The Best Story Yet About The UK's Online Porn Filters

Tim Worstall, Contributor

This is a very short little story indeed but it is just too, too, delicious to not give it airtime. The UK has decided that all ISPs must deploy opt-in pornography filters: so that children are not by chance or mishap exposed to “legal hardcore porn” in the words of the Prime Minister, David Cameron. This is, as you are obviously aware, as a result of a campaign by the usual suspects to insist that teenage boys looking at naked people is going to bring about the very fall of our civilisation.

What the campaign and the campaigners forget of course is that the internet tends to route around censorship. So it only took 24 hours for a Chrome extension to be released that entirely bypasses all such filters. And they also were unaware that creating an effective filter is actually quite difficult. You can’t just block every site that includes the words “sex”, or “porn” or “rape” because there are many sites that use such words but which are not pornography. Which leads to this:

But the changes have led to internet users being denied access to a wide range of organisations including child protection charities, women’s charities and gay rights groups. Among institutions that have found themselves subject to the blocks are the British Library and the National Library of Scotland.

The opt-in filters also deny access to the Parliament and Government websites and the sites of politicians, including Claire Perry, the MP who has campaigned prominently for the introduction of filters.

Given what they do with our money I suppose you can indeed decide that Parliament and the Government are forms of pornography. But it’s that blocking of Claire Perry’s site that is just so joyous. For of course the blocking has come as a result of her using that very same site to campaign in favour of the filtering. Leading to her site having a heavy usage of the words “porn”, “sex” and the like and thus being taken to be itself pornographic.

And I think that’s a much better joke than anything I’m likely to see in the cracker later today.

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