Dear Politicians

[andrewducker]

If you wish to protect children from bumping into pictures of naked people, then the correct way to do it is to set up criteria of acceptability, certify sites if they meet this, and then give parents the tools which would only allow their children access to that list, should they so wish it. It is not to attempt to control the entirety of the internet and turn it into your idea of a safe space.

Context.

(Is there a general child-safe accreditation system? If not, why not? It seems like the kind of thing that the government could get behind.)

Comments

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

American method of controlling the internet - let the companies charge for access to different sites.

British method of controlling the internet - Legislate, legislate and ban.

End result - people find ways around it.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Dear Politicians, if you wish to protect children from bumping into pictures of naked people, then it is none of your damn business, that's the job of parents to monitor and control.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Certify sites? And how long will that take per site? And how many new child-safe sites are added to the net per day?

Not that that'd be any easier to do than it would be to maintain a list of porn sites for ISPs to block. Which they do here in NZ, apparently, but only for sites classed as illegal. (ie. child porn.) And it's opt-in for the ISPs, not compulsory.

Oh, and I heard of a TV porn-blocker that people could get with their paid-for TV service. Apparently only about one subscriber wanted it. Which means most parents wouldn't bother with a net-blocker either.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Potentially, however, easier to administer as people would actively want their site to be certified child-safe, rather than actively *not* wanting it certified as porn.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Except it'd mean there'd be a backlog of about 99.9% of child-safe sites waiting for their seal of approval at any given time. How big a department are you proposing to vet them all?

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I'm not proposing any, I'm just pointing out that your statement that it wouldn't be easier is not true.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

To get your site certified safe would require you to submit it (so it gets quickly into the to-do list), it being deemed unsafe until the inspectors have said otherwise. That would create a heck of a lot of work for the inspectors to prevent a backlog building up.

A porn-site list on the other hand would get sites submitted by those who stumble on them (or seek them out) and believe they should be on the list, or by the porn-sites themselves (in some cases, maybe).

Either way, a lot of work for the inspectors. However, it requires only one page on a site to be pornographic for the site to be considered a porn site, and those saying 'this is porn' will probably link to that page. Simple work for the inspectors. Compare checking that with checking a site of x-thousand pages someone has said is child-safe.

Still think maintaining a child-safe list would be easier than a porn list?

[andrewducker]

Ok, so LJ just got made into a porn site because of a post on someone's journal - now you have to go through a process to get it unblocked. (Repeat for 5000 more sites).

The point is that the internet is not 'for kids'. It's for everyone. If you want a kid-safe internet then build it, don't restrict everyone else's internet.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

But you couldn't get it unblocked, because that one post makes it a porn site, so it has to be blocked.

Whereas with your child-safe approach it'd be deemed to be unsafe for children until you submitted it and it was passed as safe for children.

Note I'm not advocating either approach (by a government). Even if they could be made to work, it's the wrong approach.

Incidentally, there's a generation who've grown up with the internet now. What do 18-year-olds say about the effect on them of porn they may have seen when younger? What's the average age they first saw hard-core porn, for instance, and how do they think it affected them?

[andrewducker]

But you couldn't get it unblocked, because that one post makes it a porn site, so it has to be blocked.
Depends on whether it was posted against the terms of service, and has now been removed.

There have been a few things I've bumped into about porn which say that even more people see it as kids than before, and basically there aren't boys out there who don't have access to porn. Whether that has a negative effect I have no idea.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

It'd probably not be necessary to have them vetted, sites could self certify. Of course you'd get some people who would maliciously certify their site as kid friendly when it's a site of goatse pictures or something, but the majority of porn sites would self certify (and I think a lot of them already do), and the BBC / kids sites would do so as well.

[andrewducker]

Also - if you want to make sure that they're not going to be malicious, make them take out insurance. Any website that repeatedly fails to keep itself 'clean' will end up costing itself a fortune.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Well ... you have the problem of foreign sites and so on, but I think in principle the idea would work. It doesn't have to be a perfect system, only an improvement over the current system.

Someone might object that this is opening up a website to being sued for all sorts of reasons they can't account for, but in reality the courts in the UK aren't like those in the US, and they deal with cases of people being sued in a responsible manner.

[andrewducker]

I don't think the current system needs any improvements. It's just fine. What people are proposing is actively worse than it.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

But it wouldn't be worse with respect of children accessing porn, which is the point.

It'd be worse in the sense that you'd have to tick a checkbox when you ordered your internet.

[andrewducker]

I'm just fine with how it is in respect of children accessing porn - which is that it places control in the hands of parents.

If people wanted to tick a box when they ordered the internet asking to be censored then that's up to them, of course. Anything else would be far worse, as far as I'm concerned.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I don't think it does place control in the hands of parents because parents aren't properly aware of the problem and don't have the technical savvy to install the appropriate software etc.

I understand that you believe it be far far worse but I don't see that you've made a convincing argument that your ability to have unrestricted internet access would actually be impinged upon in any significant fashion by you having to check a checkbox once.

[andrewducker]

Because imposing censorship is wrong. I can't make it any clearer than that. Wrong. Bad. Objectionable. Heinous.

I disagree with it in all its forms, and believe that it is inherently negative.

I know that this is not a mainstream view, but it's one I'm terribly passionate about.

If it's a service that ISPs wish to provide, then I have no objection to people signing up to it for themselves, but I object with all my heart on it being something that becomes normal. It should be abnormal, and considered something people do for specific reasons and limited time periods (i.e. because they believe their children will be scarred by seeing some things).

[robhu.livejournal.com]

OK, so the issue for you is that it would make people think that censorship was normative. But of course there is already censorship on the internet, child pornography is (at least partially) censored at present.

I don't think people's concern is that they believe their children will be scarred by seeing some things, but rather that there is lots of evidence that access to pornography by children has a damaging effect on their ability to form loving relationships (which is of course quite a different sort of statement).

[andrewducker]

Cite!

(I'm happy to be persuaded of this, but I've not seen any evidence of this, outside of a small minority who are addicted to it.)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Take a look at the books and papers in the references list here.

[andrewducker]

The cites in that pdf mostly seem to refer to sex and porn addicts. Which are, last I checked, a very small proportion of people.

The paper is also published by Utah State University, which makes me sceptical of their lack of bias. Which isn't to say that they're making stuff up, but I'd be completely unsurprised if they were selective in their choice of references.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Some of the papers they refer to reference addiction (although I'd note that most of the men I know who use pornography are addicted), but not all of them.

I specifically didn't ask you to just accept what Utah State University wrote, but the references, which are in a variety of journals.

[andrewducker]

Which is fair enough - but I'm not going to spend time today tracking it down, I really should get some work done. If you bump into a meta-analysis showing that porn is harmful I'd be interested in seeing one. I read enough science aggregators that I'd have thought I'd be bumping into them if they were at all common.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I have seen such meta studies in the past, but I don't have any to hand.

There is a lot of peer reviewed material out there (some of which I've now showed to you) showing that pornography has a net negative on relationships, and as far as I know not a great deal showing the opposite.

[andrewducker]

Um. I didn't see any peer reviewed articles. I saw links to titles. I have no idea what those articles say, or how many of them say that pornography has a negative effect on all relationships.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

New government revenue stream!

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Or just introduce a meta tag for levels of adult content and have a browser option to turn on blocking. (With pages not having them being classed as some level of risk.)

Would still require some way to check for malicious sites though.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I thought there were several attempts to certify child-safe sites, back in the late 90s/early 00s?

[skington.livejournal.com]

Problem with that idea, other than the whole nanny state thing, and the sheer impossibility of compiling such a white-list while still retaining the nature of the Internet, is that e.g. Google Translate lets you view any arbitrary website.

You're not going to block Google, are you?

[andrewducker]

Google Translate is blocked in my office for exactly that reason.

Google caches, likewise.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Isn't this what net nanny programs do?

I always assumed that you specify the sites a user can visit and then they can't visit anything else. A bit crap, but I always assumed older kids and their parents would have a chat, and the restrictions could be removed.


Sometimes I feel politicians take "internet service providers" too far. They provide a connection to the internet, they are not responsible for all the content.

[andrewducker]

I agree entirely.

And yeah, Net Nanny programs do this kind of thing, but they can be worked around by kids, which is why people are asking the government to do something about it.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

If the kids are old enough to work around it (and potentially go looking for pron), then they're old enough to have a conversation. I' very much in the camp of the "parents should be managing their child's behaviour, not the government".

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Although, I would reduce it down to a behavioural/social issue :)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I think the idea has some merit, but only in as much as it's a system which everyone can choose to opt out of. There are already filtering systems for mobile etc which work quite well (I sometimes go to NSFW sites that aren't porn as such on my phone which are always blocked).

Such a system would not need to be perfect, it'd just have to be an improvement over the current state of affairs.

I think people are overreacting with respect to censorship etc. If it were a system that an adult could not opt out of then yes that would be bad, but otherwise as long as it's a system designed to limit access to porn for children then it sounds like a very good idea.

I understand that there are all sorts of technical problems that impinge on how well it would block porn, and a whole raft of downsides (things being incorrectly blocked etc), but there is a lot of evidence that hardcore pornography is being used by a large percentage of young children and that this is having negative effects on their ability to form loving relationships as adults.

[andrewducker]

I object to opt-out systems on principle for this. If people want to opt in to censorship then that's up to them, but you don't get to opt me in with you. It changes cultural norms. There's a big difference from "I turned on my kid-filter" and "I chose porn", which is how it will be viewed.

The internet is inherently unsafe. I have people on my friends list who occasionally post NSFW material on their LJ, and I'd like them to be able to continue doing so without having to worry about whether it causes them to vanish from the internet.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Maybe it would change cultural norms (although I'm not sure it's culturally normal to consume hardcore pornography anyway), that's debatable and it's debatable whether that'd be a bad thing.

The internet is inherently unsafe, but the point is we could make it safer for children without any real impact on adults who wanted unrestricted access (they'd just tick a checkbox when signing up). Imagine instead a world where every WHS Smiths was packed with the kind of pornography you find on the internet, in that world WHS Smiths would be inherently unsafe but that does not mean that it has to be that way, adding restrictions to what is in WHS Smiths (as there is in the real world) does not prevent adults from accessing hardcore pornography if they want to, but it does reduce exposure to porn for children.

[andrewducker]

The internet is inherently unsafe, but the point is we could make it safer for children without any real impact on adults who wanted unrestricted access

Yes we could - by offering people the chance to censor the internet for their children, if they so wish.

Anything else is the kind of censorship which I am revolted by, and far worse than children encountering porn.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Do you find WHS Smiths revolting because it has a censorship system?

Imagine that at one point in your life you had a button to press and if you pressed it there would be no censorship on what was sold in WHS Smiths. Would that still make it revolting?

Do you find all censorship revolting? For instance there is an existing system which censors child pornography - do you find that revolting, would you prefer an internet without such a censorship system?

[andrewducker]

Child porn is the result of illegal acts being carried out. Dealing with the results of rape and abuse is something I can live with. Censoring of child porn that's fake, on the other hand, I object to entirely.

I object to Amazon censoring their works. WH Smiths certainly used to have more adult material, placed above the heads of children. I can live with that as a compromise.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I didn't quite get your second sentence, are you saying that videos of rape and abuse are something that you think should not be censored on the internet? In any case the point I was making was that censorship already exists, so if you think censorship is always bad (which I think is what you said) then does it not follow that you'd think that this existing censorship is bad?

WHS Smiths have banned pornography in their stores for a long time (and have even faced legal challenges about it which they've won), although they do sell FHM etc.

Perhaps my analogy could be improved: At the moment there is a rating system that aims to prevent the sale of 18 films to 10 year olds, and similarly would prevent hard core pornography in a sex shop being sold to a 10 year old. This is a form of censorship imposed by the government. Do you think it would be better if there were no law preventing the sale of hard core pornography in a sex shop to a 10 year old?

[andrewducker]

I can live with children having less rights than adults, as they are still forming their basic defense systems, and need to be introduced to things slowly.

It's also not possible to make the real world into somewhere where children only go to some places - unlike the internet, where it's as possible to make some places child-only as it is to make some places adult-only.

I do object to some of the censorship that exists in the real world, as well as the virtual one.

And yes, there's evidence that legalising child pornography is linked to lowering rates of abuse, making it something I'm in favour of:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-11/s-lcp113010.php
(Although, obviously, not with real children.)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I think you're quite wrong to argue that the real world can't be made in to somewhere some places are adult only. There are lots of places where child access is restricted such as lapdancing clubs and sex shops.

I also object to some of the censorship which exists in the world, but not all of it.

I still don't understand from your response whether you think it would be better if there were no law preventing the sale of hardcore pornography in a sex shop to a ten year old.

Personally I don't think that single study is sufficient grounds for legalising child pornography - for any significant policy change there ought to be a lot of supporting evidence, not a single study. Given that the main example is of the Czech republic and as the country became a free country at the same time, it's not very clear what is the cause of the change.

[andrewducker]

I think you're quite wrong to argue that the real world can't be made in to somewhere some places are adult only.

Sorry, phrased myself badly - you can limit place X to be adult only, but you can't limit children to only go to places A, B and C. They'll be all over the place, except for the places you put specific barriers up. Whereas on the internet you could as easily put the barriers around the places they can see as the places they can't.

I said I was fine with limits on what kids can buy - and hardcore porn is one of the things that most parents are, at least publically, against their children seeing, it makes sense to place their porn habits in the hands of their parents. I don't believe it's very effective (porn used to circulate amongst schoolkids when I was one, before the web existed), but I can understand why people do it.

Personally, I think the number of 10-year-olds who want to buy hardcore porn is a fraction of a percent, and so it's not really an issue. But people do seem to get pretty het up about it.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

So do you think that censorship of buying hard core porn videos for children in the real world is:
a) A good thing
b) A good thing if the parents agree (i.e. the government shouldn't be able to make it illegal for a 10 year to get hard core porn)
c) A good thing unless the child wants it themselves

?

A recent survey showed that a third of ten year olds access porn on the internet. I find that a very troubling statistic because I do not think pornography is appropriate for children aged 10.

[andrewducker]

I think that censoring it generally places control in the hands of the parents, which is a good thing - because parents cannot, in the real world, control where their children go.

I'm quite surprised by that stat. I'd love to know whether it was "1/3 of 10 year olds have encountered porn at some point" (completely unsurprising to me) or "1/3 of 10 year olds are downloading porn regularly" (which I'd find more surprising). The other way around for 14 year olds, obviously.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Or if you're already signed up, receive a message saying if you don't specifically say you want adult content, your internet will be switched over to an R13 level.

Doing it at ISPs is stupid, since net access will be wanted by both children and adults in a typical home. And when it comes to adults, what is and isn't acceptable to them varies widely. And what they consider acceptable for themselves they may not consider acceptable for their seven-year-old.

The checkbox should be in the browser, not elsewhere.