Protecting Children from Online Adult Content

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Lisa, good morning, Good morning, How are you welcome. It's
good to have you here. I'm fine, And this caught
my interest. The Supreme Court of the United States a
week from the day we'll hear this case about the
access of minor children. This comes out of Texas to
online pornography, and your organization, of course, is on the

(00:24):
side of the Texas Attorney General in this case. What
can you tell us about the specifics of what will
happen depending on on what the court decides.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Right, Well, this is the most important case to come
before the Supreme Court on the issue of protecting children
from pornography exposure online in twenty years. So this is
a really big deal. And for those of us, anybody
who's got children today knows that the risk of their
exposure to pornography online isn't a matter of if, it's

(00:59):
a matter of win. There are surveys out there which
which are indicating that as many as seventy three percent
of kids today are seeing pornography online between the ages
when their ages thirteen to seventeen years old, and in
fact even about fifteen percent of those are seeing it
before the age of ten. So it's the extreme problem

(01:23):
and it all stems from a court case that goes
back to two thousand and four when the Supreme Court
lets stand a decision that said, you know, they thought
that just having filters would be enough to protect children online.
And I think the evidence the verdict is in on
that that that is completely false. We need multi layers

(01:47):
of protection to keep kids safe online, and we need
to be making sure that we, you know, aren't letting
miners access the extreme material that's available on these platforms.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Well point there about the filters goes to what Jim
and I were discussing earlier. He is generally of the
opinion Rosie, correct me if I'm wrong that this is
a this is a parent's responsibility, not the governments. That
these filters are available and you need to make sure
your kid can't have access. You say that's not enough, Well.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
I definitely think that's important. I mean, we want parents
to be very informed and diligent about trying to protect
their children. But the fact that it's so complicated, you know,
you've not only either've got multiple devices, right, they get phones,
they get gaming platforms. There's the devices that they have
at school, which often don't have filters turned on and

(02:40):
there's a lot of ways that kids, because they're pretty
savvy at this stuff, can get around those things. So
what we advocate for is a multi layer approach. And
the law in question that Texas has asked is said that, hey,
if a kid is going to you know, be getting online,
or people are going to be accessing these platforms online
that have pornography on them, shouldn't we at least make

(03:03):
sure that those who are getting on there are over eighteen?
Just like you would if they were going to the
local corner store. They couldn't go pick up a Playboy magazine, right,
so why should they be able to do it online?

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Well, this is what's different, do you know, because there's
several states, and ours here in Nebraska is one of
them that has that law. Now you have to register,
and I guess some of the big porn operators said, okay,
we're out of there. Well, how is this different?

Speaker 2 (03:31):
That's been a lot of it's grandstanding. They're trying to
make it look like it's the apocalypse for porn, but
that's not the case. And really, what this technology does,
what we're talking about when we're talking about age verification technology,
is it actually typically shares even less information about a
person than you would if you showed your ID to

(03:51):
a clerk at the store, like there is such sophisticated
easy ways now for age verification to be completed online store.
I think there's a lot of misinformation and fear monitoring
that the foreign industry is pursuing to make people afraid
of this idea of age verification. But there's a whole

(04:13):
association of age verification providers and they have done more
than eighty eight hundred and seventy five million age checks
over the last five years, and none of their those
people's identities have been stolen. They're not keeping databases with
everybody's information and figuring out what you're doing when you
go on pornography sites. The people who track you and

(04:34):
keep information about you when you go online to visit
pornography sites are the pornography industry themselves, not the people
who do the age.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, here's where we get into the specifics the legal
language for the Supreme Court to decide, and this is
from their website. The issue is whether the Court of
Appeals aired as a matter of law in applying rational
basis review instead of strict spruit do a law burdening
adults access to protected speech, and of course the nine

(05:05):
injustices may most of them at least understand what that means.
But can you break that down for us, Lisa, What
are they actually deciding here that the Appeals Court, that
the appeal came up after the Appeals Court made a ruling,
So the Supremes are going to decide what well.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
They're going to decide whether or not it's asking too
much of an adult to go through a simple, one
time process to verify that they're over eighteen age over
the age of eighteen in order to access a pornography
site or a website that has a lot of pornography
on it. That's all they're deciding. Is it too much
of a brandin to do a one time age check?

(05:44):
I mean, this is seriously a one time thing. It's
not something you have to do repeatedly. It doesn't save
your information anywhere, so it's not like you're in some
database that people can check out that you've gone to
a pornography site. It's nothing like that. Nothing more than
would be required. And if you want to show your
ID at the liquor store or something like.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
That, it sounds to me. You may know otherwise, Lisa,
but it sounds to me like if the court sides
with the pornographers in this case that Nebraska and other
states we have a similar law, those laws will be
declared unconstitutional.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
I mean that's possible. I can't really speak to what
the all the fallowout would be, but it definitely would
put them in jeopardy and we'd be back to where
we've been for the past twenty years, trying to do
everything possible to try to protect kids, and it's still
not enough. You know, if you'd talk to any parents today,
you'd find most people know it is so challenging to

(06:46):
try to keep your children from being exposed to this
content if they have any kind of devices, and even
if they even if you do a good job in
your own home and in your own family, there's the
kids that they go to school with, and you know,
they can introduce them to this content. So we need
to protect children and not the pornography industry.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
Yeah, but that's been the case for decades, for generations.
You know, maybe you don't let your kids have cigarettes,
but their your friends have cigarettes, so then they go
and they smoke out back after schools It's a constant issue.
It always has been. But it still starts and stops
with parents getting involved and putting in place as many
measures as possible, using technology and other things to keep

(07:24):
their kids safe. It still boils down to moms and dads.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
It can't hurt in my view, Rosie, it can't hurt
to have more guardrails when it comes to our kids
and this toxic stuff. And think of back when we
were ten years old. You know, if if somebody's dad
had a Dirney magazine, you know, that was a huge deal.
Now it's coming out of the sprinklers, this stuff. That's
all I'm saying. Lisa, thank you. I appreciate the info
and it's good to have you on.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah, Oral arguments a week from the day and if
you're interested in following that, it is fsc V Paxton
h BB's Morning News