“The SCOPE Act takes effect this Sunday, Sept. 1, and will require everyone to verify their age for social media.”
So how does this work with Lemmy? Is anyone in Texas just banned, is there some sort of third party ID service lined up…for every instance, lol.
But seriously, how does Lemmy (or the fediverse as a whole) comply? Is there some way it just doesn’t need to?
Pretty sure it doesn’t work that way. Look at what happened to Binance; not a US website, not technically allowing US customers, still successfully prosecuted by the US government for not doing enough to prevent people in the US from using it.
That’s because they were facilitating actual, across-the-board federal crimes.
Not looking at titties.
I could see states that have such draconian laws working together to attempt to do anything about flagrant violators, but otherwise Texas has yet another pointless, toothless virtue signaling “law” on their hands.
The difference between what the laws are trying to enforce is a different issue though. The point is a website can be prosecuted just for being accessible when what it offers is against local laws.
No, it cannot. Not a state-based law that the feds don’t care about and other states will tell them to fuck off over.
Not unless they are operating in Texas, accessible to Texas cops, with property seizeable by Texas authorities.
So your claim is that states specifically don’t have this authority, only the federal government? What’s your reason for thinking this?
edit: Here’s an example showing that they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair%2C_Inc.
There’s also laws like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Act
A number of state based internet regulation laws have recently run into trouble in courts, but that’s because of First Amendment concerns, not questions over whether merely being accessible to state residents gives jurisdiction to enforce them, which afaik it does.