Claire Perry forces porn filter, then her page is blocked due to naughty words

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/25/the-best-story-yet-about-the-uks-online-porn-filters/

by appleflaxen • 13 years ago

111 41 13 years ago

DanBC6• 13 years ago

She discusses adult topics, and rightly is blocked by the filters she has campaigned for.

I hope that companies do not make any special effort to unblock her, and that they ask her to jump through the same hoops as any other blocked user.

This filter system is just clearly idiotic, and clueless idiot MPs forcing it onto the public need to dogfood the results.

a3n• 13 years ago

People should write to her, letting her know that they can't access her official site, because it's blocked.

On postcards.

Everybody.

DanBC6• 13 years ago

I certainly think that her constituents and anyone with a relevant interest should write her very simple messages explaining just why her idea is so stupid.

Some of what she says seems reasonable - "Why can't Google help with the problem of images of child sexual abuse" - but they're ignorant of what Google does to help, and what offenders do to find images of child sexual abuse.

It'd be great if she could educate herself about what the problems are, what people are doing to fix those problems, and what things still need to be pushed.

I'm not sure that would work though.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

That is probably how her supporters communicate normally. The land line phone is probably still regarded as witchcraft. Not to mention that her party has allowed the postal service to self destruct, so that they can sell it off cheap to their friends.

The worry for me as a Brit is that this current government claim to be supporters for personal freedom and responsibility.... Go figure.

sheetjs• 13 years ago

Other cases of internet hypocrisy:

After pushing for anti-piracy legislation, French President Sarkozy caught pirating music: http://torrentfreak.com/french-presidents-residence-busted-f...

RIAA and Homeland Security Caught Downloading Torrents: http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-and-homeland-security-caught-do...

Fox Entertainment pirating competitors' movies: https://torrentfreak.com/busted-bittorrent-pirates-at-sony-u...

ChristianMarks3• 13 years ago

So much for the use-mention distinction. Filters so far seem unable to maintain it.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 13 years ago

Right. making the use-mention distinction reliably is probably an AI-complete problem.

ChristianMarks3• 13 years ago

I make the assumption that censors, fanatics and some persons in positions of authority either have difficulty distinguishing use from mention, or choose not to make the distinction. For example (at the risk of offending certain sensibilities), I took the defensive attitude that the operating assumption in academia was that space-like separated, non-interacting particles at opposite ends of the universe were actively sexually harassing each other, and behaved accordingly.

jere• 13 years ago

I've never heard the use-mention distinction, but its interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction

However, the distinction doesn't seem to be relevant here. When Claire Perry is discussing "porn" on her site, she'd be using it, unless she's referring to the word itself. Example: http://www.claireperry.org.uk/my-news/previous-stories/clair...

Given that 83 per cent of people say that the easy availability of internet porn is damaging to children, shouldn't this be rolled out more quickly?

Unless there is a different meaining of use-mention not described on wikipedia.

ChristianMarks3• 13 years ago

I am using the phrase to refer to the distinction between 'discourse about X' and 'X-discourse', rather than the more limited technical sense given to it in the Wikipedia. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the better reference: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quotation/. More inclusive uses of the phrase 'use-mention distinction' are not uncommon. See, for instance, this entry on the use-mention distinction and political correctness in the Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005349.h... The Language Log concludes, "In sum, failure to distinguish between uses and mentions poses a danger to freedom of speech and rational enquiry as well as the danger of falsely accusing and condemning innocent people." The sense of the use-mention distinction appearing here refers not only to individually mentioned words, but phrases, sentences, paragraphs and entire bodies of discourse.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 13 years ago

When Claire Perry is discussing "porn" on her site, she'd be using it

Claire Perry is talking about porn, but she is not talking porn. It is unfeasably hard to reliably distinguish between the two; and regular keyword matching will reliably fail to do so.

hawkharris4• 13 years ago

Defending freedom of speech feels - and should feel - very painful. If you haven't felt like screaming, you haven't truly defended your rights to speech in a democratic nation.

Why? Because defending this freedom forces us to grapple with uncomfortable contradictions. I don't want to see Neo-Nazis protesting in a public area of my city, but I allow their right to speech because I don't want courts to set a precedent for banning speech about political issues.

I don't want underage children to view pictures of sexual violence, but I have to consider how blanket restrictions on sexual content will make it harder for adolescents to access information about safe sex and for adults to view legal pornography.

I think too many people expect speech-related issues to be simple and easy. They take a hard position because they feel uncomfortable with the ambiguity that comes with balancing our emotions with larger legal precedents.

The blanket bans on sexual content in the U.K. epitomize this: emotional concerns about "shielding" children from sexual content seem to have overshadowed more nuanced conversations about education and adults' freedom to access information.

lisper4• 13 years ago

defending this freedom forces us to grapple with uncomfortable contradictions

No, it doesn't. It just means that if you choose freedom you have to put up with people making choices and doing things that you don't approve of. It's a difficult choice for some people, but it's not a contradiction.

hawkharris4• 13 years ago

I think you and I are in agreement. We're just phrasing the same sentiment differently.

Swizec3• 13 years ago

As a former 12 year old boy, I don't understand why people are so adamant to protect children from sexual content. When you're old enough to know what you're looking at, it is all you want to look at and you will seek it out no matter what. Personally I used to browse between channels on the telly to get super grainy glimpses of porn. When that wasn't available and after our phone got blocked from calling hotlines, I would simply draw naked women for myself to look at.

When you aren't old enough to know what you're looking at, you won't really care about what you see and won't think twice about it. But really if you're older than, say, 6 or 7 you should know what sex is and how it works. Intellectually speaking at least. You won't really care for seeing porn because, well, LEGOs are far more interesting.

So really, I think all this "shield children omg" isn't so much about shielding children as it is about certain adults being obnoxious prudes and using children as an excuse to get their way.

DanBC6• 13 years ago

Personally I used to browse between channels on the telly to get super grainy glimpses of porn. When that wasn't available and after our phone got blocked from calling hotlines, I would simply draw naked women for myself to look at.

You can't see a difference between grainy glimpses of softcore porn or hand drawn images, and high definition easily available images of heavy duty porn?

hawkharris4• 13 years ago

As a fellow former 12-year-old boy, I agree that shielding children from legal sexual images doesn't usually serve a purpose other than to deprive them of an education.

We wouldn't restrict kids' access to math materials, then expect them to know calculus as adults. Similarly, kids who are banned from talking about and seeing sexual content can't be expected to understand sexual health.

From an objective standpoint, the interesting question is whether or not exposure to sexual content at early ages is harmful to children. I did some cursory research on this in college and found that:

a) There seems to a big problem with bias in studies concerning sex and adolescents. Even some of the most frequently cited studies use biased language (e.g. abstracts with the phrase "the problem of children viewing sex").

b) A major variable is whether or not parents are there to mediate the kids' exposure to sexual content — not just to restrict their access, but to provide context. To use the math analogy again, it's like the difference between explaining a chapter or dumping worksheets and a textbook on the table.

bmelton2• 13 years ago

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

- H.L. Mencken

hrkristian• 13 years ago

Either I don't understand the quote, or it's way off.

   The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

By 'beginning', you'd think you want to stop a criminal from becoming a criminal (general: a problem from becoming a problem) in the first place. Laws never do this, and the quote used "and", as if that is what a law does.

belorn• 13 years ago

The subject of censorship is always irrational in nature. The described painfulness comes when two equally irrational world views crashes, and each side try to use logic and ration in order to find a common ground.

I don't want underage children to view pictures of sexual violence.

In the 1990 TV censorship in Sweden, explicit violence was demonized to the point where a cartoon show called Darkwing Duck was banned mid season. People argued that the young audience of the day had picked up a nastier and darker form of violence, and used crime statistics as evidence. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre become a symbol, and the minister of education spoke how it "spread violence" to the population. Even the plain videocassette recorder became a target, as an enabler of this plague of spreading violence.

Sexual content however, now that’s educational. In family prime time, a show called "bullen" was a teenage show which talked about sexuality from a teenage perspective. "Activities" and genitalia was commonly on the screen when a subject to be discussed was introduced. Nudity or sex was never viewed as something bad, but simply a matter of fact.

We would get the same painful experience described in the above comment if one person from the "video violence is bad" camp would meet the "sexual content is bad" camp. Each sides would try to use rational argument, which then would crash with the other sides irrational and emotional concerns.

anon1685• 13 years ago

As much as I detest censorship it seems to me that there's a good argument to be made for censoring pornography, or even outlawing it altogether.

I believe pornography is a destructive force in modern society. If modern leaders have (more or less) come to the conclusion that environmental pollution is harmful to earth and to human kind, and have put in place measures (however controversial) to reduce said pollution, maybe it's time for them to recognize that pornography is just as harmful, and that it too should be stopped, or at least reduced. If we need to take measures to protect our bodies, should we not also protect our souls?

summerdown22• 13 years ago

I find this line of argument fascinating.

To take a parallel argument, we appear to be living at a time of mass reduction in violence and crime. Yet violent video games are everywhere.

I like to think I'm in favour of evidence-based policy. What evidence do you have for believing that pornography is a destructive force in modern society?

When I look, I tend to find things like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President's_Commission_on_Obsc...

On balance the report found that obscenity and pornography were not important social problems, that there was no evidence that exposure to such material was harmful to individuals, and that current legal and policy initiatives were more likely to create problems than solve them.

hawkharris4• 13 years ago

I'm genuinely interested in your logic here. Can you tell me more about how pornography is a destructive force in modern society?

Also, I'm curious as to whether you oppose all pornography or the type of pornography that is most prevalent in, say, the U.S. and the U.K.

coldcode• 13 years ago

The greatest disease in the world is Political Stupidity.

ama729• 13 years ago

The UK has decided that all ISPs must deploy opt-in pornography filters

Wait, wasn't the big problem being that this filter is opt-out? Then why is everyone being so upset about it? Such filters existed for years after all.

Brakenshire• 13 years ago

I agree that is the most important distinction. The filter which is just coming into force, on BT (what was British Telecom, and one of the largest ISPs) is what's called an 'unavoidable question', where you have to make a choice when you first go online, to be filtered or not (and if so, at which level) so effectively opt-in or out. I don't really understand why people complain about that on free speech grounds. There has been government pressure to set up decent filters, but these are ultimately just private sector ISP-level parental controls. I would personally expect such features to be standard.

Claire Perry forces porn filter, then her page is blocked due to naughty words

Related Stories