US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

I'm a Texan and can't say I'm particularly a fan of the state politics or the current US Supreme Court, but at the same time, I can't say that this law particularly bothers me. I don't have children, and so I don't know if I can really understand what parents are dealing with in trying to ensure that their children are kept away from undesirable material, but it does seem rather difficult; I certainly don't envy them.

This is just the beginning.

Edit: really confused as to why this simple statement is flagged

You will need to upload your ID to post on social media. Bills like that have already been introduced. Lawmakers have already said this is their intention.

We are going to "think of the children" ourselves into needing to give every site our ID, or more, just to use the internet.

"...and if we let gay people get married soon people will be marrying their dogs!"

I do think there are legitimate reasons to not like the bill, but what you said is classic slippery slope

Ofcourse it is. Reddit to start working with “various third-party services” to verify a user’s humanity - https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/06/reddit-will-tighten-verifi...

Its bullshit a kid can buy a vpn without an ID for 3$ and skip any restriction, and even without that 90% of international porn sites, so the law fixes nothing but opens a slippery slope, whats next a law saying US needs a "Great Firewall" to protect the children from international deviancy.

And it also just opens the possibility for centralized ID verification services being breached and tieing identities to their more personal vices, its only a matter of time till a ID services gets exploited and a bunch of peoples identities and the sites they use are exploited.

That’s an insane leap of what I said. Like the opposite of what I said. Legalizing gay marriage is giving people more rights, not restricting them like what the court is doing here.

Because .... ITS A SLIPPERY SLOPE, that the republicans in charge and religious right wing have shown they are perfectly OK with pushing for, shit its funny how project 2025 is like 60% implemented and people are still acting like its all some conspiracy and this weird religious right wing shit isnt actually happening

Kids don't go through the hoops to buy and install a VPN just to access porn. If they were not exposed to it in the first place, which is very easy without a VPN, then they wont have the interest to get one.

As someone who went through hoops to disable filtering back in the 90s when that was the solution, yes they do. VPNs are free and can be installed on a device in about 5 minutes.

One difference is that there are absolutely no people involved with the current political power structure who are openly saying their end goal is to marry dogs.

"“Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

--Project 2025

Probably so - I've long lost the thread of what most of this is about. For instance, the state recently passed a law requiring that the ten commandments be posted in every classroom. And I had to stop and think - how many of these legislators themselves feel like they should be bound by said commandments? I'd suspect hardly any, based on their behavior.

"IT IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE! First we gave women rights, then black people rights, and now we're trying to give trans people rights and rights to illegal immigrants!"

To be clear, I support all of those things, but the point I'm making is that saying it's a slippery slope is a bad argument because A) the next steps are often based on opinion and not fact and B) what one person sees as a slippery slope another person sees as progress and growth.

I'm not arguing in favor of this Texas bill (I have pretty mixed feelings about it honestly). I'm just saying the argument the first person made is a bad argument.

> Kids don't go through the hoops to buy and install a VPN just to access porn.

When I hosted a Minecraft server, I routinely got DDoS'd by gradeschoolers. I have little doubt they could be tunneling thru a VPN in short order - because they did that too.

We’re already sliding down the slippery slope. Claiming I’m arguing in bad faith is just helping the people that are pushing us down it. A slippery slope isn’t a bad thing if it involves people getting more rights.

I also think it’s somewhat ironic that my simple statement that started this conversation has been flagged. Free speech really is done in the US.

Many VPNs are free iOS apps that vacuum your data. They are consumer-level download-tap-tap easy.

So the Texas porn law also removes hormones and curiosity? Every kid who has ever used a search engine has typed in the word fuck to see what comes back. But instead of clicking on the first link of peoplefucking.com and stopping they'll just click on peoplefucking.fr. Then there will be demands that all websites now must be approved by the government to protect the children

Kids were using VPNs and proxies when I was in school in the 2000s to access Myspace, flash games and comics. There are free ones that are spyware + hijack your PC for use in a botnet.

These were "normie" kids, not future hackers.

Taking a step back from this case.

In general any legal argument of the form: People will break the law, so there is no point in the law, is bullshit. Imagine any law and you will see how ridiculous it is.

"Making stealing with guns is illegal, people will use facemasks and file gun identifiers" "Adding security features to money is pointless, counterfeiters can always " "Adding locks to doors is pointless, if an thief wants to they will picklock it or copy your key" "making alcohol illegal is pointless, kids can present fake ids or ask their parents..." murder illegal is pointless

sometimes you can clearly see the slope being greased

kids will absolutely do that.

Not a good analogy because people don't inherently crave firearms as an inescapable aspect of the human condition. They do crave sex, food and, by most anthropological accounts, drugs. When we try to artificially restrict these innate desires we consistently see people reject those restrictions in large numbers, oftentimes leading them to fulfil those needs in worse ways than the ways that were limited. And only the most repressive regimes/social orders are able to (mostly) quell that perpetual rebellion, but those are not systems anyone I know would want to live under.

EDIT: And by comparison, most societies get along fine with very limited access to firearms. Only the most repressive manage to enforce bans on unpermitted forms of drugs or sex.

This law is a pretext to kill anonymous speech on the Internet. It always starts with porn.

The government here is asking porn companies to share the real identities with them (else age verification is not effective - you have to validate it against something). This will expand out to sites about abortion, contraception, gay advocacy, and trans advocacy. There's no way it won't.

This is a concerted attempt to get around limitations on restricting free speech by the one cool trick of asking for ID first.

Heeeeeeey, we could be asking for ID for any reason, it's definitely not to track you!/s

If you're not arguing for it, stop being an apologist for it.

As the late George Carlin put it succinctly years ago, "fuck the children!"

Why? Pointing out a flawed argument isn't the same as supporting an idea.

Hell: My fellow kids in class ~2008-2011 were using Ultrasurf to get to Facebook, powered by Falun Gong. I remember those days quite well, and the half-assed attempts by IT staff to keep us from running it or saving it to our network drives.

I just remembered my home IP address by heart to RDP back home. Another one of us hosted a free website somewhere with a spare copy of Ultrasurf to get around the filters in the first place.

We need to put these restrictions on device, and hard socially punish anyone who breaks the pact. Like, our kids get phones with parental control, they get the whitelisted approved stuff only on those.

If I give my kid a general purpose computer with unsupervised access, I better be on top of that, especially if your kid is over. It's dangerous.

We are the adults here, we have to control the children for their own good, and frankly for our own good too whether said children belong to us or not. And we sure can, and we have always done so without eliminating vice, we just agree to exclude the children and punish any adult who breaks this pact. If we can't even control the children, we must be the most incapable idiot generations of all human history.

We do not need to give children access to the internet. There will be nothing of value to children published that can't be whitelisted inside of a week, and the delay of a week won't matter.

Conversely, we cannot afford to allow a comprehensive internet censorship regime for the adult public. It's too important for civil society to survive that every adult have unrestricted read and publish rights with every other adult. Therefore, the only reasonable move is to kick the children off of it.

The deceased drug adict with 0 grandchildren?

> Kids don't go through the hoops to buy and install a VPN just to access porn.

If someone made a list of all the things kids are willing to do just to access porn, it would blow your mind.

We are living through a real life example of the fallacy fallacy: the fallacy that because an argument contains a logical fallacy, that does not mean it is not true.

Have you ever been or met a kid?

if you had kids, would it bother you if your neighbor told you legally what your kid has access?

“no, your kid can’t have access to that pg-13 movie. why? because i won’t let my kid watch it. therefor your kid can’t either.”

if that would irritate you, then this should absolutely irritate you as well.

these people need to learn to raise their own kids and quit dictating to everyone else. we would never try to ban their waltons or whatever. they need to mind their own business.

more than 10,000 book bans have happened already, this is about to get much much worse.

> we have to control the children for their own good

as long it’s your own children. you don’t get to dictate what other’s kids cant see.

religious fundamentalists don’t get to say other kids can’t see a gay wedding. same thing in the other direction, i don’t get to say that other peoples kids can’t see a straight wedding. you won’t see me screaming “straight weddings are inappropriate propaganda for a child to see!”

it’s weird af to control what other peoples kids can or can’t see.