The Volokh Conspiracy
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Free Speech Unmuted: The Supreme Court Rules on Protecting Kids from Sexually Themed Speech Online
My co-host Jane Bambauer and I discuss the Court's June 27 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which upheld a state law that required pornography sites to "use reasonable age verification methods … to verify" that their users are adults.
See also our past episodes:
- Free Speech, Public School Students, and "There Are Only Two Genders"
- Can AI Companies Be Sued for What AI Says?
- Harvard vs. Trump: Free Speech and Government Grants
- Trump's War on Big Law
- Can Non-Citizens Be Deported For Their Speech?
- Freedom of the Press, with Floyd Abrams
- Free Speech, Private Power, and Private Employees
- Court Upholds TikTok Divestiture Law
- Free Speech in European (and Other) Democracies, with Prof. Jacob Mchangama
- Protests, Public Pressure Campaigns, Tort Law, and the First Amendment
- Misinformation: Past, Present, and Future
- I Know It When I See It: Free Speech and Obscenity Laws
- Speech and Violence
- Emergency Podcast: The Supreme Court's Social Media Cases
- Internet Policy and Free Speech: A Conversation with Rep. Ro Khanna
- Free Speech, TikTok (and Bills of Attainder!), with Prof. Alan Rozenshtein
- The 1st Amendment on Campus with Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky
- Free Speech On Campus
- AI and Free Speech
- Free Speech, Government Persuasion, and Government Coercion
- Deplatformed: The Supreme Court Hears Social Media Oral Arguments
- Book Bans – or Are They?
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do you mean Paxton v free speech?
Ashcroff v free speech was 2002 (?)
D'oh! Fixed, thanks.
inadvertant error - no biggie.
Oh no, what is the party of pedophile defenders supposed to do if they can't easily groom kids online or increasingly at school?
Free speech must be fought for on distasteful grounds before it encroaches on political stuff.
You know, like Germany and the UK, which jail people for free speech, which you almost certainly complain about, rightly, in other contexts.
This isn't about protecting kids, though there is a speech aspect to it. This is about Big Brother tracking your viewing habits. If we're gonna go into damaging kids, religion and politics are also fraught subjects.
Further, if you wanna known how to work around this block, I have no idea, but jr. highs are probably full of experts.
Kids do not know how to act. So, they imitate. Unless you want porn re-enactments in the back of the school bus, their access should be restricted. You will also have more self-generated images down to childhood.
A review of online age estimation and of experience with restrictive European laws on this subject. As usual, they do not work well.
https://cybernews.com/editorial/age-estimation-tools-kids-porn/