Why I'm Cheering for This New Anti-Porn, Anti-LGBT, Christian Phone Network
Free market solutions for the win!
No porn. No sex ed. No queer content. That's the promise of Radiant Mobile, a new cellphone network that launched this month.
And I'm so into it.
Not because I'm personally offended by any of those things, mind you. Regular readers of Reason and/or this newsletter know that I'd be the last to advocate for government bans on such material.
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But that's what makes Radiant Mobile's scheme so great: It doesn't rely on the government. It's a free market solution for people who want to avoid sexuality-tinged or LGBTQ content on their own phones or their kids' phones.
Radiant Mobile's anti-sex phone network, launched on May 5, doesn't demand the state impose a one-size-fits-all solution. It doesn't ask authorities to mandate privacy-invading ID checks on websites and app purchases, or to levy a sin tax on people who want to access porn platforms. It simply offers a way for people to take matters into their own hands.
"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 founder Paul Fisher told MIT Technology Review.
The company is what's known as a mobile virtual network operator. "These operators don't own cell towers but buy bandwidth from the big providers (in this case, T-Mobile) and sell to specific demographics (President Trump announced his own MVNO last year called Trump Mobile; CREDOMobile sends donations to progressive causes)," notes MIT. The Radiant Mobile network "blocks porn, which experts in network security say marks the first time a US cell plan has used network-level blocking for such content that can't be turned off even by adult account owners."
Radiant Mobile relies on blocking technology from an Israeli cybersecurity company called Allot, which divides digital content into categories.
Unlike the porn filter, the more general filter on sexual content—a category that will include topics related to sex, sex education, transgender issues, and homosexuality, according to Allot sales director Anthony Re—will be turned on as a default but optional, with adult account owners able to turn it off and on their or their child's phones.
In addition to porn, categories of content that are blocked for all Radiant Mobile users include racism, explicit games, satanism and cultism, self-harm, terrorism/extremism, and bombs.
Some categories of content are blocked for child and teen users but not for adults, while others are blocked by default for everyone but can be turned off by an adult user or, on minors' phones, turned off by a parent.
Since it relies on network-level rather than device-level blocking, Radiant's filtering program is less prone to people getting around it by using apps or VPNs.
David Choffnes of Northeastern University told MIT, "A lot of the internet is toxic, but I don't believe that this sledgehammer approach of blocking content is the right answer."
At a broad level, I agree—we wouldn't want the government to mandate such an approach, or pressure all phone networks into taking it. But as a private, niche response to demand for sex-free phones, it's the best possible solution. Let people who want a G-rated internet purchase it for themselves and leave the wider internet alone.
In The News
Are Waymos racist? "Groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists" have pointed out "that 'studies have shown that automated vehicles are less able to detect people of color and children,'" Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in a recent piece in The Atlantic. Kelsey Piper at The Argument calls foul:
[Gonzalez] cited the 'Union of Concerned Scientists,' which indeed said that "studies have shown that automated vehicles are less able to detect people of color and children," but which does not link any such studies. Its report doesn't have a byline, and while I submitted a request for more information to their contact form Monday, I haven't heard back.
So I searched for research on this topic and found this 2023 article from King's College London about a paper with exactly this finding: "Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists." The preprint of that paper (released around the time of that article) is titled "Dark-Skin Individuals Are at More Risk on the Street: Unmasking Fairness Issues of Autonomous Driving Systems," and claims to find a "miss rate difference of 7.52% between the dark-skin and light-skin groups" — that is, other things equal, the systems they tested (which are not even the systems in a Waymo, but we'll get to that) are 7.52 percentage points more likely to miss a dark-skinned than light-skinned pedestrian.
The paper was later published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, but the published version of the paper had a very different finding: nearly identical results on dark-skinned and light-skinned pedestrians. Average miss rate was 30.15% for light skin vs. 29.71% for dark skin, a 0.44-point difference — statistically insignificant.
She also found a study from 2019 that suggested as much. But "image recognition technology has massively advanced since then," Piper points out. Besides:
All of this is entirely irrelevant to the safety of Waymo. Waymo does not primarily do pedestrian detection through normal cameras and machine learning algorithms that interpret what the cameras are seeing. It has cameras, but it also builds a complete picture of its surroundings with lidar (bouncing a laser around) and imaging radar (from emitting radio waves). Both of those will obviously be race-agnostic, though children will still be harder to see than adults as they take up less space.
On Substack
The feminist case for Waymo. Being a mom tends to involve a lot of "ferrying kids to and from school, activities, and doctor's appointments," notes Caroline Sutton at Slow Boring. Enter Waymo. Self-driving cars could alleviate a lot of this driving burden, she suggests:
This labor comes with a cost: Forty-two percent of parents who spend more than 10 hours a week driving kids around fear they are putting their jobs at risk due to the demands. And unlike a lot of child care responsibilities, this actually gets worse as kids age into more intense extracurriculars and become teenagers with busy social lives.
But imagine a middle schooler getting to soccer practice without a parent rearranging their entire workday. There's no early sign-off from the office, no scrambling to beat traffic, no 45-minute round trip for a one-hour activity. That could be the new reality.
Very few moms feel comfortable letting a random Uber driver bring their child to school or to their afterschool activities, but a self-driving car is a very different proposition. Schools' dropoff lines could be supervised to securely bring children from Waymos into the building, and similar systems could be set up at recreation centers, after-school programs, tutoring centers, and other venues that cater to children. For some families, that's 10-plus hours a week of driving that simply disappears.
Read This Thread
Phillips says she is resigning because Starmer has failed to install surveillance software onto "every phone and device in the country" https://t.co/hCH6mgTZzi pic.twitter.com/Bm04D7VQQJ
— Stakeholder Consultant (@echetus) May 12, 2026
More Sex & Tech News
• The Supreme Court has until Thursday at 5 p.m. to rule on the next steps for a case that could ban mail-order abortion pills across the country.
• A group of academics are suing the Trump administration over its policy of denying visas to and deporting noncitizens because of their work on social media content moderation or fact checking.
• Australia's social media ban for kids under age 16 "isn't really working," notes Cass Sunstein. "We surveyed 835 Australian teenagers four months after the ban took effect, and find that only about one in four 14–15-year-olds comply."
• Refurbished iPod shuffles are being advertised in the New York subway as a way to avoid screen time.
