Internet Porn Censorship

Utah was one of the first states to pass legilsation promoting a modern day morality message that porn harms public healthl. The state went on to pass a somewhat watered down bill requiring porn producers to add a warning to any porn films sold in the state.

Now Pornhub has responded to the new legislation by pre-fixing a warning to its porn films, at least for those reading from Utah. The websites also requires a tick box consent that a reader is over 18.

The Italian Senate is set to take up new legislation to block all online porn sites in the country, requiring internet users to specifically request that the porn blocks be removed The proposed new censorship law was introduced by Senator Simone Pillon, a member of Italy's nationalist Northern League party, led by former Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini.

The law would require all makers of internet-connected devices, including computers, cell phones, and smart TVs, to install software that would automatically block all porn sites. Users would have to file a specific request to remove the software in order to view porn online, under the proposed law.

It is not yet clear whether this internet censorship measure has a realistic chance of becoming law.

Update: Thwarted

26th June 2020. See article from xbiz.com

The lower house of the Italian parliament has approved an agenda item by the ruling PD's Enza Bruno Bossio to prevent the passage of a controversial amendment that would have required all adult sites to be automatically blocked by device manufacturers, and at the ISP level, with the proposal that subscribers would be required to individually request the block to be lifted.

The amendment had been inserted, as XBIZ reported earlier this week, at the legislative committee stage by Simone Pillon, a representative from the Lega party, and it was due to come to a vote by Monday.

La Repubblica opined that the matter is not yet settled, though Bossio's agenda item is an important roadblock to the Lega's attempt to censor all adult content on the Italian internet.

Momentum had been building in New Zealand over recent months for a nationwide law blocking internet porn, but the effort spearheaded by Interior Affairs Minister Tracey Martin appears to have hit a roadblock. Martin said late last year that she planned to bring her porn ban bill before New Zealand's parliament prior to the 2020 elections, which are scheduled for September.

Martin created a draft proposal to require blocking of porn sites by internet service providers for anyone under 18 years of age. But when she circulated the paper among members of the governing coalition including her own centrist New Zealand First Party, as well as the liberal-progressive Labor and Green Parties, she found a lack of interest. She now says she will not attempt to push the porn-blocking plan any further.

Despite her inability to win support for her porn-blocking proposal, Martin still says that she favors an age-verification system for online porn, according to the Herald report.

Creators working with adult content are reportedly being kicked off OnlyFans as the previously x-rated site booms in popularity during the coronavirus crisis.

Adult content creators claim they are being booted off the website which allows them to monetize their interactions with fans because of a surge of new users.

Things have already changed and the top content creators are now no longer sex workers but celebrities/YouTubers, says Mrs. Hell, a model and dominatrix. That's very problematic. Many adult content creators say they Many adult content creators say they're not breaking the rules but their accounts are still being deleted.

Creators are being removed with some unlikely sounding explanation citing suspicious/fraudulent activity on their accounts but with no further details. Those affected described how they were unable to access funds owing after the deletion..

Collective Shout is a feminist campaign group based in Australia. Its latest post promotes the latest DeepNude app:

A new app called Deepnude.to allows users to turn images of clothed women into nude imaages It follows an earlier app, Deepnude, which was taken offline last year after the developers faced significant backlash.

Deepnude.to users can transform images of clothed women into nude images for free, [but with obtrusive watermarks proclaiming 'fake'], or can pay $20 a month to create unlimited nude images. The developers are anonymous, and transactions take place via Bitcoin.

The app is premised on the violation and humiliation of women. Its purpose is to create pornographic images of non-consenting women.

Similar Deepnudes style novelty apps are available on Apple and Google app stores. Twitter hosts the official Deepnudes.to account, promoting the app: No downloads, no registration, no bullshit. Your daily fix for #deepnude content! Instagram also hosts accounts dedicated to Deepnudes themed-content, as well as hashtags to assist users in easily finding fake nude images of women.

An anti-porn campaign group, misleadingly name Freedom United, has joined in the campaign against Pornhub. Several feminist groups are petitioning for banks to act as moral censors by refusing payment service to porn companies.

Thanks to Alan who comments:

Take a look at this bullshit . As lovely a piece of authoritarian feminism as you could wish to find. Pornhub directors might like to consult m'learned friends about defamation, especially in the UK.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has called on the US government to confront supposed harms wrought by the pornography industry, which has experienced a surge in website traffic because of the coronavirus pandemic.

In an April 30 letter to Attorney General William Barr, the Conference urged the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce obscenity laws, investigate website owners for criminality, and to encourage state and local governments to crack down on the industry.

The Conference also accuses porn companies of exploiting people's growing sense of isolation and heightened levels of stress caused by the worst public health crisis in more than a century. The letter says:

As pastors, we frequently see the pain that results from a pornography habit. Marriages that are injured or even broken by a spouse's pornography use, which some divorce lawyers report as a factor in over half of their cases, have a ripple effect on children.

As pornography becomes more mainstream, so do its potential dangers. Unprecedented, unlimited, and anonymous access to pornography via modern technology has led users to seek more and more extreme videos. Thus, non-enforcement or lax enforcement of obscenity laws against producers and distributors may provide a gateway for this demand to metastasize, increasing the incidents of trafficking, child pornography, other abuse, and broader unjust conditions.

The porny Uncensored film festival has been forced to have a rethink for 2020 due to coronavirus. Rather than simply cancel it has come up with an interesting change of direction. Uncensored explains:

How are you navigating intimacy, sex and desire in isolation?
Have you ever thought of your home as a set for a porno?

It's time to be UNCENSORED and bring our sweetest and dirtiest fantasies to life. Let's laugh, lust, feel, play and COME TOGETHER. Stay home...stay horny... Let's make it HOT!

Explore new erotic narratives... Reinvent and experience the space around you as a temple of pleasure, let your garden become the heaven of sin and transform your veggies into sex toys.

UNCENSORED Festival is excited to launch an open call for pornos and erotic movies realised in isolation. Open to both amateur and seasoned filmmakers.

See submission details from uncensoredfest.com

The US anti-porn campaigners Morality in Media (who now misleadingly name themselves as the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation) have been calling on international payment companies to censor the adult tube sites, most notably Pornhub. The group has set up an international branch and recruited a few unknown morality campaign groups from around the world. Haley McNamara, director of the international branch writes in a letter to major payment companies:

Major credit card companies continue to provide infrastructure to the exploitative pornography industry. As international anti-exploitation leaders, we urgently call on these financial institutions to cease processing payments and thereby refuse to aid human rights violations

We believe this decision would be in line with your corporate ethical commitment to processing legal purchases, and that it will advance your reputation by refusing profits from sexual violence, incest, sex trafficking, child sexual abuse material, and other exploitation.

The pornography industry does not judge or verify consent in any videos on their sites, let alone live webcam videos. Tragically, this has resulted in worldwide cases of rape, child sexual abuse, sex trafficking, and non-consensually shared pornography (or 'revenge porn') being uploaded onto mainstream pornography websites.

Further, we know that mainstream pornography is promoting themes of incest, rape, racism, sex with youth, and sexual violence against women, which warps many users' sexual and neurological development. It is time for mainstream companies to stop propping up an industry that is inherently built on sexual exploitation.

Offsite Comment: Wake up and smell the coffee

See article from girlonthenet.com

Blogger Girl on the Net has written a interesting allegorical explainer suggesting that the called for action is likely to hit the wrong target.

Samantha Fox, a New York City porn star who performed in 94 adult movies between 1976 and 1985, died at her home in the city's East Village on April 22, reportedly of natural causes. She was 69 years old.

During the course of her career, she worked for all the major New York studios, including appearing in several films for Arthur Morowitz's Video-X-Pix and Howard Winters' Command Video. According to the Internet Movie Database, she also appeared in the loops Anal Party and Three Star Love in the late 70s with Vanessa del Rio, Jesse Adams and Dave Ruby.

A few of her movies that I remember:

Roommates 1982
Amanda by Night  1981
Outlaw Ladies   1981
Fascination 1980
The Filthy Rich 1980
Afternoon Delights 1980
Co-Ed Fever  1980
Bon Appétit  1980

The Mississippi House of Representatives quietly let die two unlikely bills that targeted online porn.

Mississippi bills, House Bill 1116 and HB 1120 , would have relied on neighboring Southern states -- Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Oklahoma -- to enter into an interstate compact for the purposes of banning online pornography and related marketing campaigns on social media platforms.

The bills would also have established a Southern states commission on obscenities prohibition and prescribe its powers and duties.

The bills proposed by pastor Tracy Arnold were designed to find an area of moral decency for the Internet.

Julie Bindel is a British anti-porn campaigner. She has had a whinge about OnlyFans website in the Spectator. She writes:

OnlyFans.com (OF) is the latest kid on the block to be billed as a safe, consequence-free way of selling sex and home-grown porn that empowers women. The social media site is similar to Instagram, but users pay to subscribe to creators' feeds.

The top earners on OF are women whose subscribers are male. These men pay between £5 to £20 a month to view images considered too pornographic for Instagram. Subscribers can also direct message women and pay tips to get personalised videos or photos, depending on his individual sexual tastes.

OF is a huge money machine and is doing extremely well during the Covid-19 lockdown. It now has around 17.5 million users worldwide and over 70,000 content creators, who have received over $150 million (£119 million) since its launch. Content providers keep 80% of their income, while the company takes the remaining 20%.

OnlyFans' subscription-based model has led some to claim that it is somehow empowering women. Outlets like the New York Times say it has put X-rated entertainment in the hands of its entertainers and means content creators perform fewer sex acts. Others think that because OF has reduced physical sexual exploitation, it does not put women in danger.

But of course Bindel disagrees, and should you want to read her see article from spectator.co.uk

The Free Speech Coalition is trade group representing, amongst others, US porn producers. The group has just published its interpretation of Utah's recently passed anti pornography law  that requires a warning label on products distributed in the state of Utah. The group writes:

In March, the State of Utah passed a law requiring anyone distributing obscene material in Utah to affix a warning label -- and, in the case of streaming video, a five-second pre-roll -- warning potential viewers of the dangers associated with showing such content to minors. Failure to do so can result in a $2500 fine (plus court costs and legal fees).

The law has caused a fair amount of confusion, both within the state and among adult producers. While we can not provide legal advice or specific guidance about any business' potential liability under the law, we hope we can provide some context for understanding the new law.

Some of the confusion comes from the previous versions of the bill. When the original bill was introduced in early February, the proposed law applied not just to obscene content, but to any representation of sexual activity. Thanks to the work of ACLU and objections raised by FSC, the law has now been significantly narrowed. Currently, the requirement to label content only applies to legally obscene material.

What Is Obscene?

While the word obscene is often used casually to describe any explicit material, for more than 50 years it's been a fairly narrow legal category.

Unfortunately, there is no clear definition for obscenity under US law204in order for a work to be declared obscene, a prosecutor must bring an obscenity case and secure an obscenity conviction. It is a very high standard to prove obscenity. There have been relatively few obscenity prosecutions in the last two decades, and even then for fairly extreme material.

Given this, it's unclear how the law can or will be applied to individual distributors or website owners. In theory, until a work is deemed obscene by a court, it would not be subject to the labeling requirements of this law. However, could the Attorney General bring a case regardless?204and assume most adult companies would rather pay a $2500 fine than fight a lengthy and costly First Amendment case, even if they would likely prevail? We don't yet know.

What Are The Requirements?

You should read the text of the bill for yourself here. In addition to the warning, you're required to insert code so that prosecutors can easily detect if you are using the warning.

Is This Constitutional?

FSC believes the warning is compelled speech'204essentially, the government forcing you to express a specific message204 omething the First Amendment protects against. However, until someone challenges the law in court, and wins, it remains the law.

Does It Apply to Companies Outside of Utah

Yes. Anyone with material publicly available on the web (or otherwise accessible to citizens of Utah) is subject to this law. You need not market or otherwise sell anything specifically to Utahns in order to be subject to it. (A previous lawsuit over a similar labeling law successfully challenged this point, but it does not automatically extend to this law.)

How Should My Business Proceed?

As with many new laws, your degree of compliance will depend on your tolerance for risk. Will the law actually be enforced, or was it merely a political stand? Is it constitutional? We can't answer those questions yet. Nor can we answer if the content hosted on your site is likely considered obscene in a court of law. For these questions, we can only recommend you speak with an attorney well-versed in First Amendment law.

After Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered into a nationwide shutdown, reports out of that country indicated that at least some of the hundreds of porn sites blocked there since October of 2018 were quietly coming back online .

AVN.com reported that though there was no official lifting of the porn ban, PornHub quietly became accessible to Indian internet users just a day after the stay-at-home order went into effect, albeit via the site's .org address.

Locked-down Indian citizens have been accessing PornHub content at a record rate since Modi's shutdown order, according to a report by India's Free Press Journal. Pornhub has reported a staggering 95% increase in traffic from India as of late last week.

The tube site xHamster reported a 20% rise in Indian traffic over the first three weeks in March .

Some online commenters theorized that the government had quietly relaxed the national porn ban as an added incentive to keep Indians in their homes during the scheduled 21-day lockdown.

A bill that requires porn producers to put a warning label on their products has gone into law without the governor's signature.

State governor Gary Herbert allowed House Bill 243 to take effect but opted not to sign it himself.

The bill was significantly watered down from its original version. It first required a label on every pornographic video and publication declaring it was harmful to minors. By the time the bill passed the Utah State Legislature, it was modified to only cover what is obscene.

That sets a different legal standard and requires someone to take an adult site, studio or publication to court to have something defined as legally obscene.

US porn producers are unlikely to add warning labels to their products and will challenge the constitutionality of the law if challenged,