![\"censorshipsucks\"](\"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/censorshipsucks.jpg\")
The conservative government in the UK has announced that all households in the UK will have to officially opt-in to allowing porn by notifying their ISPs of their intention. The Guardian reports:<\/p>\nThe conservative government in the UK has announced that all households in the UK will have to officially opt-in to allowing porn by notifying their ISPs of their intention. The Guardian reports:<\/p>\n
In the most dramatic step by the government to crack down on the “corroding” influence of pornography on childhood, the prime minister will say that all internet users will be contacted by their service providers and given an “unavoidable choice” on whether to use filters.<\/p>\n
The changes will be introduced by the end of next year. As a first step, customers who set up new broadband accounts or switch providers would have to actively disable the filters by the end of this year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’ve only been vaguely following these filter attempts by the UK government because, well, we’ve already been there, done that here in Australia<\/a>. The Labor government spent years trying to introduce a porn filter here and have only just this year given it up as unfeasible<\/a>. That’s on top of all the freedom of speech and human rights issues it raises.<\/p>\n
But the British are very determined, it seems. The government and pro-censorship forces doing all the standard things:using the spectre of child porn to ban consensual adult porn, ramping up moral panic about the horrors of “extreme pornography” without actually defining what they mean by “extreme”. And of course, letting us know they’re only doing it to protect the children. Won’t somebody think of the children!<\/p>\n
The “opt-in to porn model” invites the following questions:<\/p>\n
\n
- Who makes the list of porn to be filtered?<\/li>\n
- Who decides what constitutes “porn”? Who decides what constitutes “extreme porn”? What are the definitions?<\/li>\n
- Is the list public or kept secret?<\/li>\n
- What about LGBT content, sex education, discussions of sex?<\/li>\n
- What about sites that accidentally\/wrongly end up on the list? Is there an appeals process?<\/li>\n
- What about the fact that millions of new URLs and gigabytes of adult content are freshly produced every single day?<\/li>\n
- What about the fact that adults may wish to view adult content in houses where there are children?<\/li>\n
- What about the millions of households that have no children?<\/li>\n
- What about the fact that it’s actually the job of parents, not the government, to make decisions about what content is appropriate for their children to see?<\/li>\n
- What about privacy and the right of adults to view porn without having to notify their ISP and the government about it?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
That’s just the issues that I can think of off the top of my head. Obviously the UK government doesn’t give a toss about any of those things, so long as the Daily Mail and the pearl clutching prudes are mollified.<\/p>\n
Part of me wants to dismiss the whole thing – Australia’s filtering experiment has shown that it’s a ridiculous expensive waste of time and money that ultimately won’t work. How long is it going to take the UK to work this out?<\/p>\n
I must admit, I find myself wondering what will happen if ISPs DO ask people if they want porn. People aren’t as nervous about discussing porn use anymore. Will we see a majority of Britons come out in favour of it? And if so, will this change the anti-porn attitude that prevails because politicians think they are representing a “silent majority”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The conservative government in the UK has announced that all households in the UK will have to officially opt-in to allowing porn by notifying their ISPs of their intention. The Guardian reports: In the most dramatic step by the government to crack down on the “corroding” influence of pornography on childhood, the prime minister will say that all internet users will be contacted by their service providers and given an Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[910,332,815],"class_list":["post-4023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship","tag-censorship","tag-filter","tag-uk"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}