“We are going to create—and we think we have every right to do so—an environment that is Jesus-centric, that is void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans,” Radiant Mobile’s founder, Paul Fisher, told MIT Technology Review. A representative for T-Mobile did not comment on whether these content blocks violate any of its policies. In a statement, the representative added that T-Mobile does not have a direct relationship with Radiant Mobile but instead works through the MVNO manager CompaxDigital.
Fisher says he’s recruited a mix of Christian influencers to advertise the plan and has also done outreach to thousands of churches around the country, offering a way to have Radiant donate a portion of congregants’ $30-per-month subscription fee to their church. Fisher has ambitions to market it beyond the US in other countries with significant Christian populations, like South Korea and Mexico.
At least one piece of Radiant’s pitch will sound familiar: the idea that the internet is awash in toxic sludge. It’s powered by content and algorithms that are making us more sad, hateful, and detached. A number of efforts aim to fix that, including contentious age verification laws and a coming wave of lawsuits alleging that social media companies knowingly got young users hooked on their platforms.
Fisher is pursuing the nuclear option. He says Radiant is working with the Israeli cybersecurity company Allot to block categories of content, such as material about violence or self-harm. Some categories are banned by default and cannot be allowed even for adult users.
This includes pornography. Chris Klimis, a minister in Orlando who was recruited to be the company’s chief operating officer, says part of the reason he got involved was to offer Christians a real way to “do something” about what he sees as a pornography crisis in the faith. He was appalled by a recent survey showing that 67% of pastors have a “personal history” with porn use. And he worries his six children will come across porn on their devices, even if only inadvertently.
“We’ve got to figure out some way to close the door to the digital space,” he says. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”
The technology to do this blocking is a blunt instrument: Allot groups website domains into more than a hundred categories, which include pornography but also violence, malware, gaming, and in Radiant Mobile’s case “sects,” which includes websites about Satanism. If one of its users tries to visit a website that belongs to a blocked category, the page won’t load. That’s harsher than app-based content blockers like Covenant Eyes, a Christian porn-quitting app that sends notifications to your friends or family if you slip up; those can be worked around or deleted.
“Blocking in the network is certainly not new,” says David Choffnes, a computer science professor and executive director of Northeastern University’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. Such blocking is the backbone of censorship efforts by authoritarian governments, for example. But there are more benign ways it’s used too. US telecoms block particular domains known to be spreading malware and offer optional network-level controls to block adult content on kids’ phones. What is new is a US cell plan instituting network-level blocks that can’t be removed, even by adults.