Utah bill would require activated porn filter software on new phones, tablets

GOP policies have never been “small government” (in my life). They just like to say it.

> I thought Utah was a GOP state?

Not just a GOP state, but specifically a politically-dominant-historically-persecuted-by-government-religious-group state.

> What happened to 'small government'?

The dominant faction of the GOP has never really been about small government, but tends to use “small government” as a slogan to avoid debating the role of government when opposing things they see as outside the proper role of government. It's dominantly a right party that seeks to appeal to libertarians to bulk up it's base of support, not a (even just right-) libertarian party (though they do have a right-libertarian faction, whose members—and even candidates—have a somewhat fluid interface with the Libertarian Party, which is a right-leaning libertarian party.)

That said, you might think the politically dominant group in Utah would be keenly aware of the dangers of a dominant group imposing strict social controls through the power of government, but clearly they are fine with that as long as they are the dominant group.

This has probably more to do with the Morman church in Utah than the GOP.

No, the GOP wants a government just small enough to fit in your bedroom

I think this is more of a state culture thing than anything else. Regardless, political parties tend to be pretty different from state to state and vs the federal overarching party.

the old saying is republicans won’t stay out of your bedroom, democrats won’t stay out of your wallet

This is a clear violation of the first amendment, right?

I in the long run you're doing your worldview a disservice by simplifying political parties into a single axis. Especially for Utah, which can be a bit of an outlier on moral issues due to the state's large LDS population

Utah politics have a unique religious aspect to them. The majority of Utah residents belong to a religion which only 1.8% of the US population as a whole follows.

It's only big government when they do it.

UT has more overbearing regulations than any other state. They are also far and away the most conservative state. Not all conservatives in the US are aligned with them, it’s just that the cult majority have regulatory capture.

Small government means that when you see a family starving you don’t have enough to give them to get back on their feet because it’s all been spent on a military contract. It means that we can’t afford a healthcare program like every other civilized country in the world because we need to keep insurance companies from going under (except your kidneys; your kidneys have universal healthcare, did you know?). It means we can’t afford to build decent roads or pay for inner city schools because god forbid we educate people and they vote for their own economic interest. Small government means don’t regulate Wall Street because what if the stock market looks bad and boomers lose retirement portfolio value. And it means letting an 11 year old die in his own bed by freezing to death than forcing Texas to upgrade their power grid because companies saving a dime is more important and Texans would rather sacrifice lives than do anything about what had happened to them.

But also no porn, no abortions, no disrespecting POTUS (unless he is black), no access to healthcare or safe policing for brown people, and no vote unless you are male, white, and uneducated.

The GOP has been morally bankrupt since they took in the Southern Democrats and the parties flipped in ideology. They are the same party that thought owning human beings was justified as long as it padded profits and never really recovered from losing that argument. They are the party that unironically supports flying traitorous flags because it’s their heritage. They are the same types of people who would have sided with England in the American Revolution because you have to love your country no matter what. And they are the same people who are getting cozy with the people who fly swastikas because anything is apparently better than being a democrat.

Are you really surprised at this particular headline coming from a conservative state?

Many Republican voters would also like to know the answer to this question.

Edit: If your point is that many Republican policies don’t represent the supposed political ideals of Republicans, then you don’t have to look very hard to find out this is a very popular complaint amongst Republican voters.

> But when a right enables suffering and wrongdoing on a large scale, it's time to rethink that right

Counter argument - alcohol? Right to buy and drink booze enables suffering and wrongdoing on a large scale, but banning it was a disaster. Maybe something like regulating marketing would be more effective, but an outright ban would not work.

At any rate, I don't deny porn can be addictive and have negative effects for many people, but I don't think it necessarily should be forced upon everyone by the government IMO. If you want to block pornography in your household, setup a pi hole and grab a blocklist from GitHub that has the top million porn domains.

Sure, but there are plenty of tools you are a parent can use to remove access to this information to your kids. Do you believe the private market hasn't catered effectively to those who believe this?

To me it seems like overreach, a government solution trying to pile on to a problem that already has a private solution. Restrictive filtering and content management software exists and is easily accessible.

> I'm sure many of us can confirm exposure at such a young age.

Sure. It was a playboy, though. The internet has made it easier, but that shit was trafficked through schools long before the internet was anywhere close to being widely available. Bills and efforts like this will do nothing to change that.

It’s, dare I say, human nature to be curious about the forbidden.

I had this experience as well. I also didn't think it was harmful, but as I've gotten to know a female friend better I can see what a destructive and dehumanizing influence pornography has.

Parents have lots of tools to prevent children from accessing harmful content.

Government-mandated filters are the worst way to tackle this problem. It gives parents a false sense of security, and everyone will focus on bypassing it. So all the parents think their kids are "protected" when they aren't, since every kid has a friend who can show them how to bypass it. And then it kills the industry because everyone is forced to use the government-monopoly program, so there's no incentive to innovate.

Yes, sure, I understand the concern of having children be protected from things they aren't ready for...

...but is the government mandating this the best way to go about it? Is this implementation even sound?

I have filters for my kids at home. They block a lot more than smut. I'm the parent, and the government has no business here. There's no good definition for what this is, and there are a lot of things I'd consider not smut that I can imagine a virtue-signalling Utah politician calling smut. Like regular beaches. I remember talking heads complaining about some types of bikinis when I was young.

More importantly, this is the government controlling what we can see. If something's blocked that's not porn, say about Utah politicians, how will Utah citizens know? It's honestly unlikely that people in other states will make a fuss.

...because in most of the rest of the world you could and the internet made the world flat. Don't worry, if the last couple of years are anything to go by they fared much better.

Sure, children exist.

How will it affect adults? Are they trying to make a list of registered porn watchers?

Why isn't it left to parents to teach their kids about using porn safely?

I don't like this censorship. It's very 1984-ish. This is where it crosses the line from "Twitter, a private company, won't let terrorists plan acts of terror on their private website" to "The government wants you to be embarrassed for liking sex."

> Growing up watching television in the US, you couldn't see topless women on public broadcast TV, let alone hardcore pornography.

Yes, and look how the US turned out. Immensely sexually repressed, zero sex ed in many states, and throwing a fit any time they see people who don't fit their perfect idea of what a couple looks like.

Ask yourself why you're so scared children might find porn.

I'd say it is the responsibility of parents and users of digital services to protect themselves, not the government's. When the government imposes such a rule on everything unilaterally, there are two consequences:

1. It sets a precedent for future "regulatory creep": if we can force tech companies to filter porn, why not filter other things? Who will stop us?

2. When the government makes a law, it impacts everything. There is no discretion, because everyone is under equal risk of liability if the law is violated. What would the consequences of this be for modelling, legitimate sexual services, and other fields? Would the damage this does be amplified by how it meshes with other laws? There is so much ambiguity that making such a sweeping and damaging action will have reverberative consequences everywhere that nobody thought of beforehand.

I remember all of the late night movies with breasts showing.

It's a little scary they are all gone from tv.

Back then you could see some hardcore stuff at the corner store if you reached up to the nudity mags.

I remember the nudity cards.. the older ones where the women had hair everywhere.

Kinda of sad everything is repressed to a point where nothing is shown anymore but people are still worried that nudity and sex will jump out at your kids and scare them.

Growing up in Europe and Quebec, there was (is) softcore on public broadcast TV.

Ah, the old "think of the children" method to get censorship bills passed. Works every time.

This has been shown by quite a few studies. I’ll try to see if I can find some for you.

It's neither pointless nor virtue signaling. I'm not Mormon, but it's commonly understood that Utah is an LDS state and follows LDS beliefs.

R.I.P. Alex.

r/animetitties on Reddit is pretty good for news with the US filtered out. Yes the name seems weird - it’s not a joke.

Most of us millennials grew up around near unlimited amount of free online pornography and we turned out pretty functional. It might help a lot to have functioning sex education from parents instead of pretending it does not exist.

My own online addiction involves news. It sounds lame, and it is, but in terms of distraction and wasting time, it can be as bad as a porn addiction. I cope by locking down my computer with LeechBlock, and my phone with AdGuard. Both share a common blocklist hosted in a text file on Pastebin. That blocklist now has nearly three hundred websites in it, everything from NY Times to local new sites. Without exaggeration, this has saved me thousands of hours of wasted time over the years.

For whatever reason, porn holds no attraction for me, but I'm sure this system would work fine for that as well.

I have two preteen kids. We live in a very small house, and all of our computers are out in our common living space. We've long been in the habit of using our phones and tablets out in the open. Everyone can see what everyone is doing. Not because I'm paranoid, rather it's always been that way so it feels normal to all of us

Occasionally I'll take a peek at my kids' chats and browsers. As long as I own the devices and the kids are still young I feel entitled to a bit of oversight, but it really is very minimal.

I'm a college student, first year, so I definitely grew up in this age. Honestly, web filters do more harm than good in my experience.

Usually the filter starts with porn. Blocking pornhub and the other known sites is honestly fine, but there's only so much you can do. There's always google, bing, duckduckgo images (and ddg proxies those images).

So companies set out to make a stronger filter. People can post porn on Twitter, so let's block that. Reddit too. Instagram's bad for your child's development so we'll block that and FB as well as a plethora of other forum sites etc.

YouTube can have nudity too, so we need to lock it to restricted mode as well as google search.

You can see how this continues.

A web filter was installed at our house when I was younger (maybe 13, 14) and it took me a whopping 5 minutes to get past it, permanently, since I couldn't access imgur to see a picture on StackOverflow. I wish I was kidding.

At school, I believe people spent _more time_ off task on computers because they were constantly trying to find new things that got around the web filter. The school at one point had enough and installed a hyperstrict web filter that used some AI/ML bullshit to block sites. Not even 3 days later all teacher websites hosted on google sites (which was the standard district protocol) were being blocked. I couldn't continue my journey of teaching myself to code at school because so many of the tutorials I leaned on were on sites that also hosted tutorial content on how to make "the g word" (games) and were therefore blocked.

I personally believe these web filters are a net negative for kids and learning to self manage your access to inappropriate content is an important part of being a citizen of the internet. Kids will do what they want regardless, so you might as well make it into an educational experience instead of saying "no, this is forbidden," because that will only make them want it more.

As someone who grew up in the "enlargement of the internet" (20 right now), I'd say that porn negitavly impacted me for sure. I think I was like 13 when I first found porn on a nook tablet I was given for my birthday.

The issue, looking back on it, really stemmed from my mom not knowing how to stop me from accessing it, she, and all my mentors, grew up in an era like you described, the infinity of the internet (and therefor porn) did not exist yet.

Today's parents, in their giving of ipads to toddlers as a de-facto baby sitter or whatever, really need to understand the consequences of such, and how easily one can stumble into porn, and what they can do to combat that. Laws like this are doing a service, sure, but in a way that feels like the antithesis of the country/the internet.

I don't know, porn isn't inherintly bad, the porn industry seems to be based on the research I've done, but it really seems to exist in a similar place that any addiction does, and the negative implications that has.

I don't know if this answers your question, never commented on here before, but I thought I fit the bill of what you were asking. Really, parents just need to be more alert, and maybe that's impossible, I've never had a kid, but I know its a huge responsibility, and that you gotta know what you are getting yourself and your child into when you give them the entirety of the internet.

> When I think of my 5 year old nephew and all the threats our world faces, it all seems small compared to the threat he poses to himself.

Really? When I think of my 4 year old daughter I'm a lot more worried she'll get hit by a car crossing the street.

I don't know, i got tons of illicit imagery on my WWIV BBS from other sysops that didn't know I was a young adolescent back in the day. And my usage of said online media has only gone up throughout the decades and I somehow came out fine. Anecdote, I know.

I expect the result here would be 'not intended for sale or use in Utah' stickers.

Sure, California does it in the auto industry. They mandate a certain miles-per-gallon rating, some safety stuff etc., and since they're the biggest state, all the car companies go along because they don't want to lose that market.

Says five other states must adopt similar laws before it would actually become enforceable law. Still one fantasizes about manufactures simply deciding to not sell cell phones to the entire state.

I mean... yes? Just pre-installing/enabling some parental control filter on phones is way cheaper than even losing out on a few millions worth of sales.

It's pretty trivial to do since those filters already exist.

It will probably end with retailers having to do that at the time of sale, but still, it's perfectly possible.

Alternatively, could they close stores/facilities in Utah, and still sell to Utahans online? Commerce clause seems like it'd protect that.

This was my first thought. Assuming this bill even becomes law, it seems like this might hurt local retailers.

If this passed, I'd find it amusing if the only phones for sale in Utah were just a couple of the cheapest Android phones with Utah special software loaded.

I would if I were them. Let the voters drive to the next state over to buy their phones, see how they like it.

Not really. The penalty is if a minor happens to use your activated-in-the-state device to access adult content.

If you, an adult, activated it within the state and you, the adult, were the only one using it for anything (including porn) there'd be no penalty, if I understood the legislation correctly.

If you the adult owner activate the device and then deactivate the filter and then a minor uses it to access porn, there's no penalty either.

After that, it'll be waiting - probably not long - for a court to go "c'mon, guys, really?"

You're making a value judgment.

The reason this is dangerous is because the next step after blocking by default is asking why people want an exception. Before you know it, we're living in 1984 and we have no freedoms at all.

Government deplatforming and private industry deplatforming are vastly different things, especially at a Constitutional level.

What do you mean by tribalism?

What is inconsistent about thinking hate speech should be deplatformed and porn shouldn't be? Or vice versa? It seems to me like you're implying that the only reasonable and honest principle of free expression is completely absolute and anything else is cynical.

People can agree on the value of free expression and agree that there should be limits which align with their values while their values diverge. Is people having different values tribalism?

Deplatforming anyone is foolish. Anyone who thinks otherwise will be deplatformed.

I am one of those people who dislikes both. Not least because they complement and reinforce each other, plus the mania of the woke really looks like a redirected religious fervor to me. Perhaps people cannot really exist without some ersatz religion, so if Christianity goes away, something else takes its place.

If you can filter out X, you can filter out Y, and once you have a censorship system in place, the list of banned things will only get longer and longer, especially if the main qualification is that someone feels offended by that.

I feel like you should already be aware that this bill will do zilch to protect anyone from anything. The filters won't be effective and it will probably be trivial to remove them via factory reset or some other manner.

Chinese people have no problems getting around filters.

Nothing about this would prevent human trafficking of children. Being able to access adult content does not lead to trafficking.

No thanks, I’d prefer one state’s extremist religious inclinations not tank liberty for everyone else. They can monitor their own phones and their own computers and leave everyone else’s alone.

Who is 'they' in 'their culture'? And what is 'culture'? Religion?

Surely there are atheists in Utah who don't want to go on a government list of porn watchers.

Jim Crow was a significant part of the South's culture, and no state has the prerogative of First Amendment violations.