This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Lisa Femia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We’re proud to announce we’ve launched a new website at Adult Site Broker.com. This attractive new site is easier to navigate and now includes this podcast inside of it. Check it out at Adult Site Broker.com. Your first sellers or buyers to us at Adult Site Broker and our affiliate program ASB Cash will pay you 20% of our broker commission. This can amount to tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Check out ASB Cash.com for more details and to sign up. And we’re proud to announce our latest project thewaronporn.com. You’ll find articles on age verification laws and more on the industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on us. 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This is a smart buy for an existing network with traffic or for someone willing to invite investors to invest money in marketing. Now only 6.5 million euros. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Lisa Femmea of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Lisa thanks for being with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Yeah, happy to be here and to talk about these important issues. It’s really good to have you. And I’ll tell everybody ahead of time we’re recording this at the end of January right after Lisa and the gang were at the Supreme Court last week. So we’ve got lots to talk about and even though this isn’t going to run for a few months it’ll still be extremely current because the Supreme Court takes forever. Okay, so we’ll talk about Lisa here. She’s a staff attorney on the EFF’s Civil Liberties team. Her work focuses on surveillance, privacy, free speech and the impact of technology on civil rights and civil liberties. Lisa’s done substantial work challenging age verification laws across the US. Lisa came to EFF from Hogan Levels US LLP where she maintained robust pro bono practice centered on democracy reform, criminal justice and civil rights. Before joining Hogan, Lisa worked on privacy and government surveillance issues as a clinic student and postgraduate intern at the Brennan Center for Justice. Lisa also served as an NYU International Law and Human Rights Fellow in law school. Makes sense. She advocated for press freedom and media rights in Kampala, Uganda in that role. Before law school, Lisa worked as the government relations manager of a national nonprofit foundation in Washington DC. Lisa holds a JD from New York University School of Law. Maybe later you can tell us what that is. And a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. The EFF or Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism and technology development. EFF’s mission is to ensure the technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all people of the world. EFF is dedicated to protecting online users free expression and privacy rights and is fought for both in courts and legislatures across the country. EFF has repeatedly challenged laws that burden all internet users’ rights by requiring online services to verify their users’ age. In 2024 alone, EFF filed briefs and submitted public comments and letters opposing age verification laws in California, New York, Texas and Mississippi. They plan to continue their work in the states and others including, for example, Florida, God forbid, and 2025. EFF has also been active in the fight to oppose a federal online age verification bill. The kids online safety act, COSA and it couldn’t be any less of an online safety act for kids. We both know that. Okay, so, oh and by the way, before I even get into this Lisa, you know, reading the introduction made me think of something, net neutrality. Give me your take on that, where it’s at and where, well, it’s dead, I guess, right? Yeah, I mean, I am actually probably not the right person at EFF to talk about net neutrality, but it’s certainly not looking optimistic or good at the moment, but we’re hopeful we can still sort of make our case and lobby the right people and hope for the best. You guys are involved in that, right? Yes, yes, other people at EFF have been doing a ton of work on this. I personally just have not. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I mean, it’s the first amendment of the online world and they’re trying to take it away, so it’s really a terrible thing, really a terrible thing. But you would expect that from the new administration, that’s for sure. Yeah. So, where have age verification laws been proposed and/or implemented as we speak in January? Yeah, so I think right now we’re at about 19 states have passed laws requiring adult website visitors to verify their age. This is, I think, nearly half of Americans now live under an age verification law that targets porn or adult content. And this is, you know, you mentioned earlier the Kids Online Safety Act, there’s also talks of the federal government, though nothing has been passed as of yet. But really, this is a national issue, we’re seeing it everywhere. Right. Do you think the solution eventually is, because look, everyone an adult wants kids protected from watching porn. There’s not a legitimate person in our industry who’s looking to target kids, despite what the right will tell you. Do you think eventually some kind of national legislation will work? And obviously, if they do that, it would probably be device-based, right? Yeah, so, I mean, so far we’ve yet to see a proposal that avoids Harman and users’ First Amendment rights. I think there’s, you know, a theoretical world where with either some device-based liability, which would make it, I mean, this is like pretty theoretical for now, but it could have some sort of, you know, Boolean yes/no value flag that it would like pass along to the browser so you would verify your age on the device. And then that would just be pass along everywhere that you then browse on the device. If that, I think that would probably be less of a privacy concern if it really was just a sort of Boolean yes/no being passed along rather than any sort of identity. But again, that doesn’t really exist yet. And until it does, it’s hard to really assess whether that would be truly privacy protective or whether it would be effective at all actually in keeping, you know, keeping kids off some of these sites. I think the biggest issue with device-based verification is that it just doesn’t take into account the way that people share devices. You know, there are plenty of homes where people are sharing a phone or sharing a computer. And the idea that there’s a one-to-one relationship between every person and a device is just not the reality. Well, we know that the owners should be on the parents, but obviously parents are not taking that responsibility. Yeah, yeah. And I think that this is a very serious concern. But what we don’t want to see is laws pass that then burden the rights of millions and millions of adults in the name of sort of bringing everyone to whatever standard is considered safe for children. Yeah. And that’s something that the Supreme Court has affirmed multiple times is not what the First Amendment means or what you can do under the First Amendment. Well, hopefully we’re going to win some of these cases. They’ll become precedent for, I’m sounding like an attorney now, they’ll become, I’ve been reading so much legal stuff. I think I’m getting some qualifications here, but there will be some precedent to knock down these laws. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s the hope. And we’ve seen that at trial court levels, but it’s sort of been a slow workup the appellate court and now we’re waiting on the Supreme Court. And there’s some insane ones like the one in Tennessee. My God. Yeah. You want to talk about that? Yeah. I mean, that law is broad and unfortunately was just earlier this month, the sixth circuit said that it could stand and it is going into effect. So, but you know, it includes just sort of images of any sort of any of the sexual organs of the human body. That could, I mean, that could cover sexual educational materials and all sorts of, yeah. They’re burning books. They’re burning books. So there you go. How is online age verification different from flashing a physical ID in person? Yeah. I think that’s actually a really key part of this and something that I’m actually hoping to see discussed more because I think they’re really different from each other. The first thing to remember is given the sheer scale of the internet, a law that targets adults and the online context necessarily just sweeps in millions and millions of people, far more people than a in person one to one interaction does. And so first of all, it’s really broad. I think second of all, these laws generally seem to be targeting websites. So there is age verification laws that don’t target adult content specifically and the age verification laws that do target websites with adult content. The ones targeting websites with adult content tend to just have a sort of a one third threshold. So the website only has to have one third or more sexual material. So this sweeps in tons of websites that have a lot of other general purpose information on them. I think Reddit almost hits the threshold, you know? So that’s also broader than say just going into a store and you want to buy the one magazine that has sexually explicit material in it, but it doesn’t block your access to the whole store. Yeah, exactly. And then because of this, because of the nature of being online too, it’s you’re giving information to websites and any trackers, any sort of intermediaries, anything online that could be collecting your information and putting it out there. And in-person interaction, you can just flash an ID. There’s not necessarily a permanent logged record of your information. People hack routers all the time. Yeah. I mean, data breaches are unfortunately just a sort of reality of the world we live in. And I think it was just this past year and age verification service was hacked. So this happens. It’s not hard to imagine at all. It’s something that is happening, will happen, and they don’t address those things. The bottom line is these politicians trying to get rid of porn. They really don’t care about how hard it is or what the ramifications are. And they don’t think ahead. And then the other part of it is they know nothing about technology. Most of these people are 60 and over. And if you go to DC, it’s more like 70 and over. Yeah. And I think that’s been something that the age verification industry has been able to really take advantage of. They come in with a lot of magical thinking about how their service is going to be the silver bullet that tells you in a perfect way who’s what age and protects privacy. And lawmakers then engage in this magical thinking themselves when writing these laws. And yet the technology just doesn’t do what they want it to. And the guy, the main author of Project 2025, I’m sure you saw the hidden camera interview with him saying this was the way that they were going to get rid of porn. Yep. I think that is a not so subtle goal of a lot of these legislators. And it was frankly something we even heard at the Supreme Court last week, the oral arguments for Texas’s age verification law, you have Alito, Justice Alito going on about, you know, now that the internet’s bigger and there’s phones, there’s porn everywhere. There’s porn in people’s pockets and it’s really taking it beyond the scope of what the, you know, issue was. Alito, isn’t he dead yet? I know. Well, if he dies, well, well, Trump is in office, we’ll get somebody worse. You can bet on that. Yeah. And they’ll be 41. Yeah. And they’ll be in there for 40 years. So how do age verification laws chill online speech? Yeah. So I think that there’s sort of two big buckets here. The one is that some of the age verification requirements, they’ll serve as a complete block for some adults. And I think that’s important to remember. There are going to be some adults that just cannot access the website or the information which, keep in mind, is fully protected under the First Amendment for adults because they don’t have the requisite form of ID or other proof of age. You’re going to hear a lot of people talk about there’s not just age verification, there’s age estimation, there’s all these other tools that don’t require you to upload ID. But from what we’ve seen, none of these laws necessarily require that. And what’s the most straightforward and way of confirming ID is often just through government ID. So that’s probably what a lot of sites would implement and what they would use in order to implement age verification. But 15 million adult citizens in the US don’t have a driver’s license. And about almost 3 million don’t have any form of government-issued photo ID at all. So if you are required to upload photo ID, that just blocks millions of people right off the bat. I don’t know how the people with no ID get by online. Yeah. I know. It’s a reality for a bunch of people. And they also, another 21 million adult US citizens in most recent estimates don’t have non-expired driver’s license. And a lot of these age verification services do require you to have up-to-date ID. So that’s kind of-- I’ve got an expired one because I’m on the timeline, but they had the wrong address. But anyway, that’s another story. Yeah. Yeah. The wrong address is another one. So young people are far less likely to have an up-to-date or current ID. So-- Wonderful. Yeah. So besides people being blocked, though, I think then there’s the other bucket is that it chills people who do have requisite ID, but who would, for reasons that I think are probably intuitive for most everybody, don’t necessarily want to upload their photo ID before access it. So loosely. And there’s an 80% click-out rate. Right. Exactly. And that will kill porn. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that the vast majority of people would not feel comfortable uploading their photo ID in order to access sexually explicit material. And besides the lack of-- that means that undermines your anonymity online and your ability to freedom, like a freedom of association online. It also, for people who are very privacy and security minded, like we’ve already talked about, you don’t want to have to go uploading sensitive information about yourself constantly. Your driver’s license wasn’t designed to be uploaded as frequently as age verification schemes imagine it to be. Absolutely not. And let’s get into that. So how do age verification laws undermine anonymity? Anonymity. I know. I know. I know. And why is that a problem? I know it’s screwed up. Yeah. I have so much trouble saying that word too for some reason. But yeah. So I think that it makes anonymous internet browsing extremely difficult for obvious reasons. You have to verify your identity. I think a lot of these laws say that information has to be deleted right away. But in order for that to not deter users, you have to believe that the website will delete it, that the age verifier will delete it, and that none of the information will be shared, sold, or otherwise transferred while in transit. And I think all of those are pretty dubious assumptions. Yeah. They don’t trust, they don’t trust, people don’t trust porn sites anyway. Yeah. I mean, and some of these companies too, it’s just, you don’t know anything about them. You have no idea what their privacy policy is or how they handle this. Yeah. Especially outside the country. Yeah, exactly. And unlike an in-person ID check, the only real viable way to comply with an age verification mandate is to require the user to submit some information. So again, it’s not just a sort of passing moment. You really are just submitting stuff. And I think people don’t want to have to submit their driver’s license to a porn site. And I think it’s important to remember that anonymity is not just something you, like, we value in sort of a policy sense or in a moral sense, but that is actually a historic tradition that’s a part of the First Amendment. It’s part of the freedom of speech that’s protected. And it falls sort of under the concept of our own intellectual privacy, the idea that we get to explore ideas and beliefs without intrusion. So we have the space to develop our own views and then speak. And that’s been reaffirmed by the court over and over again, including online and especially online. It promotes the robust exchange of ideas and allows individuals to express themselves. And it’s essential for people who have a distinct online identity or who want to discuss or view or upload sensitive, personal, controversial or stigmatized content. So I think without anonymity, the stigma associated with the content of certain sites would deter adults from visiting them at all. Let’s face it. The right is anti First Amendment. That’s become very clear. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is a lot of talk about free speech, but it really means free speech for me and not for anyone I don’t like. Yeah. Right. Exactly. I don’t think that those justices aren’t watching porn. Come on. Yeah. Especially the most conservative ones, like Thomas. I could totally see him watching porn anyway. So what are the privacy and security implications of age verification? Yeah. I think we’ve somewhat touched on this, but I think it’s really helpful to think of age verification systems, basically surveillance systems. Right now, you have the ability to surf the web and go to websites, well, depending on what state you’re in. But as of a couple of years ago, you had the ability to surf the web and go to websites without having to confirm who you are every time you do that. And instead now, they’re surveilling you as you surf the web. So that comes with privacy considerations where suddenly you have to identify yourself in places when you didn’t. But it comes with severe security implications as well. Because I think even if you trust the website and the age verifier to delete your information, you then have the internet functions is just full of trackers and intermediaries. And the entire ad system of the internet is built on these multiple layers of entities that are just collecting data and information as you go. So there’s nothing in a lot of these laws that prevent the website or the age verifier from using trackers, which could then collect your information in transit. And they’re not required to delete your information at all under most of these laws, including the Texas law that was just up for debate. So I think even most concerningly under, say, the Texas laws, because there’s nothing in there that prevents the website or age verifier from selling, transferring, or sharing your data, even the trial court there, recognize the really disturbing implication that that means the state of Texas itself, like nothing would stop the state of Texas itself from logging these transactions as they happen and keeping a record. There’s just not full privacy or security protections built into these laws. That’s scary. That’s really scary. Yeah. Again, we get back to First Amendment. The First Amendment is good. These laws aren’t real simple. Yeah. Yeah. We, you know, these laws are just a massive assault on your First Amendment rights online. Well, we have to hope the justices will do the right thing. If you ask my confidence of that, not really high. How do age verification laws target sexual speech and sexually explicit content online? That’s a tongue twister. Yeah. So I think I mentioned earlier there’s two sort of major buckets of type of age verification law. One, directly targets sexual content. These are the ones that require age verification for adult content. We’ve seen these in a lot of states. But I think the latest, I saw something new story. It’s 41% of Americans are now living under laws like this. And so that is direct. They use basically a modified obscenity standard, which is a First Amendment standard for and describe a whole bunch of sexual content. I think that the other type of age verification law, which is a slightly broader, usually targeted more at social media platforms and at sort of preventing a whole enumerated list of harms to minors. These ones also target sexual speech and sexual content online because they contain these list of harms to minors that are so broad and so vague that basically anything that And so false a lot of the time. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And I think that a government official enforcing the law didn’t like could kind of fall under these because the things that cause anxiety or depression in minors. How are you defining what causes anxiety or depression in a teenager? It could be anything. Yeah. I would say Instagram probably does that. Right. We look at all the suicides, unfortunately. Yeah. So I think from all sides with these age verification laws, it’s sort of sexual speeches under a tag. The second type of law, as you mentioned, what states have we seen this type of law? So these are less popular as of yet. The biggest one has been the federal effort for the Kids Online Safety Act. But there’s Missouri has a very similar, I think, COSA like what they call a duty of care or what COSA calls a duty of care provision. I think Missouri might not call it that, but it’s the same thing basically where it lists out a bunch of different harms that social media sites have an obligation to prevent or they could face government enforcement actions or civil penalties or a whole host of other punishments basically. And I think Texas has also been working on a broader age verification law as well. These are also popping up all over and I think we’ll continue to see more of them. I know on the federal government side, we’ve started a new Congress, but there has still been talks of reintroducing another COSA is what we call the Kids Online Safety Act. Yeah, it won’t die. No, it just won’t go away. This is Freddie Krueger. The Freddie Krueger bill, we should call it. How is sexual speech protected under the First Amendment? Yeah, I think this is really important to remember when looking at these laws. Sexual speech that is not obscenity is fully protected under the First Amendment. Talk a little bit about that. We touched on it in some previous episodes, but why don’t you touch on that? Yeah, so it’s confusing because I think a lot of courts still don’t actually know totally what they’re doing with obscenity, but obscenity is one of the categories of speech that is not protected under the First Amendment. However, I think defining what qualifies as obscenity has plagued the courts for years. You’ve got that famous... Decades. Yeah, decades. You got that famous quote from Justice Potter Stewart where he couldn’t define obscenity, but he did say, "I know it when I see it." People talk about that all the time. But basically, there is a test now where an average person under applying contemporary community standards would find that whatever the speech or content is applies appeals to a free and interest, and it can’t really have a slack, serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. All parts of this test are confusing, but typically in the pornography context, it’s sort of meant to cover only what they call hardcore porn and material of a sexual nature that doesn’t meet the definition or doesn’t meet... There’s no definition really, but doesn’t meet hardcore porn, receives full constitutional protection for adults. Not for minors. There’s a lot of hardcore porn, and there haven’t been many obscenity cases over the years. I remember when Max Hardcore got thrown in prison, you probably know about that. I knew Max. Max passed away a couple of years ago. And he was an icon in the adult industry, one of the nicest men you’re ever going to meet walking around with his cowboy hat on and everything. He was quite a guy. But how they decided that obscenity is beyond me. Now obscenity prosecutions have happened primarily during Republican administrations. In fact, I think in the last 50 years, they’ve all been during Republican administrations. Do you think we’re going to see some with Trump back in office? I think that there is a good chance. Like 2025, which is the Heritage Foundation’s conservative vision, I think very entwined with the... I wanted to say incoming administration, but no longer the current administration. Yeah, we liked it better when it was incoming. And now it’s there. I know. So they have articulated a whole bunch of anti-ipor and sentiment. I think JD Vance has also talked about wanting to ban pornography. I think this is a real focus on the right right now. And who knows if it’s a particular focus of President Trumps or not. I don’t think it gives a shit. Yeah, right. But the people in his orbit and the people affiliated with the administration certainly want to see this happen. Oh yeah. And I think that the legal tools to target pornography exist. I think only one person really matters when it comes to this. And I would say it’s Elon Musk. If Elon Musk wants to ban porn, which he doesn’t, because it’s a big part. In fact, I would be surprised if a third of X is porn. Yeah, well, that’s actually an interesting point. Why the laws that target porn or adult content for minors are really under-inclusive is that these websites, the social media websites, can contain more porn than most other websites on the internet. Something that makes these age verification laws targeting adult content really under-inclusive and ineffective is that they don’t, with this one third threshold, this doesn’t include a lot of these social media sites that might have in just sheer number more porn than anywhere else on the internet, or not anywhere, but a lot of other places on the internet. Because there’s just so much content on these websites, they’re not hitting the one third threshold. So minors just can go on X and still get porn. So the law is not actually preventing them from accessing this material. I get it every day on my feed. Yeah, exactly. I get it every day on my feed. I wonder why. A lot of these women are my friends, so there you go. Yeah, so, yeah, personal. But I think if Elon Musk doesn’t want porn banned, which I don’t think he does, it won’t be banned. Yeah, you know, that’s, I feel like that is a good prediction now, but I think one thing I learned from the last Trump administration is that we just never know who’s going to be in, who’s going to be out. You never, you never know what this, you know, what end is up in the Trump, the Trump universe. Oh my God. It’s crazy. But it all comes down to money and Musk has given him a lot of money and he continues to give him money. And I’m sure a ton of it is under the table. So that’s how Trump operates. And that’s one thing you can count on is that if there’s money in it for him, then he listens. What have been some of the immediate results of the state age verification laws targeting sexual speech? Yeah, so I think that this is how a lot of people have even heard of them. Even ones who don’t work on this type of work or work in those industries is that I think sort of getting a lot of press is porn hub, but other major sites as well have been, I think, understanding the risk of age verification and in response to implementation have just been pulling out of states. Yeah. I think we saw that Texas first and then Florida, South Carolina. So now there’s many Americans who no longer have access to the major and sort of more out in the open and better regulated sites. Yeah. And they’re instead going to migrate to darker corners of the internet. Correct. They won’t ask users to verify age and are also probably don’t take security or safety as seriously. No, they very well may put viruses on your machine. They’ll have a very extreme content that you probably wouldn’t see on porn hub because porn hub does have a very, very good filtering system and porn hub doesn’t even allow uploads anymore. So I interviewed Solomon Friedman, no relation from, I don’t want to say A-Low, he’s actually from ethical capital partners and ethical capital partners owns A-Low who owns porn hub. So there you go. We had a two-part episode that ran before this and that’s something that if you didn’t hear it, you should go back and listen to because it’s very, very key to everything that we’re talking about today from the site owner’s perspective. Texas’s age verification law, otherwise known as HB 1181 is under review at the Supreme Court in free speech coalition, the Paxton. I want to always say versus, that’s not right. What does that law look like and how does it target sexual speech? Yeah, so I think we’ve referenced this a lot already, but basically it regulates any website that publishes content one third or more of which is quote, harmful to minors and defines this in a pretty broad way. I think it could encompass virtually any explicit content from porn to sex ed materials to even, you know, romance or fanfic or R rated movies. Don’t forget drag queen readings. Exactly. I think it’s important to remember a lot of the people implementing these laws, their idea of what is sexually explicit or pornographic and compasses things that you and I would probably not consider is actually explicit or pornographic. I know. Yeah. But basically the law forces people who visit the websites that make that one third threshold or more to prove they’re over 18, either via government issued ID, like a driver’s license or a passport digital ID, which they wrote in the law, but doesn’t exist in Texas yet. So that’s just kind of moot or transactional data, which they specify something like records from mortgage or employment entity. So it was signed into law in 2023. And in September of last year, a trial court, a federal trial court actually temporary block the law, issued an injunction, recognized all of the constitutional issues. I think the other thing I didn’t mention because this has been sort of everyone kind of seems to agree this is unconstitutional, but the law also required warnings to be put on. Yeah. Boring sites being like, you know, pornography is addictive and can ruin your mental health or something. Which is totally unfounded, which there’s no scientific proof of that. Yeah. And if I recall, they tried to look for the legislative record to see if they even had any anything to back this up and it was just pretty sparse. So and that’s, you know, a government without any basis whatsoever can’t force companies to say something that’s also a First Amendment violation. So yeah, but then it went up to the Fifth Circuit, which is a Pellet Court, which reversed the injunction. And that’s now how it’s ended up at the circuit. They don’t like us very much the Fifth Circuit. And it was sent there on purpose when I gather from everyone. The Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton oral argument was a week ago from today. It was January 15th and you were the lead attorney. What’s going on in that case and what are the main arguments? Well, so yeah, to be, I was the lead attorney on EFF’s friend of the court brief. But there you go. Free speech coalition was the plaintiff. And so I think their attorneys were Quinn Emanuel and the ACLU. So but we filed a friend of the court brief, which Supreme Court typically gets a lot of these, a ton of these were filed in this case. And yeah, so then I attended the oral argument and I have to say it’s sort of there’s some disagreement among people who follow this about what’s going to happen. It’s a little hard to read the tea leaves. What do you think is going to happen? I think, and this is just my personal opinion, I think we might see them. So the question on appeal was basically just what standard does the court need to review this law under? So for laws affecting speech under the First Amendment, there’s different levels of scrutiny, the highest being what they call strict scrutiny and the lowest and easiest to pass threshold rational basis. And so if a law requires to be reviewed under strict scrutiny, it’s going to be a really, it has to be narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest. It’s a really, really hybrid. And usually, and I think oftentimes that means a law is just struck down. But what was interesting at the court in this case is so the Solicitor General, the US federal government intervened and also argued. And Solicitor General kept saying, we think strict scrutiny applies here, but we could imagine situations in which strict scrutiny is met because all parties seem to agree that protecting kids, I think everyone will probably agree that protecting kids is, you know, from harmful content is a compelling government interest. It’s just the issue is that the laws are not narrowly tailored at all to achieve that interest. I think there was also some discussion of a more intermediate in between level of scrutiny. And I think that there’s a solid chance there are enough votes for some form of intermediate medium form of scrutiny or for a sort of loosened strict scrutiny. I am not sure, and I know there’s others who are more pessimistic than I am. I am not sure I saw enough votes to really uphold the FISCIRCITS determination that it’s just the lowest level, rational basis level of scrutiny. This is a content based restriction on speech pretty explicitly. And that typically requires strict scrutiny. So I think that there was also a couple of the justices kept mentioning age verification specific standard. So I don’t know. I think we’re going to see some sort of intermediate crafted standard. And then they’ll return it to the fifth court to analyze under that. Lovely. Yes, lovely. So it sounds like it might be a hot potato going back and forth for a while. Yeah, it could be. I mean, then again, some people, you know, Justice Roberts was completely inscrutable. Honestly, Justice Thomas was barely said anything either. So there’s just some open questions there. Interesting. Interesting. For Thomas not to talk, that’s real interesting. Who’s file briefs in support of either side? Some of the amicus briefs filed in this case seem to argue against pornography in general, not just minors access to it. So based on those briefs, what might we expect to see from the anti porn movement moving forward? Yeah. So I think that this is a really kind of helps illustrate just who supports these laws. I mentioned that they’re typically in Supreme Court cases. There are a ton of friend of the court briefs filed. And these briefs do get read and are taken to consideration. And supporting Texas aside was a real kind of like who’s who’s who’s who of the more like Christian nationalist right? Rila McElway. I’m sure she was there. Yeah. I mean, and you got some congressional Republicans, I think led by Senators Mike Lee and Josh Holly on the open there. I had one of my guests or my guests on the podcast called Josh Holly a cunt. No one time. Yeah. I mean, I think their brief, their brief is real, real clear. It opens calling internet porn a plague. So a plague now. I love. Yeah. Yeah. So definitely not tailored just to minors access. Yeah. I think it also had Lauren Boebert and Dan Crenshaw on it. That was a who’s who wasn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. No, there’s a bunch of organizations sort of affiliated with heritage and project 2025. There was a was it that so called child’s right group known as them before us does a lot of anti trans campaign campaigning. Oh, yeah. Very anti IVF and surrogacy. So that’s anything different. Yeah, basically. So that was what we were seeing in support of Texas. Whereas the other side, it was organizations like us and the Center for Democracy and Technology and booksellers, people who are concerned about maintaining access to speech. Woodhole was one of them. And woodhole. Yeah, woodhole signed RS. I believe. Yes. How might these groups use age verification laws to go after sexual speech more broadly? Yeah. So I think, you know, they’re they’re already probably envisioning it in some capacity in that way. And if you can impose heavy liability on websites for not blocking out minors, you can oftentimes lead to just censorship online because some smaller sites might not have enough resources to really implement age verification and might if they’re not wholly dedicated to sexual content might just start shutting down the more to get themselves under a one third threshold. So you could imagine this maybe on a like a fan fiction site that just starts censoring out more sexually explicit content. And suddenly that’s just blocked and censored. You could also imagine these laws being used to just generally target pornography sites and impose strict requirements on them be used to as an excuse to have like prosecute them or have the government go after them otherwise. I think that there is a lot of flexibility in these laws because of the way that they’re drafted to allow room for the government state governments to just go after websites and companies that they don’t like in the name of complying with the age verification law. I think one of the ones that’s going to be real interesting to watch is COSA. Yeah. COSA has been a constant battle and it’s sort of funny to see it keeps getting not quite making it across the finish line because of concerns. Everyone is concerned that the other side, well not everyone, most people, most legislators seem to be not that concerned, but you’re getting periodic legislators on both sides of the aisle that are suddenly going, "Hmm, wait, who’s going to be enforcing this? Like, is it my people or is it their people?" And I think we’re going to keep seeing that fight over and over. Interesting. Tell me a little more about how the justices responded at the oral argument. Yeah. So, I think you got some real general kind of anti-porn sentiment from especially Justice Alito and Justice Barrett, some real concern about that. I think at the same time this was some of the best we’ve seen for Justice Jackson on the First Amendment in my opinion. She was very fiery and pointed out in I think very well how much this is a burden on adults and really burdens adults First Amendment rights. Something that we kept, the justices kept saying at the beginning was, you know, now, because there were previous cases that are almost directly on point, tackling laws that are really similar to this from the early 2000s. And you know, Justice is saying, well, the internet’s evolved since then. Now, everyone has the internet. This means there’s just more porn. And I think Justice Jackson was the first to say, "Okay, but this cuts both ways." Now that everyone has more access to the internet, has more reliance on the internet, has a phone in their pocket, as soon as you make requirements that apply to the whole of the internet or to the whole of certain websites, it’s burdening even more adults than it used to. And that was, I think, a really good point I’m glad was made. I was concerned a bit by the sort of lack of understanding of the tech. It seemed on sort of across the board. Taxes is, in their oral argument, at one point said something like, you know, biometrics aren’t identifying, which I thought was just an insane thing to say because they’re just arguing in favor of age estimation, which is unlike age verification relies on doing a facial scan or other, like doing movements to prove your age, which I think is also just a lot of magical thinking. They’re full of that. Yeah. There was, I think, a lot of concern about how states could still pass a law to prevent kids from accessing sexual material online if they did a higher standard. And this seemed to be of particular concern to many of the justices, which is why I think we’re going to not get a pure, I would be surprised if they landed on a pure, strict scrutiny like we’ve seen before, because so many of them seem concerned with states being able to pass a law. Interesting. Well, let’s just hope the justices do their job and stand up for the First Amendment. That would be nice. Yeah, that would be great. This is what we hope. Indeed. Well, Lisa, I’d like to thank you for being our guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk, and I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. Yeah, thank you for having me. It was great to chat with you. My broker tip today is part two of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week we talked about converting traffic and improving user experience. Make a good offer. If you’re selling something and the offer isn’t good, you won’t make money. It’s plain and simple as that. And if your offer is to contact you, or to get more information, then make the offer attractive and easy to understand. If you’re selling something, make buying easy. Show them an easy way to buy and then leave. Help them by making suggestions on what to buy. Amazon.com is the best at this. They always have suggestions on what to buy based on your buying and browsing history. They use AI to do this. There are AI engines available these days at a modest cost. Look into this if you can. Don’t clutter up your site with unnecessary items, buttons, and images. Keep it as simple as possible. The best and most successful sites are the simple ones, the ones that lead you to take the action you’d like them to take. It’s not that hard. Just remember, when you’re putting together any site, try to think through the buying process like a human being. Whatever you do, don’t turn over that process to your designer. Don’t just say, "Build me a website." What you’ll get out the other end will not give you what it is you’re looking for. Give them as much direction as possible and make it easy for them to build a site for you that makes your business succeed. We’ll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with performer and podcast host, Lily Craven. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. And once again, I’d like to thank my guest, Lisa Femia. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
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