choos…

I figured I’d get this response, but:

I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA. Consumer companies take COPPA seriously.

You absolutely cannot control what companies do with data, so you want to prevent its collection in the first place – but you can penalize them when they do something wrong, which does influence their beyavior. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the GDPR, but to say it had no effect would be an odd claim.

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

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available? The mode for treating trans kids is puberty blockers until they’re 18 and then they can choose their own treatment - but that pathway is being blocked by more and more laws and fear mongering about kids being transitioned against their will

"Transitioned against their will" is a very crude way of articulating the tradeoffs of prescribing puberty blockers. The core issue at hand is that absent puberty blockers, somewhere between 60-80% do not persist with a cross-sex gender identity after going through their natal puberty. Psychologists attempted to predict which patients would persist in a cross sex gender identity and which would not, but they were nev…

It seems like you're referring to a specific study, could you link it?

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

#568
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flip it on its head. An age verification requirement might stop your 12-year-old from accessing a porn site headquartered or hosted in the US, but it will do nothing to keep your kid from finding porn on any of the thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of websites hosted in various other countries who don't care about this sort of thing. These sites are (or will be, if US-based sites become inaccessible) just as easy…

Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis. Similarly the only expect…

Blocking every country outside the US is simply admitting failure here.

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

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be wrong there. While the majority does not oppose homosexual relationships they are against affirmative transgender treatments for minors.

> transgender treatments The grandparent post didn't say "transgender treatments" they said "transgender issues." Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?

This isn't an "I believe..." / "Do you believe..." kind of issue though. This is "Will the American State and Federal government impose an increasingly stringent moral compass on the wider internet, over time"

Which... the VISA-Mastercard duopoly, backed by American soft power and with an American moral compass, already rather proves that point for anyone that's ever tried to pay for erotica outside the mainstream

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