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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25898 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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There was an increase in censorship?

I would, if forced to make the decision, prefer our country's violent nutjobs target insurance company CEOs(who can hire private security, spend time behind secured areas instead of in public[eg going out to eat at country clubs rather than the local steakhouse], etc) than schoolchildren. From a utilitarian perspective I hope Luigi has copycats because it will redirect potential mass shooters. I would, of course, rather that our nutjobs be sane, or failing that confine themselves to long, thought out, and incomprehensible youtube comments, and if they must act out in public it's best they be institutionalized. But none of those things are going to happen.

I haven't noted any wave of censorship, either.

There's most certainly a lot more censorship lately. Even I can tell, and I'm not really paying attention. Vita and Mastercard pressuring Steam and some other platforms to remove pornographic content. Paypal is doing something similar as well (I was recently refused a purchase by them). England pushing for online IDs, and speaking of banning VPNs. X and Discord implimenting age verification. Australia is also pushing for online IDs, and there was something in Canada as well which I do not recall because I'm not really paying attention myself.

I didn't get to see the deleted comment, I'm just surprised with how fast you boiling frogs are getting used to the new temperatures. (I don't believe that you're unaware of what's happening, as I'm quite clueless compared to the average user here myself. So instead, I will assume that you either don't consider these things to be censorship, or that you don't consider it to be a substantial change)

The porn bans were signaled as inevitabilities way in advance of anything actually happening; at the end of the day, Texas law is probably a bigger reason than any wave of censorship.

The Uk and Canada are mostly cases of unpopular center-left governments trying to ban their opposition from speaking; this is something the Biden admin pretty transparently wanted to do but was unable to, as well.

In neither case do I really call it a ‘recent increase’ in censorship.

The Texas law is bad, but it only applies where at least a third of content on a site is under the 'harmful to minors' banner. Even accepting for how poorly that calculation is defined, there's little chance it'd apply to sites like itch.io or x twitter, and zero of it applying to Steam. It wouldn't apply to payment processors at all.

Edit: I replied to a child of a comment, thinking it was a direct reply to me. Oops.

I'm not sure which Texas law you're refering to? I consider it an effect, and not a cause. Did the deleted comment imply that everything is downstream from a new Texan law? I admittedly can't defend such a position, I'm just pointing out a pattern with the belief that no explanation makes it any less concerning.

'harmful to minors' is so subjective that whoever has the most power can make it apply to everything that they're against. The label has not had anything to do with what is literally harmful to minors for like 20 years now.

Anyway, Steam and Itch.io have already been hit by censorship (though Itch seem to have gotten some of the games back). ID laws are already gaining traction. I've already had purchases refuted by Paypal because of reasons which are false, but the sort of false where people are afraid of arguing against them because it will make them appear immoral. This is either censorship from many different causes in rapid succession, or it's a coordinated attack on human freedom by somebody with enough power to get multiple countries and multiple major payment processors on their side.

The Texas law hydroacetylene is mentioning is Texas HB1181, which puts some potentially high fines on commercial websites that provide more than 1/3 material that is "harmful to minors" and don't have age verification processes (or who don't put certain notices, though that prong is still on hold and unlikely to survive legal scrutiny). While there's some vagueness to how the math happens, the actual definition of 'harmful to minors' is pretty explicitly limited to nudity and sexual acts.

I don't like the law, and I am skeptical both in the "I don't think a sixteen-year-old is going to be hurt by seeing a boob" sense and "I'm not willing to burn down the commons over it" sense. It's certainly driven some censorship. But I don't think it's responsible for the examples people are using here.

Itchio readded search and recommendations for NSFW games that had been deindexed (if they are set as free). As far as I can tell, only a small number of games were completely removed from the service, but they've stayed removed for new purchase (or download):

Some pages have received a “content notice,” which applies to individual pages where our team has concluded we can no longer support their business. If you previously purchased or received a download key for one of these pages, the downloadable files are still available in your library, assuming the creator has not taken down the page or removed the files themselves.

Texas is simply the largest state which requires ID verification to access a porn site- this de facto blocks NSFW domains in Texas, supposedly(I’m unwilling to check).

Panicking about Texas laws in ways that make it clear the panicked did not read it is a thing that happens all the time and is not unique to porn bans.

It's certainly possible; even the bit where the Texas government swears in court that they won't bring these charges against those companies runs into the trouble where the Texas government includes Paxton. But it's even more common for people to panic when a country government has been sending nice letters informing them of their legal requirements and mentioning civil fines and criminal penalties.

And I'm skeptical that nVidia lacks lawyers who can read.

((I will admit one silver lining; we might get fewer NordVPN ads. But as tempting as that is, I'd rather keep my principles.))

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