South Carolina Lawmakers Want to Charge People a Fee to Watch Free Internet Porn

However, South Carolina news website GoUpstate reports, if a company doesn't want to install the porn filter, it could instead pay an opt-out fee of $20 per device; a buyer who's 18 or older could also pay $20 to have the filter removed. Those fees would reportedly go to the South Carolina Attorney General's Office's human trafficking task force.

State Rep. Bill Chumley, one of the bill's authors, told GoUpstate that the bill would also prohibit access to any website that facilities prostitution or trafficking. "If we could have manufacturers install filters that would be shipped to South Carolina, then anything that children have access on for pornography would be blocked," Chumley said. "We felt like that would be another way to fight human trafficking."

According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, 58 cases have been reported in South Carolina as of September this year, and one study suggests the problem may be even more widespread than many realize. Experts point to some of the state's major highways as "a traffickers' dream pipeline." For example, Interstate 85 connects Atlanta and Charlotte, two cities that consistently rank high for human sex trafficking.

But critics of the law take issue with the purported link between human trafficking and porn; some have also called it puritanical and tantamount to "state-sponsored censorship of publicly accessible information." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chumley and co-author Rep. Mike Burns have yet to explain how the whole plan will actually work—will Apple really make iPhones that come with filters just for South Carolina or will local Apple stores have to install them?—and both were reportedly reluctant to speak with reporters about these concerns, or about the potential First Amendment violation inherent in the legislation.

Abbi Tenaglia, the founder of an anti-trafficking organization, Transforming Hope Ministries, further notes that South Carolina would be spending money in order to earn money for anti-trafficking efforts. She suggests that lawmakers are underestimating how savvy most people are when it comes to computers. "In some cases," she tells Broadly, "it may be simpler for a person to remove the blocker themselves… and worry about the fine later if/when government discovers it."

The need for funds to fight trafficking is very real, though. The biggest expense in the anti-trafficking movement is victim services, says Pam Strickland, the founder of Eastern North Carolina Stop Human Trafficking NOW. "That's because once someone has been through a trauma as severe as being trafficked, it just requires so much time and money to help restore that person. The cost per person of housing and counseling and job training—it's just immense."

Tenaglia agrees, and offers the lack of housing for trafficking survivors as one example. "It costs well over $400,000 a year to run a shelter that may house four to 10 survivors for about a year," she explains. "Raising $400,000 even one time is difficult because this is a difficult topic to discuss and to acknowledge is happening in our cities and states."

What Transforming Hope Ministries has done, according to Tenaglia, is use their resources to focus on educating people about what's happening in their cities—which is, many would argue, a better use of government effort and funding than a state-mandated porn blocker that's tangentially related to stopping human trafficking. "In understanding the issue better, we've found that the community is more likely to support any efforts to eradicate something like human trafficking from their city," she says.