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.