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Google Trends vs. Community Standards On Obscenity

circletimessquare writes "Google Trends is being used in a novel way in a pornography trial in Florida. Under a 1973 Supreme Court ruling, 'contemporary community standards' may be used as a yardstick for judging material as unprotected obscenity. This is a very subjective judgment, and so Lawrence Walters, a defense lawyer for Clinton Raymond McCowen, is using Google Trends to show that, in the privacy of their own homes, more people in Pensacola (the only city in the court's jurisdiction that is large enough to be singled out in the service's data) are interested in 'orgy' than "apple pie'."

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  1. Re:Petard, meet hoist. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Hey assholes, don't mod down people just because they have a different opinion than you.

    Pull your heads out of your asses. For supposed pro-choice, pro-freedom of speech slashdot users you sure are a bunch of whiney pussies when someone disagrees with you. How quickly you turn into the gestapo when someone goes against your group think.

    Someone needs to meta-moderate whoever did that into oblivion.