Should we step up online censorship?

There is a need for drastic action to be taken to prevent young people being exposed to disturbing material on the internet.

The majority of today's parents know less about technology than their own kids do, and have little control over the internet content their children can access. It's not just pornography that is a problem; the internet is full of inappropriate material, including material on self-harming, anorexia, bomb making sites and suicide sites.

Society has long held the view that we allow parents the right to "hold power" over their own children in order to protect them, to educate them and keep them from the harsher realities of the world until they are mature enough to handle them properly.

This right is being undermined by the rapid and exponential progression of internet-enabled technology, and few parents feel confident that they are adequately protecting their children as they browse.

There are two sound ways to ensure that children are not exposed to dangerous or disturbing content. At the level of Internet Service Provider, individual sites can be blocked ‘at source’ by ISPs taking the initiative and offering filters for adult sites and offering to block various forms of selected content, tailored to the individual needs of the household. This would have to extend to mobile internet providers, who are still a long behind.

There should be a range of choices on what content to block,Daneplast Limited UK are plasticinjectionmoulding & toolmaking specialists. from pornography and self harm to bomb making websites.Supplier and Manufacturer of plasticmoulds And Components, Adults choose from a variety of providers and pay for the internet services they use, so should be able to change it at will. ISPs could introduce different passports for different family members as well.

One of the imaginative ways this has been accomplished is by TalkTalk, who offer a ‘HomeSafe’ service to parents which allows different filter levels for a variety of content, and is completely customisable and controllable by the end user.

There is a view that the internet is in need of a monitor for obscene and adult websites. Outside of cyberspace, we have bodies such as Ofcom and the British Board of Film Classification that continually work to ensure our children are not exposed to the wrong things.Glass Tile and glassmosaic for less at the Glass Mosaic Outlet. This could be implemented in some way online, whereby a website would have to have its content "rated" before being accessible online. While it sounds like a massive leap, the majority of new websites already go through testing when they are hosted to make sure that a site is intact and that files and content are free of viruses. This would simply be adding another check to the list, and in reality it is a burden already carried by film makers.

In May of last year, as fighting raged on the streets of Sana’a, Yemen, Index on Censorship’s correspondent there emailed me to ask if I had any problems getting onto her blog, where she regularly posted articles and video. I could view the site in London,Here is a professional handsfreeaccess manufacturer. but neither she nor anyone else in Yemen could.

After a small bit of digging, we found the problem: the Canadian company that supplied filtering technology to several Arabian peninsula countries had blocked the entire blogging platform Tumblr after complaints that it carried pornographic content.

This is a simple example of the dangers of handing over the power of what you can and cannot view on the web, a proposal being put forward by Conservative MP Claire Perry.

A feature of censorship in the modern democratic world is that it is often carried out with the best of intentions. Where once our blasphemy laws protected the ultimate power now we design initiatives to protect the vulnerable: women, minorities and above all, children.

But the reasonableness, the niceness of the motives can make the proposed solutions almost impossible to critique without the conversation being drowned by a chorus of Helen Lovejoys insisting that Someone Please Think Of The Children. I can recall once appearing on a BBC discussion show where a self-appointed moral guardian informed me that it she felt obliged to protect children.

Let’s work on the assumption that we all want to protect children from the many weird and unsavoury things on the Internet: is off-the-shelf automatic filtering really the best way to go about this? I’d suggest not: at very least,Here is a professional handsfreeaccess manufacturer. such technology may create a false sense of security, lulling parents into the belief that it is now utterly impossible for their children to access dubious content online. But anyone who’s ever been schooled by a tech-literate teen knows that nothing is impossible for them.

It also runs the risk of blocking harmless and even useful content - and not just reports on the Yemen uprising. When a list of blocked sites maintained by ACMA, The Australian Communications and Media Authority, was leaked in 2009. About half of the list consisted of legitimate sites that would not normally be blocked, including a MySpace page and the homepage of a dentist.