The HuffPost reports that on March 24 Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, signed a bill that would require mobile device companies to “automatically enable filters for harmful content for minors. But the rule won’t change anything in the near future.
The bill requires adult content filters to be installed on all smartphones and tablets sold in Utah. Buyers who don’t want to use the filters would need a password from the phone manufacturer to disable them. If the filter is not automatically turned on when the user activates the device while a minor accesses harmful content, the device manufacturer would be liable for a fine of up to $10 per violation.
As it stands now, both Apple and Google devices offer parental filters, but they are turned off by default. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an anti-pornography group that supports the bill, argues that the filters are too complicated to activate and “leave most Parents powerless to protect their children online. So the basic purpose of the law is to make device manufacturing companies turn on the filters in their devices at the factory and to add barriers to turning them off.
This bill could face an immediate constitutional challenge. The ACLU of Utah, which opposes the bill, tweeted that it “infringes on the First Amendment right of the general public to freely access the Internet. The Supreme Court famously struck down the Communications Decency Act in 1997, which banned indecent material from being made available to minors. This is because child protection filters can easily filter out even harmless information. Even if filters can be turned off, requiring reliance on devices to block pornographic content may not work in court.
To address the troubling difficulty of enforcement, a provision was deliberately added to the bill stating that the law would not take effect unless five other states enacted similar legislation, and that the law would be automatically repealed if no state passed similar legislation by 2031.
Other states have followed Utah’s lead in restricting pornography, with Utah taking the lead in declaring pornography a public health crisis in 2016 and more than a dozen states proposing similar resolutions afterward.
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