This isn’t about the porn
It’s about censorship
The UK government is wanting to censor pornography and other “inappropriate” material from the internet in order to protect children from viewing these images.
It’s easy to see where they are coming from, children shouldn’t really be looking at these types of content. They’re children.
But the problem lies inside the “inappropriate” material idea. What exactly is “inappropriate”? The Chinese government blocks anything they define as “inappropriate” and we are all aware of the Great Firewall of China.
Censorship is never right, it breaches free speech rights. The company that will be behind our own great firewall, Huawei already has close connections to the Chinese government.
Davey C said the reason behind our future censorship programme is to “protect our children and their innocence”. Why is this being left to the government? Surely this is up to parents to protect their children, not the government.
Major ISPs have their own child filtering systems and there are a dozen programmes on the market that deal specifically with this issue. Perhaps money and effort should be put into awareness of these products because the current proposal is just censorship.
Censorship should be restricted to illegal content, only. When they start to block porn, they’ll move onto other things that are deemed unsuitable.
England Riots (2011)
During the riots in England a few years ago, social networks and messaging services were blamed for communication during the riots, so what did they do? They shut it down.
My point is, the government will shut down, block, censor whatever they don’t like or agree with. Again, much like the Chinese government.
There’s currently a petition to stop ISP filtering on gov.uk — Sign it here http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51746. Should it reach 100,000 it will be debated in parliament.
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