US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law | Hacker News Reader

US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

wired.com

96 pointsmikece201 comments

What's worse is that combined with the ruling in Mahmoud v Taylor, age verification can now be justified against anything considered "adult" or "pornographic" in nature - including LGBTQ+ storybooks, information on abortion or sexual health, discussion about HIV, or even just political dissidence if a state wants to reach particularly far. "Adult content" is nebulous and vague on purpose, and one party is taking advantage of that to attack minority groups and undesirables.

The point isn't to defend sex work (though you absolutely should), it's that sex workers are just the first targets when it comes to authoritarian change like this. They're the canaries in the coal mines of free speech, and the fact they're screaming in venues like Wired or Hacker News should really give everyone cause for concern that their stuff is next, unless things change.

And on the topic of parenting, look, I hate to be that dinosaur, but age verification doesn't stop minors from accessing adult content: competent, aware adults do, or at the very least put things into context when mistakes happen. As a child of the 80s-2000s who was effectively babysat by technology in some form, STOP DOING THAT. It's bad for the kids, it's bad for the parent-child relationship, and it's offloading your responsibilities as a parent to other adults and entities who did not consent to accepting them. It's about acknowledging that you won't be able to shield them completely for harm, and preparing to put things into a healthy context when mistakes do happen rather than demanding everyone else be punished just so you can avoid temporary awkwardness. We don't need tighter laws in the name of protecting kids, we need parents to do so - and build a society where at least one parent is always accessible to children to oversee their development. It means building technology that puts parental needs above profit motives, creating software that's quick and efficient to force children off apps and back into the real world, rather than turning them into mindless zombies watching videos all day.

Laws punishing consenting adults to "protect kids" are ineffective at their stated goals, but highly effective at punishing threats to a given regime. It's why fascists and authoritarians weaponize sex so early in their regime change: it's all about control in the most intimate way, to normalize its creep elsewhere.

Whats probably most important to a tech related forum: The dirty secret that drives new technology: it's porn

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2002/mar/03/internetn...

Hey— performer & small site owner here. Most of the hypothetical cases in the media (and these comments) relate to Pornhub, OF, etc— companies that definitely can afford to implement age verification even if it hurts their bottom line. This totally misses the vast majority of porn sites that are very small, operate on licensed technology that may not even be maintained, and would have their ~low-5-digit annual income nuked by the cost of compliance. In these cases, geo-blocking states one by one as they implement these laws becomes the only option. Yeah VPNs exist, but HN users faaaaar over-estimate the technical knowledge & ability of the average American used to having the net served to them on a silver platter.

The regulatory burdens on most companies have been gradually increasing, to the point that it is very difficult to run companies with <100 (some might say <1000) employees in most non-software industries. I am sorry to hear that it will negatively impact you, but you don't have the most sympathetic story, and nobody seems to care about this issue anyway, so there's little hope of reprieve, and you'll likely just have to bear it or quit.

Why is the story not sympathetic?

Voters don’t seem to sympathize or at least support pornographic performers or distributors; see Operation Choke Point for an example of how they were lumped in with ‘unsavory’ industries, and cut off from essential services (with no substantial corresponding outcry).

Most of the time they'll go on Twitter or the noncompliant websites instead. That being said, published numbers have shown VPN subscriptions skyrocket. Public tech skills aren't what they were in the 2000s, but people who can't/won't verify ID are motivated. It is a powerful force after all.

I hope you’re right! There’s certainly nothing inherent stopping a widespread shift toward VPN usage and other technical work-arounds that have been part and parcel of internet usage in many countries for decades.

Just make sure it is not a Facebook owned VPN which is actually used to spy on its users.

https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/facebooks...

> They would use a method known as "SSL man-in-the-middle" to decrypt Snapchat's protected traffic to inform Meta's business decision-making.

This particular story seems moot to the worry porn viewers would have of Facebook ratting them out to law enforcement.

I think it's silly to think that any VPN isn't spying on you, for profit or for government compliance.

Mullvad?

It might help short term profit, but ultimately a VPN company relies on their customers trusting it, so spying is likely to hurt them - once a reputation gets trashed their customers are going to switch.

Government compliance depends on which government has jurisdiction, so it makes a lot of sense to avoid authoritarian jurisdictions.

e.g. NordVPN was originally Lithuanian, but is now based in Panama due to its privacy-friendly laws.

> It might help short term profit, but ultimately a VPN company relies on their customers trusting it

I read that as, the best long term financial move would be to secretly work with the government. ;)

> Yeah VPNs exist, but HN users faaaaar over-estimate the technical knowledge & ability of the average American used to having the net served to them on a silver platter.

We can evaluate this by considering the results of DNS blocking ThePirateBay.

ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=How+effective+was+dns+blocking+the...

That's not a reference, it's just a list of search results.

Do you have a direct source for how many Americans accessed TPB after it was DNS blocked in all of the US?

> That's not a reference, it's just a list of search results.

Results are references. Links pasted in HN can leave some doubt what's at the other end. Usually that's fine but by presenting those same links thru a search engine, you get some text to help indicate whether they have the info you want.

The results may also include links you would want - but maybe I wouldn't choose.

> Do you have a direct source for how many Americans accessed TPB after it was DNS blocked in all of the US?

This is a very narrow scenario you've presented. It doesn't seem to address the aspects of the thread in a helpful way.

As a performer and small site owner, am I to understand that you usually sell sexual material and you don't perform any check to make sure that they are not kids? How are you making sure that users are of age other than the "I am 18: ENTER" button? Maybe you take credit cards and can check their age through that? Do you take crypto or wallets that don't require 18+?

Do CC issuers report the owner's age?

I am not sure whether the issuers report that to the processors (though I doubt it), but you cannot get that information from a processor.

It would be not very reliable because kids could take parents' card under some excuse (I want to ride an electric scooter, they allow only adult users so I need a card).

If they can do taht they can probably make copies of their parents ID too

I'm not an expert but it would be helpful to look into the similar field of gambling. I read that there's lots of teenagers that are gambling and presumably they would evade controls in the same way, use parent's credit card or get them to fund a wallet of sorts. And maybe steal their parent's ID and use that for verification.

High tech verification that requires the ID to be photographed along with a facial verification largely solve this problem I believe, but I imagine kids go to gambling sites that are either unregulated or loosely regulated in some sketchy jurisdiction (which can be accessed with VPNs even if banned in a country.

I have kids and try very hard to keep them from inappropriate material online.

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.

I tend to think that this challenge posed by "mixed" domains, partly unobjectionable but partly inappropriate, will only become more prevalent. A couple of thoughts:

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.

The absolute worst domain for mixed content is google.com. Google has it's own internal internet. Searching for inappropriate images on Google images (using "safe" terms), and downloading the cached image is a powerful workaround.

Ok, there are a few worse ones. But it's pretty bad.

You pretty much have to whitelist. I think we're heading towards a future where we give kids only devices that restrict internet access to known good content. There's more than enough known good content out there already to keep kids occupied until they come of age.

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.

Back to curation, back to whitelisted web rings, yes I think this is the only option

Nope. Schools require Google Classroom, and that contains workarounds.

Some of the worst stuff I've seen was via Google Classroom.

Heh. This among other reasons is why parents who care a lot put so much effort into homeschooling or so much money into private school.

It would be nice to have sane defaults but when you have so many people with so many opinions that's not really possible.

The most difficult part is getting parental enforcement. Because a lot of parents:

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.

I'm a very, very "tech savy" parent, raising a non tech savy child.

Parental control software simply does not work. It just does not. And even worse, it is advertized as working!

The only solution is to deprive them of devices that access the Internet. But even that does not work, because schools often require Chromebooks to use with Google Classroom.

Did I mention Google Classroom has workarounds that let through tons of inappropriate content, and there is no way for the school to know?

When the schools are literally requiring software that allows inappropriate, what can you do?

Go to a school board meeting early, before it starts. Bring up the issue, and say “if any of you doubt that this can be done, I will happily demonstrate just how easy it is - privately, and with content that is legally available to adults.”

If they aren’t responsive, call a local TV reporter.

I have strongly explored such options, and decided against this approach.

I would be interested to know why, if you don’t mind sharing.

Not the parent but I raised 5 and spent lots of time with their educators.

A school board meeting comes with limitations on what can be communicated. It often isn't a good fit to introduce new factors because there is no time learn and evaluate them properly.

School boards are commonly composed of non-technical people. They will be limited in their ability to judge the risks that are presented. Besides time, they'll need to have access to (and trust) qualified people of good judgment. It's a lot of prequalifiers.

And all of the above aside, school board positions have recently become appealing to agenda-driven bad actors. If they happen to be on your board, whatever you present will be viewed thru the lens of their agenda. Good outcomes tend to starve in that environment.

I know the school board members and local reporters. It’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody.

School board meetings are already filled with too many folks putting on partisan displays.

I think the message would be combined with other messages, and would not make anything better.

That was why I said “before it starts”. I wouldn’t put it on the public agenda for that reason, at least until you had discussed it with the members privately first.

Edit: but in a small town I could see why you would be extra-cautious.

There are kosher phones that have all kinds of restrictions on Internet access. Mostly used by Orthodox

The Mennonites have nice phones too.

excellent example of convergent evolution

Would it not be reasonable and safe and private to implement age verification through login.gov? An Oauth implementation that knows your identity and age can produce a verifiable token that attests your age but not identity. The only way your identity would leak would be if both the porn site and the oauth retain the tokens (which they would both claim not to do else no one would use this), and the attacker gets access to both.

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.

You need something like Verifiable Credentials to do this properly imo. You don't want something like OAuth because the login service knows which websites you're requesting the login from.

I'm not suggesting that people actually authenticate to Pornhub using Login.gov's oauth, they would continue to auth (or not) as they do now. Login.gov can issue a token saying, in essence, "A user authenticated to me, and that user over 21, but I'm not going to identify them, I'll just give you a random GUID so this token will be unique".

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.

What I've been thinking of is (although very similar):

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.

It also needs to prevent sharing the age verification token.

You can put all of the state into the browser:

1. Site generates an AES key for the verification request. Gives it to the browser along with (short) expiration time in an encrypted cookie (so the browser can't see or forge the key). Encrypts a request to .gov (using .gov public key) saying "use <key> to encrypt a token for <requesting IP>". Gives that request to the user to present to .gov.

2. Browser asks user if they'd like to request age verification. Proceed.

3. Gov does ID verification. Checks requesting IP matches. Creates tokens for "over16", "over18", "over21", and any other magic ages that laws exist for, each individually encrypted with site AES key and IP-bound. Gives all tokens back to the browser so .gov doesn't know which will be used. e.g.

    {
      "over13": "<encrypted token>",
      "over16": "<encrypted token>",
      "over18": "<encrypted token>",
      "over21": "<encrypted token>"
    }

4. Browser asks user which token they want to give to the site (that could actually be part of step 2, and the site could indicate which one it would like).

5. Site gets single relevant token back, decrypts the cookie, and uses the key to decrypt the token. Checks requesting IP in response token matches. Checks token signature against .gov public key.

.gov only learns that some age-restricted service was requested, but not even which age. Server only learns user is over the required age. Browser can't see or modify any of the messages between .gov and site because they're all encrypted.

With such a protocol, adding more age-restricted use-cases (e.g. buying cigarettes/alcohol, gambling, social media/advertising/anything where you need COPPA's "I am over 13" assertion) would increase overall privacy.

Look into "Verifiable Credentials" (aka VCs)

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.

Whatever technical solution is implemented needs to:

1. Not inform the authentication provider about which websites you're visiting.

2. Not inform the websites about your meat space identity.

Unless I'm missing something, what I'm describing satisfies both of these (unless one or both parties are malicious).

> (unless one or both parties are malicious)

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.

Add

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.

At this point, I can't even imagine a return to normal governing, let alone good governing. Like imposing enormous fines for ISPs selling user traffic data for packet analysis, to sell name-associated web traffic data to any company or foreign power even when the user is behind a VPN.

Yes, uploading IDs to commercial entities (porn or not) is terrible. Coinbase's recent KYC breach is going to lead to a metric ton of identity theft. While there used to be penalties for securities fraud- no more of that under Trump- there are no penalties for privacy violations and until there are, commercially pervasive KYC is an absolutely awful idea.

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.

I’m curious if Apple Wallet will provide a framework for future privacy protecting age verification nationwide after securing the ability to load US Passports into Apple Wallet, since Driver’s licenses in Apple Wallet is such a patchwork and they seem to be a trusted method of doing verification without submitting your information to some sketchy porn website.

Apple has never been friendly towards adult sites. They could have made a mint off of adult applications in the App Store, but it isn't their style.

A note on what the future will look like and how we'll get there.

    [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.

ref: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/27/the-conservatives-on-the...

So how broad is this?

Can a state now require you to verify your age and identity to read a newspaper they don't like?

Let me start off saying I'm not a fan of this law. I don't think these requirements are workable with current technology, and I don't necessarily agree with the goals or that the goals are worth the side effects of the regulations.

> 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.

But what counts as obscene is not well defined. Forget newspapers you could have to age gate Wikipedia

What counts as obscene has been defined for a while. And I don't think Wikipedia would count as obscene by the Miller test.

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.

Even in this description you deferred to your own personal interpretation when you said "I don't think much of the content of Wikipedia is describing sexual content in a patently offensive way". Someone might, or might find it politically expedient to pretend that they do. After all, what's "offensive" is arbitrary.

You're misunderstanding my description.

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.

> 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.

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.

in a nation of 400 million people you only need 5 to agree with you (if it's the right 5) and then the 6 of y'all are "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" and the 399,999,994 of us are out of touch deviants.

You're just kicking the can down the road. "Who decides what's obscene?" "The average person." "Who decides who the average person is?" In your own argument you keep pointing to how arbitrary and abusable this average person standard is as though that makes it somehow a better choice, but at the end of the day the idea of the "average person" is just someone dressing their own personal feelings in a pretty hat. There is no determining who the average person is or what they believe empirically, so the opinion of the person actually making the decision just gets labelled the opinion of the "average person". It does nothing but distance the people making these decisions from responsibility for them because they get to pretend they're just doing what everyone would want. It's 100% arbitrary.

Would you also argue any standard related to a "reasonable person" to be entirely arbitrary? That's an incredibly similar standard used to determine negligence and similar concepts.

name one

It's a pretty common standard used in a lot of places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person

And other similar "vague" concepts arise elsewhere in the law, like someone "skilled in the art".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_i...

What counts as obscene has notably not been defined.

"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.

IRT The Simpsons, the Simpsons of 1989 and the Simpsons of today are essentially two radically different shows, they just happen to both be animated and feature four fingered yellow cartoon people. That very early 90s Simpsons show featured far more family violence and other things along that nature than the show today, among a lot of other things that make the show very different.

Even then, it wasn't like the average person was arguing for it to be banned by obscenity rules. The spat between H.W. Bush and the Simpsons was a comment he made, saying "We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." It's not like Bush was actively pushing for The Simpsons to be taken off the air or anything along those lines.

Honestly, I think it makes more sense to have some kind of standard like a reasonable person/common person/contemporary community standard when trying to define something like "obscenity". Not making an argument of what kind of law to pass with that, just stating I don't think having some etched in stone standard would ultimately be good in the end for any kind of law related to such content. Ultimately its the same to me in terms of laws that would otherwise try and regulate certain kinds of commerce or whatever, with extremely rigid definitions that can't keep up with changes to the marketplace. That we might find something like The Simpsons potentially detestable in the 90s but otherwise fine today is an example for such a standard with flexibility, not against it IMO. We wouldn't want the law to be bound to whatever people specifically thought was "obscenity" in 1850 to still hold legal weight today.

I understand the point you're trying to make. However, I wanted to point out that Wikipedia being one-third porn/obscene content is unlikely in the extreme.

It's not really that unlikely. In the exact same brief upholding the Texas Porn ID law they're arguing that states have the power to decide what is obscene or not; they're setting up the blocks for saying things like any LGBT content is inherently obscene. This is especially clear in another ruling posted today [1] where the supreme court argues that parents have a right to fully withhold children from any LGBT content they might experience from school.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-297_4f14.pdf

Not if I get to pick what's obscene

I'm just very skeptical of the argument that, when we see a fuzzy line, we have to erase it entirely so that nobody can abuse the fuzziness.

Why shouldn't we? A law that isn't well-defined in no law in the proper sense. Ambiguity and overbreath will just be weaponized against people and organizations the government doesn't like just like the Department of Education has done with Title VI in its crusade against a nebulously defined "anti-Semitism".

Since you bring up anti-discrimination law, I would point to the concept of “hostile work environment” as a good example. It’s fuzzy and ultimately subjective to draw the line where crude jokes become so offensive and so pervasive that they constitute harassment. But if you refused to draw any line, you’d end up with a lot of workplaces where women aren’t in practice welcome.

Not unless that newspaper is "more than one-third sexual material".

Huh, I think old playboy magazines might actually be under that one third.

Wanna bet what the ratio is for e.g. Reddit?

NSFW is hidden by default iirc, so something like this would only apply to enabling NSFW content.

A couple years back (around when they were adding the API restrictions/shutting down third party apps), I found a site dump that looked like it was around 50%.

What counts as sexual material?

Pretty much all courts in the US would use the Miller test to determine if material is obscene or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test

I am not a lawyer and am not behind a PC atm, but didn't Rowan v. USPS determine that the receiver of mail has sole discretion about if the material they received is pornographic or not?

A more limited context of course.

Not really.

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.

Republicans have slowly been moving toward anything LGBTQ being reclassified as "obscene" "pretty much" as defense for what courts consider shifts from day to day, as more right wing get put into positions of powers specifically RELIGIOUS right wing people, the courts have been more than willing to keep redefining what things were previously meant to mean.

This seems pretty easy to get around through either lorem ipsum or inflated pizza related dialogue.

The archive link shared by heythere22 (which seems to be a different story) discusses this.

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+.

Considering another of today's rulings came down in favor of religious opt-outs for kids in public schools, and that that case came out specifically because parents didn't want their kids exposed to books with LGBTQ characters in them, then yeah—I'd say we're scarily close to redefining an entire class of people's existence as obscene.

(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-...

This is already laid out in Project 2025.

> 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...

This shit is genuinely terrifying and it seems like no one is doing anything to stop it.

Does obscenity not already include pornography? Porn most definitely doesn't pass the Miller test, so the only reason it's not currently illegal is because the federal government doesn't enforce that law.

So pornhub needs to see how many terabytes of content they host and use AI to generate 2x more terabytes of cat pictures and add them to a compliance tab on their home page now?

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

doubly so because you can create the cat pictures and make them technically accessible just by hosting them but you don't have to provide equal means of access between the cat pictures and the "cat" pictures. Users are guided to the content that they're actually there for and anyone who actually wants to see feline photos can navigate to their URLs manually. Every pic uploaded triggers generating another cat pic (or subtly altering one that exists) and now no minors are protected but your operating costs have gone up by a little bit and the government has established that it gets to decide what is appropriate for minors and can use violence to force the entire internet to meet that definition.

Contact vx underground, they'd be happy to help

So a site just needs to generate enough content until its under that threshold?

> So a site just needs to generate enough content until its under that threshold?

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.

There are quite a few legislators who'd consider an episode of Will and Grace to be entirely "sexual material" because it depicts gay main characters.

Ezekiel 23:20 isn't, though, of course.

To be precise, "more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors." What exactly does that mean? Anything that "promotes" a non-heterosexual, non-binary lifestyle? Anything that discusses safe sex?

Texas certainly could've written the law more narrowly, and chose not to. Small government for me, big brother for thee.

https://archive.is/9DGKM

Banning kids from using social media would probably have a much more significant positive impact on their mental development. Obviously kids browsing Pornhub is not a good thing, but sites like TikTok expose them to much more traumatizing violent material, and of course turns them into quick dopamine-seeking zombies that are glued to their smartphones.

Frankly speaking, even for underage teenagers the most harmful thing about porn is the potential for addiction, not the content itself.

This will just drive people to non-compliant foreign sites. They just killed their own adult industry, who is gonna take their business and taxes elsewhere

Someone in this chain of corruption probably owns a VPN company or another entity benefitting (short term) from this ban.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

You have to adjust your priors at some point though, right?

    Fool me once, shame on my prior.
    Fool me twice, shame on my posterior.

Adhering to that adage eventually becomes something masochistic and Sisyphean.

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.

I think your assumption that Texas cares about its porn industries is incorrect. Pornhub is a Canadian company. Afaik it's the #1 porn site, I could be wrong. I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas. Registries of porn sites are readily available. (I use them in my hosts file blocking). So, my guess is that the likely step will be block all of them until they prove they have ID enforcement.

Conservatives claim to hate Chinese-style internet censorship, but in practice they want to build a Great Firewall of Texas.

> Conservatives claim to hate Chinese-style internet censorship

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.

I think all 3 of these things are valid concerns.

You do, but lawmakers generally don't.

> I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas.

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

> if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked

Actually they've already pre-emptively blocked themselves. If you try to access their site from anywhere in Texas, you get a wall of text urging you to call your congressman and oppose this law (or so I heard from a guy).

I don't think the big-business adult industries is particularly present in Texas, and the independent creators who are in Texas leaving if they are able or being forced out of work if not is probably an active goal of Texas politicians.

i believe the big prob sites are already foreign controlled (canadian).

Oh boy, I can’t wait until I have to submit my government id to some random “age verification” provider just so I can read Oglaf.

Not the first time porn has come up on here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441276

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418862

If you visit P*Hub from Russia, it requires you to authorize though Vk (Russian superior Facebook clone) to use the site, maybe because of this it is not blocked unlike other similar sites. I wonder what they do with this data.

So, buy stock in VPNs?

Or in anti-porn and anti-vpn startups. If you suggest teenagers will buy VPNs and we should monetize that, it should set some alarms to question your ethos.

I think plenty of legal adults have zero interest in having a link tied to their porn consumption. The never ending stream of data leakage announcements should make it clear that if the data is collected, you have to assume it will become public. VPN at least puts a layer of indirection on that.

Agreed. As an adult, I would use a VPN to bypass ID requirements to preserve my privacy.

Which they're fully aware of. They will eventually at some point pass a law requiring you to identify yourself to the VPN and/or government.

This decision is ultimately about the end of the last vestiges of anonymity on the internet, unfortunately.

So just produce three-fourths AI-generated non-adult irrelevant material, and segregate it enough to not harm regular user activity. Got it.

Next step is to outlaw VPNs

Apart from being a mainly unworkable law, that's not going to go down well with businesses that have remote workers.

Ultimately, trying to crack down on VPNs is likely to lead to laws against any encryption that the govt. can't inspect as otherwise they can't distinguish between lawful/unlawful use.

This is just "Papers Please!" for the digital world. Does your cable TV or satellite box require ID verification for skinimax shows? Didn't think so. Do you want to submit your ID to every other site and user profile? Because that is where this is obviously going. This is a bullshit law that won't help anyone while harming millions, kids see most porn on non-porn websites anyways.

Are you sure it doesn't? Don't you need a contract with the cable company to get cable in general?

As they should. What's unconstitutional about the law?

as I've said before, if you block legal porn sites, people will find other ways of getting porn which will expose them to and prolierate illegal porn. This is not a good law.

I'm more interested in the downsides of not having ID verification. We have an entire generation of humans raised with effectively no verification going back 30 years now. So what is the data? Why is a high barrier so important that every adult has to annoyingly climb over it with all sorts of friction?

Dramatically lower teen pregnancy rates is one metric from the last 30 years.

One consequence that concerns me greatly is that men in the generation you're describing routinely choke their sexual partners. I remember a decade or two ago, when I thought it was ridiculous that porn might teach people to be abusive - I regret to admit that I was catastrophically wrong. (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/sep/02...)

I don't particularly enjoy it, nor does the wife.

But if erotic choking is consensual amongst two adults, what exactly is the issue?

Are we to start policing how people enjoy fucking?

You're replying to someone who conflates this type of practice with abuse. They are not educated, not curious, and you are not going to have a productive conversation with them.

I would agree that this is abuse if it was not consensual.

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.

I don't follow the argument. In the sphere of gender roles, for example, I absolutely believe that adults should be allowed to set up whatever arrangements are best for them. I would never walk up to a traditionalist couple and demand that they set up their relationship how I'd prefer. But I would still find it very concerning to hear that most young men expect their wives to not work or not make male friends, even if young women accepted it.

> But I would still find it very concerning to hear that most young men expect their wives to not work or not make male friends, even if young women accepted it.

How is this in anyway related to what I said?

Were you attempting to reply to someone else?

I think that choking your partner is presumptively physical abuse, in the same way that controlling who your partner can talk to is presumptively emotional abuse. It’s possible to consent to these things, sure, and if some individual tells me they’ve thought it over and genuinely want it it’s not my place to contradict them. But it’s also quite easy to not consent, or to frame mere acquiescence as consent in response to social pressure. I’m intensely skeptical that this is the one kind of gendered violence against women that’s pursued primarily for benign, consent-respecting reasons.

> It’s possible to consent to these things

Some people have odd kinks. While it may weird you out (and in many ways it weirds me out too) I am far less judgemental about it. If people want to be choked while fucking, well, by all means, as long as I am not involved. Most kinks I hear about are things I have no desire to experiment myself.

> I’m intensely skeptical that this is the one kind of gendered violence against women

Why do you presume that women are the only ones being choked?

And also why do you presume that a consenting adult is actually not consenting to something they are actively engaging in? Why infantilize people like that?

I think having to codify "obscenity" so deep into the law to even make it become an exception to free speech is an indicator of a bigger problem. I know the US is generally a lot more conservative about this, but it really feels like more extreme forms of religion/politics are relying on the popular vote to shortcut solutions.

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.

Pornography isn’t sex. It doesn’t promote healthy sex from the statistics I’ve seen. Many teenagers now think that doing sex acts they see online before even ever kissing is normal.

I also suspect it’s at least partly linked to declining reproductive rates. It’s the same as freely available sugar. Human ape brains weren’t evolved to handle this sort of easy access high dopamine stuff.

Somehow you have to provide an ID to watch porn in Texas, but a 10 year old kid can go to specs.com and just lie about their age and view imagery of a controlled substance. My wine club just delivers wine without verifying my ID, so a 10 year old child could just do the same with a parent's credit card.

I don't understand how this makes sense.

You already have to show ID to see rated-R movies in the US. I don't see how this is any different.

The movie theater doesn't keep a database of who's been watching their movies.

[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

Why don’t they?

Surveillance capitalism wasn't innovated when movie theaters started checking IDs.

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.

By the letter of the Texas law, neither do the commercial entities that have to verify identity:

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”.

well I’m definitely sure there’s no bad actors or just plain incompetent folks who can fck that up nossir

Are there business destroying fines associated with non compliance? Otherwise it becomes a, “Whoopsie fine” when companies inevitably get caught selling out its user base.

They linked the law right there. Yes.

> $10,000 per instance when the entity retains identifying information in violation of Section 129B.002(b);

$10k per instance. If you have 1M users and retain their info, you're potentially facing a $10B fine.

The sites that were protesting these laws were saying they're concerned about such retention, so no doubt they're glad to know that they and their partners are banned from retaining that info and face extreme fines for doing so.

That seems like it'd be easy to avoid if you're a small operator. Set up some embarrassing porn site, scrape user details and sell them to a separate company (likely controlled by yourself). Then close the porn business as soon as there's any chance that you'll face investigation and instead work on getting individuals to pay you for not publishing their embarrassing kinks.

I'm not sure that criminal extortion is a great strategy to avoid civil fines, but I suppose as an individual you should just avoid giving your information to any business not large enough to have a CCO.

As we all know, everybody always follows the rules.

I understand the sentiment and agree but the practicality is a different story.

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's online

* It crosses state boundaries

* It's not law to show ID to get into R rated movies

Should state online privacy laws not apply to internet companies operating out of state?

Putting aside the actual differences between that and this, I guess I don't think that should be required by the state either.

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?

I've never shown ID to see an R rated movie in a theater in the US.

> You already have to show ID to see rated-R movies in the US.

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.)

ID to see rated-R movies in theaters (but not on streaming services, some of which don't even require payment or even an account), is a voluntary measure done by the industry.

I don't know that I've ever actually been carded at a theater.

In 95% of cases that is entirely on the studios and/or theater's personal desire to not allow minors, it isn't illegal. You can take a 3 year old into an R-rated movie as long as someone older looking is there says they can, and are not IDed themselves or known to have any authority over what a child is and isn't allowed to watch. A lot of hotels don't rent rooms to people alone under 25 or so, that doesn't mean its illegal for hotel rooms not to rent rooms to younger people either.

This, of course, will result in massive data breaches exposing white male "christian" Texas politicians/porn users, and much laughter and merriment. VPNs will do a good business, too.

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