The bill would make sites with more than 25 percent adult content liable to fines, and lumps homosexuality into "sexual conduct."

An age verification bill in Kansas that is the most extreme in the country has passed both House and Senate and is on its way to the governor’s desk. The bill will make sites with more than 25 percent adult content liable to heavy fines if they don’t verify that visitors are over the age of 18. It also calls being gay “sexual conduct,” which critics say could set up the state for more censorship of LGBT+ citizens.

  • mindbleach
    4·
    8 months ago

    Fuck it, maybe let kids watch porn.

    That’s your worst-case scenario, right? That’s why these pearls are clutched? Well I don’t care. Minors with ready access to vanilla photographs of naked people, on above-board commercial websites? So what. The horrors imagined by conservative dullards are a mundane experience for millions of people, and relatively few of them become dog-fuckers or axe-murderers. Almost like a healthy libido is normal and 18 isn’t the day you take the shrink-wrap off your genitals.

    Teenagers masturbating is a non-event. It’s as unremarkable and unpreventable as atomic decay. It will happen. Do you want it to focus on whatever quasi-erotica passes through the filter? Bugs Bunny in drag, beach volleyball, that one episode of their favorite show where everybody shrinks? Shoddy AOL filters probably made more furries than Disney ever did. AI’s gonna twist kids right up. Tell me with a straight face that’s better than real photos of fake tits.

    So fuck it. I’m not terribly bothered if kids occasionally see gross shit on the internet. It doesn’t need to be illegal, for sites to keep undesirable content hidden by default or excluded entirely. The US has no laws against being an outright Nazi, but on any site not run by and for Nazis, that shit is not welcome. If logged-out Twitter users are one click from seeing some Rule 34 shit, that’s pretty far from the worst thing Twitter’s ever done.

    By all means, keep actual smut off broadcast TV. Expect websites to put the weird stuff behind warnings. Don’t sell porn to minors. But if your website doesn’t take a credit card to visit, hey guess what, anyone can see it, and anyone will. Oh well. People who think that’s the end of the world are lunatics who mean it literally.