Sexual Hypocrisy and the Internet
To be convicted of distributing obscenity, the material you were distributing must be patently offensive by “contemporary community standards”.
In Florida, one lawyer is mounting an obscenity defense using Google Trends to show that contemporary community standards aren’t quite as innocent as the contemporary community would have you believe.
Walters “plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like ‘orgy’ than for ‘apple pie’ or ‘watermelon,’” Richtel reports. (Evidence here.) The point is “to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics—and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.”