GOP isn't a person. It's a loose confederacy of people. For small government freedom-loving Republicans, go to e.g. parts of Texas.
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:
* 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.
I live in Cedar City. Down here everybody hates Mitt. Few for the right reasons (like his 47% comments about the middle class/low class), most because this is Trump country and he's not one of "them".
Church has been out of session a long time so a lot of the Mormons (I'm exmo btw) I guess flocked to QAnon as a replacement for religion during the pandemic?
Somebody's grandpa was checking me out at the register at a small grocer and said "did you see it" all excitedly about the Trump parades going around town. Not like I could miss them circling the entire city for two weeks straight - that being just the first day of it.
There's some romney conservatives I'm sure in Utah, but there's so many Trump ones now too that I don't even think Mitt will win the primary in 2026.
If he really was bi-partisan though why not support ending the filibuster? I mean if he wants to deal with democrats and be a cross-the-aisle kind of politician he kind of needs to offer an olive leaf. Him and Murkowski could do a lot together as conservatives with a new plan to keep the party conservative but still reach across for some social progress.
Like the stimulus plan and ending the filibuster would give him big rapport with a lot of senate democrats who'd be more willing to co-sponsor bills with him. That's how we could fix Washington, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Everyone wants whatever type of government to push the issues they care about. Dems want small government when it comes to marijuana legalization, but also the Federal government should set education curriculum across the entire country or enforce country wide mask mandates. GOP wants states to be able to ban abortions and teach creationism, but chafes at the idea that states could legalize marijuana unilaterally.
"Dems want small government when it comes to marijuana legalization..."
This isn't really true. The legalization involves local and state regulation and taxes. Sure, the law is more lenient in that one can legally sell and buy the product, but it comes with substantially more regulation (you now need a department to do inspections audits etc).
"chafes at the idea that states could legalize marijuana unilaterally"
Technically they can't legalize it. They can do so at the state level, but it can still be illegal at the federal level. The thing is, the feds don't have the resources to enforce all the laws they make.
I do agree that most political parties and figures can be hypocritical.
As a Democrat I want big government when it comes to marijuana. Why shouldn’t we have the FDA test cannabis products for impurities, set labeling standards, check that facilities that process it are safe, and that labor laws are abided?
I think it depends on which topics one holds most dear.
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.
It doesn't have anything to do with which topics one holds dear. Small governments would not tell you you can't smoke weed, or buy alcohol at certain places or certain times of day, or cities can't create their own municipal fiber ISPs, or gay people can't get married, or women can't get abortions, or put under god in the national anthem and currency
The parent comment that I was replying to was stating that one party is known for small government, but isn't. I'm just saying they might appear to be small government depending on the person's views and in comparison to the other party. Neither party is advocating in good faith for a true minarchy.
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.
(FYI it's Mormon*, named after the Book of Mormon)
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".
I don't agree that it's like nicknaming Muslims "Mohammeds" or "Qurans". There already exists a short word to refer to Muslims, which is Muslims.
Mormon is an effective short form of "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints", which is a mouthful. And sometimes, you might want to refer to a specific type of Christian, such as Baptist, Protestant, Catholic, or in this case, Mormons.
> I don't agree that it's like nicknaming Muslims "Mohammeds" or "Qurans". There already exists a short word to refer to Muslims, which is Muslims.
“Muslim” and “Islam” weren't imported from Arabic into general use in English (or most other Western European languages) until after “Mohammedan(ism)” or similar constructions had been around for a long time.
> Mormon is an effective short form of "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints"
It's a short alternative, but it's not really a short form as it does not derive at all from the long form. (LDS is more of a short form.)
> Mormon is an effective short form of "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints", which is a mouthful.
I agree, but they've asked not to be referred to by that term. If we extend the courtesy to trans people who don't want to be referred to by certain terms, I don't see why we shouldn't extend the same courtesy to religious people who don't want to be referred to by certain terms.
If trans people were asking to be referred to as "people who were assigned a gender at birth but do not identify with that gender now" instead of "men" or "trans men" or whatnot, one might object to the lengthiness of that, too.
I see where you're coming from, but for the purposes of language, I'm not aware of Mormon being a slur, and it's probably the most widely known term used to describe people in the LDS church. It's been only a few years since the church themselves called themselves Mormons:
A person changing their name and a tribe changing their name is not exactly comparable, but I can see there is some gray area. I guess if people in LDS really made a big deal out of it, I'd change the way I referred to them.
Exmormon here, and op is full of it. We used to call ourselves mormon for a long time, and many of my friends still active were like whatever I'll disregard that "commandment" to not use Mormon as a term... I mean there's still a pro-mormon subreddit called mormon, and until 2016 the church had mormon.org with multiple people sharing their testimonies using the phrase "I'm a mormon".
This is just a corporatocracy trying to "rebrand" under new management. Nothing more.
> 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 have a hard time referring to them as Christians when they think that the non-Latter-Day Christians are someone that needs converted. They sure send a lot of missionaries to go after (other) Christians. They sure seem to teach that you have to be part of their church. In short, they sure seem to act like they regard other Christians as "other".
So, no, I have a hard time calling them "Christians".
(And if you're going to say that they self-identify as Christians, well, Jesus said something about "Not everyone who calls me 'Lord, Lord'...")
> I have a hard time referring to them as Christians when they think that the non-Latter-Day Christians are someone that needs converted.
Most Christian groups think that “Christians” outside of their group need to be converted. There are theological reasons why large groups of Christians exclude LDS, SDA, JW, and certain other groups that self-identify as “Christian” from the scope of that term (while still including very large sets of ‘Christians’ with whom they otherwise disagree), but “they think other ‘Christians’ need to be converted” isn’t one of them, and there would be no Christians at all if that standard was applied consistently.)
I think I know why you're saying that, but at least in Texas most people who identify as Christian aren't really aware of the differences between groups. If one believes that Jesus is God, it doesn't matter if they even go to church at all, or if they go to evangelical or Catholic services. It's all considered Christian, and social circles often include people from vastly different denominations.
Most Christian groups don't focus on converting other Christian groups. That doesn't mean they don't know the difference between Catholic and Protestant.
Sure, but they are mostly seen as superficial differences that people don't much care about in practice. One might not want to go to Mass because they prefer the style of a modern evangelical service, but they couldn't care less if you go to Mass and have no interest in converting you to their style. As an example, Catholics who move to a new area might start attending a Methodist church because of the similarities in services. I'm sure many of the leaders are aware of the deeper differences, but among the people not many care.
> I have a hard time referring to them as Christians when they think that the non-Latter-Day Christians are someone that needs converted.
Yet I'm assuming you have no problem calling both Sunni and Shiite Muslims "Muslims" even though they each think the other is wrong and that the other needs converting to their way of thinking? Disputes about which church/sect is the one true church authorized by God are going to happen in every major religion. I think the term "Christian" though is generic - if you believe in and follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, you are a Christian.
> 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".
The first for members is problematic (especially in speech, where there is no equivalent to capitalization to distinguish the proper nouns from a combination of common words; and plenty of people discussing “Latter-Day Saints” would very much not want to endorse the idea that the people referenced are “latter day saints”.
The latter of those is even more problematic for somewhat similar reasons, since there are lots of other people who identify as and are commonly known as Christians, so it's not particularly good to distinguish Latter-Day Saints. Especially given that the boundary large groups of Christians who disagree on, well, nearly everything else draw around the boundary of “Christian” excluded Latter-Day Saints.
> Calling Latter-day Saints "Mormons" is like nicknaming Muslims "Mohammeds" or "Qurans" or nicknaming Islam "the Mohammed Church" or "the Quran Church".
Or, to use a less hypothetical example, it's like calling Muslims and Islam “Mohammedans” and “Mohammedanism”, respectively.
Of course his successor is trying to erase all of that by banning even using LDS ... now you must say they're a "Member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints"
There was a time when we simply preferred to be LDS, then we started embracing Mormon cause that's what people called us anyways so might as well go with it if it allowed opportunities to proselyte/teach the gospel etc...
I left the church in 2017 though after reading https://cesletter.com it woke me up to just how much of a cult the church is, and how white-washed their history is...
I was taught by my Bishop an ex member of the seventy that Joseph Translated the bible by using an ancient Urim and Thumim device in a breastplate with seer stones.
Church now admits nope: He used a stone he found digging a well, dropped it in a hat and put his head over the hat.
There's also too many similarities with The book of Mormon and other similar books of that time like "The Late War".
Anyhow, I think the new "rules" about ditching LDS, Latter-day Saints, and Mormon nomenclature at every chance came out iirc around 2017-18 it was after I had my membership removed... My wife's still a member but she's a lot less believing especially after how the church didn't really come out very strong in favor of protecting people from the pandemic and re-opened a lot of wards.
The prophet was a cardiologist he could've done more to persuade the members to wear masks but did not.
I don't know enough to dispute the doctrine/dogma points you've brought up.
All I know is if someone asks me to use a different term when referring to them, I usually oblige out of respect. That goes for transgender people that want me to use different pronouns/names, religious people that want me to use different terms, etc. If someone says "please don't refer to people of my tribe as 'Native Americans', we prefer the term 'Cherokees', I'm not going to start debating them and be like "well, your leaders last decade wanted 'Native American' so I refuse to call you what you currently prefer". Intentionally ignoring a request like that is incredibly disrespectful and rude, in my opinion.
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.
There is a lot of case law surrounding obscenity, and courts have ruled that bans on obscenity do not necessarily violate the first amendment (there are a variety of tests involved). The rationale never seemed sound to me, but somehow I have not been appointed to the Supreme Court.
It might be a violation of the first amendment, but I think that'd be unlikely.
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.
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
> I in the long run you're doing your worldview a disservice by simplifying political parties into a single axis.
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.
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.
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.
> UT has more overbearing regulations than any other state
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).
Utah has actually made some interesting changes lately. Within the last few years they've legalized Budweiser and gotten rid of the Zion Curtain mandate (which seemed like an awful idea in terms of safety. One waiter told me they called it the "Cosby Curtain").
Maybe some day Utahns will be able to order a glass of wine at dinner before they've decided what they want to eat.
> Not necessarily taking one side ot the other, but they also have very restrictive fireworks laws.
Utah is a really dry state. Fireworks have a bad tendency to start fires out here, fires that can get rather large. It's not that they're spoilsports (with respect to fireworks), it's that they have experienced some significant downsides.
But if that's really the reason, then why not regulate it like burning rather than have only specific dates that they can be used? From what I remember, there's only 4 or 5 holidays/weeks they can be used.
Honestly I like the 4% ABV limit on beer. It forces brewers to make interesting flavors, rather than just blowing you away with ludicrously high ABV masked in hops.
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.
> “One of the most difficult challenges I work with are the effects from pornography,” Gibson said. “Average age of first exposure, which is often accidental, is 10 to 11 years old. Anything we can do to help prevent that puts us in a proactive rather than a defensive position.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Utah is a Mormon state: statewide, Mormons account for nearly 62% of Utah's 3.1 million residents [1] and 91 of the 104 state legislators are Mormon [2].
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.
I understand the HN crowd may take issue with this, but the ease at which a child can stumble onto pornography or adult content is really scary. Even with google safe search, etc enabled. Growing up watching television in the US, you couldn't see topless women on public broadcast TV, let alone hardcore pornography.
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.
The problem is there are no good tools to filter internet content. They are a) imperfect and b) filter out lots of perfectly good content or breaking parts of the web. Using twitter with the Google safe search dns for example is a pain, certain image hosting domains are blocked all together.
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.
What's the alternative? There seem to be obvious negative externalities which the promulgating industries seem disincentivized to address...seems to be a legitimate basis for government intervention.
*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.
The alternative is to take advantage of tools already out on the market developed privately to help people lock down and filter content from the internet. Content and privacy filters have been out forever...use those instead of the government heavy handedly imposing something.
My opinion (and strictly an opinion) is if diverse types of information are more readily available you can either lock down your child's access to that information OR you can prepare them for what they might encounter. Separately its also good to guide them on access and responsible use of the world's knowledge (good, bad, moral, immoral) which is literally at their fingertips
It's additionally odd given that the GOP is (allegedly) the party of "personal responsibility" . You would think this translates to expecting parents to supervise children, rather than have "government interference" do it for you. Regardless of what you think of the law, it's effective at highlighting that the GOP isn't really the "small government" folks that pundits want to make them out to be.
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.
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.
> “Because (children) are not developmentally ready to handle [porn], it leads to the problems of depression, anxiety and all the problems that go with that including and up to its most extreme form, suicide ideation and attempts,” Gibson said.
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.
I grew up Mormon and know that consensual sex between mature adults is often considered to be second only to murder in its "sinfulness". I expect this teaching mixed with accidental porn encounters doesn't help.
I studied with Mormons for a year just out of curiosity, and didn’t get that vibe at all. The people I met were big on the “be fruitful and multiply” thing.
Porn is terrible for human beings on like a million different levels, especially the young and under developed brains, and none of those reasons are religious. Just biologically it’s like a diet of sugar to a child, equally poisonous.
> I studied with Mormons for a year just out of curiosity, and didn’t get that vibe at all. The people I met were big on the “be fruitful and multiply” thing.
within marriage to someone of the opposite sex, a critical detail for Mormons and Catholics. Do almost anything you want in the bedroom as long as you're a heterosexual, married couple working to make babies.
Religion affects political beliefs, but pornography is still a political matter. Marxists and feminists also commonly oppose pornography. Pornography is illegal in China, North Korea, and Vietnam, which are all atheistic communist states.
>“One of the most difficult challenges I work with are the effects from pornography,” Gibson said. “Average age of first exposure, which is often accidental, is 10 to 11 years old. Anything we can do to help prevent that puts us in a proactive rather than a defensive position.
If the most difficult part of your job is teaching kids about sex, you're doing your job wrong.
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. And of those threats smartphone porn-addiction seems the worst. It's like giving every child a pot vape pen or alcohol flask and then wishing them "good luck".
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.
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.
Right-o, if we keep up with this "IF YOU HAVE SEX, YOU'LL DIE AND BURN IN HELL" curriculum (if you can even call it that), we're only compounding these problems. It's time to get over ourselves and start preparing teens to have safe sex instead of saying "no don't do it" because that just means they'll have unsafe sex.
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.
Statistically a child is more likely to suffer eventual chronic illness such as diabetes due to their own bad diet choices than a permanent injury from crossing the street. A person is more likely to kill themselves than die from a traffic accident. So yes, really.
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.
Is there a legal precedent already where a state forced a private company to include specific software on a device?
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?
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.
Doing that when building these devices at scale and handling support queries for it is probably not cheap. Most phone manufacturers don't allow retailers to tamper with the software on the phones/tablets (that opens up a can of worms in terms of security), so they'd have to do it very early, maybe even at the factory — which means earmarking which devices are bound to Utah. Responsible manufacturers (e.g. Apple) would also have to audit the filter code, or build it themselves.
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.
> I doubt the bill will pass, but if it does, I doubt many manufacturers would comply.
They'd probably comply. Most could strike a deal with an existing company to provide software for this. Hell, more than likely a company who makes such software is probably a campaign contributor to many of the supporters of this bill.
AFAIK, the law doesn't define how effective the filter must be. So any good-faith attempt is probably more than enough.
Even if the software is just a skin of Chrome with a add-on installed that blocks a list of websites.
I won't lie though, I would find it hilarious if foxnews.com was put into this obscenity filter.
Every single phone manufacturer sans apple allows this. Ever heard of Verizon bloat ware?
And yes, they will comply, 1) it’s the law, and 2) they won’t leave money on the table.
Device manufacturers don't have to follow random Utah laws: they can simply not sell phones in Utah and not have corporate operations there. Utah has 3 million people, it's not exactly a major population center. There are many cities in the world with more people than Utah.
And I'm pretty sure "Verizon bloatware" is not installed at point of sale. What would stop a random employee from installing keyloggers? This stuff is centrally managed.
They'd very likely be losing money by complying with such a law. They wouldn't be leaving money on the table, they'd be taking it off the table.
Eh, it's a tossup. Commerce clause protections for interstate trade only go so far, some attempts by states to regulate what can be sold or how have passed court tests, others have not. It hinges on whether the regulation would be discriminatory or overly burdensome.
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.
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.
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.
You know what, I like this, as long as the filter can be fully disabled, legally. Not sure why "always on" tracking is needed, it can be local-first. A dynamic, content-based (filter video tags, image tags, not by DNS) porn or suggestive content filter would be handy.
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.
IMO the exact opposite is needed i.e. normalization of sexuality.
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.
Haha. I read this and laughed thinking Utah just announced limiting technology to flip phones and Palm Pilots.
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 asking this completely seriously: where's the proof that pornography is harmful? People in the top comments keep saying without backing it up at all, and the claims they do sound kind of outlandish to me.
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.
I'm not for censorship, but we do need privately run, aggressive porn controls. It's an addictive substance. And like drugs, the supply side is even more insidious.
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.
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?
I enjoy splitting hairs too, but I feel that the distinction between government and platform authority, and Europe and US law, would be used by either side of the porn-deplatforming-supporter and hate-speech-deplatforming-supporter dichotomy when convenient, so is not really a relevant distinction. We can probably locate similar proposals from each of the government/commercial (authority) and porn/hate-speech (content) quadrants, and observe the same dichotomy of reactions.
I feel these are all just justifications that people will deploy when applicable to the tribe they are defending, they don’t explain away the tribes.
That link is more relevant. I don't mean to split hairs. Different nations (cultures? belief systems?) will feel differently about them and make different decisions. I don't think that a discussion that doesn't separate them out will end up anywhere productive.
So when debating the merits of government policy, we can’t talk about Utah and France in the same conversation? I understand that this would make it harder to fit into local tribalist conflicts.
Your tired argument falls flat.
Yes, the first admenement applies to government, but when government and private companies are so unified in task and purpose, as well as value exchange, the distinction between the two is meaningless.
So no “muh private companies” holds zero water. At all.
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 think it’s consistent to believe that free expression allows for deplatforming, and then to have a belief about when deplatforming is necessary.
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)
Do you think the distinction between government interdiction and private is immaterial? I think I regard the distinction between business and government a lot less than most but still understand that there are significant differences between the two and some people think those differences are extremely important.
By tribalism, I mean that people have an intuition for whether the deplatforming is promoted by, or used against, people who they identify with, and that guides their views on whether deplatforming is appropriate. For example, people in one tribe have recently been identifying with people who got deplatformed for hate speech or incitement and they believe these efforts are driven by the repressive values of another tribe. Others read the story about porn and think about how Utah legislators are part of some other tribe, and that leads that to make some argument from free expression (I think the highest rated comment here about “small government” is a good example).
You could make an argument that’s more tribe-independent like this: “limiting freedom of expression by deplatforming is appropriate, but only to prevent a legitimate harm”. Then the two tribes would try to justify their side by debating about which harms are legitimate, which at least has a chance of being data-driven.
People who say that deplatforming is never or always appropriate get points for consistency. But I suspect that
their comments will mostly be upvoted on stories where the principle aligns with the more prevalent tribe.
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 sincerely hope this results in Utah becoming an absolute technological backwater due to device manufacturers being slow to equip new technology for these new requirements.
I mean if it at all stops some kid from getting human trafficked or from getting a porn addiction at 12 then I can’t say that it’s one of the worst laws ever.
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!
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.
Why not? You don’t think there’s a % of idiots who bait people and a % of more idiots who fall for it and end up meeting in real life after being manipulated on some porn chat?
Sounds fine; it's their culture and prerogative. Probably a benefit to deter such consumption for as many youth and young adults as possible, given the negative impact on mental health.
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.
We already know what the real goal is. It's theocracy. While I fundamentally believe all religions are true, I don't want to live under any theocracy at all.
And yet, the intention is to deter usage of a product/vice that is a bane on America. Cut the supply is effective at reducing consumption.
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.
