Anti Porn Laws – Scottie's Playtime

I know that the Christian religion has been on a push for forcing the US to be a theocracy run by their personal church doctrines. Why I don’t understand? Do they think that will earn them favor with their god? Is it simply a way for the leaders of the movement to gain more power / wealth? Is it simply they are terrified of after they die and are convinced that their forcing others to follow their church doctrines will get their god to give them more benefits in heaven. The religious strictures on sex and sexual stuff is rooted in an ancient not correct misunderstand of life and sexuality. I still do not understand why others watching porn upsets Christian republicans. I really don’t get it. Is it because they are afraid the people watching will masturbate? Is it because sexual arousal is fearful to them? I really wish someone could explain it to me. Even in the church boarding school I went to my senior year of high school they did not push that no sex stuff very hard, instead they occasionally reminded us not to touch ourselves. They need not have worried, in the boy’s dorm we were touching each other which in our kid brains got around the entire sin of jerking off thing. Hugs.

https://www.xbiz.com/news/292258/updated-michigan-legislators-propose-online-porn-ban

Michigan lawmakers have introduced a bill that would make it illegal to distribute pornography via the internet in the state.

HB 4938, introduced last week by six Republican members of the state House of Representatives, would “prohibit the distribution of certain material on the internet that corrupts the public morals.”

Pornography is the principal target, though the bill also seeks to criminalize depictions of transgender people.

The bill defines “pornographic material” broadly, to include “any content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”

The bill appears to exempt from the ban material protected by the First Amendment. Since pornography is constitutionally protected speech, this makes it unclear how the legislation could actually work.

According to the law, “prohibited material” means “material that at common law was not protected by adoption of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States respecting laws abridging freedom of speech or of the press.”

XBIZ spoke with adult industry attorney and First Amendment expert Corey D. Silverstein to attempt to explain what this meant.

“I think they are trying to say that it would not be applicable to content not deemed as obscene under the Miller test,” he said. “But it is written so poorly that there is some uncertainty as to their angle, which also makes the proposal both vague and ambiguous.

“At the same time, it could be another attempt to undercut and soften the Miller test, which we have been seeing in various other states throughout the country,” he added.

The proposed penalties in the bill are severe, including up to 20 years in prison or a fine of up to $100,000, or both. It also allows for civil fines of up to $500,000 per violation.

The bill would require internet service providers to implement “mandatory filtering technology” to prevent Michigan residents from accessing “prohibited material” as defined in the bill, to “actively monitor and block known circumvention tools,” and to block access to specific websites on receipt of a court order.

The bill calls for the state attorney general to establish “a special internet content enforcement division” staffed with “digital forensics analysts, legal experts, cybersecurity specialists, and investigators” to enforce the proposed law.

Silverstein added that he doesn’t believe the bill has much of a chance at being adopted.

“This bill has virtually no chance of going anywhere, given the current makeup of the Michigan legislature and its far-left Democrat governor,” he said. “The bill is unconstitutional at every turn. Regardless, it is alarming that this type of thinking and government waste continues to occur.”

The bill was referred to the Committee on Judiciary.

Talk of porn bans has increased in recent months. Earlier this year, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah introduced federal legislation that would redefine almost all visual depictions of sex as obscene and therefore illegal, a goal that was also laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint, which has heavily guided the Trump administration’s agenda.

Update, Sept. 19: The bill’s reference to “known circumvention tools” includes VPNs, proxy servers and encrypted tunneling methods, which would make it nearly impossible to access adult content online within the state.

https://www.xbiz.com/news/287606/nyu-study-finds-age-verification-laws-dont-work

These types of laws are marketed as to protect the kids. The right has learned that if they want people to back banning something bring out the trope “of it is needed to protect the innocent littlest ones, the children”. They are trying to do it with everything they disagree with and always have. In the 1970s they went after gay people, especially teachers claiming it was needed to protect the kids from the evil gays. They did it with drag queens a few years ago and are using the same trope against trans people. They insisted any book or media that had any LGBTQ+ characters or plot had to be removed from libraries to save the kids. They seem to think reading a book with a gay kid somehow makes real life kids gay? These people just want everyone to live by what they preach, to live by their precepts. They have no respect for the rights of other people to live and do as they want. They want to force their restrictive morality on everyone else and to their Christian hell with anyone who disagrees with them. They are dictators of how others live. I just do not get their fear of sex and the enjoyment of it. Hugs’

it indicates that the laws are “effective” or “working” — contentions that imply the goal is to prevent anyone from viewing adult content, rather than just minors.

A group of university researchers has published a study whose findings suggest that age verification laws are ineffective at achieving their stated goal of preventing minors from accessing adult content.

In states that have passed AV laws, some adult websites, including Pornhub, have opted to block access rather than shoulder the legal burden of compliance.

A representative for Pornhub parent company Aylo told Mashable that after the company complied with local AV laws in Louisiana, the site’s traffic dropped 80% in that state.

Focusing on search behavior as an indicator of adult content viewing habits, researchers at New York University’s Center for Social Media & Politics found that searches for Pornhub dropped 51% in states with AV laws, while searches for noncompliant platforms rose by 48.1%, and searches for VPN services rose by 23.6%.

In other words, people living in states with AV laws who did not want to submit identifying information to prove their age did not stop watching porn.

Instead, according to Aylo’s statement to Mashable, “They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children.”

Aylo’s statement takes issue with the way many states have chosen to implement AV laws, calling said implementation “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.” The company believes that children should be shielded from porn, but that the best way to do that is for parents to employ content filters on individual devices.

To test the effectiveness of the laws, the researchers created a “digital twin” — a computer simulation — of each state, and compared actual observed search trends in those states with their model of what search trends in those states would have looked like had they not passed AV laws.

This revealed that users faced with an age verification requirement to view an adult site searched for alternative sites that did not require age verification, and for methods of circumventing age verification, such as using a VPN.

The team then used multiverse analysis, a technique that considers alternative research approaches to the same question, to confirm that its findings remained reliable under various scenarios.

While the researchers admitted that using Google Trends is inherently flawed due to the limitations of its data — for instance, it is not possible to know what percentage of users searching for AV-noncompliant sites or VPNs may have been minors — the study nonetheless concluded that AV laws were ineffective, since users in states with such laws simply seek alternative ways to access adult content.

They also noted that such laws effectively punish compliant sites and function to limit general access to adult content, not just minors’ access.

“Our findings highlight that while these regulation efforts reduce traffic to compliant firms and likely a net reduction overall to this type of content, individuals adapt primarily by moving to content providers that do not require age verification,” the study reports.

Numerous backers of the current spate of state AV laws have asserted that when adult sites withdraw completely from states with such laws, it indicates that the laws are “effective” or “working” — contentions that imply the goal is to prevent anyone from viewing adult content, rather than just minors.