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Do you support proposals for ISPs to be forced to block porn sites?
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Personally, I've not been convinced by any of the arguments put forward for such a measure. I'm also highly irritated by the horrendous articles published in various publications claiming things like 'how the internet turned my child into a depraved sex monster' or something along those lines - they are wholly unconvincing, manipulative and I would not be at all surprised if they were faked.
I think it's also worth pre-empting the 'won't somebody please think of the children' argument, too.
There's been an awful lot of sensationalism and nonsense spread about the impact on young people potentially (just potentially) being able to access porn.
As someone who has *actually grown up* with the internet - not merely seen it emerge and then speculate about how children interface with it - but someone who as actually lived among the first generation of children with internet access, I find these arguments utterly unconvincing and wholly one-sided. Were children in my school - a very small, remote rural school I might add - accessing pornography? Yes, they were. Just as they were masturbating, swearing, talking about sex etc. I have never seen a shred of evidence that this is a process which damages a person's psychology which is not already damaged. It's just as fatuous and unsupported as the arguments people used to make about roleplaying games in the '80s, or video games in the '90s/2000s - I'm highly, highly sceptical that it has anything like the level of impact on children that people seem to think it does.
I consider my internet-access from an early age one of the most precious things of my life. I've had access to information I never would have otherwise (see for instance the huge numbers of highly accessible science education videos on Youtube, from users like Thunderf00t). Porn is only as big a part of the internet as sex is in the lives of human beings generally - a big one, yes. But it's not the defining and overriding feature by any stretch of the imagination.
There's been an awful lot of sensationalism and nonsense spread about the impact on young people potentially (just potentially) being able to access porn.
As someone who has *actually grown up* with the internet - not merely seen it emerge and then speculate about how children interface with it - but someone who as actually lived among the first generation of children with internet access, I find these arguments utterly unconvincing and wholly one-sided. Were children in my school - a very small, remote rural school I might add - accessing pornography? Yes, they were. Just as they were masturbating, swearing, talking about sex etc. I have never seen a shred of evidence that this is a process which damages a person's psychology which is not already damaged. It's just as fatuous and unsupported as the arguments people used to make about roleplaying games in the '80s, or video games in the '90s/2000s - I'm highly, highly sceptical that it has anything like the level of impact on children that people seem to think it does.
I consider my internet-access from an early age one of the most precious things of my life. I've had access to information I never would have otherwise (see for instance the huge numbers of highly accessible science education videos on Youtube, from users like Thunderf00t). Porn is only as big a part of the internet as sex is in the lives of human beings generally - a big one, yes. But it's not the defining and overriding feature by any stretch of the imagination.
"the problem with this is where do you stop? And indeed how do you stop it totally without going China's route?"
You can't - and even the Chinese example meets with highly variable levels of success:
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Sure the 'Great Firewall' has made access to some sites a little more difficult, but it's by no means been as succesful as it is often represented.
You can't - and even the Chinese example meets with highly variable levels of success:
http://
Sure the 'Great Firewall' has made access to some sites a little more difficult, but it's by no means been as succesful as it is often represented.
I agree that allowing ISPs to be our guardians isn't the way to go. There's another big (technical) problem with blocking pornographic sites - what do you define as porn? There are (rightly) filters we have at work that block certain sites, but these 'content monitoring' software utilities use very broad brushes in their definition of what porn actually is.
