Speaker Johnson uses software that notifies his son if he looks at porn, and vice versa. One former user spoke to Insider about what that's like.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
House Speaker Mike Johnson and his son use an app that lets the other know if either has viewed pornography, according to a recently-unearthed clip from 2022 that's been making the rounds on Twitter.
—Receipt Maven (@receiptmaven) October 31, 2023
It's the latest curiosity to emerge about the new speaker, an evangelical Christian from Louisiana who was not well-known nationwide until his sudden ascent to the top job on Capitol Hill.
But while Johnson's "covenant marriage" is fairly unique, his use of porn-tracking software is actually not, and religious conservatives quickly noted as much after Rolling Stone wrote a short story about it on Sunday.
—Andrew T. Walker (@andrewtwalk) November 5, 2023
There are several different apps — known as "accountability" software — that allow for this sort of monitoring, including Covenant Eyes, Accountable2You, and EverAccountable.
According to WIRED, more than 50,000 people downloaded Covenant Eyes in 2022, and the company is said to boast hundreds of thousands of users, including retired NBA champion Lamar Odom.
Typically, they allow "accountability partners" to keep track of one another's online activity, notifying one if the other views something interpreted as being pornography.
Speaker Johnson uses Covenant Eyes, and says in the unearthed clip that he has an accountability partnership with his then-17-year-old son. "I'm proud to tell you, my son is — he's got a clean slate," said Johnson.
But often, it's close friends who are monitoring one another.
"You create certain habits when you're not a Christian, and then all of a sudden, you're running up against some strong commands from Jesus — that lust is akin to adultery and that kind of stuff," said Christopher Johnson, a Washington, DC-based conservative activist who's not related to the new speaker of the House. "So you try and figure out ways to keep folks accountable."
An evangelical Christian who was baptized into the Southern Baptist Church in Columbus as a teenager, Johnson later became a YoungLife leader at Ohio State University. He and a small group of fellow Christian leaders on campus began using Covenant Eyes when he was a sophomore in order to "keep each other accountable."
Johnson's accountability partner was a friend who was later his best man at his wedding, and if either of them viewed material that the software identified as pornographic, the other would receive an email.
"Sometimes it is just the software you know, flipped or whatever," said Johnson. "And sometimes it's genuinely a guy who struggled and fell, and there's a conversation that leads to repentance."
Yet some of the concern about Speaker Johnson's use of the software isn't related to his prohibitive view of pornography, but instead about the invasive nature of the technology itself — Covenant Eyes includes near-constant surveillance of its users' devices, taking a screenshot once per minute, according to WIRED.
That software was developed by Michael Holm, a former data scientist for the National Security Agency, the federal government's chief surveillance arm.
"The software sees the screen just as you see it," Holm told The Christian Post in a 2019 interview.
"When I was using it, it was way before fears about big data were as big as they are now," said Christopher Johnson, adding that using the technology was a "necessity" given the sensitivity of the topic and the unlikelihood of voluntary confession to porn use.
More broadly, it's not uncommon for evangelical congregations to encourage members to download this kind of software.
According to WIRED, the accountability software industry has ballooned into a "multimillion-dollar ecosystem" and includes hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users around the country.
And while plenty of Christians happily and voluntarily use the software, that's not true of everyone.
"I wouldn't quite call it spyware," one former user told WIRED in 2022. "It's more like 'shameware,' and it's just another way the church controls you."
