US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

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?

What counts as sexual material?

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+.

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

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

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

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

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

Contact vx underground, they'd be happy to help

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.

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%.

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.

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