My concerns with laws like SB 20 including "cartoons and animation" is what is the criteria for determining a character's age? There is no exact set standard and could end badly for all anime fans if it gets interpreted in the broadest possible way.
Anyone with Marin Kitagawa hentai on their PC in Texas might want to go full Hillary Clinton and BleachBit their hard drives if this passes the Texas House.
Though banning AI generated realistic CP is a 100% win. That shit has been completely banned at the federal level since 2003. This is the one time Congress actually had good foresight and states are playing catch-up.
Now they're just baiting to ban some more users!
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Kiwi Farms has become completely unrecognizable compared to what it was even one or two years ago. This isn't even about the law itself or KF's reaction to it, since Null and Kiwi Farms have been seething about loli and shota for years. Rather, it's about the sheer lack of funny on the Farms nowadays.
Now, Kiwi Farms has gone through spurts of this in the past when the major lolcows were all inactive or boring at the same time. However, this is not the case right now. Bossmanjack is out of jail and is back streaming. Nick Rekeita got his charges dropped and is back on social media. Ethan Ralph is still doing his thing. Patrick Tomlinson is still doing his thing. DSP is still doing his thing. The entire left wing community is melting down over Trump's presidency to the extent that they're openly making death threats en masse.
In spite of all the funny things happening, what is Kiwi Farms focused on right now? Seething about lolicons and shotacons. Seething about Andrew Tate. Seething about Elon Musk. Seething about foreign politics. Seething about blacks and Muslims. Seething about moids in Beauty Parlor.
Kiwi Farms can no longer be considered a gossip site or even a comedy site. It has fully morphed into the right wing/TERF version of ResetEra, a bunch of joyless unfunny moralfags who go on constant crusades against people and communities they don't like. Sure, there were elements of these moral crusades in the past, but Null and other Kiwi Farmers always used to ask "Where is the funny?". Nobody's asking that anymore because nobody goes on Kiwi Farms to find funny content nowadays. They go there to form a moral crusade against whatever Null is mad about at that particular time and farm upvotes by circlejerking in favor of said moral crusade.
Laws that are too broad like these do end up getting challenged in the federal court system though.
To be honest, this wouldn't be the first time Texas passed laws that got struck down later on because they're too stupid to realize how the Bill of Rights actually works (like when Texas tried to restrict public drag queen shows and then a federal judge struck parts of that down not too long after or when the Texas state legislature recently tried to ban speech criticizing the leadership for the Texas state legislature and that recently got struck down in the courts as well).
So this to me seems like another Supreme Court case in the making. Remember, the Free Speech Coalition v. Ashcroft (2002) ruling is still standing Supreme Court precedent (it's the ruling that stated that fictional depictions of child sexual abuse are protected speech). So I can imagine that civil rights groups like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Free Speech Coalition, and possibly the ACLU and NetChoice may file lawsuit against the state of Texas to challenge this law.
I'm aware of the Protect Act of 2003 which (objectively speaking) parts of that also has dogshit legislation where that's also way too broad in regards of what is seen as obscenity. But that law was written back when the Religious Right had more power and how social attitudes were like back then and anime and manga were still seen as niche forms of entertainment (stuff like Dragon Ball and Pokemon were popular back in the day but they were an exception since Western media still dominated American entertainment distributors back then). Japanese entertainment is no longer this niche form of entertainment anymore as it has gone mainstream, the cat is out of the bag and Japanese media is now a world wide sensation that may also end up challenging laws in other countries as far as free speech goes.
It's like how way back in the day Germany banned the video game Doom for being "too realistic" (this was during the anti-video game moral panic of the 1990's) only for the game to get unbanned by the early-2010's when the game was compared to games like GTA 4 at the time and argued that it's silly to ban a game with outdated MS-DOS graphics when a modern game like GTA 4 can continue being legally sold in Germany (so the German government unbanned Doom because that embarrassed Germany at the time).
Honestly, this may actually be the worst thing to happen to Kiwi Farms and may not be the victory they are hoping for.
If you remember the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling (2022), that ruling overturned Roe v. Wade and it was in regards to a right to an abortion. Roe v. Wade was always dogshit legislation because nowhere in the Constitution does it grant a person a right to privacy as far as medical manners go. So the conservatives got smart for once and realized that to overturn Roe v. Wade then they have to put aside their Bibles for once and to fight against it in a secular and objective manner by arguing that Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional because nowhere in the Constitution granted privacy for medical manners rather than calling it immoral like they used to do (Bible thumping did not help the Right to overturn Roe v. Wade in their previous attempts). What do I think about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade? I think the Supreme Court ruled correctly in overturning Roe v. Wade because Roe v. Wade was always dogshit legislation (even the late liberal SCOTUS justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledged how Roe v. Wade was dogshit due to its unstable legal foundation to stay as a SCOTUS precedent any longer). The issue of abortion should have been an issue for Congress to tackle, not the Supreme Court at the time in how they ruled back in 1973.
Do you see where I'm getting at here? While obscenity (as established by both the Miller test and the Dost test) are not protected speech, what may come out of this is seeing the Supreme Court possibly nuking outdated obscenity laws and possibly adopt new strict scrutiny standards for both the Miller test and the Dost test in order to prevent further abuse by the legal system. So stuff like lolicon and shotacon may no longer be in a legal gray area anymore and they may become fully protected speech from that point on should this issue return back to the Supreme Court after roughly 20 years later.
The Protect Act of 2003 may finally get its day in the Supreme Court and possibly have some parts of it struck down for the same reasons Roe v. Wade was overturned back in 2022 (because the one thing the Protect Act of 2003 and Roe v. Wade have in common is that they are both still dogshit legislation).
