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Survey Shows Censorware Support
Bret writes: "According to the NY Times, a recent survey shows broad support for censorware in U.S. schools. Even scarier: "the survey did find that 74% of individuals said the government should ban online pornography altogether and 75% supported a government ban of online hate speech." Read all about it at http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/10/18/technology/18EDUCATION.html while you still can." This leaves me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I hope the survey they mention is really as skewed as it sounds. I mean, 75% want online porn outlawed. They just ask ppl who don't realize the internet doesn't end at US borders, or those who have a lifetime subscription to Porn Digest?
However the bit about most people who have recently gotten online access wanting filtering is unsuprising. First thing my GF mother did when she got online was ask how to find porn. Second was how to find stuff that wasn't porn.
Abestos: She's into dolls and likes making clothes for her granddaughters so the first thing she looked for was little or girls or clothes. I cringed.
Th funniest thing about the whole censorware debate is that censorware is nearly useless for libraries and school. Think about it:
(1) A library or a school wants to catch the people DLing porn. How will installing easy to circumvent protections which mearly train the porn user to circumvent these protections help? Now, some censorware for libraries dose use an alarm, but the bad block rate means that about once a week some little girl is tramatized by screaming alarms and kicked out of the library for looking at a feminist website.
(2) No reasonable adult really carres about another adult viewing porn onlie. they mearly want to prevent people from leaving open netscape windows containing porn and to prevent kids from changing the background as a prank. No censorware dose anything to prevent these sort of mistakes and/or pranks.
What is the solution? Place the computers in a realitivly poblic place and have librarians walk past them periodically. If the problem persists then have a computer which only the librarians see do a slide show of the JPGs in the netscape cache directories. The librarians can go have a look at all the various computer users when they see porn flash past.
These systems are cheap, simple, discreate, adaptable, adhears to community standards, and will produce almost no bad blocks. Why do we not see the AFA spending many thousands of dollars advocating these sorts of more effective blocking procedures? Simple, the AFA & friends do not give a shit about porn. They are only interested in blocking access of young people to feminist, gay, AIDS, safe-sex, liberal web sites.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I don't trust public opinion as reported in the newspapers.
This is just an example. Other people are much better at this than me. This is based on an idea from the BBC comedy series Yes, Prime Minister.
1. Do you feel that children should be subjected to pornography?
2. Do you feel that children are affected by hate speech?
3. Do you feel that schools have a responsibility to protect children?
4. Are you in favour of schools using pornography filtering software?
Or alternatively
1. Are you in favour of freedom of speech?
2. Do you feel that children should be allowed to learn without restriction?
3. Should we rely on buggy computer software to tell us what our rights are?
4. Are you in favour of Censorship software in schools?
Simply publish the last result. It says whatever you want it to say.
You can even bias it by asking one question. People will be more in favour of schools installing filtering software to protect children that installing censorship software to restrict access to the internet.
From the paragraph right after mentioning support for "banning":
"If young people are seen as adversely affected, people see a need to step in," Shah said. "They want to restrict some forms of content and they want to do it at the point of access and not at the point of production. The strongest support is for restricting access of children to this kind of content."
All they are saying is that 74% of people support restricting access to pornography at access points. I support this as well. I don't want my son or daughter to be able to surf for porn at the library or at school. Slashdotter's make a big deal about how its the parent's responsibility to supervise their children. I agree. But when it is impossible for me to be supervising my child away from the home, I support this sort fo initiative. Just like I support the laws prohibiting my son from buying playboy at the local convenience store.
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
I ask because while I admire the base sentiment, the technology does not exist to do what the lawmakers want. The censorware debate is as much a discussion about luddites making technology decisions as it is anything else. What do you do?
Why do people do surveys on issues like this? They're never accurate, people hang up and people lie, to the point that the data is meaningless.
First of all, people hang up a hell of a lot on pollsters any more - thank telemarketing. But is hanging up independent of response? We don't know what the hangup callers think, whether they're answers would be the same as non-hangup folks, or whether they would be more likely to answer yes or no to any particular question. I would think hangups would come from people who value their privacy, which might be people who would support free speech (There's no proven connection of course, that's a wild guess, but there's no way to prove/disprove it. It seems reasonable.)
A bigger problem is that people who do answer give the "right" answer no matter how unbiasedly the question is phrased. No one wants to say to a stranger "I support porn, as a matter of fact, I enjoy many pornographic products." There's no benefit to giving a truthful "incorrect" answer and no penalty for a false "correct" answer. This problem doesn't crop up in more vanilla-type polls, like "who ya gonna vote for?" because there is no socially incorrect response. To do this type of survey with any confidence, you need to use some confidentiality techniques that aren't possible via telephone...