‘Christian’ Wireless Provider Promises To Censor All LGBTQ Content
from the good-luck-with-that dept
A new “Christian” mobile phone provider named Radiant Mobile is promising to offer a wireless service that censors all LGBTQ+ content. The MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), which runs on the T-Mobile network, says it’s keen to deliver “faith-focused mobile service,” according to the company’s website.
According to NIT Technology Review, the MVNO is working alongside Israeli cybersecurity firm Allot to impose a network-level blockade of not just all pornography on the internet, but all LGBTQ+ content as well:
“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.”
“Void of trans,” indeed. Good luck with all that. Porn filter systems, no matter whether device or network centric, are notoriously fickle and routinely make all manner of filtering mistakes that wind up blocking all manner of additional content. They’re also historically easy to bypass, depending on how they’re designed.
The article makes it clear that Fisher’s primary target is porn, and it sounds like censoring gay and trans related content isn’t something that’s been particularly well thought out. They’ll figure out in practice that trying to “sanitize” the internet on the network level to somehow conform to narrow worldviews isn’t technically possible, no matter what promises Allot is making to Reliant to justify their price tag:
“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.”
Yes, this would technically violate FCC net neutrality rules if the corrupt U.S. courts hadn’t dismantled them, but even if the rules still existed they wouldn’t have been enforced by the Trump FCC anyway. And yes, this raises all sorts of First Amendment and privacy legal questions, which is probably why T-Mobile tried to distance itself from things when contacted by 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, who is apparently pivoting from a career as a supermodel agent to sell this heavily censored version of the internet to purportedly moral religious folks, is trying to strike brand partnerships with evangelical churches. Fisher’s backed by $17.5 million in investment from Compax Ventures and Roger Bringmann, a vice president at Nvidia.
There’s been a flood of these lazy MVNOs that pander to Trump zealots and operate on the T-Mobile network, not least of which is the Trump Organization’s Trump Mobile, which promised customers an expensive new Trump reskinned phone “made in America” that was being made in China and it never actually delivered (despite a lot of down payments). So: It’s all quite on brand.
Filed Under: bigots, censorship, fcc, filtering, lgbtq, mobile, mvno, net neutrality, network, paul fisher, roger bringmann, telecom, wireless
Companies: allot, compax ventures, nvidia, radiant mobile, t-mobile
Comments on “‘Christian’ Wireless Provider Promises To Censor All LGBTQ Content”
I've returned the favor
I’ve been adding radiantmobile.com to every blacklist that I run or have write access to or have input to. My guess is that my reach vastly exceeds theirs.
WWJD? (hint: not this)
Re: Gaming?
Did you see they include “Gaming” as a bad category?
Don’t forget to block out Dancing, good Christian people of America.
Why no talk about censoring lies, murders, and prideful statements.
It’s also note worthy Jesus associated with prostitutes, adulterous women, tax collectors and other sinners.
So this sounds like a rather… un-Christ-like decision.
Re:
Jesus was a freaking leftist activist anarchist, and so now also a terrorist, but Radiant Mobile is talking about the other one, “Jesus-centric” aka Jesus 2.0, which is slightly left leaning but surely okay to get half of internet blocked.
I’ve heard that this new “Jesus” is already burning in Hell with his bast mate Satan, but Radiant Mobile seems to have erased all proofs of it from internet.
Personally, I wish them total success. The amount of blocking will be noticeable, and that person’s first encounter with an LGBTQ+ person in real life will be all the more world-shaking if they have no previous experience to draw on.
Um, boss? I can see it raising privacy legal questions, no problem. Deep packet inspection? yeah, that.
But First Amendment questions? Is the US government, a state government, or like that holding a license hostage or something? Otherwise I’d have to bring up comparisons to Twitter’s editorial decisions. It may be moderation that nobody but a total loon would support, but without the government being involved, it doesn’t rise to a 1A issue.
Re:
I can understand a common carrier with their hardware not being allowed to censor because multiple entities will need to traverse that hardware to get to different places on the internet. But a virtual carrier that is riding on top of that hardware (with no hardware of their own) I think could limit it for its own customers.
Or is my understanding of a virtual carrier wrong?
Still I think this is going to be a laughably bad filter.
I’m gonna make a game out of getting information around this.
I’d love to know what sites these evangelicals are looking at if they really need to pay grifters put a firewall between them and .
If you have no idea for a product or service, you can’t go wrong with just slapping a crucifix on it and selling it to nutters.
…make a boatload of cash before his venture crashes and burns.
This is exactly the freedom of speech that Techdirt fights for.
Corporate entities are permitted to censor or not censor stuff at their leisure, without guidelines nor safety rails from the government, because those guidelines and safety rails would violate the first amendment and ‘freedom of speech’.
Be glad that the media company is able to speak freely as you desire by censoring whatever they want to censor.
Or, if you don’t like it, perhaps you should accept that speech from media companies needs some degree of regulation.
Re:
You won’t find anyone here who thinks this phone service is anything more than a ploy to separate gullible queerphobic religious freaks from their money. (And if you do, chances are they’re trolling you.) But a difference exists between a corporate entity like this phone service provider going “you can buy from us a service that will stop you from seeing queer stuff and porn” and a corporate entity like PayPal going “we’re going to prevent you from doing any kind of business if you sell even the tamest adult content possible”. If you can’t figure out why one is merely stupid but not necessarily a threat to freedom of expression and the other is both stupid and a legitimate threat to actual freedom of expression, that’s on you.
Re:
Whoosh!
On the upside, devout christians won’t post as many hateful comments on banned sites.
What could go wrong?
Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 2012, when a Christian website set up a filter to protect their readers from LGBTQ content and changed Olympic sprinter Tyson Gay’s name to Tyson Homosexual.
https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a20829982/site-reveals-tysons-hidden-agenda/
Re:
Well now he’ll simply be renamed “Tyson [Blocked to Protect Kids]”.
We are going to create ...
“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.”
And most likely void of customers, too. What’s that, it’ll include bible-belters? Maybe. But how many of those bible-belters secretly want a little bit of porn of a late night?
Re: re:
This is meant for the kiddies and the wife. Can’t have them corrupted by this filth.
The man of the house must have full access in order to keep track of all the evil-doers in order to protect the family.
Place your bets on how long until one of the backers of the company is identified by other Grindr users.
After it launches, find out what wireless service the top people at the company use. I’m guessing they won’t use their own service. The service is for bilking ideologically short-sighted people.
If you don’t want to see porn on your phone, don’t search for it…? Also, it’s a mobile phone provider, not a home internet provider and isn’t your work, Starbucks, or public library internet provider. If you can’t stop yourself from looking for gay porn so much that you need to switch carriers, then you’re able to just use a different internet connection and/or a different device.
This is such a dumb grift from so many angles.
If a person or company wants to remove themselves from the public space that is fine. If they stop other people (non-customers) from accessing or traveling the public space then we have a problem.
It’s weird, but I can’t recall in what part of the Gospels Jesus even mentioned, let alone expressed any concern or prohibitions against, any of those things that this “Jesus-centric” service is promising to block.
Are you a cishet white man, or are you a porn category? 🙄