A new US cellphone network plan that blocks porn sites at network-level is set to launch, marketed at Christians who want to keep ungodly content off their devices.
Radiant Mobile bills itself as “The first ever Christian mobile carrier”, although other carriers such as Patriot Mobile also bill themselves as explicitly Christian. Radiant Mobile is, however, believed to be the first cellphone plan in the country to use network-level blocking for porn that can’t be turned off by users, even if they are verified adults. The company will use the T-Mobile network for its coverage.
The firm has recruited the Israeli cybersecurity company Allot to block content categories for the network’s users, including a category about sexuality. An Allot spokesperson told MIT Technology Review that “LGBT content” tends to fall in this sexuality category, so will likely also be blocked.
Although porn content is always blocked on the network as per Radiant Mobile’s policies, this sexuality category is blocked by default on users’ phones, but the block can be removed by adult account holders.
Paul Fisher, Radiant Mobile’s founder, told MIT Technology Review that the network would create an environment “void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans”.
Tinker Bell, Satanism, and the limits of godly browsing
The launch of Radiant Mobile comes at a time when many US states are cracking down on age verification for online porn access, introducing tougher laws regarding sites and platforms implementing verification. Aylo, the company behind Pornhub and RedTube, has been lobbying Apple, Google, and Microsoft to shift age verification to the device level rather than individual sites. Radiant Mobile is, in a sense, exactly what device-level filtering looks like in practice, just deployed by people with a very different agenda than the one Aylo had in mind.
With 62 percent of US citizens identifying as Christians, Radiant Mobile has a theoretically large addressable market, and the network doesn’t stop at blocking porn and LGBT content with its professed godly influence.
It will also offer users its own Christianity-related content (pictured above), including AI-generated Bible-themed videos. Radiant Mobile has licensed intellectual property from Elf Labs, a company that claims rights to public domain fairy-tale characters, to portray figures like Cinderella and Tinker Bell in its content. The IP basis for those claims is, as you might expect, contested territory.
As well as the sexuality content category, which reportedly includes LGBT content, Radiant Mobile can block content in a category called “sects”, which includes Satanism-related sites.
The network has heavyweight business support, with Nvidia vice president Roger Bringmann the lead investor and silent partner in the company. Founder Paul Fisher said that Radiant Mobile has garnered $17.5 million from the Compax Ventures telecommunications company.
A level up from ‘shameware’
Radiant Mobile isn’t the only Christian porn and LGBT content-blocking phone service available. In 2022 SEXTECHGUIDE covered the so-called ‘accountability apps’ Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You, which operated like spyware and sent messages to a designated ‘accountability partner’.
The idea of the apps, which were marketed at church-goers and became known as ‘shameware’, was to dob users in if they accessed content such as porn.
Accountable2You logged words such as ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ when they featured in a user’s URL. Covenant Eyes was found to be taking regular screenshots of users’ phones.
Both apps were suspended from the Google Play app store, before being reinstated, with Covenant Eyes saying a ‘new version’ had been released.
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