Tag: in-the-news

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an important challenge to a terrible, regressive California animal-rights law that violates the U.S. Constitution, fairness, and common sense. The challenge was filed by the nation’s largest pork producers, most of whom may no longer be able to supply pork to the California market due to Proposition 12, an animal-rights law adopted by California voters in 2018.

At its most basic level, this case concerns Prop. 12’s targets: farmers raising livestock outside California for consumers in California. But, as I’ve detailed, given California’s gigantic population and the impact the state’s food economy and regulations have on the rest of the nation, this case is also as much about farmers, retailers, restaurateurs, and consumers in Iowa, South Dakota, or North Carolina as it is about those in California.

As I explained earlier this year, Proposition 12 was a California ballot measure that was adopted in 2018 by nearly two-thirds of state voters. The initiative, supported by many of the nation’s largest animal-rights groups, requires that confinement spaces for covered livestock whose meat or eggs will be sold in California must be large enough that the animals have enough room to lie down, turn around, and spread their wings. The law includes fines and possible jail time for violators. 

Prop. 12’s definition of “confined in a cruel manner” includes confining a veal calf in a space that’s less than 43 square feet; a breeding pig in a space less than 24 square feet, or  an egg-laying hen in a space that’s less than 144 square inches. Sellers of meat and other products made from these animals may be held liable in California under the law if they knowingly sell products—a pork chop, say—that don’t comply with the law. 

While Prop. 12 will raise prices that California consumers pay for many animal products, its real impact is—as intended—being felt outside the state.

“The requirements of Proposition 12 apply to covered products sold in the state, irrespective of whether the products originate from covered animals raised on farms within or outside of California,” a state Prop 12 explainer details (emphasis mine). “For example, a breeding pig confined in another state must be housed in compliance with Proposition 12 if her offspring will be used for purposes of covered pork products sold in California for human consumption.”

That’s outrageous. It’s even more outrageous when you consider that California imports nearly all (99.87 percent) of its pork. And though Californians consume around 15 percent of the nation’s pork, only around 4 percent of pork producers nationwide currently meet California standards.

It’s almost as if Prop. 12 was adopted to crush the national market for pork. Thankfully, the U.S. Constitution prohibits such laws.

In their suit, the pork producers rightly argue that Prop. 12 is unconstitutional because it created “dramatic economic effects outside of the state and require[s] changes to the nationwide farm industry [that] violate the dormant Commerce Clause.” (The dormant Commerce Clause, I’ve explained, prohibits states from adopting laws and regulations, like Prop. 12, that impose unfair burdens on interstate commerce.)

A ruling in the case could have a dramatic impact on  other laws around the country—including California’s equally unconstitutional foie gras ban and a Massachusetts law that’s similar to Prop. 12. Indeed, the first case listed in the pork producers’ Supreme Court  petition is a suit challenging California’s foie gras ban. I’ve written at least as much as anyone about that case, including many columns and a Supreme Court amicus brief in support of foie gras producers (which I submitted, as counsel of record, on behalf of the Reason Foundation, which published this website, and the Cato Institute).

“California’s foie gras ban is a primary example of a food or agricultural law that erects unconstitutional obstacles and barriers to the national food economy. But the law does not stand alone. Other recent California laws evidence both a comparable intent and impact. Worse still, other states have begun to follow California’s lead, passing laws that pose similar challenges to the existence of the national food economy,” I explained in the amicus brief. “If this Court allows states to prohibit interstate commerce in poultry products and other animal products that are inspected and deemed wholesome, unadulterated, and properly branded under federal law, then laws like these from California, Massachusetts, and other states could ultimately destroy our national market in food.”

I am a big fan of all types of food economies—local, state, regional, national, and international—and I think each plays a key role in making America’s food supply abundant, resilient, and responsive to consumer demands. If we are to continue to have a robust national food economy, the Supreme Court must strike down Proposition 12.

The post SCOTUS Could (and Should) Strike Down California's Animal-Rights Law appeared first on Reason.com.

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4/9/1923: Adkins v. Children’s Hospital decided.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 9, 1923 appeared first on Reason.com.

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For more than a decade, both amateurs and professionals shared their sometimes sweet, sometimes weird, and often graphic sexual activity on Pornhub. Launched in 2007 not long after YouTube and with a similar free-for-all spirit, the site represented a new wave of “adult entertainment” in which anyone with an internet connection could partake and anyone with a digital camera could become a star.

Dubbed “tube sites,” Pornhub and its various peers began to dominate web traffic generally and porn consumption specifically. These sites trod on porn’s established business model, but for savvy sex workers the tube site network could provide a way to break into the business or reach audiences directly, without the porn industry’s usual middlemen. To monetize one’s presence in the early days took some creativity, but tube sites would eventually offer content partnerships that allowed people to get paid directly for their videos. Their competitors, such as cam sites and clip stores, made the process of charging money and getting paid even smoother.

The result? For the first time, people with a truly diverse array of body types, looks, races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, and kinks had direct access to the tools of porn production and distribution. In the past, porn had catered to a much more narrow range of tastes, with predictable results. Now audiences could access all sorts of content that defied conventional notions of who and what was deserving of lust. On sites like Pornhub and the microblogging platform Tumblr, outside-the-mainstream content thrived.

And then, one day, it was gone.

In December 2020, without warning, Pornhub removed all videos posted by unverified users—a massive cache of content encompassing anything not posted by formal content partners or members of the platform’s official model program. More than 10 million videos were suspended, and unverified users were banned from uploading or downloading new videos.

It was more than a disruption to the site. The unannounced disappearing of so many videos was “a huge cultural loss,” says Ashley, a transgender sex worker and civil rights activist with a robust presence on social media and in offline organizing. (At Ashley’s request, we’re identifying her by first name only.) Ashley volunteers with the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Behind Bars, a group dedicated to helping incarcerated sex workers. She recently helped spearhead a campaign protesting financial discrimination against sex workers and LGBTQ content creators. Unverified videos, Ashley says, are “inclusive, just by definition, of all the queer content that people felt unsafe with being directly affiliated with.”

The Pornhub purge came about two years after Tumblr’s ban on any content depicting sex acts, and preceded a similar announcement in summer 2021 from OnlyFans, a subscription content site popularized by sex workers. OnlyFans would later reverse this edict, but the fate of adult content on the site remains uncertain.

Then, in September 2021, the first user-uploaded porn site—Xtube, founded in 2006 and now owned by the same parent company as Pornhub—shut down entirely.

Demand for online porn hasn’t weakened, at least not according to web traffic numbers. Nor do there seem to be fewer people willing to create and post it; it’s not uncommon to hear sex workers complain about the glut of adult content creators these days.

Nonetheless, it’s a financially precarious, and perhaps even dangerous, time to be in the business of online porn. And one of the biggest reasons why is that a constellation of activist groups, rooted in deeply conservative opposition to virtually any depiction of sexuality in the public sphere, have put considerable pressure on the middlemen who keep online porn in business. In some cases, that pressure has led to the creation of onerous new laws; in others, it has been aided by support from powerful figures in business and government. These groups have repeatedly sought to conflate the existence of consensual commercial sex and porn production with the prospect of forced sexual exploitation, often with lurid statistics about exploited minors that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Although these groups say their aim is merely to rid the web of abuse, it’s clear that their true goal is to eliminate the vast majority of adult sexual content from the web through a combination of legal pressure tactics, lobbying for new laws, and political intimidation. It’s a campaign for a sex-free web. Rather than help vulnerable women, these efforts threaten to make life worse for the very people they claim to want to help—while simultaneously stifling internet expression more broadly.

From ‘Morality’ to ‘Exploitation’

Few organizations have done as much to try to squelch online porn as the group that for most of its life was known as Morality in Media. The group was founded in 1962 to fight countercultural influences, especially those with sexually explicit material. In 1969, for example, it went after underground newspapers for “obscenities” and “push[ing] drug usage as the ‘in’ thing.” In 1971, its target was “titillating ads in the U.S. mails,” along with “smut in media”—including “nudie, homosexual, sado-masochistic and teen-age sex books”—that might be “inciting our nation’s youth to violence, perversion, promiscuity, drug experimentation, hatred and tastelessness.”

By the early ’80s, the group was bemoaning adult bookstores, soap operas, and MTV. “Really and truly, soap operas are destroying the family’s moral base,” its president said in 1984. In the ’90s, it railed against daytime talk shows and sitcoms depicting sex outside marriage. The specific nature of the threat was always shifting, but the core crusade was always about mass media portrayals of sexual activity that didn’t align with traditional values.

In 2015, the group rebranded as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). Since then, the internet and tech companies have become its primary targets. Search engines, social media, online classified ads, digital marketplaces, and streaming video services have all found themselves under fire, along with online pornography platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans.

Today, the group tends to trade the language of “decency” and morality for feminist-tinged talk of consent, objectification, violence against women, and sex trafficking. Pornhub “normalizes themes of racism, incest, and violence against women,” NCOSE said in a 2019 press release. HBO profits “from sexual objectification, exploitation, and violence,” it declared in 2016. NCOSE describes its work broadly as “exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sex abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health harms of pornography.”

Underneath it all, though, NCOSE is still the same old musty conservative values group aimed at eradicating sexuality in the public sphere. It cloaks that under a mantle of saving the children, and it uses intimidation and legal pressure to get what it wants.

In recent years, the group’s annual “dirty dozen” list has condemned the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue for “sending a message that women’s bodies are for public consumption,” Cosmopolitan magazine for “hypersexualized cover models,” Seattle coffee stands for having scantily clad baristas, Amazon Prime Video for showing “simulated sex scenes,” and Netflix for featuring “gratuitous amounts of nudity.”

“When Netflix, a highly influential platform with over 200 million users across the globe, hosts sexually explicit content like ‘Cuties,’ ‘Big Mouth,’ and ‘Sex Education,’ it deserves to be called out for profiting from sexually exploitative content,” says NCOSE CEO Dawn Hawkins. “Sexual exploitation is not entertainment.”

NCOSE is one of a handful of influential groups intent on recasting a wide range of sexual content and activities as “exploitation.” It’s joined by groups such as Exodus Cry, which was born out of an evangelical Christian church in Kansas City and bills itself as foe of “commercial sexual exploitation”; the Justice Defense Fund, a lobbying and litigation group founded by the anti-porn activist Laila Mickelwait; and Demand Abolition, an anti–sex work group founded by the oil heiress and Clinton-era ambassador Swanee Hunt.

Though they speak the language of feminism, these groups are steeped in the spirit of conservative purity culture—an evangelical ethos popularized in the 1980s and ’90s. Purity culture hinges on abstinence rituals like virginity pledges, chastity rings, and father-daughter “purity balls.” It’s predicated on the notion that sexual activity should be relegated to monogamous and heterosexual married couples, and it preaches strict gender roles, female modesty, and total abstinence from premarital sex. It often rests on the idea that promiscuity not only destroys a woman’s value as a partner but her emotional stability and self-worth.

Some prominent anti-porn activists spring directly from this world. Exodus Cry founder Benjamin Nolot has distanced himself and his organization from the group’s evangelical roots, but he became known for giving talks like “contending for purity in a pornified world,” in which he defines sexual immorality as “all sexual activity outside of the marriage covenant between one man and one woman.” Others come from a radical feminist background that eschews gender norms and embraces queerness yet sounds strangely like its religious right counterpart when it comes to sex work. In both frameworks, women who participate in porn are ruined. Men who watch porn are damaged. Porn “kills love” and threatens the well-being of American women and families.

A shared goal of these groups is to remake the internet as a sex-free zone by casting a vast swath of nontraditional sexual activity as “sexual exploitation” or “human trafficking,” especially if it involves the transfer of money, even indirectly. “Any content that turns people into public sexual commodities has no place on the Internet or in society,” Hawkins says.

This strategy has had remarkable success, earning an audience and acclaim among reporters, politicians, and prominent feminists unlikely to be so kind to a band of moralistic Bible-thumpers denouncing promiscuity and calling sex outside marriage a sin. The purity culture ethos of shame, abstinence, and fallen women still permeates these groups’ activism. But it’s been repackaged as a bid to protect women and kids from trauma and sexual harm rather than to uphold the sanctity of marriage and biblical womanhood.

A central plank of this strategy is litigation.

In January 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit accusing Twitter of sex trafficking. The basis for this claim is that the social media site temporarily hosted a link to a video, hosted on a separate site, featuring two teenagers engaged in sex acts. The minors had taken the video themselves and shared it with a third party via Snapchat. In August, a judge ruled against Twitter’s motion to dismiss the case.

In February 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against MindGeek, the parent company behind a number of porn sites, including Pornhub. In the suit, which is also ongoing, two Jane Does accuse Pornhub of hosting videos without their consent. And in March, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against WebGroup Czech Republic, the company behind one of the world’s most visited porn platforms, XVideos.

In all of these cases, an underlying kernel of harm is alleged, such as a teen being blackmailed into sending a stranger sex videos or women being duped into appearing in online porn. But rather than target the perpetrators of that harm directly, the NCOSE strategy is to go after platforms that—however briefly or unknowingly—hosted evidence of it taking place.

None of these suits would have a chance at success without the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018 (FOSTA), a law that NCOSE backed. In addition to making it a federal crime to host content that facilitates prostitution, FOSTA amended the federal statute known as Section 230—which says that individuals and intermediaries online aren’t always legally liable for content, interactions, and transactions by clients or users—to make it easier for private citizens and state attorneys general to sue digital intermediaries.

Digital intermediaries include everything from Facebook and Twitter to Pornhub and XVideos to search engines, Substack, cloud hosting companies, dating apps, video chat platforms, web payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe, and any other website or app that serves as a conduit for content, communication, or trade.

The goal of both FOSTA and the NCOSE lawsuits is to change the Section 230 paradigm when it comes to sex. The strategy involves first recasting sex trafficking. Legally, this is prostitution that involves minors and/or force, fraud, or coercion; in the popular imagination, it necessarily involves violence, abduction, and rape. The crusaders want to make it mean essentially any activity that involves sex work, even between consenting adults, or any sexual activity involving minors, even if there is no commercialization and even if intermediaries facilitating its exposure have no reasonable expectation of knowing about it.

At its core is the idea that sex work can never just be work; it’s always exploitation. Hawkins says as much: “That sex buyers must pay to sexually access the bodies of others demonstrates that the sex in prostitution is unwanted by those being paid. Payment, whether in cash or by other things of value, is the leverage used to abrogate the lack of authentic sexual desire of those in the sex trade.”

Additionally, any third party profiting from sex—no matter how indirect or inconsequential—counts as exploitation. That’s the crux of the Twitter lawsuit: NCOSE’s argument is that because Twitter runs ads alongside all content, it profited from the tweet sharing footage of teens engaged in sex acts, and therefore it violated federal law against child sex trafficking.

Under this logic, it’s incredibly risky—reputationally, legally, and financially—for online intermediaries to allow any sort of sexualized business or content. No company wants a reputation for supporting exploitation, sex trafficking, and child abuse. And hosting sex-business transactions risks FOSTA-enabled lawsuits and abandonment by credit card companies and banks.

In other words, these groups have gone after online sex work and pornography by making it difficult, if not impossible, for sexually oriented businesses to process payments and collect money for services rendered—if they can create accounts at all. These tactics threaten the entire porn industry and the livelihoods of thousands of sex workers. Online sex work is, after all, work: If you can’t collect a paycheck or bill your clients, you can’t do your job.

Creating Chokepoints

To that end, activists have been pressuring financial institutions—credit card companies, banks, etc.—not to do business with sex workers, sexually oriented businesses, or any intermediary that won’t discriminate against these groups.

This method was tested with the classified advertising platform Backpage. In 2015, activists used the press and public relations campaigns to pressure credit card companies to stop processing Backpage transactions.

But it wasn’t simply an activist pressure campaign: Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Tom Dart, who has staked out one of the nation’s most aggressive stances against sex work, threatened action against these companies if they didn’t stop. After Dart’s threats, Mastercard and Visa both quickly ditched Backpage. A federal judge would later rule Dart’s actions unconstitutional, because they violated the First Amendment, but the damage was done.

The Backpage situation proved that popular pressure and the mere threat of sex trafficking lawsuits could work as well as, if not better than, government mandates. It’s a playbook activists are now repeating with companies like Pornhub and OnlyFans.

Private campaigns to change business practices are a vital freedom. And private businesses can “censor” or choose not to associate with whomever they want. But that doesn’t mean these actions are always a social good, nor beyond criticism. More importantly, porn’s enemies aren’t simply speaking out privately. They are also calling for, and in some cases successfully generating, legal and political sanctions.

It’s true that NCOSE is not the Department of Justice (DOJ). An Exodus Cry petition isn’t an executive order. But neither are these groups simply calling on people to boycott Pornnub or delete their Twitter accounts. They’re calling on the DOJ and members of Congress to act against them, and they’re filing lawsuits that threaten serious court-ordered consequences for these companies. These demands for state action have proven influential.

Take FOSTA. NCOSE backed the law and has taken credit for its passage. The group has alternated between appeals to women’s liberation (calling it a “test of the strength of our national resolve to deliver on the promise of #MeToo”) and appeals to saving the children (“today, ordering a child or adult online for sex is as easy as ordering a pizza”). NCOSE is now pushing another law to weaken Section 230 protections, called the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act, which eliminates Section 230 protections for material involving minors.

And sometimes they are clearly backed by state actors with real power, as Sheriff Dart’s campaign against Backpage shows. Dart and Demand Abolition, notably, used to partner up for a series of prostitution stings called the “National Johns Suppression Initiative.”

The threat to tech companies now is legal trouble not for failing to uphold current criminal justice norms but for failing to proactively define sex trafficking, exploitation, and obscenity as broadly as these groups would like them to be defined—and as these groups may eventually succeed at convincing lawmakers and courts to define them.

“What it comes down to really,” tweeted Gustavo Turner, an editor at the adult industry publication XBIZ, “is that there’s a well-funded, well-organized group of people working 24/7 to align the state’s definition of ‘crime’ with their own notion of ‘sin.'”

After FOSTA passed with the promise of taking down online classified ad venues, activists started focusing on other user-generated content platforms. Mickelwait’s “TraffickingHub” campaign took aim specifically at Pornhub. And as with the crusades against classified ads, former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof amplified this crusade. (Kristof left to run for governor of Oregon, but was ruled ineligible because of the state’s residency requirements.)

In a highly sensationalistic December 2020 column, Kristof accused Pornhub of being complicit in rape and child abuse. To make this argument, Kristof relied heavily on Pornhub keyword searches and faulty assumptions. Ambiguous words and phrases like teens and young are taken to mean minors, even though these words often refer to young adults or are used to tag role-playing videos featuring adults who are actually much older. Scenes featuring “nonconsensual” encounters—another popular role-playing category—are likewise taken as indications of literal rape.

Kristof fleshes out these keyword insinuations with anecdotes from young women like Serena K. Fleites, who as a young teen took naked videos of herself, shared them with a boy, and wound up on Pornhub. She’s now at the center of a class-action lawsuit against Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek. Fleites’ is one of several tales Kristof relays in which videos were removed by Pornhub when notified, only to be reposted on Pornhub or other websites. Their stories showcase the perils of modern digital adolescence, when intimate images shared with other teens or exploitative adults can wind up living forever and recirculating endlessly online. What they don’t suggest is a problem unique to Pornhub, since the videos often circulated around the internet. Nor do they reveal a company indifferent to underage or nonconsensual pornography.

“Any assertion that we allow CSAM”—that stands for child sexual abuse material, the new officialese term for sexualized content featuring anyone under age 18—”is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue,” protested Pornhub in a statement. It went on to point out that an Internet Watch Foundation analysis has found only “118 incidents of CSAM on Pornhub in a three year period.” This is out of millions of videos—around 13.5 million before the purge, according to Vice.

Data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows MindGeek reported 13,229 instances of potential underage content to the group’s tipline in 2020—far more than many tech companies, but far less than such mainstream platforms as Google (which submitted 546,704), Imgur (31,571), Facebook (20,307,216), Microsoft (96,776), Snapchat (144,095), TikTok (22,692), and Twitter (65,062).

None of those numbers offer definitive proof of anything, since they’re a function of how much a service is used and by how many people as well as the company’s proactiveness and internal definitions. But to the extent that online exploitation is a problem, they suggest that porn sites aren’t the chief vectors. Indeed, Kristof’s op-ed even admitted that these mainstream sites may be trafficking in far higher volumes of illegal imagery. Nonetheless, he closed his column by calling on credit card companies to stop doing business with Pornhub.

Kristof’s cry was echoed by an influential hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, who reportedly convinced Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga to comply. (Ackman’s crusade has since expanded; he has recently accused Google, Bing, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter of “facilitat[ing] and profit[ing] from the distribution of child rape porn” because they allow links to or search results from porn sites.) Before long, Mastercard, Visa, and Discover suspended business with Pornhub and its parent company, MindGeek. (Visa later resumed business with some MindGeek properties.)

Last summer, Visa and Colbeck Capital were added to a lawsuit filed against MindGeek. “It is believed to be the first Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case that attempts to hold financial institutions accountable for the role they may play in sexual exploitation by processing payments,” the Financial Post reported. If successful, it could pave the way for taking credit card companies to court any time they unwittingly aid in harm.

Many cheer these developments when they affect a business or cause they don’t like. But once the floodgates open, it creates new avenues for legal pressure against any industry, company, or individual who can plausibly be portrayed as dangerous, including political causes and movements.

It’s part of a trend of using “banks as a proxy for state censorship,” Porn Panic! author Jerry Barnett suggested in a September Quillette article. And this trend coincides with other disturbing developments, including “increasingly muscular attempts by democratic governments to censor the internet…the successful linkage of a largely baseless ‘sex trafficking’ narrative with sex work and pornography; and a zero tolerance approach to content platforms that holds them responsible for even a single illegal item of content.”

“Pushing for more aggressive content moderation, especially from infrastructure-like entities like payment processors, web hosts, [content delivery networks], etc, is a terrible idea that will always backfire against marginalized people and social movements,” tweeted Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future. And “that ship has maybe sailed. There is practically an entire industry now around pushing narratives like ‘Why is XYZ web service hosting ABC terrible thing? This is an outrage!’ (and well-intentioned but misguided journalists happy to uncritically amplify).”

Mastercard Speeds the Erasure

Not long after Kristof’s article came out, Pornhub announced new policies, including the takedown of millions of videos posted by unverified users. Some treated this as a win against exploitation, while others accused Pornhub of simply trying to erase evidence of its wrongdoing. But Pornhub users and creators may see it differently.

Unverified content doesn’t translate to illegal or harmful content. Anyone posting in the early days, anyone wishing to remain anonymous, amateurs with no wish to monetize their videos—all were unverified.

“Unverified on Pornhub just meant that they didn’t want to give their ID to MindGeek,” says Ashley, the sex worker activist. These videos were removed “as kind of a sacrificial altar in the name of keeping payments.” But it wasn’t enough for the credit card companies and Pornhub “got defunded anyway.”

Meanwhile, a huge archive of diverse content was just gone. “Most of the retro movies were washed away,” lamented Steven Underwood at LGBT news site NewNowNext recently. “We lost many scenes, including content starring models who have become synonymous with queer dalliance and exploration.”

When Tumblr ditched sexual content in 2018, people realized that a lot of artistic and archival material was lost, says Ashley. “It’s only stigma against porn—the word porn, the idea of porn being central to a site—that prevents people from realizing that a similar loss of culture just happened on Pornhub.”

Last year, Ashley was one of the organizers of a day of sex worker action dubbed Acceptance Matters, which included protests, online testimonials, and a petition that got more than 2,000 signatures. While targeted at discrimination from the banking and financial services industry in general, the campaign was especially a swipe at Mastercard, which uses the slogan “Acceptance Matters” in its LGBTQ campaign.

In April 2021, Mastercard announced new rules for all adult businesses and content. The rules—which took effect October 15—state that “banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content.” Putting banks in charge of gathering information on and evaluating such policies is no small task, and likely many will determine doing business with adult content businesses isn’t worth it.

Some of the required controls Mastercard offers are that adult businesses must review all content prior to publication—a costly and time-consuming proposal that goes far beyond current practices for mainstream social media and user–generated content based platforms. In addition, they must have “documented age and identity verification for all people depicted and those uploading the content,” a rule that goes beyond what’s required by federal law, under which porn creators are required to keep such records, but web platforms that host them are not.

Mastercard’s policies “will result in a major chilling effect and destruction of many ways of working for sex workers and other impacted parties,” including all queer content creators, argues the Acceptance Matters website. In addition, “all of society suffers from restrictions on consensual sexuality and speech, increases in surveillance, and misdirection of resources that should help the most vulnerable.”

With the Acceptance Matters campaign, “we’re asking Mastercard to live up to their publicly stated goals and promises to [the LGBTQ] community,” Ashley tells me. In LGBTQ outreach efforts, Mastercard is “trying to get us to spend through them, but they’re not doing anything to make sure the card is accepted at our businesses,” she points out. “Like, it’s not that we need rainbow branded cards. It’s that we need basic access to the same basic tools everyone else has, and an end to policies that discriminate against us by targeting a job that we’re more likely to do than anyone else.”

“They’re destabilizing the entire community—even people who are not sex workers—because when your community is defined by sexual orientation, it’s seen as sexual content,” Ashley says. Rules that may make sense for professional porn producers and performers, such as mandatory IDs, “would really suck for fine artists and historians and educators and just average everyday people who deserve a right to be able to post nudity to other adults without being tracked by the state.”

OnlyFans Under Fire

Many blamed Mastercard’s new policy for a July 2021 announcement from OnlyFans that it would stop allowing sexually explicit content. The announcement came as a huge blow to adult content creators. It’s “like Taco Bell deciding not to sell tacos anymore,” commented sex worker and content creator Kimmy Kalani in an August 27 video about the announcement. “We helped build that platform, and they’re just going to kick us to the curb.”

But Mastercard’s new policy had no bearing on the decision, nor was it investor-driven, according to OnlyFans founder and CEO Tim Stokely.

“The change in policy, we had no choice—the short answer is banks,” Stokely told the Financial Times in August. Institutions such as the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and the U.K.’s Metro Bank would “cite reputational risk and refuse our business,” said Stokely. “JPMorgan Chase is particularly aggressive in closing accounts of sex workers or…any business that supports sex workers.”

OnlyFans reversed course about the policy on August 25, stating that it had “secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community” and would “continue to provide a home for all creators.” But the situation highlights how precarious things can be for platforms that want to allow adult creators—and for the creators who rely on them for income.

It’s not just traditional banks and credit card companies aggressively policing adult business. Many online payment processors, such as Square, PayPal, and Google Pay, explicitly reject transactions for adult-oriented businesses and performers, or have been known to close sex worker accounts without warning.

The False Promise of Crypto

When OnlyFans first announced it was banning adult content, Edward Snowden tweeted, “Bitcoin fixes this.” This isn’t a rare notion. For several years, various folks have suggested that cryptocurrency can solve sex workers’ issues with banks and credit card companies. The idea really picked up in 2015, when Backpage, backed into a corner by Sheriff Dart’s pressure on credit card companies, began accepting bitcoin, litecoin, and dogecoin for paid ads. Suddenly, sex worker guides to bitcoin started popping up everywhere. Headlines have declared that “sex work is moving to blockchain payments” and “sex workers are finding freedom in cryptocurrency.” Filmmaker and performer Whitney Moore tweeted last year that “Bitcoin will be the answer when Venmo, PayPal and the like continue to shoot themselves in the foot by cracking down on [sex worker] payments.”

But while bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies might help mitigate issues with traditional banking, they’re far from a panacea.

“Over the last 4 years I have tried in vain to get my customers to pay me in crypto and let me tell you, it’s like pulling teeth,” says adult performer and content creator Allie Awesome. “Tons of sex workers are able to accept crypto, and we would love to, but that doesn’t mean our customers will adopt it.”

Besides, sex workers still need a way to convert crypto payments to cash. “My landlord does not accept bitcoin. The grocery store does not accept bitcoin. We still rely on exchanges and banks,” says Awesome. And “not all [cryptocurrency] exchanges are sex worker friendly….You also need to link your bank to an exchange in order to cash out, and banks aren’t always sex worker friendly either.”

For instance, Coinbase explicitly prohibits businesses engaged in “adult content” from using its services. On top of all that, the rules around cryptocurrency are constantly changing, making its use “somewhat of a gray area legally,” notes Awesome. “It seems like every week there is a new law being passed or the [Securities and Exchange Commission] launches a new investigation.”

And with Democrats pressing to treat cryptocurrency brokers more like traditional financial players, exchanges and other platforms that deal in cryptocurrency may wind up pressured to exclude sex workers, too.

A War on Intermediaries—and Sex Workers

What all of these tactics share is a focus on intermediaries. Payment processors. Social platforms. Even hotels. One NCOSE-backed lawsuit accuses Wyndham Hotels of sex trafficking for failing to put a stop to prostitution involving a 16-year-old that was taking place in one of its rooms; NCOSE alleges that hotel staff should’ve been suspicious of things like “large quantities of used condoms left in the room” and “excessive requests for sheets and room cleaning services.” Another suit is against the state of Nevada, where some counties allow legal (and highly regulated) brothels.

These suits give you a sense of the NCOSE mission’s scope. The group might claim its only goal is to stop extreme exploitation, not consensual encounters. But this sounds awfully close to wanting constant surveillance of people having sex outside traditional bounds.

Activists have found that they don’t need to directly ban pornography, LGBTQ content creators, sex workers, etc. They just need to portray the commingling of sex and money as “risky” and increase the threat of legal and criminal justice penalties for ignoring those risks.

Shutting down websites that largely traffic in legal and expressive content—and are keen to intervene when this isn’t the case—can raise the profile of a group like NCOSE, which fund-raises off the idea that it’s fighting “human trafficking” rather than images of consensual nudity. But threatening their livelihoods doesn’t always prompt people to quit porn. Sometimes it just makes their working conditions more dangerous. And shutting down centralized platforms doesn’t stop predators from posting illegal or exploitative content. But it does make that content and the platforms hosting it harder for investigators to reach.

“Companies like Mastercard are now accomplices in the disenfranchisement of millions of sex workers, complicit in pushing workers away from independence into potentially more dangerous and exploitative conditions,” says the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade group. The grim irony is that NCOSE may be facilitating real exploitation in the name of stamping it out.

Many sex workers, it’s fair to say, don’t feel like any of these moves actually protect them. “Taking away our platforms does not help sex workers or trafficking survivors,” says Awesome. Sex work advocacy groups, she says, have offered real help in actual instances of trafficking. “Sex workers are the experts on our lives and experiences,” she says. “The [anti-porn activists] aren’t. They rely on fabrications, half-truths, and sensationalized narratives.”

“You know who actually cares the most about trafficking?” Awesome asks. “Sex workers.”

The post The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet appeared first on Reason.com.

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Randy and I are adding several cases for the second edition of An Introduction to Constitutional Law. One of the classic cases, which appears on the AP Government required list, is Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969). I had read the majority opinion before, but never read Justice Black’s entire dissent. I suspect this passage from Justice Black’s dissent will resonate with many people today:

Change has been said to be truly the law of life but sometimes the old and the tried and true are worth holding. The schools of this Nation have undoubtedly contributed to giving us tranquility and to making us a more law-abiding people. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable liberty is an enemy to domestic peace. We cannot close our eyes to the fact that some of the country’s greatest problems are crimes committed by the youth, too many of school age. School discipline, like parental discipline, is an integral and important part of training our children to be good citizens—to be better citizens. Here a very small number of students have crisply and summarily refused to obey a school order designed to give pupils who want to learn the opportunity to do so. One does not need to be a prophet or the son of a prophet to know that after the Court’s holding today some students in Iowa schools and indeed in all schools will be ready, able, and willing to defy their teachers on practically all orders. This is the more unfortunate for the schools since groups of students all over the land are already running loose, conducting break-ins, sit-ins, lie-ins, and smash-ins. Many of these student groups, as is all too familiar to all who read the newspapers and watch the television news programs, have already engaged in rioting, property seizures, and destruction. They have picketed schools to force students not to cross their picket lines and have too often violently attacked earnest but frightened students who wanted an education that the pickets did not want them to get. Students engaged in such activities are apparently confident that they know far more about how to operate public school systems than do their parents, teachers, and elected school officials. It is no answer to say that the particular students here have not yet reached such high points in their demands to attend classes in order to exercise their political pressures. Turned loose with lawsuits for damages and injunctions against their teachers as they are here, it is nothing but wishful thinking to imagine that young, immature students will not soon believe it is their right to control the schools rather than the right of the States that collect the taxes to hire the teachers for the benefit of the pupils. This case, therefore, wholly without constitutional reasons in my judgment, subjects all the public schools in the country to the whims and caprices of their loudest-mouthed, but maybe not their brightest, students. I, for one, am not fully persuaded that school pupils are wise enough, even with this Court’s expert help from Washington, to run the 23,390 public school systems in our 50 States. I wish, therefore, wholly to disclaim any purpose on my part to hold that the Federal Constitution compels the teachers, parents, and elected school officials to surrender control of the American public school system to public school students. I dissent.

I sometimes wonder what schools would look like if Justice Black’s views had prevailed.

The post Justice Black's Dissent in <i>Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

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A Friday bonus Reason Roundtable! Live from Reason Weekend in Nashville.

In the latest special Friday Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss President Joe Biden’s student loan moratorium extension and Big Labor.

14:47: The Biden administration’s student loan moratorium extension

34:52: Biden and Big Labor

40:58: Editors answer questions from a live audience at Reason Weekend.

This week’s links:

“Mad Genius” by Matt Welch

“40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets” by Brian Doherty

“Once Again, Joe Biden Extends the Moratorium on Federal Student Loan Repayment” by Corey Walker

“Biden’s Coronavirus Relief Package Has Almost Nothing to Do With the Coronavirus” by Peter Suderman

“Canceling Putin, Canceling Russians” by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“The Big Labor President” by Matt Welch

The post A Friday Bonus <em>Reason Roundtable</em>! Live from Reason Weekend in Nashville. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has announced an end to no-knock search warrants in the city. The policy will ban city police from using or requesting no-knock warrants and implement modest reforms for how long police must wait to enter property after announcing themselves. But does the new policy go far enough to prevent needless deaths?

The change was inspired by the February death of Amir Locke, who was sleeping on his cousin’s couch when police executed a pre-dawn, no-knock raid. Locke responded to the aggressive intrusion by reaching for a gun that he was licensed to carry. Before Locke ever touched the trigger, a Minneapolis Police Department officer shot him three times from mere feet away. Locke later died. 

“We accomplished what we set out to do,” Frey said in a press release, “This policy is among the most forward-looking and extensive in the nation and will help keep both our residents and officers safe. I’m grateful for all our internal and external partners who provided data, feedback, and guidance in the creation of this policy. Their efforts will have a lasting impact on public safety in Minneapolis.”

The policy mandates that police knock and wait for at least 20 seconds before entering. For warrants served between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m., the waiting period extends to 30 seconds. The new policy has exceptions for “exigent circumstances,” a list that includes stopping a suspect from attempting an escape or from harming themselves or someone else, as well as the need to prevent the destruction of narcotics. 

The policy also classifies search warrants into low-, medium-, or high-risk categories. Officers are not allowed to use forced entry for low-risk warrants unless exigent circumstances arise. Medium-risk search warrants must be signed off by two supervisors. High-risk warrants will only be carried out by SWAT and must be approved by a commander. If conducted at night, they must be signed off by the deputy chief of investigations or someone above that rank. 

But is this enough?

Following Locke’s death, Reason‘s Jacob Sullum observed that knocking and waiting, as opposed to entering without announcement, often still leads to unnecessary violence. “The Louisville cops banged on the door of [Breonna] Taylor’s apartment for about 30 seconds before breaking in and claimed they also announced themselves,” Sullum wrote. “She and [Kenneth] Walker still did not realize the intruders were police officers.” Taylor was killed by police and Walker was charged for using a gun in self-defense. 

Sullum called for “a fundamental reevaluation” of “dynamic entry” tactics. While Minneapolis’s new policy may reduce the frequency of the riskiest kinds of raids, by preserving dynamic entry as an acceptable police practice, the city still leaves far too much room for tragedy.  

The post Minneapolis Bans Police Use of No-Knock Warrants appeared first on Reason.com.

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Police and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents in Pharr, Texas, thought they had intercepted a massive meth smuggling operation this February. Juan Carlos Toscano Guzman, a Mexican national, spent nearly six weeks in jail accused of transporting roughly 700 gallons of liquid methamphetamine. But it turned out not to be illicit drugs at all, just the result of unreliable drug field tests that have led to hundreds of other wrongful arrests.

The case, first reported by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, started when a Pharr police officer noticed three men transferring liquid out of large barrels next to a tanker truck. The officer noticed strange crystallization around the barrels and called in backup.

According to the criminal complaint filed against Guzman in federal court, Pharr police officers, firemen, and DEA special agents all tested the liquid in the barrels using drug field tests, and they came back presumptive positive for methamphetamines. The DEA estimated the total haul was 700 gallons of liquid meth with a street value of more than $10 million. The seizure made headlines across the state.

“This massive drug seizure impacts way beyond our region where it was headed,” Pharr Chief of Police Andy Harvey said in a Facebook post. “This stemmed from a patrol officer’s attention to detail when he observed something out of the ordinary and he used our resources to further investigate. This is great policing!”

But a DEA crime lab would later invalidate those field test results, leading prosecutors to drop their case against Guzman in late March. Guzman’s lawyer told the Star-Telegram he was transporting a mix of diesel and oil.

As Reason reported last year, such drug field test kits are manufactured by several different companies and are used by police departments and prison systems across the country. The test kits use instant color reactions to indicate the presence of certain compounds found in illegal drugs, but those same compounds are also found in dozens of known licit substances. And although the tests are fairly simple to use, they’re still prone to user error and misinterpretation. 

Because of this, they are generally not admissible as evidence in court, but police still use them to establish probable cause to arrest and jail people. This has led to hundreds of known instances of wrongful arrests and even guilty pleas from defendants facing charges for test results that crime labs would later invalidate.

For example, Atlanta resident Ju’zema Goldring spent nearly six months in the Fulton County jail in 2015 after police said sand from a stress ball in her purse tested presumptive positive for cocaine. She was left in jail for four months after a crime lab concluded that the mysterious powder was sand, not cocaine. A federal jury in Goldring’s civil rights lawsuit awarded her $1.5 million earlier this year.

In 2019 in Georgia, a college football quarterback was arrested after bird poop on his car tested positive for cocaine. A Florida man was wrongfully jailed in 2017 after a field test confused his donut glaze with meth.

In 2016, sheriff’s deputies in Monroe County, Georgia, arrested Macon resident Dasha Fincher after they found a plastic baggie of blue crystals in her car. A NARK II field test of the substance returned a presumptive positive for methamphetamines, and Fincher was charged with trafficking and possession of meth with intent to distribute. Fincher sat in jail for three months until a state crime lab determined that the substance was blue cotton candy. 

A follow-up investigation by a Georgia news station found that the NARK II test kit produced 145 false positives in Georgia in 2017.

Last year, more than a dozen Massachusetts attorneys said they were falsely accused of sending drugs to their incarcerated clients, who were then put in solitary confinement for receiving legitimate legal mail. (One way that synthetic opioids are smuggled into prison is by soaking papers in the drug.) A class-action lawsuit followed, challenging the Massachusetts Department of Corrections’ use of NARK II field tests to detect contraband and punish incarcerated people.

Until police and prisons acknowledge the limitations of these tests, cases like these will keep popping up, and innocent people like Guzman will be deprived of their liberty for doing nothing wrong.

The post Faulty Police Field Tests Said This Trucker Was Carrying 700 Gallons of Meth. It Was Diesel. appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Liberal government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is proposing a ban on foreigners purchasing homes in the country in an effort to combat high housing prices. If the small number of existing foreign homebuyers and other countries’ experience are anything to go on, it won’t do much good.

“We will prevent foreign buyers from parking their money in Canada by buying up homes. We will make sure that houses are being used as homes, rather than as commodities to be traded,” said Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s finance minister, in a forward to the government’s proposed 2022 budget.

The plan would ban foreign commercial enterprises and people who are neither Canadian citizens nor permanent residents from purchasing “nonrecreational, residential property” for a period of two years.

Running foreign buyers out of the housing market might strike some as xenophobic. But even in welcoming Canada, it’s a political winner.

During last year’s elections, both Trudeau and Erin O’Toole, leader of the rival Conservative Party, proposed a ban on foreign buyers, reports Bloomberg. The left-wing New Democratic Party proposed a 20 percent tax on homes bought by non-Canadians.

There’s a certain logic to a ban on foreign home purchases. Reducing demand should, in the short run, reduces prices. Those benefits would all go to the remaining Canadian homebuyers.

The problem is that foreign buyers are a small percentage of overall buyers in the housing market. Excluding them does little to dampen demand. Soon enough, it’s overwhelmed by rising demand from native Canadians.

The record of policies aimed at reducing foreign buyers in housing markets shows fleeting effects on affordability.

Starting in 2016, the British Columbia provincial government levied an additional 15 percent property transfer tax on homes bought by foreigners in the Vancouver Metro area. In 2018, that tax was raised to 20 percent and expanded to other areas of the province. Provincial property transfer data does show a pretty steep decline in foreign-involved purchases after the implementation of the tax, from about 10 percent of all property transfers to between 1 and 2 percent.

The effect on housing affordability was minimal, however. One study on the tax found that it reduced house price growth by 1 percent, with that benefit fading away after just 7 months. Foreign home purchases continue to be about 1 percent of total home purchases in British Columbia. And it’s still the most expensive province in the country to buy a home.

In 2018, New Zealand also largely banned foreign nationals from purchasing homes—estimated to be about 3 to 4 percent of home sales. Since, home prices increased by 12 percent in 2019, 18 percent in 2020, and 23 percent this past year.

Getting rid of restrictions on supply would do much more to reduce housing costs than marginally reducing demand in the short run.

Canada has many of the same price-increasing restrictions on new housing that U.S. cities and states do. Its local and provincial governments restrict new dense housing within the urban core and suburban development on city fringes. Several cities have rent control, which discourages investment even more.

“Rather than chasing villains, we should seek solutions,” writes Steve Lafleur of the Fraser Institute, a free market Canadian think tank. “If policymakers want to increase housing affordability for young people, families, and newcomers, they should reduce barriers to housing construction.”

Not only would reducing home construction barriers improve affordability, but it would probably make scapegoating foreigners for Canada’s domestically sourced high housing costs less politically profitable.

The post Justin Trudeau's Plan To Ban Foreigners From Buying Canadian Homes Won't Make Housing Affordable appeared first on Reason.com.

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In what should serve as a major blow to the credibility of federal law enforcement agents, a district court jury acquitted two men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The jury deadlocked on the charges against two other defendants, and it’s not clear whether prosecutors will seek to retry them, according to The New York Times.

Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris were acquitted on all charges they faced. Adam Fox and Barry Croft will be eligible for retrial.

This is an embarrassing outcome for both the FBI—which had relied on a vast network of informants that were extensively involved in planning and even encouraging the plot—as well as Whitmer herself, who treated the plot with utter seriousness and connected it to former President Donald Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric.

In reality, Whitmer was never in actual danger; “Big Dan,” the ringleader of the alleged plot, contacted law enforcement early on, and the FBI paid him $54,000 to conduct six months of surveillance on a loose network of militia members who were upset with Whitmer’s aggressive COVID-19 lockdown policies. When the group staked out Whitmer’s house, it was Big Dan leading the effort—with the FBI’s foreknowledge and encouragement.

At the same time, Big Dan’s FBI handler, a man named Jayson Chambers, was attempting to start a side business as a security consultant; he thus had every incentive to construct a major domestic terrorism bust that he could take credit for foiling. As The Times reported:

No attack ever took place and no final date for an abduction was set, testimony showed, and the details of the alleged plan sometimes differed from witness to witness. The F.B.I. informant, Dan Chappel, said he believed the group planned to kill Ms. Whitmer, whose handling of the Covid-19 pandemic had infuriated the men. Ty Garbin, the man who earlier pleaded guilty in the case, said he thought the group of men might abandon the governor in a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan. Another man who pleaded guilty, Kaleb Franks, said he had hoped to die in a shootout with the governor’s security detail.

“There was no plan to kidnap the governor, and there was no agreement between these four men,” Joshua Blanchard, a lawyer for Mr. Croft, said in closing arguments. He said the government tried to conjure up a conspiracy by using a network of informants and undercover agents, and that “without a plan, the snitches needed to make it look like” there was movement toward a plan.

The FBI, of course, has a long history of engaging in entrapment: i.e., inducing people to plan crimes that they had no intention of carrying out. The victims of these prosecutions have often been Muslims, though right-wing groups are also a common target of overzealous law enforcement. It appears that the jury possessed reasonable and well-justified doubt that the there was ever any actual plot to kidnap Whitmer, despite the FBI’s attempts to manufacture one.

The post Jury Acquits 2 Men Accused of Plotting To Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared first on Reason.com.

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In Shanghai, which is three times the size of New York City, residents have been under strict pandemic lockdown since March 27 in some parts, and since March 31 in others, with no end in sight.

Having detected a huge surge in cases, with more than 20,000 new cases being found daily, Chinese authorities locked the city of 25 million down, forcing residents into situations of extraordinary deprivation and subjecting them to brutal containment and control measures. With residents unable to leave their houses, food supplies are dwindling, and government workers attempting to deliver supplies to homes and apartments, frequently failing to do so in a timely or consistent manner. People are running out of the medicines they need to stay healthy or alive. Some people experiencing medical emergencies, CNN reports, have died after being turned away; they were unable to access care without negative COVID tests. “We are not killed by Covid, but by the Covid control measures,” read a viral post on social media site Weibo.

Due to strict containment and isolation measures in place for COVID-positive people, some mothers report being forcibly separated from their COVID-infected children by authorities. Health authorities allege parents will be able to appeal this and seek permission (!) to accompany their COVID-positive children to hospitals and isolation wards. It is unclear how this will actually apply in practice and whether this will end the brutal measure of separating parents from their young, sick children.

“In this country it’s not the virus that scares us, but the chaotic anti-Covid measures that have caused risks to the well-being of the elderly, the children and companion animals,” Shanghai resident Lily Chen told Bloomberg. “I now realize we can only rely on ourselves—not the government—to protect our own families.”

A video that has gone viral in China shows one family in Shanghai being taken off to COVID quarantine as their pet corgi chased the van in pursuit of its people. They had ostensibly released the dog into the city, assuming possible survival, instead of letting it stay in the family home during the quarantine period (where it would die without care). The dog was promptly killed by a COVID prevention worker wielding a spade. (This is not the first time Chinese authorities have come under fire for brutal treatment of pets in pursuit of COVID containment.)

The great leap forward, from the discomfort of your own home. Hunger drives people crazy, how can this continue? https://t.co/i1wnRiwcg2

— Alex Turnbull (@alexbhturnbull) April 5, 2022

Those who do violate or attempt to violate state-mandated quarantine or lockdown are subjected to punishment, though it is difficult to know the full extent due to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aggressive censorship. In other cities like Shandong, which was also recently forced under lockdown, videos of harsh punishments have circulated:

Disturbing video of COVID volunteers forcibly shaving someone who stepped outside of the house in Heze, Shandong (山东省菏泽市鄄城县凤凰镇) pic.twitter.com/TI49QzRnqa

— Alexander Boyd (@alexludoboyd) April 5, 2022

(Some on social media site Weibo suggest that the above could be a parody, while others elsewhere note that “forcibly shaving only the left side” is a callback to “an insulting practice widely used during the Cultural Revolution.”)

All such measures are part of the CCP’s “COVID Zero” strategy, which aims to entirely eliminate COVID spread within China’s borders, often through imposition of aggressive regional lockdowns like the one seen in Shanghai, as well as strict border control and frequent testing. Only about half of China’s above-80 population is fully vaccinated, with Chinese vaccines proving less effective than their Western counterparts. It’s unclear what the death toll looks like as this COVID outbreak takes it course, and CCP-sourced numbers are notoriously unreliable.

What is clear is the degree to which residents of Shanghai are disturbed by the state of deprivation they’ve been forced to endure; an unusually high amount of government criticism has emanated from Weibo and other platforms, which are typically heavily censored. “We don’t want to starve to death,” chanted residents of one suburb.

“Control your soul’s desire for freedom,” one drone told them as it aerially broadcasted COVID control policies throughout the city, emblematic of how seriously CCP authorities take citizens’ concerns.

The post Under COVID Lockdown, Shanghai's People Are Running Out of Food and Meds While Pets Get Killed in the Streets appeared first on Reason.com.

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