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Anti-Porn Laws Can't Stop Porn, But They Can Stop Free Speech
Anti-porn laws can't stop porn, but they can stop free speech. In the meantime, people will continue to get off to anything and everything.
The sentiment in the comments on most content that floats to the top of my algorithms these days—whether it’s in the For You Page on TikTok, the infamously malleable Reels algo on Instagram, X’s obsession with sex-stunt discourse that makes it into prudish New York Times opinion essays—is confusion: How did I get here? “The current test for obscenity requires, for example, that the thing that's depicted has to be patently offensive,” Becca Branum, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project, told me in a call. And as we saw with FOSTA/SESTA, and with the age verification lawsuits cropping up around the country recently—and what we’ll likely see happen now that the Take It Down Act has passed with extreme expectations placed on website administrators to remove anything that could infringe on nonconsensual content laws—platforms might not even bother to try to deal with the burden of keeping NSFW users happy anymore.
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