Conservative legislators in Utah have introduced a motion that would automatically block pornography on phones and tablets sold in the state, a move that critics have blasted as unconstitutional.
Governor Spencer Cox has not openly indicated if he backs the proposal, but a spokeswoman said he will carefully consider the measure before a March 25 deadline.
Supporters of the state senate proposal claim that restricting graphic material helps parents protect their children, many of whom have their own devices, and are consuming more time online during the coronavirus pandemic – adults would be able to turn off the filters if they choose.
Legislators in the majority Mormon state have previously ordered warning labels on pornography, declaring it a public health crisis in 2016, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has railed against pornography in a conservative culture that sometimes considers mainstream magazines and lingerie catalogues offensive.
Phone manufacturers and retailers claimed filters would be too difficult to implement in a single state, and successfully lobbied for a provision that would only allow the proposal to be enforced if at least five other states follow suit.
If the bill is signed into law, Utah would be the first state to mandate filters on devices.
Federal constraints aimed at restricting children from viewing porn in the 1990s were struck down in the courts.
The National Centre on Sexual Exploitation said the bill would help parents who’ve had difficulty managing filters on their children’s devices.
Executive Director Dawn Hawkins said in a statement that Utah has passed a critical, common-sense solution to better protect vulnerable children from accessing objectionable pornographic content on phones and tablets.
Republican Rep. Susan Pulsipher, the bill’s sponsor said that a child that wants to find it and tries to would probably be able to still, but that it was just one step in the right direction, and Susan Pulsipher maintains the move doesn’t infringe free speech rights because adults can disarm the censors. However, some advocates disagree.
And Samir Jain, policy director at the Centre for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, DC-based Internet policy group said that you’ve got the state mandating the filtering of lawful content and that fosters immediate First Amendment Flags.
Samir Jain said that the wording of the bill could apply to any device ‘activated’ in Utah, meaning it could be used to track the location of anyone passing through the state.
Porn could also be classified as an addition that has destroyed countless marriages and relationships and could lead to more aberrant behaviours. Such as porn with young girls and children which makes a bundle of money for the human traffickers.
However, people can be addicted to anything from caffeine to sugar which are the biggest addictions in the United States – should people be barred from those for their own good as well? But of course, we shouldn’t be supporting children having access to porn, but then should children be allowed to have a phone unsupervised?
And Utah lawmakers want phones and tablets to be shipped with parental controls preconfigured to block porn because evidently, the legislators think that parents are far too stupid to set up parental controls themselves – to be fair, they might be right about the last bit.
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