Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online • Hacker News Board

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

#711

Post by rocqua » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 6:53 AM UTC

cmilton wrote: post #334

VBprogrammer wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slippery slope from here to banning under 18s looking at websites discussing suicidal thoughts, transgender issues, homosexually and onto anything some group of middle age mothers decide isn't appropriate seems dangerously anti-fallacitical.

While I completely understand the slippery slope concept, we ban all kinds of things for under 18s based on morals. Why couldn't these be any different? How else does a society decide as a whole what they are for or against. Obviously, there should be limits.

Those bans are leaky, and physical. They aren't censorship, and (almost?) Exclusively ban services or sale of goods to underage people. They are also costly to implement, and require a lot of state effort to enforce.

These digital checks, if done "right". Are cheap to implement, and hard to get around. They don't easily let adults allow a kid to do it anyway. And a government can trivially check if a whole swath of businesses is implementating it.

That last point makes it very easy for governments to use this for widespread ideological interventions. With very little option for others to push back, because few people are involved in enforcement.

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

#712

Post by dcow » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 6:54 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #549

mlyle wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most age verification ranges from silly to chilling to speech. But I don’t think we can somehow punt these problems to the quiz from the beginning of Leisure Suit Larry (which never stopped 10 year old me).

Requiring someone to have a government ID isn't anywhere near 100% effective because people will just borrow one from dad's wallet while he's not looking or use a device already signed in as someone else or the high school freshmen will get one from the high school seniors etc. If we're admitting solutions that aren't 100% effective, why can't we admit solutions that aren't 100% effective but are much better at prese…

Well this time around the phone will ask the person presenting an ID for biometrics before allowing them to use Dad’s ID. We are improving. There is no perfect solution; we don’t live in a perfect world. Surely we shouldn’t give up and regulate nothing…

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

#713

Post by intended » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 6:57 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #293

kelnos wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I think accusing conservatives of hypocrisy is blase and yesterday's news. Of course conservatives are hypocrites. All they care about are their end goals, and they will say and do whatever they need to say and do in order to achieve them. One of those goals involves enshrining Christian values into law. Christian values themselves are often hypocritical and contradictory. And inconsistent: ask 10 Chris…

[flagged]

Sadly hammering it home means nothing - this is an idea which belongs to a news media environment where something like the fairness doctrine and bi-partisanship existed.

On The Right of the media economy, you surface the best narratives, and there are no penalties for being inaccurate. Because everything is opinion and rhetorical tricks, saying “It’s terrible what happened in this Dem state. Here’s how the dems caused it” and then being able to say “we never said that dems were monsters”, while platforming fringe theories like pizza gate.

If you go against the narrative you just dont get airtime and attention - meaning you get no revenue or political power. Worse, you might get primaried.

Hammering the truth means nothing, because you would only be selling it back to the center and the left.

The right is interested in facts, only to the point that they support their goals. It’s a protected market.

You can’t really outcompete rackets, but you can’t really restrict speech without getting hit by free speech arguments.

It’s a problem worth solving though, and its a problem worth learning about.

One thing that seems to work isn’t counter speech, its angry speech. It’s not the pro-vax group that gets credence vs the anti-vaxxers, it’s the anti-anti-vaxxers who do it.

I wish people had better ideas, but its hard to even realize the specifics of the market failure.

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

#714

Post by scns » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 6:58 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #460

yndoendo wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Nope. Phyllis Schlafly's son Andrew (Phyllis is the woman who more or less single handedly ensured the ERA didn't pass, persuading American women that somehow they didn't even want equality) ran (still runs maybe?) a web site where among other things he "re-translates" the Bible so that e.g. Jesus's preaching is "Properly" translated to mean whatever it is suits his worldview. Religion is about believing things you h…

> Phyllis is the woman who more or less single handedly ensured the ERA didn't pass, persuading American women that somehow they didn't even want equality

There is a series on Disney+ about this, "Mrs America". Worth watching.

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

#715

Post by ninjin » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 7:00 AM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #622

Nasrudith wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not better for children to grow up in a fucking Orwellian dystopia just because you have hang-ups about sex.

I’m less concerned about porn/sex and more concerned about smartphone and social media usage.

But why fall back on the state to police every website and service? Not to mention that the Internet is wider than any jurisdiction you can hope to achieve.

Plenty of devices have parental controls and it is your duty as a parent to look into this and understand the consequences when you hand a device to your child that allows them to consume a global diet of media and connects them to a majority of the global populous. It is not unreasonable to expect device/software manufacturers to provide the power to parents to do this and we already have had the free market provide options for this for decades.

To me, it is not any different than to expect a parent to consider the potential consequences of children playing in the streets, etc. and take action. Thus, to me, the people pushing this kind of legislation are either sloppy thinkers or dishonest in what aims they hope to achieve.

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

#716

Post by sigwinch » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 7:01 AM UTC

john01dav wrote: post #676

al_borland wrote: post #10

All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID? 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. I don’t want to give this data, and…

I'm concerned that such validation would need to be proprietary and locked down with some sort of user hostile TPM-like-thing in order to be effective. If this wasn't the case, then anyone could fork the foss tool and create a bypass. The average child won't do this, but a few will and some adults probably will over anti DRM principles and then it's published and widely available.

These are ideological litigious fanatics among a much bigger herd of worried parents. They’ll attack any bypass tool and risk degrading the features of normal stuff like browsers and url parser libraries; totally ineffective at solving the problem but doing something in the eyes of unsophisticated constituents.

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

#717

Post by chme » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 7:03 AM UTC

conradev wrote: post #290

al_borland wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting, but I’d like to go a step further. I watched the first quarter of the video on where they go over how it works. The site requests data from your ID and they get that data. The site chooses which data it needs and if it will store it or it or not. Sites these days have a tendency to ask for more than what they need, and to store it for profiling purposes. The user can deny the request, but then ca…

The spec is being implemented by Apple, who is sensitive to privacy issues. The intent of the ISO spec is to allow you to request fine-grained data, like birth year only, but if you read the W3C standard, they explicitly call out privacy as a complex thing that maybe should be regulated. The spec spells out the complexity: some ID verification processes actually need a lot of info! But some, like an alcohol age check…

> The spec is being implemented by Apple, who is sensitive to privacy issues.

I generally agree with your points, but I wouldn't trust Apple, or any publicly traded company, to have any kind of ethics. Just because their incentive to make as much profit as possible, leads to them trying to differentiate themselves from other companies, and thus they choose to temporarily align with privacy concerns doesn't mean they will not compromise on them, if they see better profits elsewhere.

I rather have privacy enforcing regulations like the GDPR or policies that go even further, than relying on publicly traded companies to protect their users.

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

#718

Post by rocqua » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 7:06 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #680

al_borland wrote: post #10

All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID? 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. I don’t want to give this data, and…

By a similar argument, why should stores check id's when selling alcohol or cigarettes? Raising kids is not their job either. The answer is because we live in a society. Society is about families, not just adults. Sure, raising kids is primarily the job of the parents, but everyone helps. Sometimes that results in a bit of inconvenience for businesses. Excluding kids from businesses that are adult-only isn't very kid…

The issue is that currently, adding restrictions to what minors can do is expensive, both economically, and politically. It requires the cooperation of a lot of non-government appointed people, and many of them could (locally) sabotage the restrictions.

This limits the restrictions to those with incredibly broad support. Keeping a lot of agency with families on how to raise their children.

Digital age verification, if implemented well, is easy to enact, and hard to sabotage without being noticed. That enables restrictions that 49% of people disagree with. Heck, it enables restrictions that 49% of Congress disagrees with. That could be 60% of people disagreeing.

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

#719

Post by rocqua » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 7:09 AM UTC

sigwinch wrote: post #650

Bender wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PICS and ICRA were not adopted by many due to complexity. RTA [1][2] is a more generic header that can be used on any adult site or site that allows user contributed content and is easier to implement. There needs to be a law that requires clients to look for this header if parental controls are enabled. Not perfect, nothing is. Teens will easily get around it but most small children will not which should be the spir…

> There needs to be a law that requires clients to look for this header if parental controls are enabled Would that require MiTM at the network level? Or, is there a custom X.509 RTA that would tell clients not to accept the certificate?

Put it in the parental controls feature of the browser. Parents have to turn it on. Parents get to decide if their kids can watch porn. The government helps parents enforce the rules parents want.

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

#720

Post by sigwinch » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 7:13 AM UTC

dcow wrote: post #706

al_borland wrote: post #10

All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID? 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. I don’t want to give this data, and…

> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. (1) Without addressing the general statement, specifically this isn't new. You’ve historically not been allowed to buy pornography or cigarettes or alcohol without age verification or watch obscene content between the nightly news runs. I don't see this specifically as parents wanting the government to raise their kids at all. It’s peop…

1) it doesn’t go as far back as you think. Only within my lifetime did the drinking age settle on 21. The Feds couldn’t do it directly, so they hacked highway funds. So that’s a bad example when porno has changed so much. What we’re risking here is parents who haven’t tried any solutions being convinced that litigation is the only way.

2+3. A simple cookie with a birth year ought to work. Why should every site worry about South Dakota’s definitions when checking a cookie seems reasonable effort. Circumvention of that is already fraud.