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.

  • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
    1421·
    8 months ago

    I’m fucking sick of these laws. Since when was the “party of small government” all about creating literal nanny states?

    • snooggums@midwest.socialEnglish
      83·
      8 months ago

      It always has been, just like how they claim to be fiscally responsible while bringing back trickle down economics to destroy government funding.

      They have lied constantly for the nearly 3 decades I have been able to vote.

      • FenrirIII@lemmy.world
        22·
        8 months ago

        They take money away from education and remove laws/rules about lying. We’re at the top of a mountain of shit built by conservatives and we’re going to start sinking.

    • exanime@lemmy.today
      30·
      8 months ago

      Since forever?.. The party of small government is a slogan… No more true than the wings you get from drinking red bull

    • modifier@lemmy.ca
      18·
      8 months ago

      Because they have never been the party of small government. You don’t need to be the party of small government if you’re the party of credulous rubes.

    • Smite6645@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      7·
      8 months ago

      Small enough to fit in your living room, bed room, computer room, doctor’s office, library, kid’s classroom, etc.

  • Uranium3006@kbin.social
    1201·
    8 months ago

    The anti gay part is the whole point. They’re not protecting kids, they’re protecting Christian control over kids (pay attention to who’s actually doing all the child sex abuse)

    • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
      10·
      8 months ago

      This bill is unconstitutional, but we’ll have to wait and see if the insurrection-appointed SCOTUS will do their job or if this is like a gifted RV sort of ruling.

      • 5too@lemmy.worldEnglish
        482·
        8 months ago

        It also calls being gay “sexual conduct,” which critics say could set up the state for more censorship of LGBT+ citizens.

        As in, they can use anti-porn measures to block information from kids about homosexuality in general.

        • soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz
          337·
          8 months ago

          I’m confused. Wouldn’t heterosexuality be sexual conduct too? And also block information about heterosexuality of the same nature to kids? How is this specially anti gay

          The only way this could be considered anti gay if we’re inferring the people in control choose what to block and are homophobic and biased enough to only block homosexual content. That’ll fucking explode if it happened.

          Also, porn is fucking unstoppable there will be plenty of all kinds of porn for all to see. No worries

          • MetaCubed@lemmy.world
            31·
            8 months ago

            TL;DR: IANAL, however, the document this bill references to define what content is harmful to children directly, verbatim defines sexual conduct as including “homosexuality” broadly

            Okay so this bill is SB394 (linked above obviously) and it opens with the following

            Any commercial entity that knowingly shares or distributes material that is harmful to minors on a website and such material appears on 25% or more of the webpages viewed on such website in any calendar month, or that knowingly hosts such website (…)

            It carries on to later define “harmful to minors” in section h-3 as the following:

            (3) “Harmful to minors” means the same as defined in K.S.A. 21-6402, and amendments thereto.

            If we go look at K.S.A. 21-6402 we can find that it is regarding “Promotion to minors of material harmful to minors” and goes on to declare in section d-2 that “harmful to minors” refers to several things including sexual conduct (I’m omitting this full quote for brevity, you can find it in the linked document).

            Now if we look a little further down, we can see that Kansas currently defines sexual content as defined in section d-8:

            (8) “sexual conduct” means acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals or pubic area or buttocks or with a human female’s breast; and (…)

            Considering all this, i think extremely reasonable to believe that this could outlaw LGBTQ+ content from being displayed openly online within Kansas

            Edit: fixed sexual conduct/content mixups

            • soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz
              137·
              8 months ago

              I’m going to assume your repeating typos of “content” and “conduct” are accidental and you meant the same word for all times you used one of them…

              Holy shit why the fuck is homosexuality in section d-8. It’s an easy fix to just delete that one word.

              Thanks for sharing and with such detail, honestly you’ve really outlined the issue and helped me see. The sexual conduct definition is horrendous

              • MetaCubed@lemmy.world
                2·
                8 months ago

                Whoops, Yes it was a little past 1am when I wrote that I must’ve gotten them mixed up which switching back and forth between the documents. I’ll double check and correct that in a moment.

                I’m sincerely glad you actually read it all, the world can be a little fucked right now.

          • chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world
            261·
            8 months ago

            Yes, but if you only enforce the rules for “dirty homosexuals”, it effectively is an anti-gay bill. Conservatives have proven time and time again that they’re happy to selectively apply the rule of law in any way that suits them.

            • soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz
              224·
              8 months ago

              Big “if” in my opinion but I’m not a US citizen so I can’t really say I’m sure about that.

              The bill is a load of shit either way, the world is changing, you can’t shield minors from porn.

  • flames5123@lemmy.world
    64·
    8 months ago

    How will verification be done? Are they making the websites foot the bill for verification, which pornhub is super against, or are they going to make a centralized device verification, like how Louisiana did, allowing its residents to access pornhub again?

    How is the 25% decided? Public content or private, like a Dropbox system? 25% by file size, length (how are pictures counted here), or just per item (would a gallery or picture be the item here)?

    These legislatures know NOTHING about technology and how it all works and are just doing this for censorship and LGBTQ+ discrimination.

  • ExcursionInversion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    531·
    8 months ago

    Going to repost this

    They want to ban it nationwide

    Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. 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

    -A Promise to America", Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 5, Project 2025

    • FenrirIII@lemmy.world
      171·
      8 months ago

      So, holding onto all those old Playboy magazines can be considered an investment. My wife can’t argue that!

    • Mirshe@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 months ago

      Not just ban it, but completely outlaw it in the old sense of the word. Anyone who they claim “purveys” or “produces” porn could be on The List (you know the one). Of course, these terms will be defined in the broadest terms (one could likely assume they already have all the bills for this written on some legal expert’s hard drive as we speak, just waiting to be delivered to whoever they want to introduce it), and will be applied to pretty much anyone that they wish gone, at any time they wish them to disappear. Did you draw something mildly NSFW in your notebook when you were 12? That’s production. Did you write slashfic back in freshman year? Yup, you go on The List.

      This also conveniently leaves the door open to class sex education material as “pornography”, which several states have already done (these states are generally testbeds for later national propositions).

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    373·
    8 months ago

    Seems pretty easy to work around.

    If a porn site has 10,000 videos, just add 2,501 non porn videos (just use public domain stuff) and make a button to hide those. Scale those numbers up/down as needed.

    Just add a bunch of junk LLM-generated videos to pad out the content so that the number of actual porn videos remains 25% of the total. Then just provide a button to hide those AI-generated junk videos.

    • GiantRobotTRex@lemmy.sdf.org
      5·
      8 months ago

      Any commercial entity that knowingly shares or distributes material that is harmful to minors on a website and such material appears on 25% or more of the webpages viewed on such website in any calendar month

      (emphasis mine)

      They can host as many non-porn videos as they want but it doesn’t matter if people aren’t watching those videos. For every webpage with porn, they’d have to force the user to visit three webpages without porn first.

    • ChocoboRocket@lemmy.world
      5·
      8 months ago

      Might want to check your math, 25% is the maximum ‘adult content’ allowed.

      To use your numbers, a business with 10,000 videos would need +7,500 of them being non-porn to be under 25% and not be fined.

  • samus12345@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    8 months ago

    It also calls being gay “sexual conduct”

    Okay, as long as it’s illegal for everyone else other than asexual people to exist as well.

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
    223·
    8 months ago

    Get ready for the real life lesson 😉. Mamma and Daddy are going to have to explain all sorts of stuff about birds and bees.

    Daddy, what is a DP gangbang? Mom, my BF wants a threesome, is that a soda? No, we don’t have sex, we only lick.

    It’s going to be perfect! And then those sexual retards are going to migrate to LA one day. Or maybe they go to Vegas for their wedding.

  • Pickle_Jr@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    7·
    8 months ago

    Article is pay-walled. Does it say how many legislators voted for it?

    I highly doubt the democratic governor would sign this bill. Does it have enough to override a veto?

    • snooggums@midwest.socialEnglish
      16·
      8 months ago

      While the Kansas state legislature is almost entirely Republican, they don’t tend to override the governor’s veto too frequently as they are not as lock step due to having all the power.

      Without checking the numbers, this seem like the kind of thing they would let the governor’s veto atand so they can use it against her in the next election.

    • Tinks@lemmy.world
      3·
      8 months ago

      There is a veto-proof majority. Governor hasn’t announced what she plans to do yet

  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
    41·
    8 months ago

    IDGAF about visitors I just want the people in the porno to be of age and I don’t feel like it’s being adequately enforced.