Cultural Attacks

The debate over whether something is obscene is messy and increasingly political in nature.

West Jakarta police arrested and publicly shamed two young Indonesian women for nude camming earlier this week, charging them with “pornography.”

Six months after suspending two religious “porn surveillance” apps following a Wired magazine report exposing them as spyware, Google Play has quietly reinstated Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You on March 1st.

Women’s rights groups in Thailand used the International Women’s Day to campaign for the legalization of sex work, hoping to create a safer environment for women in the industry. The …

A former actress and her husband are among a group of 16 suspects indicted by public prosecutors for allegedly operating online gambling and pornographic websites and money laundering.

A top executive for NCOSE, the religiously inspired anti-porn lobby formerly known as Morality in Media, admitted this week that members of the organization have “met regularly” with Meta executives responsible for Instagram moderation.

Online porn is a minefield.

Amidst a full blown media-fueled moral panic in the U.K. designed to sell the controversial Online Safety Bill to the public, influential journalist Jenni Murray published an extremist tirade in the Daily Mail last week advocating for all adult content to be made illegal and for the imprisonment its…

Free Speech Coalition (FSC) has released an online guide tracking new anti-porn age verification laws and bills in multiple states, in a wave of what the trade organization has called “the most aggressive censorship we’ve seen in decades.”

Some members of the antiabortion movement are pushing for a comeback for the Comstock Act, an archaic law passed in 1873 mainly to target what Anthony Comstock, an anti-vice crusader, viewed as dirty books. Mary Ziegler argues that this new tactic poses a threat to abortion rights even -- or perhaps…