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Pornhub Sues Texas Over Age Verification Law
(www.vice.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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The sicko in me hopes they spend the next two weeks linking every policymaker in the state to their pornography habits and just dump the whole dataset online. Yeah, it would probably counterproductive and not great for democracy but I wouldn’t it be the sickest burn of all time?
Ironically it would be so much easier to do that if they actually implemented the law they're suing over, which demands they record the ID of everyone who uses the site.
Hmm, the article is a little confusing, but it sounds like they're mostly just complaining about the age verification, not really suing over that specifically. The real sticking point, and the one they actually stand a good chance of winning in court is about the warning they're being required to display that's both libelous and factually false. Texas for better or worse is within their rights to require age verification, even the very odious version of it being proposed that would require collecting state IDs, so it's unlikely that they would actually win if that was their only issue with the law. Fortunately Texas (and others) massively overstepped by trying to slap a health and safety warning a la cigarette packages onto porn sites since they let a bunch of nutty politicians write the text of the message rather than actual medical professionals (probably because they couldn't find any respectable medical professional that would endorse their wacky notions).
Not really. It does kind of tread on the first amendment. Like, imagine I wasn't allowed to say something to you because the government doesn't allow me to. What does that sound like? Like, you can't put barriers on free speech.
They restrict speech that violates the rights of others. And much of that is in civil court, not criminal. And a lot more of that is consumer protection in regards to how to legally sell something, not simple speech. You're confusing a lot of things with speech that are absolutely falling under entirely different regulations. And to be clear, the lawsuit does claim both aspects are violating the constitution. It's not just the warning that they're complaining about.
You're misunderstanding in your explanation shows you are less well versed in this aspect than I am.
Edit: it's also one of the first claims being made in the lawsuit. So. There's that.
Double edit: government can't pass laws "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;" it does not limit it to criticism at all
There is no absolute right to free speech as has been ruled again and again and again. Restricting access to pornography to adults is one of the areas that has been ruled as an allowable restriction, or more accurately there are laws against providing children with pornography, just like there are laws restricting access to alcohol and tobacco. The interesting argument in this case is, can the state require a specific mechanism of restriction be employed. Looked at another way, would the case hold up if instead of porn we were talking about alcohol? If Texas required a site selling wine for instance to maintain a database of customers state IDs would that be legal? I suspect the answer would be yes, but it's debatable, so it's risky to bring a lawsuit with that as its sole basis.
The warning on the other hand, that's a MUCH stronger argument. More so even than censoring speech, compelling speech is looked down on far more severely. The law is asserting as facts, things that at best are debatable, and at worst are just downright lies, and forcing sites to repeat those dubious "facts" is really not going to go over well. They are so bad in fact as to verge in libel. Focusing on the warning label is a pretty easy slam dunk in their case, while going after the ID portion is much more iffy. I don't think they'll be successful in getting the law overturned on the basis of the ID collection, but I do think they'll succeed on the basis of the required warning label.
Government has curtailed free speech only when the burden is justified by it's benefit. Here they're saying it fails, not because they're prescribing a specific method but because it's curtailing free speech beyond what is beneficial to the payout. It's high burden, but low effectiveness in its states goal. Hence why they're saying it's being used to curtail speech they simply don't like.
Edit: and no, a database being kept fails scrutiny as it doesn't serve the stated benefit.
Hmm, it's an interesting argument and it might work, but I still think it's a far weaker argument than the one against the warning label. In either case this will be an interesting one to watch and I suspect because of the multiple issues with the law PornHub will ultimately prevail. Maybe not in the initial case, but certainly on appeal.
This is a 5th grade understanding of the 1st amendment. Good job, now let's work on the adult one.
Exactly. Malicious compliance, while reminding people exactly why they shouldn’t be so quick to give up their anonymity on the internet.
They'd make themselves exempt without a second thought.
How do you expect them to do this... without verifying who they are?
I'm not a member of the house or Senate so I don't know what they can do. But I'm sure they can have as many open doors as they're like.
They would just use a VPN like everyone else