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Justine Roberts speaking about Internet Porn again...

1 reply

BadgersPaws · 19/05/2011 12:56

...and she still completely misses the point.

www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/19/mumsnet_regulation/

At one point she seems to possibly suggest that the reason that there was such a bad reaction to the (thankfully) abandonded campaign to get ISPs to block porn earlier in the year was that "Lots of people on Mumsnet are very keen on pornography".

No Justine, how wrong can you be?

The reason that so many people reacted badly was that the campaign was ill conceived, technically ignorant and influenced by dangerous extremists. And Justine doesn't appear to have listened very well to the arguments against the proposals as she said:

"I think the regulators should put pressure on the people involved, the ISPs to come up with a solution to this."

The "people involved" are the parents and not the ISPs, the ISPs cannot really do anything about this problem. Every single day that you chase the fantasy of there being some magic bullet that someone else can provide is yet another day when you avoid the one and only true solution, which is helping parents to both understand the problem and to deal with it.

Anyone who tells you that the ISPs can do something to make this go away is either technically ill-informed, out to make money from the problem or has some other agenda.

For example one of the leading groups who are pushing for ISP controls and filters are SaferMedia. They are the sort of people who do want outright censorship of the internet. The sort of people who want to block everything from sex education to Steven Segal movies. The sort of people who consider homosexuality a deviance. The sort of people who point to China's attempts to censor the Internet as being an example of how things should be done rather than as an example of horrific, expensive, deeply flawed and failing attempts to stifle freedom.

I really hope that the comments were taken somewhat out of context and the Justine understands that this really cannot be tackled at the ISP level.

I really hope that people like SaferMedia are still not trying to influence people like Justine.

Mumsnet could really make a difference in pushing for education, help and awareness over this issue.

However once again I'm worried...

JustineMumsnet · 19/05/2011 14:45

It was taken out of context. I clearly said that I thought parents were ultimately responsible for their children's internet safety and that government regulation was a bad idea because of all the suspicion/nervousness around potential miss-use. But I said I thought parents' needed help because the stats show that many don't use internet safety tools (only 54% parents use filters) and even Google safesearch and that in any case what about mobiles (half of children go online via mobiles) which are used outside the home. And that the ISPs in particular are well positioned to offer some help. Broadly what I called for was a sensible debate around the issue without it dissolving into hysteria about censorship and freedom of speech. After all we all (I think) agree about the desired outcome. I'm agnostic about how we get there but it's important to be able to have the debate, if only to raise awareness...

(ps the porn comment was a remark about no one's out to stop consenting adults view porn, not so keen on 8 year olds seeing it.

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