VidAngel: Content filtering technologies, religion, and American copyright law

Abstract This article traces a cultural history of the visual media filtering industry in the United States—from VHS tapes to internet filters to digital streaming platforms. Through an analysis of the company VidAngel, a video filtering start-up, and its recent copyright lawsuit brought by a group of major Hollywood film studios, we highlight the influential role that religion and copyright law, as interanimating forces, have played in the development of content identification and moderation technologies and practices. Emerging from this cultural history is a discourse that insists consumer rights to protect their families from morally objectionable content outweigh the copyrights of content creators. Used as a legal justification for content filtering, this family media rights discourse conflates personal moral decisions based on conservative religious values with neoliberal consumer empowerment in an effort to subvert hegemonic media systems by returning the power of media influence to private families in private settings. This article argues that religiously-motivated systems to identify and remove morally objectionable content have not only resulted in innovative business models targeting niche conservative religious audiences but that such businesses inevitably challenge and shape U.S. copyright law, significantly impacting several areas of contemporary media regulation well beyond the Mormon communities at the center of this narrative.