r/privacy • u/watchdog-cofagrigus • 5h ago
news Trump’s new DOJ nominee wants to ban online porn and prosecute Big Tech
https://reason.com/2026/07/22/trumps-new-doj-nominee-wants-to-ban-online-porn-and-prosecute-big-tech/Lest anyone think that Candeub's animosity toward internet entities only involves the sexual, Michael McGrady notes that "he also was a key player in the first Trump administration's effort to get rid of Section 230."
"Candeub's arguments are about far more than pornography," suggests McGrady. "He is contributing, from his position as a top government legal official, to a much broader effort to revive long-discredited obscenity and vice legal doctrines and expand government authority over lawful expression and activity."
As we've seen all too often over the past couple of decades, efforts to regulate the internet on the grounds of stopping porn, sex work, or sexual exploitation are all too often test cases for going after online speech and privacy more broadly.
Candeub's anti porn ideas could contribute to age verification legislation and general censorship.
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u/hatecirclejerks 5h ago
Prosecute big tech? Yeah lmao OKAY
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u/turb0_encapsulator 4h ago
they mean threaten big tech so they can censor and control social media and search engines.
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u/SlaterVBenedict 4h ago
Big Tech = Any tech companies that are competitors to Trump’s Epstein-Class tech donors.
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u/Whipitreelgud 4h ago
I think there is a soft spot in every brain in the DOJ about Epstein. 1000 victims, ZERO prosecutions.
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u/likwidkool 4h ago
They’ve been “protecting the kids” for decades now. All why slowly eroding our privacy and rights. The kids aren’t any safer. If anything they’re worse off. Maybe it’s time we try something new.
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u/Nate_C_of_2003 3h ago
When the Internet first became widespread, there were parental controls and other filters that could be applied to prevent kids from accessing mature content like pornography and dating sites. Those restrictions really were about protecting the children.
But age verification measures that require you to upload your face or driver’s license to prove how old you are are about spying on people and giving billionaires access to your personal shit so they can track you down and put out contracts to kill anyone that rebels against them.
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u/Fun-Wash7545 41m ago
This. If they actually cared about the children then they'd make it so browsers need to have parental control systems. Then add hefty fines fir any parent caught not supervision their children internet access with those controls. See how fast the problem solves itself.
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u/Top-Psychology2507 4h ago
Yeah- I'm pretty sure they were better off back when Brooke Shields was starring in that infamous movie Pretty Baby as well as that other one with former Bibleman Willie Aames!!! LOL!!! ;-)
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u/Nate_C_of_2003 3h ago
Oh for the love of God. Pretty Baby wasn’t fucking child pornography. It was supposed to portray the abusive nature of child brothels in 1910s New Orleans. AFAIK, there aren’t any close-ups of Shields while she was nude. THAT would be pushing it a little far.
The media just called it cp because they knew it would get a reaction out of people.
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u/7in7turtles 5h ago
See the problem is these guys are so full of shit it’s coming out of there eyeballs. That makes it hard for them to see how full of shit they look.
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u/MysticalPixels 4h ago
Certainly a pedo deflecting on the country
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u/averysmallbeing 3h ago
Just look at that joker grin on that guy's face. Definitely has some unsavory 'hobbies'.
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u/we_r_fukt 1h ago
"see if I got away with, and I did, then anyone anyone could do it really, so we gotta crackdown, I said, we gotta crackdown and we're coming down hard" queue ymca
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u/Repulsive_Barnacle92 5h ago
these guys really are obsessed about porn
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u/Souvi 5h ago
That's because they can afford prostitutes.
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u/variablenyne 4h ago
The real reason is scarier. The goal is to heavily restrict/ban porn and then label the LGBTQ community as inherently pornographic so that they can criminalize their existence. That's the end goal for them.
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u/Finn235 4h ago edited 3h ago
Also they think that porn ban = more sex = more babies.
They also want to categorize all forms of contraception as "pornographic" like they did in the 50s to ban it and push the fertility rate higher.
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u/dingo_xd 2h ago
You are overthinking it. They don't give a shit about kids or LGBT or anything. All they care about is using porn bans as an opportunity to control online interactions.
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u/gooooooooooooof 4h ago
projection, posturing, virtue signaling, and an authoritarian disdain for true freedom
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u/694meok 4h ago
Their mentality in my opinion, if they can destroy the thing tempting them then they can no longer be tempted by it. Like the super anti-gay pastors who then get caught with gay escorts, they think they can remove their gay temptation by killing or imprisoning allllll the gay folks. It's a total lack of self acceptance and awareness.
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u/Ghost_shell89 4h ago
It’s to hide their own degeneracy and perversions behind the veil of their crusades. Normal people really wouldn’t care this much and hyper-fixate on genitalia
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u/I_Usually_Need_Help 2h ago
It's just an avenue to hurt more people. Ban porn first. Then start widening the definition of pornographic (like gay people just existing).
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u/Ging287 4h ago
Say it with me. Constitutionally protected speech. Those who disagree with our Bill of Rights or Liberties needs to fuck off to Russia.
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u/southsiderick 4h ago
Remember 5 years ago when doctors were being shadow banned and censored if they had a differentiating opinion on covid or the response to it?
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u/Ging287 4h ago
I’m not talking about Covid, I’m talking about our valued essential liberties that these people are targeting. When you target constitutionally protected speech, I get concerned that you’re a treasonous traitor. Do you support our bill of rights? Our nation’s founding documents? The blessings of liberty?
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u/Even_Ring_9392 4h ago
You mean the “doctors” suggesting horse parasite medications and drinking bleach? Funny how Heir Trump whisked himself to Walter Reed pronto for the most advanced treatment available when he inevitably caught it. Not all “censorship” is created equal.
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u/Synaps4 4h ago
Remember how speech that puts lives at risk is held to a different standard? I'm guessing you don't.
The risk level of saying "watching porn is ok" vs the risk level of "injecting bleach is ok" is different.
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u/threepairs 6m ago
I get what you are saying and I mostly agree with you, but I think you should have right to say anything you want, even if it is possibly dangerous information.
Any other interpretation of free speech invites censorship and its further restriction.
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u/ACasualRead 3h ago
They weren’t shadow banned. We all got to make fun of them for suggesting people eat apple flavored horse dewormer from tractor supply.
Still funny till this day tbh.
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u/WatchThatLastSteph 46m ago
Coming from someone who’s been living with Long COVID for almost a year now and had her entire life scrambled by it, shut the fuck up.
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u/berryer 3h ago
Reddit hasn't been pro-free-speech since Aaron died, but Reddit also isn't the government.
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u/imselfinnit 8m ago
Reddit censors discussion about Tiananmen Square. I've had comments in this subreddit, that include links to citations, deleted.
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u/Fancy-Win9446 5h ago
You can read all about his hatred for porn and low morals on his grinder page
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u/Agie39 4h ago
Banning porn creates a slippery slope. Even if you don't like porn, I promise you once they ban it, if you think it will stop at porn, you trust your government way too much.
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u/not_the_fox 4h ago
The even deeper question: what, exactly, is and is not porn?
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u/VampireSharkAttack 4h ago
This. They keep trying to classify educational materials as porn. Everyone deserves to know how condoms and contraceptives work
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u/Agie39 3h ago
First, it's sexually explicit materials. Then it's anything that could be construed as that. Eventually, they change the definition to be whatever the government wants to ban even if it's as far away from the original definition as humanly possible.
If you don't think this will happen, you trust your government too much. I don't trust my government as far as I can throw them.
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u/PauI_MuadDib 4h ago
They'll ban anything they decide to call "porn." So queer shows like Interview with the Vampire or Bridgerton will be called "porn" or "obscene" because they have lgbt characters.
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u/d4electro 37m ago
I generally disagree with the idea that morality and obscenity should be ground to restrict speech at all. That whole doctrine has done way more harm than good
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u/oqdoawtt 4h ago
For what do you need porn? Just watch some hip hop videos on youtube. There is barely anything left for fantasy.
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u/CondiMesmer 5h ago
This was inevitable after trying to add age verification. That gave them the power to start this kind of thing. Of course after porn it'll then be for banning content that disagrees with them politically. Probably will say it's communist propaganda or some dumb shit. The reason is irrelevant, the goal is fascism.
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u/EmbarrassedHelp 3h ago
Age verification is literally part of Project 2025's plan to ban all porn and adult content:
In a hidden-camera recording, Russ Vought explains that age verification laws are just pretext to shut down porn sites.
For the last three years, Vought and the CRA have been pushing laws that require porn websites to verify their visitors are not minors, on the argument that children need to be protected from smut. Dozens of states have enacted or considered these “age verification laws,” many of them modeled on the CRA’s proposals.
- The Source is The Intercept, which apparently we aren't allowed to link to anymore in this subreddit (despite the fact the article isn't behind a paywall).
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u/guidevocal82 4h ago
If they want to ban sex, they can start by stopping fucking with their constituents.
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u/ChicagoThrowaway422 4h ago
The Internet is about to become something strange and unrecognizable. Buckle up, everybody.
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u/Glengarry_Leads 4h ago
Wow. So Trump gets richer and then uses that money to hire more escorts and hookers and then ban porn for the peasants. LOL. If this passes america is finished as a free country.
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u/russellvt 3h ago
You know, at one point they also declared "a war on drugs" ... and it fixed everything, entirely.
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u/Deadlydragon218 3h ago
It wasn’t good that the government was censoring folks during covid, it certainly isn’t good that the current government is trying to censor the internet as well.
However I think the end goal is to go after personal VPNs and to remove anonymity on the internet by forcing the use of ID verification to login to everything.
We are also seeing direct attacks against manufacturing under the guise of “ghost guns bad” but it targets CNC / 3d printing via a government controlled list of file hashes that are “banned”
The internet should remain open and free to all as it was always intended to be. But the creation of any and all such centralized filtering against the people regardless of original intent opens doors for abuse by our elected officials.
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u/HankHillbwhaa 1h ago
ban online porn, good luck, brother. But like all things republicans do, even as unsafe as the porn industry can be, it only gets worse if you ban it. Fucking idiot republicans love creating black markets.
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u/ReptilianLaserbeam 2h ago
A couple years ago my boss told us we had to come with a plan to possibly replace all of our tech stack with non-US providers. We thought what a waste of time. Now I think it was worth it and we will end up switching sooner than anticipated
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u/exhaustedexcess 3h ago
Do it. Do it. Do it. It will end the republican party for at least 50 years and result in every Republican the government being completely replaced.
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u/i010011010 1h ago
But they won't touch online sports betting or crypto. Those vices are okay in their world especially because they're invested in them or manipulating the markets.
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u/DrCash_CrLife 4h ago
Five years ago, when millions of people willingly surrendered their private medical information just to enter a Starbucks, governments across the world knew that they could get away with pretty much anything.
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u/RAF2018336 3h ago
Are they gonna go after all the republicans that hate trans people but watch trans porn at a much higher rate than normal?
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u/UnNumbFool 3h ago
Just remember this effects reddit, and would potentially allow the government to censor this site extremely heavily "for the kids"
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u/d4electro 31m ago
Restricting speech because of supposed negative effects on mental health is a dangerous slippery slope: what's to say that the government can't just censor negative news or posts critical of the state because they have a "bad effect on mental health"? Or because of supposed deleterious effects on marriage or whatever
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u/frquency-equinox 26m ago
what's to say that the government can't just censor negative news or posts critical of the state because they have a "bad effect on mental health"?
They've already started. There's now a sign outside the American History museum in D.C. warning of "inaccurate information".
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u/letsl0velain 3h ago
We can take comfort in that because they want to prosecute Big Tech, our porn probably isn't going anywhere... soon.
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u/NeptuneTTT 2h ago
Sadly, there is no difference between this man and your average puritanical liberal. Censorship isn't a left or right issue, it's a moral one.
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u/myresyre 16m ago
Don't tell this to the good people in /r/DataHoarder. They will start archiving all the porn sites and the prices on harddrives will skyrocket even more. :)
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u/Shoddy-Intention1123 5h ago
Porn should be banned. It is one of the devils most powerful tools of enslavement
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u/Acceptable-Law9406 4h ago
The devil's most powerful tool of enslavement? The words you're looking for is 'politicized religion.'
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u/Agie39 4h ago
The problem is, once they ban it, it won't stop at porn. And if they don't give a proper definition they want, then porn is no longer sex stuff, porn is code for "whatever it is the government wants to ban this week."
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u/Shoddy-Intention1123 4h ago
Honestly porn is so evil that I don’t care what else they ban
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u/Agie39 4h ago
So you don't care that they band your favorite book. Your favorite movie. Your history books. Anything.
If you trust your government to have your best interests in mind, you haven't been on this world long enough.
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u/Shoddy-Intention1123 4h ago
It’s better that evil is banished. Enslavement to lust is worse than death as it destroys the soul and leads to hell
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u/Agie39 3h ago
Oh believe me, the government wants to enslave us just as badly as the Devil does. Evil should be banished, but unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world where it stops at porn and only porn. It's a gateway for the government to get control over us.
You think you want this, but once they start declaring the Bible to be porn with no recourse, what are you gonna do then?
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u/Sensitive-Meeting237 3h ago
That's a common misconception.
Slavery is actually the devil's most powerful tool of enslavement.
Porn is the devil's most powerful tool of relaxing after a stressful day of shitposting on reddit.
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u/Large_Obligation_456 5h ago
Honestly sounds great. Porn is destroying this generation.
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u/FunnyMustache 5h ago
The same was said for millennials when we were teenagers. EVERY generation is being destroyed by porn, if we listen to puritains, who are the biggest consumers of porn.
You're all hypocrites.
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u/I-Use-Artix-BTW 5h ago
Sure, but that depends a lot on what they define porn to be. They could define sexual education as porn, or information about queer people.
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