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Re:Pornhub blocks access in Mississippi and Virginia over ag... by Brybry on Thursday July 06, 2023 @11:25PM (#36626712)
> There is a reason TV companies get fined when someone says a "bad" word.

This is actually really complicated and possibly (likely?) unconstitutional.

They basically can do limited censorship because of FCC v. Pacifica [1]

But that failed when applied to the internet. [2]

And it even fails sometimes when applied to TV. [3]

A different court in the future may very well overturn FCC v. Pacifica without anyone passing a new Federal law.

And States already are almost certainly prevented from outright censoring porn because:

a) legal porn has already been ruled *not* to be federally obscene via Miller test. [4]

They have to use the 'actionable indecency' bit from Pacifica to censor (ie. these ID laws) otherwise first amendment protected material. [6]

b) the first amendment is incorporated and thus applies to the States [5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FCC_v._Pacifica_F...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Liberti...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Fox_Television_Stations...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actionable_indecency

Re:Pornhub blocks access in Mississippi and Virginia over ag... by badrabbit on Friday July 07, 2023 @05:00AM (#36629101)
You did not disagree with anything I said. You can sell porn in any state but you can't display porn on a public display outside your store. Similar to how in most states you can't expose yourself to the public.

Free speech can be restricted when harm can be caused.

If these recent laws are unconstitutional then are you saying no one wants to challenge them? Not even the aclu?

Re:Pornhub blocks access in Mississippi and Virginia over ag... by Brybry on Sunday July 09, 2023 @04:28AM (#36652703)
The Louisiana law is being challenged [1]

I don't get why we can't instead have regulation requiring porn websites to implement adult content rating meta tags, which most porn sites already do (look at the site source sometime). [2][3]

Then let parents use content blockers and/or built-in parental controls.

If we need even more regulation after that then require platforms to provide parental controls to block tagged content (which I assume they generally already do anyway?)

It's not like the sites that don't implement rating meta tags are going to follow these more strict ID verification laws.

In my opinion, I feel like these laws are not really about protecting children (which most everyone supports), as I don't see that they will meaningfully do so.

That makes me think they're instead about conservative political points at the expense of annoying adults.

[1] https://www.nola.com/gambit/news/the_latest/groups-file-free...

[2] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

[3] https://davidwalsh.name/rta-label