Internet Porn Censorship

A Paris court has offered to organize a mediation to find a way to prevent minors from accessing pornography on the internet.

Campaigners had asked telecom operators to immediately block several porn websites but French law does not actually specify how this should be achieved.

The decision to order the parties to negotiate will be formally taken soon as the French internet censor ARCOM does not seem willing or able to specify how age verification should be done.

The Cypriot company MG Freesit es, publisher of the Pornhub platform, one of the five sites targeted in this procedure, for its part filed a priority question of constitutionality (QPC) which calls into question the legitimacy of Arcom to act.

The court will decide on October 4 whether or not to send this QPC to the Court of Cassation. If this was not the case, a new civil hearing would be organized to examine the case on the merits.

During the debates, the lawyers representing Pornhub, Tukif, XHamster, Xvideos, Xnxx, targeted in December 2021 by a formal notice from Arcom and which are among the most visited sites in France, tried to prove their goodwill. " None of the technical solutions that we have tested have proven to be satisfactory.

Recent reports from the Cnil and Peren, the government's center of expertise in data protectin, have recalled the risks associated with existing majority verification solutions offered by the industry, while by paving the way for a system based on trusted third parties.

The UK's data protection censors at the Information Commissioner's Office ICO have generated a disgracefully onerous red tape nightmare called the Age Appropriate Design Code that requires any internet service that provides any sort of grown up content to evaluate the age of all users so that under 18s can be protected from handing over sensitive ID data. Of course the age checking usually requires all users to hand over lots of sensitive and dangerous ID data to any website that asks.

Now the ICO has decided to make these requirements of porn sites given that they are often accessed by under 18s. ICO writes:

Next steps

We will continue to evolve our approach, listening to others to ensure the code is having the maximum impact.

For example, we have seen an increasing amount of research (from the NSPCC, 5Rights, Microsoft and British Board of Film Classification), that children are likely to be accessing adult-only services and that these pose data protection harms, with children losing control of their data or being manipulated to give more data, in addition to content harms. We have therefore revised our position to clarify that adult-only services are in scope of the Children's code if they are likely to be accessed by children.

As well as engaging with adult-only services directly to ensure they conform with the code, we will also be working closely with Ofcom and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to establish how the code works in practice in relation to adult-only services and what they should expect. This work is continuing to drive the improvements necessary to provide a better internet for children.

Irish Injustice Minister Helen McEntee has voiced her concern that pornography has become too easily accessible and more violent and degrading , after a survey by a campaign group claimed that one in five men in Ireland aged under 55 watch porn daily.

The survey, carried out by the Men's Development Network, found that more than 70% of men under 45 have reported using porn at least once a week.

Reacting to the findings, McEntee said:

Pornography is too easily accessible, it has become more violent and degrading. It has changed the way younger people view sexual relationships.

Men and boys can become agents of change by challenging discrimination, sexism, and violence and I welcome the tireless work that Men's Development Network does in this area.

I am glad that my department has been of assistance this year by providing funding for its awareness-raising campaigns.

I'm confident that, through continued education, we can support men and boys, and women and girls, to fulfil their aspirations, unconstrained by narrow stereotypes. We must continue to work together.

Our recently-published third National Strategy on Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence takes a zero-tolerance approach and will support us all, over the next five years, to face up to the excuses we as a society make for unacceptable behaviours.

A government spokeswoman for the DES or Digital Economy and Society Ministry that censors the internet in Thailand said that everything was being done to protect young people from online pornography.

Noppawan Huajaiman said that this was a concern of Thai PM Prayuth Chan-ocha. So the DES were monitoring the situation closely, following up on parental complaints, giving advice and ensuring that the law was followed to the letter.

She said that court orders can be obtained to remove obscene content and offenders can be jailed for five years and get 100,000 baht (£2300) fines under 2007 legislation. But she also said that parents can and should complain to platforms when they see obscene material.

Thai ISPs routinely block major porn websites but the blocks can be readily evaded using VPNs or TOR

Researchers in China claim to be able to detect porn watching brain waves for the purpose of censorship. The helmet-like device can detect spikes in human brainwave patters when the watcher is presented with pornographic imagery.

In order to extend and automate the porn censorship that is already going on, Beijing Jiaotong University researchers developed the mind-reading helmet, which looks more like a shower cap covered in wires, to maximise the efficiency of it's current efforts. It's able to detect pornographic imagery with high accuracy, and is even able to filter through potentially detracting brain waves caused by emotional states, low energy levels, and random thoughts.

Researchers note that the technology worked almost every single time participants were presented with explicit imagery. However, it did trigger some false alarms leading to accuracy claims of 80%.

It's assumed that these will be tools to help porn appraisers do their jobs more effectively; rather than clicking through hundreds of images a day, assigning them either a pass or fail on the horny scale, they can be shown a bulk of images in quick succession, and the computer will use their brainwave data to do the rest.

Ukrainian activists have reportedly started buying ad space on adult sites accessible in Russia to bypass Vladimir Putin's ramped-up censorship efforts and provide accurate information about the invasion.

Jemimah Steinfeld, editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship explained that adult sites are perfect conduits for disseminating information to counteract state propaganda.

Steinfeld cited Ukrainian digital marketing expert Anastasiya Baydachenko as saying that adult sites offer huge audiences whose operators prioritize profits over politics and are therefore quite willing to take her money.

Baydachenko first tried buying ads on Google, YouTube, Facebook and other high-traffic sites, but Russia's fake news law undermined that effort -- whereas the ads on adult sites have reached hundreds of millions of internet users in Russia.

Offsite Article: French lawyers provide the best summary yet

15th June 2022. See article from taylorwessing.com

 

Offsite Article: Have we opened Pandora's box?

20th June 2022. See article from tandfonline.com

Abstract

In thinking about the developing online harms regime (in the UK and elsewhere1) it is forgivable to think only of how laws placing responsibility on social media platforms to prevent hate speech may benefit society. Yet these laws could have insidious implications for free speech. By drawing on Germany's Network Enforcement Act I investigate whether the increased prospect of liability, and the fines that may result from breaching the duty of care in the UK's Online Safety Act - once it is in force - could result in platforms censoring more speech, but not necessarily hate speech, and using the imposed responsibility as an excuse to censor speech that does not conform to their objectives. Thus, in drafting a Bill to protect the public from hate speech we may unintentionally open Pandora's Box by giving platforms a statutory justification to take more control of the message.

See full article from tandfonline.com

 

Offsite Article: The Online Safety Act - An Act of Betrayal

5th July 2022. See article from ukcolumn.org by Iain Davis

The Online Safety Bill (OSB) has been presented to the public as an attempt to protect children from online grooming and abuse and to limit the reach of terrorist propaganda.

This, however, does not seem to be its primary focus. The real objective of the proposed Online Safety Act (OSA) appears to be narrative control.