Can a state now require you to verify your age and identity to read a newspaper they don't like?
> Can a state now require you to verify your age and identity to read a newspaper they don't like?
Most states have laws in place that regulate the sale and distribution of pornography and other "obscene" materials. This has been true for a long, long time. So yes, states have had the ability to require you to show ID to get a "newspaper" they don't like, assuming that newspaper is actually just pornography/obscenity. I don't think most people would argue Pornhub are news sites though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
. Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
. Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Clearly the whole of Wikipedia is not trying to appeal to purient interests of the average person. I don't think much of the content of Wikipedia is describing sexual content in a patently offensive way, and I'd argue it has serious political and scientific value.
You don't just need "someone". You'll find "someone" say anything, including that the Earth is flat, its 40,000 years old, and we're controlled by lizard people. The standard isn't "someone". You'll find someone who claims a table of ICD codes or a stop sign appeals to their prurient interest and is sexual in nature.
You'd need "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" to say that under the Miller test and have the court/a jury to agree. Not just any person applying any standard.
No, you just need the court to agree, you don't need to actually get the (non-existent, fictional abstraction) of “the average person” to say anything, you just need a judge to believe that.
"Contemporary community standards" and "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" are so vague as to be useless. Whose community? Which standards? How many people have to be offended by something? How many people have to find value in it for it to be serious?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity
> In 1957, two associates of acclaimed poet Allen Ginsberg were arrested and jailed for selling his book "Howl and Other Poems" to undercover police officers at a beatnik bookstore in San Francisco. Eventually the California Supreme Court declared the literature to be of "redeeming social value" and therefore not classifiable as "obscene". Because the poem "Howl" contains pornographic slang and overt references to drugs and homosexuality, the poem was (and is) frequently censored and confiscated; however, it remains a landmark case.
The Simpsons was considered concerningly off-color in the 1990s; I remember quite a bit of pearl clutching about it, to the point of them getting into a bit of a feud with George and Barbara Bush. Now it's positive family values TV of "serious artistic value".
Most of what's on Pornhub is considered pornography but not obscenity currently, but that could change on a dime.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-297_4f14.pdf
A more limited context of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of...
> The addressee of postal mail has unreviewable discretion to decide whether to receive further material from a particular sender, and a vendor does not have a constitutional right to send unwanted material to an unreceptive addressee.
It's not necessarily that the receiver has the sole right to determine if the material is pornographic or whatever, its that the receiver of mail has the right to decide to no longer receive material and that the sender doesn't have a right to force its delivery through the mail.
The form to prevent someone from sending you mail you don't want is a PS Form 1500. This form starts off saying:
> If you are receiving unwanted sexually oriented advertisements coming through the mail to your home or business
But, you can still just file it against say a roofer sending you unwanted advertising or whatever. The USPS isn't allowed to challenge your personal determination that you're receiving unwated sexually oriented advertisements. Maybe you personally find roofers sexy and are trying to avoid being around roofers and having their services offered at your home. USPS isn't allowed to judge.
The published plan from the heritage foundation includes a few more steps: (1) redefine obscenity to include pornography, effectively banning it via interstate commerce laws (2) extend this to anything that could “be harmful to minors”, which will certainly include information about groups they don’t like, starting with LGBTQ+.
(Never mind the fact that other recent anti-LGBTQ rulings and policies have heavily implied as much, but I don't think they've been quite so explicit. Yet.)
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/27/nx-s1-5430355/scotus-opt-out-...
> 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.
https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/project-2025-lgbtq-rights...
Seems annoying but not impossible to do.
Edit: I am happy to build a cat pic to porn ratio audit company if anyone is interested. I want to participate in the funniest regulatory process this will create
No. That alone is highly unlikely to prevent performative lawsuits from state attorney generals. Especially (but not limited to) AGs who are intent on satisfying their culture war kink.
Ezekiel 23:20 isn't, though, of course.
Texas certainly could've written the law more narrowly, and chose not to. Small government for me, big brother for thee.
This decision is ultimately about the end of the last vestiges of anonymity on the internet, unfortunately.
[edit] and that doesn't just mean “okay jimbob is a dirty dirty boy.” It’s also a handy way to create a registry of whatever the handlers think is the target perversion du jour.
[edit][edit] … and it's not even the government who's keeping that database, it's pornographers. Regardless of your political leanings or trust in the gov't, can you imagine a less trustworthy party to hand off your ID to? mein gott
But since they've moved most ticket purchases online it's very likely they do maintain such a database now, and monetize an "anonymized" version of the data.
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/pdf/HB01181F....
Edit: Key bit there, the commercial entity or third party verification “may not retain any identifying information of the individual”.
Not many people pay in cash (though, for now, it's still possible). 99.9% of people carry a tracking device in their pocket, and it's a junior engineer level task to correlate transaction data to an ID via any number of methods.
So while it's not "built in" at a movie theater it's child's play to figure out who's watching what, when. Effectively, it's the same thing as requiring an ID to watch porn in that light. Similarly Google has shown (repeatedly) it's absolutely trivial to figure out who a person is via tracking. Then, it's absolutely trivial to determine a person and their porn preferences.
I can see both sides. The parents are ultimately responsible for their child's media consumption. But, a company also has a duty to ensure they're not violating any rules. The "Are you over 18" pop ups are there for legal reasons. I think that this ruling simply codifies what has already existed and provides a way to make it harder to bypass (without a VPN).
* It crosses state boundaries
* It's not law to show ID to get into R rated movies
If an individual theater wants to do it, sure, but I don't agree with the state requiring it.
There's something sort of hypocritical about wanting to give parents more control over decisions about their children while simultaneously taking it away.
If I have a mature child who wants to see an acclaimed art film that is R rated for whatever reason, why shouldn't I be able to make that decision? What's the next step? Verification on blu-ray players?
The law doesn't, in most places, require theaters to demand or log ID (it sometimes requires them to deny admission to people under 18 without parent or guardian permission, and in some places doesn't even do that, with any restrictive policy being a matter of theater policy following private industry group recommendations), and they mostly don't even do the former unless the patron appears, to the ticket seller, to be underage (and even then, IME, its iffy, probably because while that's generally theater policy, the ticket sellers aren't minimum wage earners, likely teens themselves, and not closely supervised.)
I don't know that I've ever actually been carded at a theater.
Edit: really confused as to why this simple statement is flagged
I do think there are legitimate reasons to not like the bill, but what you said is classic slippery slope
To be clear, I support all of those things, but the point I'm making is that saying it's a slippery slope is a bad argument because A) the next steps are often based on opinion and not fact and B) what one person sees as a slippery slope another person sees as progress and growth.
I'm not arguing in favor of this Texas bill (I have pretty mixed feelings about it honestly). I'm just saying the argument the first person made is a bad argument.
I also think it’s somewhat ironic that my simple statement that started this conversation has been flagged. Free speech really is done in the US.
"“Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
--Project 2025
We are going to "think of the children" ourselves into needing to give every site our ID, or more, just to use the internet.
And it also just opens the possibility for centralized ID verification services being breached and tieing identities to their more personal vices, its only a matter of time till a ID services gets exploited and a bunch of peoples identities and the sites they use are exploited.
When I hosted a Minecraft server, I routinely got DDoS'd by gradeschoolers. I have little doubt they could be tunneling thru a VPN in short order - because they did that too.
These were "normie" kids, not future hackers.
I just remembered my home IP address by heart to RDP back home. Another one of us hosted a free website somewhere with a spare copy of Ultrasurf to get around the filters in the first place.
In general any legal argument of the form: People will break the law, so there is no point in the law, is bullshit. Imagine any law and you will see how ridiculous it is.
"Making stealing with guns is illegal, people will use facemasks and file gun identifiers" "Adding security features to money is pointless, counterfeiters can always " "Adding locks to doors is pointless, if an thief wants to they will picklock it or copy your key" "making alcohol illegal is pointless, kids can present fake ids or ask their parents..." murder illegal is pointless
EDIT: And by comparison, most societies get along fine with very limited access to firearms. Only the most repressive manage to enforce bans on unpermitted forms of drugs or sex.
If I give my kid a general purpose computer with unsupervised access, I better be on top of that, especially if your kid is over. It's dangerous.
We are the adults here, we have to control the children for their own good, and frankly for our own good too whether said children belong to us or not. And we sure can, and we have always done so without eliminating vice, we just agree to exclude the children and punish any adult who breaks this pact. If we can't even control the children, we must be the most incapable idiot generations of all human history.
We do not need to give children access to the internet. There will be nothing of value to children published that can't be whitelisted inside of a week, and the delay of a week won't matter.
Conversely, we cannot afford to allow a comprehensive internet censorship regime for the adult public. It's too important for civil society to survive that every adult have unrestricted read and publish rights with every other adult. Therefore, the only reasonable move is to kick the children off of it.
The government here is asking porn companies to share the real identities with them (else age verification is not effective - you have to validate it against something). This will expand out to sites about abortion, contraception, gay advocacy, and trans advocacy. There's no way it won't.
This is a concerted attempt to get around limitations on restricting free speech by the one cool trick of asking for ID first.
Heeeeeeey, we could be asking for ID for any reason, it's definitely not to track you!/s
But if erotic choking is consensual amongst two adults, what exactly is the issue?
Are we to start policing how people enjoy fucking?
But that is not what the linked article says. The article does point out that there are risks with the practice, but if consensual it is only a matter of safety and education, not abuse.
How is this in anyway related to what I said?
Were you attempting to reply to someone else?
No child was ever damaged from getting a glimpse of a very normal adult human interaction. When young people are old enough to be curious about this (e.g. they're looking to access spicy content), the correct approach IMO would be an open dialogue from their parents and extensive education/access to age-adapted materials in school. There is nothing dirty, shameful or obscene about sex, it's a natural process. It's also not scary, and it can be practiced safely and responsibly.
I don't understand how this makes sense.
I know it's unlikely to happen because of America's (misguided IMO) extreme distaste for digital government ID, but it seems like the current solution (people uploading pictures of their driver's license to porn websites) is worse in every possible way.
edit to add more details, since I'm thinking it through: the token would need to include the issue date and be signed obviously, and would be ephemeral. Properly implemented, it could be done entirely in the browser (Firefox would have a "age verification provider" pull-down) in way that's transparent to the user and both private and secure. And since you have to be 18 to get a credit card, essentially any service you pay for with a credit card in your own name ought to be able to attest your age, even if it hasn't done KYC or scanned a government ID.
1. Government has private/public key or similar for "Is above 18/21/legal age" 2. Site generates random data 3. Sends data to user 4. User somehow sends the data to government for signing (be it via some login or whatever) 5. User gets signed data back and sends it to the site 6. Site verifies the data against the public key
I guess the signing part could be done with all sorts of different methods, but the site would still need to be able to somehow figure out how it was signed and get the appropriate public key for it.
The main problem I see is that this isn't exactly stateless, so you do need some form of (semi-)persistent identifier on the server side.
You can have a digital ID that you store in a wallet. You can then present the credential and selectively disclose information.
There's a bunch of W3C specs and RFCs around this.
1. Not inform the authentication provider about which websites you're visiting.
2. Not inform the websites about your meat space identity.
It should be assumed (for the purpose of evaluating if a system is actually secure) that they both are, and are working together.
Validation can be done cryptographically so that assertions (like age) can be verified by one party, and consumed by another party, without either of those parties being able to tie the combination together, even if they are actively cooperating.
3. Not allow someone who gets both (1) a log of authentication provider transactions, including timestamps, who was being verified, and whatever output the provider generated, and (2) a log of the website's age checks including timestamps, website accounts, and whatever proof was provided to match them up to associate real IDs from the authentication provider with website account IDs.
To make this work I think any such system will need to be so widely used that there are hundreds or thousands of verifications happening every second at each authentication provider and typical users get verified many times a day, and there should probably be some random delays introduced by the user's computer.
Otherwise it could be too easy to unmask people by looking at verification timing. If you are trying to unmask a user who verified through provider P and P only did a verification for one person that day it is very likely that is the person you are trying to unmask.
Wrt login.gov, as someone who has contracted with fedgov and knows some former 18f people, absolutely excellent humans and technologists- their work notwithstanding, Musk's criminal rampage through fedgov databases and US SC complacence with same has turned me into a rabid libertarian. Cities and states are set up to- and should be funded to- provide individual constituent service. Fedgov is just not.
https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/facebooks...
This particular story seems moot to the worry porn viewers would have of Facebook ratting them out to law enforcement.
We can evaluate this by considering the results of DNS blocking ThePirateBay.
ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=How+effective+was+dns+blocking+the...
[Justice] Thomas’s invention of “partially protected” speech,
that somehow means you can burden those for which it
is protected, is particularly insidious because
it’s infinitely expandable. Any time the government wants
to burden speech, it can simply argue that the burden is built
into the right itself—making First Amendment protection
vanish exactly when it’s needed most.
This isn’t constitutional interpretation;
it’s constitutional gerrymandering.
The real dangers aren’t dedicated porn sites, but poorly managed social media sites. You can’t just block the domain.
In many cases, the bad material comes from peers. Kids have always talked about “bad” things, but the internet super charges it.
I generally support these efforts, but I’m also very cynical they help.
Politicians focus on the problems they control, like rules for sites that rigorously follow the laws and fit in a clear category. They care far less about the grey areas where the most harm is often done.
I think this is a good thing. I’d feel a lot better if these efforts were combined with rigorous privacy protections.
For example, third party identity verification services should be civilly liable for privacy breeches, and required to carry insurance to meet the obligations.
1. Filtering at the DNS level will never be enough. You'll always need to have the capability for the browser or user agent to do filtering, since the user agent has the context to know the full URI as well as other things needed for filtering. The OS admin (parent, school IT admin etc) will need to be able to block all user agents except the ones that have the reporting and filtering capabilities tuned to the admin's requirements. This is the direction Windows is heading, but it is very rough.
2. I wonder if more domains could do what Google, Bing, Youtube etc do and permit a safe version to be requested at the DNS level. I personally would like to be able to do so with Reddit, Twitter and more.
Ok, there are a few worse ones. But it's pretty bad.
There will be managed whitelists that your kids can access, which sites must apply for and demonstrate compliance with the policy of, and you will be able to trust, so that you or other guardians in your family don't have to manage the minutia, which is effectively impossible for you to handle.
And your children will be able to access only these, and any other exception that you personally whitelist them to have.
And we other adults won't let kids, yours or anyone else's, have open access through us as proxies, just as we won't buy them cigarettes or alcohol if they asked us, because we all agree doing so is wrong. And we will have punishments for those who break this rule, just like we have had for generations for pre-internet vices.
We won't need to bother trying to censor the whole internet anymore. We'll just take away children's unlimited unsupervised access to it, just as we have come to a social and legal consensus to exclude them from other parts of the physical world we all agree they are not ready to handle.
I predict this will happen, major device makers like Apple will lead it, and everyone will eventually agree it is appropriate and in best interests of everyone.
A. Aren't tech savvy enough to set up rigorous controls.
B. Don't feel like dealing with setting up the controls to keep their kid quiet.
C. Allow things that contain the content anyway. (Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc.)
And D. Assuming their kids don't learn to bypass it anyway.
I'm sure with the locked down nature of devices today, good parental controls are easier to come by. But when I was a tech savvy teen, the controls on my machine weren't much more effective than wishful thinking.
Frankly speaking, even for underage teenagers the most harmful thing about porn is the potential for addiction, not the content itself.
First of all, privacy and free speech are human rights and this is so brazenly a violation of them. The government has no business knowing every site anybody goes to and mandating delicious databases of blackmail material with every piece of adult content any American citizen has ever watched.
Second of all, reduced access to porn correlates to an increase in sex crimes and teenage pregnancy. This is bad news for us all.
It really is that simple.
Instead of being smug about how you like the outcome (this time) you should be concerned that your constitutional rights are subject to the arbitrary moral whims of whoever happens to be in power at the time. Imagine a Congress and complicit SC that together legislates it's illegal to visit Christian churches without government age verification because some right wing factions churn out violent extremists who brainwash and indoctrinate children into their ranks as young as possible?
aa_is_op•3h ago
josefresco•3h ago
rendleflag•3h ago
kirubakaran•3h ago
heavyset_go•3h ago
Apply it to your personal relationships, but you will be steamrolled over and over again if you naively assume good faith in politics, business, etc even after you've been flattened to a pancake.
TriangleEdge•3h ago
pavlov•3h ago
dragonwriter•3h ago
What they hate about Chinese internet censorship isn't the scope and pervasiveness, it’s who specifically controls it and what specific decisions are made.
noqc•3h ago
lesuorac•3h ago
WarOnPrivacy•2h ago
I'm guessing you mean blocking their entire NS host. It would be a massive overreach and would block every site they're authoritative for.
It's one more thing on the rapidly growing Unconstitutional=Okay stack. Cherry-picked courts are routinely fine with that. But it wouldn't stop lawsuits from registrars, site owners and other parties harmed thru collateral damage.
Just blocking PH's current IP would take down over 40 sites.
ref: https://bgp.he.net/ip/66.254.114.41#_dnsrecords
dragonwriter•3h ago
rayiner•3h ago
Excellent.