Sometimes one quote is all you need to break down a news story to its essence:
(Utah state Sen. Jake) Anderegg ultimately voted in support of the bill, saying that while he has “a lot of trepidation” about the bill, he doesn’t “want to be the guy” who opposes an attempt to shield children from graphic content.
Ah, yes, for the children. Of course. Those children, so endangered by online porn that this legislation swiftly moves to protect them…as soon as 5 other states do the same.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) signed a bill on Tuesday requiring porn filters on cell phones and tablets, The Associated Press reports.
The bill, HB 72, is aimed at establishing filter requirements and enforcement for tablets and smartphones activated in the state on or after Jan. 1 of the year the measure takes effect, according to its text. Manufacturers that don’t abide by the law could face fines of $10 for each violation with a cap of $500.
At least five other states have to pass the measure for it to take effect, however. A spokesperson for Cox previously told the AP that he would “carefully consider this bill during the signing period.”
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Susan Pulishper (R), said she was “grateful” that Cox signed the bill, which she said was aimed at keeping porn away from children, the AP notes. She also noted that parents could take the filters off.
Jason Groth, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah, told the news service that the measure was “another example of the Legislature dodging the constitutional impacts of the legislation they pass.” He further said the bill’s constitutionality will likely be argued in court.
Utah has been trying to curb pornography in the state for years.
Actually, let’s make that two quotes:
(Utah)Gov. Spencer Cox has said the measure would send an “important message” about preventing children from accessing explicit online content. The proposal is the latest move in Utah’s legislative campaign to curb the availability of porn…Cox has said he isn’t as worried about constitutional concerns because the proposal won’t be immediately enacted.
Wait. So it is such a crisis that the legislation won’t be immediately enacted. This bold step to protect the children will only become effective after five other states pass a similar ban first. Maybe the sponsor of this piece of legislation can shed some light here:
Proponents of the bill framed it as a step toward protecting youth in the state from exposure to harmful pornographic material — and as a way to help out parents who aren’t tech-savvy. Content filters already exist on phones and other devices, but activating them often takes several steps, and Rep. Susan Pulsipher argues it can be frustrating for parents to figure out how to turn them on.
“[The bill] doesn’t take the place of good parenting. It doesn’t take the place of family rules or family discussions,” the South Jordan Republican who sponsored HB72 said Saturday. “It’s just a tool to help good parents be good parents.”
The term for all of this is pose. It’s a pose, the downward dog of grandstanding. These officials are doing something that fires up their voters without actually doing anything about the Very Bad Thing they are ostensibly very seriously doing something about. Especially for a problem that is dealing with the now 15-year-old technology of smartphones, nearly 30 years of the internet in its present form, who knows how long for porn in the visual medium to go along with the fact we have graphic sexual images from cave walls to sculptures for the entirety of human history.
The fact that many folks will wave the awfulness of the porn industry as a shield against any criticism of this legislative posing further lets you know this issue is heavy on the emotion and projecting, and light on the ostensibly legislative good achieved. Especially legislation destined for a protracted court battle. Unless you want to keep arguing you only care about the children if five other states do first. What nonsense.
Read the legislation for yourself here:
Utah
Maximum fines of $500? For multi-billion dollar companies?
That’s not exactly toothless but I’ve seen worms with more bite.Report
New Rule: Utah will now install state monitored cams in every childs bedroom to make sure they aren’t hiding porn mags under their mattress!Report
What will it take to get them to give up the ghost abd just leave the anti-sex stuff behind?Report
Anti-porn == Anti-sex?
That’s… that’s a strange conflation, there.Report
not for many people dude. Evangelical Christianity, for instance, conflates porn with sex and sexual deviancy at that. Many Evangelicals (including the Atlanta shooter IMHO) want to rid the world of porn so people stop having sex for pleasure.Report
As the kid who handed out tracts at the beach, please. Tell me more about what Evangelicals believe and what they conflate with what.
It’s true that they conflate porn with sexual deviancy, but “sex” and “sexual deviancy” are not co-extensive.Report
Thanks for restating my point.Report
Allow me to explicitly state what I left unstated:
They do not conflate porn with sex.
Because sex and sexual deviancy are not co-extensive.
Let’s compare to Veganism.
Eating meat is not the same thing as eating leeks.
“BUT THEY’RE BOTH EATING!”
Yes, they are both eating.
But eating meat is not the same thing as eating leeks.
Even if you think that they’re more or less the same thing, there are reasons that Vegans have for not seeing them as co-extensive.Report
If you want to filter out sex but not graphic violence, it’s a simple conclusion.Report
“They’re only doing X. They’re not doing X *AND* Y! Therefore, they’re hypocrites.”
The only bills worth passing are omnibus ones.Report
“Anti-porn == Anti-sex?”
It’s the kind of thing you think when your concept of how religious people view sex is basically Brady from “Inherit The Wind”.Report
At least this isn’t cancel culture. CC is terrible and going lead us to communism tomorrow. The hundreds of various laws proposed by Rs for actual gov regulation of speech are just the justified response to save the country.Report
I wouldn’t have framed it like that.
I would have gone for “see? We all agree that the Amendments aren’t absolute! Utah can ban porn, New Jersey can ban guns! And the smugglers can continue to make a lot of money!”Report
Well amendments typically aren’t absolute so… Ummm yeah.
I guess I see your point though about the folly of letting every state make their own laws.Report
Given that the filters can be removed by adults, I’m not seeing how this is any different from trigger locks.Report
Robert Bork, who would have been the bestest and most originalistest justice ever, was fine with porn bans because he thought the First Amendment protected only political speechReport
I can only imagine how eloquent Al Franken would have been about the importance of people in Utah having access to naked women.Report
Paging the Party of Personal Responsibility.Report
There is zero evidence that porn is a public health crisis. There is plenty of evidence that stigmatizing it and the use of it creates problems. See, e.g., the sex-addiction garbage I wrote about earlier this week.Report
FWIW, they can’t actually ban porn in Utah because….Utah citizens love their porn.
And in the privacy of a voting booth, they’d likely make that real clear even as they publicly and piously support such laws.
Last I checked, Utah was mid-range in “average time spent on porn sites” and in the Southeaster US block of “Really loves lesbian porn” with a side of “cheerleader”. It might have changed. Heck, back in 2010 or so Utah was actually top in the US for buying porn subs. Apparently they just don’t feel right pirating porn….Report
I just want to point out again that this is not “banning porn”.
This is adding a removable porn filter that must be removed before porn is viewed. (And, let’s face it, it isn’t going to work.)
But it’s not “banning porn”.Report
slippery slope, mighty slippery . . . .Report
Greg! We need you over here!Report
I agree slippery slope arguments are terrible. People who use them should be given at the minimum a stern side eye up to complete cancelation from known existence.Report
We REALLY need am accepted Snark Emoji . . . . .Report
Sure, get one emoji then before you know it the camels nose is under the slippery slope and we’re FacebookReport
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAReport
you can monitor what kind of porn they like along with how much porn? I knew Utah people were big time porn consumers but the “really loves lesbian porn” is a new fact.Report
Several major porn sites — Pornhub most famously — keep stats. Google does as well. Heck, social scientists have even done studies on it — porn searches on google seem to correlate with religious affiliation in the US — the more religious a state, the more porn gets searched.
And regional stats are important as it informs search results and ad targeting which is, you know, where the money is.
During election week this year, Utah’s most common search term on Pornhub was “Mormon”. Texas was “sexmex” which I’m can only guess at, Iowa wanted to see Yoga Pants, and Rhode Island was big into pegging.
You can see 2017’s results here, which was the “lesbian” year IIRC: https://mashable.com/2018/01/16/pornhub-data-2017-us-state-searches/Report
Mormon? I don’t even want to think about it. Sexmex has all sorts interesting implications considering anti-immigrant politics in Texas.Report
I knew such information was available, but I wasn’t sure where to find it. Thanks.Report
This doesn’t seem enforceable at all and as Kazzy points out, the penalty is so low that Apple can easily pay it again and again rather than follow the law. It is probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment and the Commerce Clause to boot.Report
Where are our libertarian friends? They should be criticizing this as interfering with the marker (which would produce much better porn filters then a government mandate will) and displaying revealed preference (if people wanted a porn filter, they’d install one.)Report
“But the government shouldn’t have the ability to intrude into the lives of private citizens to this extent!”
There. That’s my best offer.
I’m used to “Of FREAKING COURSE IT SHOULD!!!!! It just should choose to use its powers for good rather than evil!” as the counter-argument from my statist friends.Report
We favor publicly funded basic wifi, but it probably won’t support porn at modern resolutions and frame rates.Report
Ahem, let me try. How’s this:
‘And there’s the real rub, pun fully intended. The free market has always been better at producing and improving access to porn. All this concern about what vagrants can and can’t watch at the public library is so much central-planning, commie nonsense. It’s downright un-American and you should be ashamed for suggesting it.’Report
My opponent opposes pornography. I recommend publicly-funded pornography!Report
“Modern resolutions” have become a problem for the porn industry because they make imperfect complexions too obvious.Report
I contributed my snark way upthread. That’s about as much outrage as I can muster for a thing that isn’t a thing until 5 other states suddenly decide it needs to be a thing.
But if I must, yes, this is interfering with markets, and it’s a heavy handed nudge, and honestly, Utah should really stop touching itself like that in public, it’s unseemly.Report
“you didn’t comment about how this ridiculously stupid thing is ridiculously stupid therefore YOU ACTUALLY SUPPORT IT” is quite a take, sirReport
It’s not that, it’s that there’s a certain style of argumentation I’ve grown so used to that I miss it when it’s gone.Report
I’ll stipulate that Andrew is correct, this is just for show. Fine.
But honestly the comments are pretty terrible. The bill says right there on the front page that the filter can be disabled by an authorized user; if people wanted to argue that the device should default to YES Pr0N! … fine. What I think is overlooked in all the snark is that Devices and ISP’s are, in fact, ‘conspiring’ to thwart reasonable technology attempts from filtering.
I say this as a tech-savvy father who has tried lots and lots of tech: Web-browser filters? How dumb are those? 3rd Party Apps that monitor multiple browsers? Better, but easily circumvented. ISP Apps on Devices? Those things never work… and break after every update — it’s almost like they don’t care about the results, just the additional $9.99/month to pretend something is happening. Router filters? Now we’re talking… but guess what… the ISP’s don’t like DNS changes (because it robs them of some intel about your usage) so there are all sorts of subtle DNS wars going on that even I can’t follow that cause your router based filters to randomly fail… or your ISP owned Filter to reboot/reset to default ISP DNS servers, and all sorts of ‘shenanigans’ that aren’t simply the fault of hapless parents. ISP’s: We weren’t deliberately trying to break your filters, we just updated our firmware to provide you these awsome new features. Feature list: [null] And… phones don’t use the Routers you have control over… they go direct to the ISP… which doesn’t offer a filtering service. So your Router controls are kinda silly – when they work.
A Law (not necessarily this one) would do some of what this proposes:
1. Devices and Ecoystems have to build-in User based Security and not look to dump/break App level restrictions.
2. ISP’s should filter traffic by law (and yes, the router based filters *do* filter for Violence or Guns or the other Snarky bullshit above) — and by filter I mean offer user-based options and increase the metadata regulations of content providers to support this.
3. Failing ISP’s filtering, then the law should favor 3rd parties filtering, and prevent ISP’s from playing the games that they do play via Hardware and/or DNS wars.
Obviously, any law has to have auditing, adjudication and fines… and, as far as I can tell, the bill seems to have some concern for the fact that the devices have to have an audit trail of how the filters were set-up, who authorized changes, and when, etc. That’s a minimum, and at a minimum it isn’t ignored… I’m sure it could be reasonably enhanced to prevent frivolous lawsuits… but that becomes a Tech/Device/ISP engagement issue — which they would do if they were looking a $10 fines per incident. Absent that? They don’t and most tech really doesn’t work… or works sporadically with constant vigilance.
At a minimum… as I’ve said in other threads when this topic comes up… I don’t care if the default is ON or OFF… I do care that the Govt. does play a role in regulating the rules so that we can opt to turn it ON or OFF… and honestly, y’all are either blissfully ignorant of the tech games going on to make sure that PR0N data $$ are consumed or disingenuous, or worse. I am disappoint.Report
This is a fair point, that ISPs and content providers play all sorts of games to defeat end user filtering. And yes, we should have a law that insists that the end user is prime. It’s just silly to focus such a law at porn. That smacks of virtue signalling rather than attempting to tackle a salient issue.Report