Tag: porn

FSC Secures Preliminary Injunction Against Unconstitutional Texas Law

Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs, a coalition of major adult platforms and creators, have been granted a preliminary injunction against the Texas antiporn law, HB1181. Texas is blocked from enforcing the law while the case is litigated.

“This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” says Alison Boden, Executive Director of Free Speech Coalition. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the Court agreed with our view that HB1181’s true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”

The Court agreed with FSC and our co-plaintiffs on nearly every argument:

  • The law violates First Amendment rights of creators and consumers
  • The law has a chilling effect on legally-protected speech
  • Parental filters are a less restrictive and more effective method of protecting minors
  • The state does not have the right to compel speech in the form of health warnings

HB 1181 required sites with adult content to force their visitors to provide digital IDs or other official proof of age, as well as display pseudoscientific “health” warnings. Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs argued that the requirements are unconstitutional and expose consumers to significant privacy risks.

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Talking About Sex Online Shouldn’t Be Illegal

Kayden Kross, an adult film entrepreneur and a former business partner of mine, sent me a text message a few months ago. She was excited—she was seeing a community of straight dudes gather on Deeper, the power exchange and BDSM-themed website she owns, to discuss their sexual preferences, turn-ons, and other various tastes. And she was seeing this across other platforms too. This felt rare to her, and groundbreaking to me. 

When I asked Lucie Fielding, a mental health counselor in Washington state, how many spaces she was aware of for straight men to have these conversations, she said “Oh, not many—unless we’re talking incels—there’s got to be stuff on Reddit, but apart from that, these are such important forums. Because there’s such a societal pressure for men not to be talking with one another about these things.” But on platforms like Deeper, PornHub, and other online providers of adult videos, the comments section is just that sort of conversation.

Kross described the communities as having creeds of acceptance, giving examples such as “The ‘don’t yuck my yum’ thing. It’s agreed upon that so long as you are not saying something that is a political minefield, it is not OK to dog on someone else’s expression of what they’re there for. And when people do, even if it’s something where you can’t imagine anyone would be into that, you’ll see people rush to that person’s defense. There’s very much this understanding that in order for this to work, everyone has to agree not to add shame to the pile.”

And it isn’t just sexuality being shared. Someone might say, according to Kross, “‘My dog died today.’ And then someone else will chime in with, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ And then the person will say, ‘I had no one,’ and ‘I’m alone.’ And then someone else would be like, ‘Well, I would have given you a hug if I was there.’ We all know, there’s this kind of idea of traditional masculinity, and the expectations are that men don’t really talk about their feelings. And the fact is, in the comment section, when you’re anonymous, you’re not subject any longer to expectations, right? That’s why we have trolls. But it’s also why you end up with these kinds of conversations that, you know—otherwise, who would you have them with?”

But these conversations, like so many others, are at risk of being censored out of existence. New state laws requiring verification of consumers’ ages threaten to wipe out small producers and scare off subscribers concerned about threats to their own reputations in the event of a data breach. Laws like SESTA/FOSTA have made promotion of adult entertainment—already an uphill battle—even more starkly difficult, reaching as far as those Reddit communities Fielding mentioned and causing many subreddits about sexuality to shutter. And payment processors and banks have been denying adult workers access to financial infrastructure for decades.

Why does freedom of speech and freedom from shame matter in this context? According to Fielding, “Shame tells us that we are bad. That our desires are bad, that our pleasure isn’t valid. And the relationship between shame and isolation is that when we feel that we are bad or that there’s something to be ashamed of, we withdraw because we don’t want to share that.… That leads to social withdrawal.… It means that folks are trying things in very risky ways, because they don’t have the community around them.” One example is choking—without proper safety and risk-informed consent, this risky activity can turn deadly with alarming ease.

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“I Just Want To Sell Titty Pictures”: Sex Workers F**ked By Crypto

Sex workers – who frequently face financial discrimination, losing access to payment apps and banking apps such as PayPal, Venmo and CashApp due to their profession – began using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin as an alternative for payments, which bypass traditional banking systems and avoid service fees from platforms such as OnlyFans.

According to data by the Free Speech Coalition, 2/3 of sex workers have lost access to a bank account or financial service, with 40% having an account closed within the last year, Wired reports.

“I just want to sell titty pictures,” said Allie Eve Knox, a professional dominatrix and fetish performer. “I never wanted to be an expert in financial discrimination.”

…

Given the systemic discrimination throughout the banking sector, many sex workers have turned to cryptocurrencies as a means of both storing wealth and accepting payment. For a while, things were great. Digital currencies allowed customers to pay discreetly without supplying personal information, while sex workers now had a way to bypass the banking system entirely.

Knox, for example, began accepting crypto in 2014 – holding up a QR code through which viewers could tip her in crypto.

Another sex worker, former escort-turned-porn star Lira Roux, told the outlet that she began to accept crypto in 2015 at the request of clients. Initially, she would exchange the crypto for dollars, however when new laws came into effect – after which many adult-friendly advertising sites were barred from accepting regular money – she began to pay for ads with crypto too.

“By and large, crypto is useful for people that aren’t being taken care of properly by the government,” Roux said. “For sex workers, who aren’t well-served by banks, it becomes a useful option.”

Now, thanks to regulatory scrutiny which has gone into overdrive since the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, sex workers are ‘bumping up’ against limitations – and are finding that ‘decentralized’ crypto is no more detached from the banking system than traditional currency – as sex workers are finding it increasingly difficult to convert crypto into dollars. Typically, this is done via an exchange, which then allows one to withdraw to a traditional bank account. Sex workers are now being banned from crypto exchanges.

“You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” said Knox. “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.”

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Texas Dept. of Health and Human Services Refuses to Answer Questions About Anti-Porn Law’s Mandatory ‘Warnings’

The Texas Department of Health and Human Services has declined to confirm or deny whether the “health warnings” mandated by the state’s recent anti-porn age verification law are supported by any official documentation or statement produced by that office.

As XBIZ reported, the Republican-authored HB 1181 was passed by the Texas legislature with bipartisan support in May and will go into effect September 1.

The new Texas age verification law — part of a state-by-state campaign by religious conservatives and anti-porn activists to outlaw all sexual material online — compels adult websites to post pseudoscientific anti-porn propaganda disclaimers declaring that “pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses and weakens brain function.”

HB 1181 is a much-augmented version of Louisiana’s age verification law and its many copycats, and echoes the debunked “porn addiction” language of faith-based anti-porn groups.

XBIZ asked the Press Office of the Texas Department of Health and Human Services if the department could provide any documentation or statement pertaining to those warnings, and clarify whether the language of the warnings has its basis in any documentation or statement produced by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services.

After requesting several days to provide a reply to the query, Press Officer Tiffany Young declined to answer, deflecting the questions with an invitation to contact “the authors of this bill for information about how it originated.”

XBIZ also contacted Texas Department of Health and Human Services Chief of Staff Kate Hendrix and the bill’s main sponsor, Rep. Matt Shaheen (R), but received no reply to the same questions.

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Inside an Abusive Anti-Porn Camp for Teens

When Cameron was growing up in the 2010s, he was preoccupied​ with two things: that he was gay, and that there would be dire consequences if his parents and community found out. He lived in a small town in Utah, where over 90 percent of the residents are Mormon. “They are very strict about gender roles and sexuality,” he says.

But Cameron didn’t want to keep his secret to himself. In 2014, when he was 14, he came out to a close friend via text message. Soon after he sent the message, his parents went through his phone and discovered it. “They immediately confronted me about it,” he says. “I was barely ready to tell one person. I was not ready to have that conversation with my parents.”

That conversation was just the beginning. “There was probably about a year there where it was just absolutely brutal—where every day it was coming up around the dinner table,” says Cameron, identified here by a pseudonym at his request. “I can remember my mom picking me up from school and being like, ‘You realize that you’re taking away everything that I thought I could ever have, right? You realize that because of this, I’m never going to have grandchildren from you.'”

His parents’ disapproval was devastating enough, but Cameron says things got worse when the news spread throughout the community. Anonymous accounts started sending Cameron homophobic messages on Facebook. “All gays of the world should be strung up and drowned in the ocean,” he recalls one of them saying. Even scarier were the random people who showed up at the family’s doorstep to confront his mom.

“It was, honestly, really, really terrifying….Everybody around you hates you and essentially wants you purged from the earth,” Cameron says. Around this time, he attempted suicide.

In spite of the harassment, he managed to go on a few dates with guys when he was 16. Nothing panned out, but his parents found out about it. Around the same time, they found some gay porn on his phone. They started locking him in his room at night, forcing him to pee in Gatorade bottles.

During this time his father told a co-worker who was in his late 20s about Cameron. Soon the man “started reaching out and being very schmoozy,” Cameron said. “I was so alone. Everybody hated me….And here’s this person.” He was giving Cameron the attention he craved. They began having sexual encounters. Cameron says the relationship was consensual, yet “you’re under the age of consent, and there’s no way to justify pedophilia. But he was always just really, really nice.”

Once again, his parents found out. They confiscated his phone, so he could no longer talk with the man or look at porn. They also pressed charges, and the man was sent to prison for a year. Cameron was sent to his own prison of sorts: STAR Guides Wilderness Therapy, which bills itself as “the country’s premier wilderness treatment program for teens with technology, pornography and sexual addictions.”

These camps say they can change teens’ lives by helping them overcome severe mental and behavioral issues. STAR Guides claims the camp “provides a specialized ‘unplugged’ environment to reset and re-balance the physical, mental and spiritual health of youth…under the guidance of highly trained therapists and professionals, we provide a setting where youth can feel safe and supported when working through sensitive pornography or sexual issues along with trauma, free of fear, embarrassment or shame.” And some parents and teens testify that STAR Guides was a positive experience. “You gave me my daughter back, and helped her how she needed,” one parent said in an exit interview. A teen said the program was “extremely helpful and life-changing”; another said, “I found myself.”

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Germany uses AI to target online content for removal, send data to police

Germany has a “porn police” – regulators, that is, who are using an “AI” tool called KIVI to find adult content across the internet – on sites and apps like Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and TikTok.

And when they do, those creating and/or posting this content could wind up in prison or pay fines, and they are notified of their transgression by the actual police.

Porn is not KIVI’s only target – the tool also scans for “political extremism, Holocaust denial, and violence.”

Reports mention a couple, dabbling in amateur porn, who received one such letter from the police in Berlin, that said they had posted pornography online unlawfully. However, the letter was not big on detail, neither when it comes to where the content in question was shared, nor why the action was illegal.

In this case, it eventually turned out that the system found the content while scanning Twitter, providing the police with screenshots.

The policy of suppressing porn seems to be picking up speed recently in Germany, as over a hundred people were sent the same type of letter and could now stand accused in criminal cases.

Even though pornography itself is not illegal to access in Germany for those over 18, there has been a push to introduce age verification using this particular industry as the obvious choice to promote the implementation of the technology.

As ever, age verification is touted as a way to protect those under 18 from inappropriate content, but in reality, to try to achieve that, every internet user is exposed to the age verification process (typically involving presenting government-issued IDs to sites or third parties).

And the authorities seem determined to have their way, since they are now ordering Twitter to block contentious accounts and have even tried imposing a blanket ban on a major porn site that would affect every user in Germany, Wired writes.

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Group Founded By Gavin Newsom’s Wife Teaches Kids About Gender Roles With Images From Pornhub

The organization founded by Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wife Jennifer created a film for middle school students that shows sexually explicit images from Pornhub in order to teach students about gender roles and stereotypes in society.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom is the founder of The Representation Project, a group which claims it is focused on fighting sexism and has distributed its curriculums and films to 11,2000 classrooms, 5,000 schools and 2.6 million students. The organization created a film for public schools and kids ages 15 and up that depict sexually explicit images of nude women from websites such as Pornhub, MassiveCams and BDSM.XXX in order to discuss the harms of such images on young boys.

The film “The Mask You Live In” is designed to help raise a “healthier generation of boys and young men” by discussing how society has constructed harmful gender stereotypes, the organization website states. The film features scenes from pornographic videos including “two dirty brunettes dominated in the stables” and “girl next door manipulated and sexually dominated by kinky couple” to demonstrate how pornographic material is distributed to boys and can negatively affect relationships and “sexual aggression.”

Other images in the film shown to students display tags on pornography websites like “orgasm,” “domination” and “face fuck,” according to Open the Books. The K-5 curriculum paired with “The Mask You Live In” says that beginning in elementary school, kids begin to “objectify and degrade women.”

In addition, middle school students are taught about gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation and biological sex using the “gender bread person,” according to “The Mask You Live In” curriculum. The “gender bread person” explains that gender isn’t binary and that while biological sex comes from genitalia, gender identity comes from the head.

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Louisiana’s new law requiring age verification on adult websites is driving uptake of digital ID

Downloads of Louisiana’s state digital ID app have substantially increased because of a new Republican law requiring adult websites to verify the age of visitors with ID.

Since Dec. 31, the day before the law took effect, downloads of LA Wallet increased from a daily average of between 1,200 and 1,500 to over 5,000.

The increase in downloads and site visits coincided with the Jan. 1 implementation of the state law requiring adult websites to verify the age of visitors or be held responsible for distributing harmful content to children.

The law was sponsored by Republican state Rep. Laurie Schlegel, who said that she saw the harm caused by pornographic content while working as a couples therapist and decided that websites should start requiring users to show ID.

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The Porn Industry Is Worried That a Republican Senator Wants to Ban Porn

Some members of the adult industry are worried that a prorposed federal bill that’s going after content that aims to “arouse, titillate, or gratify” sexual desires has the potential to outlaw porn nationwide.

This week, Republican Sen. Mike Lee, from Utah, introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), which seeks to “establish a national definition of obscenity that would apply to obscene content that is transmitted via interstate or foreign communications,” according to a statement from Lee’s office. 

Technically, a federal standard that defines obscenity already exists. Under the decades-old Miller Test, content is obscene if it hits certain conditions, including that the content in question depicts sexual conduct “in a patently offensive way.” At the moment, producing and distributing sexual content is legal in the U.S. 

The Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for workers in the adult industry, and its members are watching Lee’s bill closely because they believe it represents yet another attempt by conservatives to censor speech and expression about sex. 

Lee “introduced a bill that would remove porn’s First Amendment protections and effectively prohibit distribution of adult material in the US,” Free Speech Coalition (FSC) tweeted. “FSC is monitoring the bill, and will continue to do so in the new Congress.”

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UK plans to criminalize digitally putting someone’s face on nude body

The UK’s controversial Online Safety Bill has a section that would make sharing “pornographic deepfakes” without consent a criminal offense in England and Wales. This would involve digitally putting someone’s face on a naked body.

The bill seeks to address the rise in manipulated explicit images, where a person’s face is superimposed on another person’s body.

Current legislation requires proving that the images were shared to “cause distress.”

However, the proposed law does not require the prosecution to prove that someone intended to cause harm, potentially leaving the door open for jokes to be prosecuted.

According to the government, one in 14 people in England and Wales have been threatened with their intimate images being shared online. It added that there is a global concern about deepfake technology being used to create fake pornographic images. A website that creates nudes from clothed photos had 38 million visits in 2021.

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