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Michigan Republicans have introduced sweeping legislation to ban sexual internet content, including standard porn, ASMR, AI-generated manga, and everything in between.
It would also ban using VPNs and other software and hardware tools, including proxy servers and encrypted tunneling networks, to circumvent the restrictions.
The primary sponsor of the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act is 33-year-old state Rep. Josh Schriver, who calls himself “Michigan’s most conservative state representative.”
“The intent of my bill is simple: Internet Service Providers block porn sites. Boom. Done. That’s it. They could do this in like 10 minutes if they wanted to,” Schriver says.
(Credit: Josh Schriver/X)
He’s also pushing to add porn distributors to the sex offender registry. “These measures defend children, safeguard our communities, and put families first,” he tweeted last week.
The bill itself is a doozy to read. It details, in graphic detail, exactly the type of sexual acts it does not want circulating on the internet. For starters, the bill defines porn as any material whose “primary purpose…is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”
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Buckle up for this next part. The bill goes on to clarify that this includes anything showing “vaginal or anal intercourse, fellatio or cunnilingus, masturbation, ejaculation or orgasm, penetration with sexual devices, group sex, bondage, domination, or sadomasochism, acts involving bodily fluids, erotic ASMR, animated sexual activity generated by artificial intelligence,” and more. (Seems like the lawmakers who wrote the bill might know a thing or two about this type of content.)
Another clause is raising alarm bells among civil rights and LGBTQ+ advocacy groups. The bill prohibits the depiction of transgender people, or individuals of “one biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be the other biological sex.” (Sorry, Shakespeare.)
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The penalties for a person or website that posts this type of content range from up to 20 years in prison to $500,000 in fines. The bill demands that websites and social media services update their terms of service to prohibit that content in Michigan. That could mean sites like Pornhub or OnlyFans couldn’t operate in the state, and possibly AI chatbots like Elon Musk’s Grok, which now has a sexual anime companion and “spicy” image generator.
Co-sponsors of the Michigan bill include Matt Maddock, James DeSana, Joseph Fox, and Jennifer Wortz. It remains to be seen how much traction the bill will get. In the Michigan House, the GOP has a slight 58-52 edge. In the Senate, Democrats have a one-seat advantage, with one seat currently open.
Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, is currently blocking its sites in 17 states over age-verification laws that it says are a privacy nightmare that puts people’s personal data at risk. The Supreme Court, however, recently upheld Texas’s age-verification law, so Aylo is considering its options. In the meantime, people are getting around these bans by using VPNs. So, a blanket ban on the technology could mean fewer choices for web users, unrelated to sexual content.
The pornography issue, meanwhile, was addressed by the Supreme Court in 1973, with Justice Potter Stewart famously stating of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” The challenge was to define when sexual content veered into obscenity, and therefore illegal, territory. Ultimately, the justices developed a three-pronged test to determine if content could get someone in legal trouble, with Chief Justice Warren Burger acknowledging “the inherent dangers of undertaking to regulate any form of expression.”
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