Starbucks finally bans porn

Starbucks announced last week it will start blocking porn sites on its in-store Wi-Fi service in 2019. The move comes after years of pressure on the coffee giant to set up filters to block explicit content.

Internet safety group Enough Is Enough (EIE) launched a porn-free campaign aimed at McDonald’s and Starbucks in 2014. The group argued unfiltered Wi-Fi hotspots are safe havens for online criminals, like sexual predators and pedophiles, to operate with anonymity. They also allow people to look at pornography in plain view of the general public, including children. EIE argued both companies had effectively blocked porn at their stores in the United Kingdom and could easily implement similar plans in the United States. They would also be following in the steps of other national chains that filter their free Wi-Fi, including Panera Bread, Subway, and Chick-fil-A.

In response, McDonald’s installed filters at around 14,000 locations in early 2016. At the time, Starbucks said it was working on a plan to filter explicit content, but 2½ years later, the company had yet to take any action.

In late November, EIE announced a new petition calling on Starbucks to follow through. “By breaking its commitment, Starbucks is keeping the doors wide open for convicted sex offenders and others to fly under the radar from law enforcement and use free, public Wi-Fi services to access illegal child porn and hard-core pornography,” EIE President and CEO Donna Rice Hughes said. “Having unfiltered hotspots also allows children and teens to easily bypass filters and other parental control tools set up by their parents on their smart phones, tablets and laptops.”

Within a few days, Starbucks said it would start blocking porn. A company spokesperson announced the change to Business Insider in an email on Nov. 28: “To ensure the Third Place [in addition to home and office] remains safe and welcoming to all, we have identified a solution to prevent this content from being viewed within our stores and we will begin introducing it to our U.S. locations in 2019.”

Hughes isn’t celebrating just yet. “They won’t get an applause until they’ve actually implemented safe Wi-Fi filtering,” she told NBC News last week, noting EIE ran a thank you campaign back in 2016 when Starbucks first said they would take action. “This time we’re going to wait and see, and we’re going to keep the pressure on.”

EIE is fighting an uphill battle amid the increasing normalization of pornography in American culture. It’s easier to get Starbucks to back paper straws than porn-free Wi-Fi.

Even the vocabulary is changing: Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, is no longer a porn star in the porn industry, she’s an adult movie actress in the adult entertainment industry. That shift is not just a change of words, “it’s a fundamental redefinition of an entire sector of our society in moral terms,” said Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a WORLD News Group board member. “And this isn’t by accident.”

Indeed, a Gallup survey released in June found 43 percent of Americans think pornography is morally acceptable, up from 36 percent in 2017. Men ages 18 to 49 had the biggest jump: from 53 to 67 percent in the past year.

That might explain why one of the world’s largest free pornography websites had the audacity to respond to the Starbucks decision with a ban of its own. In a memo to his staff last week, the vice president of YouPorn banned Starbucks products from its offices, effectively fighting for the rights of people who like to watch porn in public places.

“One way or another, there has to be some reckoning for the fact that this scandal has now invaded virtually every American home,” Mohler said on his podcast, The Briefing, adding that the conversation today is about whether we can even say pornography is pornography, “much less say what we all know, and that is that pornography is evil. It is wrong, it is deadly, it distorts human sexuality, it is an assault upon human dignity.”