This is something I’ve noticed on The Hard R, all over the rest of the internet, and in real life. More and more people seem to just assume that some form of expression they don’t like is illegal, or punishable by authority figures in some way.
Porn is obviously a big one. A lot of porn is controversial, but not illegal. Incest, bestiality, lolis, etc have been removed from almost all mainstream sites. Now people just assume it’s illegal to have or to look at it, but it isn’t in most of the free world.
I’ve also seen a LOT of people make various assumptions about what sort of speech must constitute hate speech, with the assumption that it’s actually required to be removed from anywhere on the internet or any public place.
It’s not even just expression though. Modify your car. Dig in your yard. Touch your own house’s plumbing or gas. Mow your lawn. Decide NOT to mow your lawn. Root/Jailbreak your phone. Access Youtube without ads through a third party app using the official API. “Are you allowed to do that?”
People seem increasingly willing to subject themselves to unofficial authority like websites, software/consumer agreements (which might not have much legal teeth beyond the option to deny service), Home Owners Associations, etc, and act like they have no idea they can just… leave. They think it’s the immutable law of the land.
To be fair, a lot of things were actually made illegal through bullshit legislation.
For example, DMCA and CISD anti-circumvention provisions mean someone else can call anything an “effective technological measure” and use that to make modding illegal, ECU tuning needed a DMCA exemption to be legalized, Japanese law forbids save game editors since 2019, and filming facesitting porn was made illegal in the UK before this was overturned years later.Legislation has gotten far too complicated for reasonable humans to fully understand. Many countries simply don’t know how many laws they have in effect anymore. At this point i just assume everyone is a criminal and most of the world just happens to not have had a technocratic authoritarian government willing to be anal to everyone about this (rather than just certain groups the masses don’t care enough about such as intelligentsia or uyghurs), and act accordingly.
DMCA pisses me off. Punishing people simply for publishing a piece of software is such bullshit.
Don’t even get me started on patents. At least laws still come up slowly enough you could theoretically keep up at a federal level at the low, low cost of all of your time and sanity. Doing the same with patents has been impossible for the last ~4 decades and doesn’t protect you against things such as submarine patents.
I don’t think they’re necessarily becoming any more prone to it, just that it’s a natural tendency and the internet has gradually been sanitized over time. In parallel with that, we’ve got a lot more normies on the internet now than in the wild west days.
I have definitely noticed that. I imagine that a large part of it is due to manipulation by various companies. Like if you look up loli on The Hard R search you’ll get something saying what you want to find is illegal. Other websites offering similar fixed results containing the misinformation they so often claim to be harmful, I guess it’s fine when they do it, though. 🤔
I imagine a decent chunk of people find these pieces of misinformation and don’t desire to look further since they don’t like that thing. Or they’re too scared to look for more information on the topic and just take the fearmongering as fact. And there’s definitely people who just assume anything they don’t like should (and therefore must) be illegal, so they go around acting like they’ve spent years in law school specializing in that very specific topic, despite having no idea what they’re talking about and are just talking about how they think things should work.
Like if you look up loli on The Hard R search you’ll get something saying what you want to find is illegal.
A friend of mine looked it up on a porn website because he didn’t know what the word was (but knew what hentai was) and he received a similar message. We joke that he’s probably on a list somewhere now, but it does kinda concern me that it’s being presented as illegal when that’s not always the case.
I personally think it’s about shaping the narrative. They want to tell you what you can and cannot do, even if what they are saying is outright lies. It’s not misinformation when they do it.
My ex’s mom thinks rooting a phone is illegal.
IMO, it depends.
If the manufacturer has an official way to do so, regardless of how annoying (xiaomi wait times) or cripling (knox e-fuse) it is, there’s a presumption of legality involved.
If they actively go out of the way to try to prevent it, current legislation generally gives them a path to sue, which typically results in a legal limbo. One could argue this was necessary to achieve interoperability with other software (and use, say, the reverse engineering exemptions of the DMCA), but there’s still a general notion of lawsuits being too expensive to defend against.but there’s still a general notion of lawsuits being too expensive to defend against
But a bottle of vodka is only like $20 and old rags are free. Can’t be that expensive do defend a bullshit lawsuit
I don’t think vodka is flammable, is it?
I don’t have a cheap enough bottle on hand to test. And I certainly don’t want to burn the nice overproof rum I have, though I’m certain it can
Surely a tissue in a small dish of vodka is enough of a test?
You’d have to distill further it to effectively do this
Some people say regular 40% liquor isn’t good enough. Of course, 50% or higher isn’t hard to find, it just costs more. I’d test it out in my yard, but I don’t think that’s legal lol…
This is really annoying in hentai subforums where people running it don’t really understand hentai. Worst examples include admins/mods that ban art of canonically underage girls, which makes up a vast majority of hentai art. For example, Misty from Pokemon. I remember posting her in a hentai thread on Pornbay and wound up getting banned and labeled a false term. She was drawn deliberately as an adult, big boobs and full-fledged woman body. Big nope over there, and other places are similarly strict.