Utah is a religious conservative. That's an entirely different sort of person. It's a demographic which, in many ways, would align better with Democrats, if not for a few wings of the DNC such as:
* Dawkins-toting militant atheist wing
* Pro-choice feminist wing
That's a big part of why Mitt Romney so often sides with Democrats on key votes, and takes so much flack from other parts of the GOP. He was also governor of Massachusetts, which is about as blue as you get. It take a special kind of Republican to win there.
I don't agree with a lot of what Utah Republicans stand for, but I don't see much hypocrisy there. It's pretty consistent:
* Against: Porn, anti-abortion, homosexuality, drinking, smoking, drugs
* For: Helping poor people (although with a complex split of private charity, church, and government), good education, clean strong neighborhoods, community, families, churches
COVID19 went a bit wonky, but with a few exceptions like that, it's mostly straight-line honest Mormon views.
Curiously, pre-Romney, who seems among the least corrupt politicians in government, Utah was represented by Orrin Hatch, who seemed to be among the most corrupt of the senators at the time.
It's politics, everyone is a hypocrite.
If you are in the minority on an issue, you may feel something is overbearing but the other side may feel it's "reasonable". For example, if one isn't a gun owner, then they aren't something one has to know and deal with. So one may feel that more regulation is not infringing on rights or freedoms.
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.
However, (also FYI), adherents prefer if you refer to the church as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" and members of said church "Latter-day Saints" or simply "Christians".
I know "Mormon" is a long-standing nickname and most people don't intend to use the term derogatorily, but calling Latter-day Saints "Mormons" is like nicknaming Muslims "Mohammeds" or "Qurans" or nicknaming Islam "the Mohammed Church" or "the Quran Church".
Access to such is already heavily restricted based on the viewers age and the content (including the actors age) and that seems to be generally socially acceptable. I think that the "important" part of the first amendment is usually focused on government control of speech that is made in opposition to the government, this doesn't appear to violate that in any way so I'd guess that the supreme court would probably be okay with this law from a purely first amendment perspective.
A more applicable law would seem to be Article 1 Section 8 (the interstate commerce clause) but that is also pretty weak - I believe that certain states already have widely differing views on adult content so even that might not stand up.
Probably. But after years of being compared to socialists and communists on a constant basis, despite not ever having met a liberal who had any interest in socialism or communism for the US -- it's hard to avoid seeing politics in the USA as anything other than a two-team sport.
Like what? Are you referring to alcohol laws? Because last I checked you could still by beer at the grocery store in Utah, but you cannot do that in Montgomery County, Maryland (most populous county of one of the bluest states).
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?
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.
I'm sure many of us can confirm exposure at such a young age. My friends and I were all exposed around that age. I hate the fact that I was exposed before I had the capacity to understand what it meant.
This is absolutely a battle worth fighting. 10 year old children should not be exposed to anything so addictive. In my experience it all too often results in lifelong addiction that leads to broken marriages.
Many of us think this type of action by the government violates people's rights. But when a right enables suffering and wrongdoing on a large scale, it's time to rethink that right. Rights should serve humanity, not the other way around.
For example state's rights became a shield for slavery. The Civil War violated state's rights and ended thereby slavery. I think this is how it should work.
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.
In my case, this would have done very little. A child gets exposed to pornography at friends' houses and at school. Once you're hooked, filters are pretty easy to work around.
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.
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.
The LDS teachings are against pornography (comparing it to the plague in the very first line of [3]), and a survey of 192 male Mormon college students aged 18-27 showed 100% of them considered viewing pornography "unacceptable". [4]
That Utah would pass anti-pornography bills isn't surprising, IMO.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-utah-salt-lak...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/286983987f484cb182fba9334c52a617
[3] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/prophets-and-apostles/un...
[4] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232507019_I_Believe...
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.
It seems there is really no strong disincentive for sites to censor themselves or be amenable to censoring.
Surprisingly though, reddit seems to actually be leading the way with stricter nsfw tagging and requiring login to enable. Maybe a trend others will follow.
...but is the government mandating this the best way to go about it? Is this implementation even sound?
*Not necessarily agreeing with the proposed solution here of a mandated approach. Just saying that this may be a situation where government intervention is necessary even if it's just to sponsor public education of options that parents have to protect children.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Is this true? I have a young child and have a hard time imagining she would view porn as anything other than strange or bad being done by other people. I don't think she would take it personally, and of course, I'm not going to test it out. TV regularly depicts violent murders of innocent people, yet I don't hear claims of that leading to suicide.
If the most difficult part of your job is teaching kids about sex, you're doing your job wrong.
I dunno what I expected: but what I got was a face full of anime titties.
which I'm not even opposed to in principle but: c'mon man.
Seriously how do parents manage this and is there any young reader that cares to comment on how it affected them? If my high school had a dropbox filled with nudes and buddies sharing links there is no chance I would be able to concentrate. At least a filter on my phone would raise the barrier between study time and porn browsing. Not saying this law is the answer but it appears to address a real problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Microsoft breakup in the late 90s might be one example but even that was not about setting specific kinds of software as the default, just letting users choose the default.
Looking down the line at state or federal mandates for this kind of stuff, it's easy to see it venture into backdoor encryption territory. If they can mandate porn filters for safety reasons then why not expand that concept to encryption?
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.
It gets even worse for Utah, though. The bill demands that any device activated in Utah comply with the law — not merely sold in Utah. So manufacturers would need to turn on location tracking and make it impossible to disable, for all users in the world, just to detect the corner case that they happen to be in Utah, so that they can silently turn on a Utah-specific porn filter.
I doubt the bill will pass, but if it does, I doubt many manufacturers would comply.
To get such a law struck down, phone sellers would have to prove to the court that setting up Utah-specific phones would be excessively difficult.
I don't think it would be struck down with the commerce clause, but it would be close.
So if I was driving through Utah and my phone was wiped, the manufacturer would have to push a porn filter down for it to be legal?
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.
[1] https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/03/05/porn-blockin...
People are saying you could just turn it off. I don't see that as the point. I would keep it on, because I want less porn. The same reason I want the government to nudge me to use a seatbelt, because as an irrational human, I can be too short-sighted to look over my long-term interests. The same applies to porn: Porn can harm me in the long-term by rewiring my brain in a bad way, but gives me short-term ecstasy.
It's a preactivated, effective filter for erotic content. It helps people who want to avoid porn avoid it.
I see it not as "government restricts porn" but "government nudges people to avoid porn, provides switch to turn off."
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.
Parents should not be afraid to talk to their children about sex and how sex relates to pornography.
The best safeguard against dangers is education of children. And this is only possible in a culture where adults are not afraid to mention the word "sex".
Children can and sooner or later will have to be their own filters of the world.
Otherwise you are creating a bubble that will pop at some point and your kid will be without tools to handle it, and without someone to ask for advice.
A kid or a teenager will know that sex is a taboo that you do not mention with adults.
The same applies to alcohol, cigarettes, eating habits, body image etc. It needs to be talked about.
Seriously, what is the manufacturer’s willingness to accept the costs of this legislation? Making one product for Utah and another for the rest of the nation?
Though, it is interesting to imagine a new middleman industry to take the manufactured products and modifying them for resale in the local market. With a little sticker a la Intel inside...
I'm gonna do some research on my own after I'm done with work, but if that point is being pushed so much it needs proof.
The tech industry should work harder to provide market-driven porn controls so gov't doesn't have to heavy-hand censorship.
Social media are the largest distributors of porn and offer free marketing to porn sites (e.g. freebies for onlyfans). Open the "explore / trending" page and in 2 clicks you will be on a porn site – massive free porn traffic (worth billions).
Considering only the demand side is selfish and short-sighted. There's way more harm on the supply side, even among what we like to sugar coat as "voluntary" creators.
How should we feel about a world where porn is the best opportunity for 18-25 y/o women? Every time you check out porn , you are enabling that world.
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1. who reacts most strongly to this story about deplatforming porn
2. who reacts most strongly to stories about deplatforming hate speech and incitement
And try to figure out if the two groups have different principles about free expression, or perhaps the principles are irrelevant and only function as justifications when convenient for some kind of tribalism.
Many keyboards have been worn out debating about the difference between the first amendment and free speech, but can we isolate to one case or the other here and set that issue aside in one thread?
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?
I don’t think it’s consistent to think that deplatforming is wrong, but only when the type of deplatforming that was most recently brought to your attention is a kind you don’t like.
I think “free expression” in this context is more like a tool for argumentation than a real principle that people hold, so people forget about it when convenient. (people who always or never support deplatforming get points for consistency)
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.
States should be free to make these kinds of laws IMO, but not the federal government. There are plenty of states for all types of cultures to thrive without fighting. We should leave more things for the States/People to handle, 10th Amendment!
Chinese people have no problems getting around filters.
Surely there are atheists in Utah who don't want to go on a government list of porn watchers.
Is this really 1A when we are talking about mental health of our children? It's fairly well established that no pornography consumption is a net positive.
