This Christian phone service will give its owner "enormous" power over what customers can see

A first-of-its-kind Christian cell phone network purports to block users from both pornography and LGBTQ+ content. But critics say the project’s size and subjective nature will give the company’s founder too much control over what users can see.

Launched on Tuesday, Radiant Mobile aims to create a “Jesus-centric” environment, founder Paul Fisher told the MIT Technology Review.

The network plans will filter out all pornography with no exceptions. While it will also filter out LGBTQ+ content by default, adult users can override that filter by changing their settings. There are also over 100 other categories adults can control.

But there is a huge issue with subjectivity and what constitutes LGBTQ+ content, especially on websites that cover a variety of topics, like news. The Review pointed out that this gives Fisher “enormous and subjective control over which are allowed or banned.”

He said, for example, that Yale University’s website is classified as education, “But they have a subsection of one of their websites that’s totally focused on, you know, trans equality.” That subsite does have its own domain, so it is blocked separately, but Fisher warned, “If we see [queer content] on the front pages of Yale University, we’ll block them too.”

Before embarking on this project, Fisher was an agent for supermodels, but says he now regrets his work in the industry. He said God spoke to him one night and told him to do something faith-based.

The company plans to supplement the thousands of blocked websites with its own religious content, some of which will be directed at children, featuring characters like Tinker Bell and Cinderella.

David Choffne, executive director of Northeastern University’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, said he isn’t sure the company’s goal to block every “inappropriate” website is feasible.

“It’s really hard to come up with a list of every website you think is problematic,” he said, adding that in his opinion, a “sledgehammer approach of blocking content” is not the right answer to addressing toxicity on the internet.

For the massive content blocking project, Radiant has partnered with Allot, an Israeli cybersecurity company. The company also uses cellular bandwidth from T-Mobile, which told the Review in a statement that it does not have a relationship with Radiant but rather works through a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) manager called CompaxDigital. The company did not comment on whether the content blocking violates its policies.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.

Originally published here.