Internet porn: Automatic block rejected (UK)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20738746

by andrewaylett • 14 years ago

20 39 14 years ago

andrewaylett• 14 years ago

This is good news. I fear that the two sides of the debate have been talking past each other -- it would obviously be a good idea to stop children from viewing porn, but there are three problems with that requirement: it won't stop all access, it won't magically just block for children and it won't only block pornography, even by the conservative standards of what I'd prefer not to see.

I have primary-school-age children, and to my mind the best way to protect them is sensible supervision and a good ad-blocker.

kfk• 14 years ago

Best way to protect them is to let them the choice.

inovica• 14 years ago

No it isn't. S/He said "primary school age children" and some kind of parental supervision is definitely necessary here. You can't give young children a choice in many areas - including food for example - as they don't have the skills, experiences and capacity to make an informed choice.

Regarding the automatic blocking of porn, I agree that this shouldn't happen, but when it comes to children I believe that good parenting is one of the parents being selective until the child is grown up enough to make their own decisions

antihero• 14 years ago

Opt-in government maintained filters, like as an optional service?

Retric• 14 years ago

it would obviously be a good idea to stop children from viewing porn

I don't think most children really care about porn before puberty. So, I don't think it's really an issue.

PS: Most of the reasons to block porn also apply to adults. Why not block it from everyone?

kragen• 14 years ago

I don't think most children really care about porn before puberty. So, I don't think it's really an issue.

I'm going to guess that you don't remember much of your pre-puberty childhood. I remember quite a bit from mine (1976-1985), including what the other kids talked about. Porn, and sex in general, were definitely topics we had strong interest in. But without internet access, our options were pretty limited.

PS: Most of the reasons to block porn also apply to adults. Why not block it from everyone?

It's not that anti-porn people think porn isn't harmful to adults. Most of them do. They just think protecting adults from porn is out of reach, while protecting kids from porn isn't.

tommorris5• 14 years ago

"it would obviously be a good idea to stop children from viewing porn"

Nonsense. I'm bloody glad I had access to porn as a closeted gay teenager. Without access to Internet porn, my teenage years would have been far more miserable and lonely.

It was only a decade ago when Section 28 was still the law of the land. Internet porn was giving plenty of gay teenagers the sex education that society and the education system was too prudish and/or fearful to give them.

jQueryIsAwesome6• 14 years ago

I wish I could upvote this multiple times. Teenage years are a period usually with low self steam, confusion and doubts. At least porn helps teens to calm their hormones in healthier way than the alternatives: striptease, hookers, "bad girls" or drugs. And with internet they can do it from the safety and privacy of their own home without the risk of doing anything stupid to watch people having sex. And of course, like you mention being gay doesn't help with all of those puberty issues.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

To be a little nit-picker here, but he specifically said children, wereas you said teenagers.

I too believe it is a good idea to make sure 6 years old don't stumple on a inter-racial shemale anal-gangbang site before they are old enough to understand what sex is.

Teenagers are an entirely different catagory.

iamben• 14 years ago

Sensible supervision is definitely the best way. When friends have asked for the best way to stop their kids looking at nefarious things on the Internet, my answer is usually to put computers in a communal room and not to give the kids smartphones until they're grown up enough.

I'm not sure how many kids pre-puberty are looking for porn - I know until a certain age I had absolutely no interest whatsoever. And for kids that are old enough to be curious about porn - you could probably argue that social networks and SMS and whatever else are just as dangerous.

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

I think the issue is that you can sometimes stumble on quite hardcore porn without actually looking for it. I've used plenty of non porn sites that have had porn as advertising.

The issue is at what point have the "grown up enough". The law says that porn is only for those > 18 but good look persuading a 16 year old that they aren't allowed a smartphone.

drequivalent• 14 years ago

Damn, govt, get off the internets. Porn is the very foudation of Internet's Maslow pyramid. If you remove all porn from the 'net (which is near-impossible and not worth an effort), there will be the only one website left. It will read "Put the porn back". And what the funk with all this opt-out bullshit? Why should I all of a sudden use the service I do not need and not even know about? If I want to filter my or my kid's (or sister, or whoever the funk is on my home network) browsing experience, I'd do that on my own gateway. I know better what I should and should not browse. Which leads me to expect, that the true target of filtering is not really porn.

ollysb• 14 years ago

Perhaps a sensible middle road would be to ask customers whether they want to enable "child protection filters" when they sign up to an ISP. This way parents have the best possible chance of protecting their children without the danger of over-reaching censorship.

TamDenholm2• 14 years ago

If you as a parent have internet in your house, its your responsibility to control your childrens access to it, not the governments. Same goes with porn or non-porn mags and DVD's.

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

I certainly agree in principle and am glad we don't have these measures.

OTOH I can understand why this might be a harder thing for parents than perhaps is acknowledged.

There are so many internet capable devices in households nowadays, including phones and games consoles etc. Sure you can try and implement some filtering but no system is bulletproof, especially when you consider P2P networks, anonymous proxies etc etc.

So I can understand the worries of parents who perhaps themselves barely understand the internet (likely their kids are much more savvy) themselves but want their children to have access to the internet as an education resource.

You might try and not allow any internet enabled device in bedrooms etc but then these days everything is an internet device and they will likely want to play games with always-on DRM etc.

jQueryIsAwesome6• 14 years ago

> The worries of the parents.

This is the part I don't understand, what are those worries? What do you think it happens when a kid watchs porn? What negative consequences have been demonstrated to happen? And is not like porn randomly plays itself in the browser, you have to use explicit sexual words for Google to respond with links to porn sites.

nodata2• 14 years ago

> in your house

That's hilariously old fashioned. Kids have smart phones.

TamDenholm2• 14 years ago

I didnt literally mean "in your house", if you as a parent allow your child to have a smart phone, again thats your responsibility to determine what you want your child to have access to.

tommorris5• 14 years ago

Here's what the filtering would mean: sexual health sites would also be blocked. Whenever I visit a university or corporation that has filtered Internet access, I always test out a few sexual health and LGBT support sites. Inevitably, a few of them are blocked. (Hey, my alma mater used to filter access to the Wikipedia article "Same-sex marriage" because it has the word "sex" in the URL.)

For years, websites that offer a space for young people to talk about sex, sexual orientation, relationships and so on have been blocked because too many of the people making the censorware presume that sex == porn or that LGBT == porn.

That's the cost of our anti-porn prudery: that people can't access sites that have advice on having healthy sex and relationships. Mandating a policy with that kind of side effect by law is a really dumb idea.

I've yet to see a compelling case that teenagers are being harmed by porn. But not having access to advice on how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases... that's really harmful. Whether it's providing sexual health advice or providing an anonymous shoulder to cry on for sexually confused teenagers, the Internet has saved plenty of young people's lives and health. It's helped people discover who they are, how to come out, how to have positive, healthy relationships. Ensuring that the next generation can have access to the enormous amount of good stuff that the Internet provides is precisely why we need to ensure we do not have government-instituted web censorship.

DanBC• 14 years ago

> Here's what the filtering would mean: sexual health sites would also be blocked

You list the result of bad filtering, and suggest that a national filter would have the same problems.

While I disagree with a national filter it's easy to think it would have been better than the lousy filters already existing.

Does the existing child porn filter prevent access to innocent sites?

tommorris5• 14 years ago

Yeah, but the policy wasn't to have one "national filter". It was to have the government tell ISPs "you must have a filter". How the ISPs implement it would be up to them. Which means they'd go buy the same crap that universities, libraries and corporations are currently using and implement that.

Deciding what counts as "porn" is very difficult. Deciding what is illegal child porn is, with the odd exception, pretty easy. But for legal non-child porn, well, what about a 15-year-old girl writing erotic Harry Potter shags Dracoy Malfoy fan fiction and sharing it in the fanfic community on LiveJournal or whatever. Does that count as "porn" in the same way as commercially produced videos does?

And it is trivially defeatable: one kind finds a stash of porn, puts it on USB sticks and sneakernets it to all the other teenage boys in the neighbourhood. Hell, sexting exists.

ramblerman• 14 years ago

> it's easy to think it would have been better than the lousy filters already existing.

Why on earth would you assume that? It's a government imposed solution with no competition or incentive to be user friendly. If anything every politician and bureaucrat involved in the project would rather make it more restrictive to be safe than risk their own ass.

superuser2• 14 years ago

>advice on having healthy sex and relationships

I highly doubt that an institution which blocks pornography wants its students having any sex at all.

tommorris5• 14 years ago

Abstinence education works wonderfully right up until the moment it stops working.