South Carolina bill would block computers from accessing porn

Joel Hruska

South Carolina representative Bill Chumley has a plan to block porngraphic content viewing on PCs sold in South Carolina. The bill would require all manufacturers who sell hardware in South Carolina to include mandatory porn-blocking software to prevent the system from accessing prohibited material. Manufacturers who didn’t want to equip their computers with the blocking software could pay a $20 fee to avoid it, while consumers who wanted to lift the filter after purchasing hardware would have to certify that they were over 18 and pay a $20 fee themselves.

Whenever legislation like this has been proposed, it’s almost always been cast in terms of protecting children from accessing adult material. Chumley’s plan doesn’t quite fit that mold, however. According to the bill, the funds collected from computer sales or filter removal would be transferred to the South Carolina Attorney General Office’s human trafficking task force. The bill would also require all computers sold in SC to block access to websites that facilitate prostitution or human trafficking.

The scale and scope of human trafficking in the United States is difficult to pin down for many reasons. Victims include homeless and runaway children, as well as individuals who were either lured to America under false pretenses or smuggled into the country specifically for prostitution or forced labor. Many victims refuse to cooperate with police investigations out of fear that their loved ones or families will be targeted if they cooperate. In some cases, victims refuse to cooperate because their own governments are actively complicit in the human trafficking trade.

According to the DOJ, between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the country every year, while the US State Department estimates that 244,000 children and teenagers are at risk of trafficking, particularly runaways. Women tend to be forced into prostitution or domestic service, while boys are principally targeted for agricultural work, the drug trade, or petty crime. Upstate South Carolina is considered a trafficking corridor due to Interstate 85, which runs between Atlanta and Charlotte. Both of these cities are Top 20 destinations for human trafficking in the US.

Sadly, the links between pornography and prostitution are too uncertain to claim that upcoming VR porn will function as an effective substitute for a poorly lit encounter in a cramped vehicle or roach motel.

On the one hand, Chumley’s proposed bill is an attempt to prevent a very real problem. On the other, it speaks to the need for legislators who think critically and understand technology. First, there is no practical way that Dell, HP, or any OEM could create a filter system for pornography that individual users couldn’t break or bypass. Second, more than 20 years after the internet began to go mainstream, content filters are still prone to false negatives and positives. There’s no such thing as a perfect filter and therefore no way to simply prevent people from accessing porn by legislative diktat.

Third, and most importantly, there’s no rigorous evidence that viewing online pornography is connected either to increased prostitution or sex trafficking itself. This argument has certainly been advanced by various scholars, while others have pushed back, noting the simplicity of the work and the significant tendency to conflate prostitution with human trafficking. Some researchers have argued that while some human trafficking absolutely takes place in the United States and should be stopped, much of the work and rhetoric on the topic has all the hallmarks of a moral panic — a pervasive fear that some enemy or behavior has crept among us unnoticed and is now in danger of unraveling society. The ‘white slavery’ fears of the early 1900s, the accusations of ritualized satanic abuse at daycares in the 1980s, the gibbering terror of Dungeons and Dragons, and ongoing efforts to link video games to violence or violent behaviors are all examples of moral panics.

There is, in short, no evidence that a mandatory filter would do anything about whatever human trafficking problem exists in South Carolina, and no evidence that such a filter could actually function effectively.