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Congress vs Misleading Meta Tags
Krishna Dagli writes "The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill that would make it a federal felony for Webmasters to use innocent words like "Barbie" or "Furby" but actually feature sexual content on their sites. Anyone who includes misleading "words" or "images" intended to confuse a minor into viewing a possibly harmful Web site could be imprisoned for up to 20 years and fined, the bill says." Terrible news for the Barbie/Furbie fetishists out there, to say nothing about being completely impossible to enforce globally.
...to use the META tags "Congress" and "intelligent" on the same web page.
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Does this imply that any porn star named Barbie has to change her name (again) before starting up a web site?
Can costumed fetishist adults sue a 12-year-old girl for describing her pet puppydog as "furry" on her livejournal?
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What? It's precisely because it can't be codified globally that it's pointless to do anything about it here. Do you honestly think that anyone outside the US is going to voluntarily conform to this law? Do you think anyone inside the US can't get around it by moving their content outside the US?
As usual, Congress is meddling in things it does not understand. They want to look like they are doing something to protect children, yet at every turn the things they come up with are ludicrous. And they've also dropped the ball on the whole Net Neutrality issue. It's clear Congress doesn't understand what the Internet is ("a series of tubes" said the learned Congressman) or how it works, or the fact that it's a global resource, far outside the realm of their ability to control it.
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Congress, with all the problems in the world, focuses on THE most pressing problem right now - misleading meta tags.
With respectable, upright, and moral leaders like these, we will all be safe from accidentally looking at pr)n - we are saved!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
How common is it to visit a porn site when you where really looking for Barbie dolls or anything else for that matter? It's not something that has ever happened to me. The only time I see porn on the internet is if I go look for it.
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Disclaimer: I am in Canada.
From the wording in the summary, this speaks to the mentality of the congresscritter. I mean, some right-wingers have this idea stuck in their head that the pr0n on the internet is there for the children, that people are trying to lure kids to the porn sites for some reason which I (nor they) cannot imagine. What benefit is there in that for anybody? It's not as if the kids have any purchasing power! Hell, it's not even as if webmasters can capture some parents income with porn!
"Daddy, will you buy me a membership to this website! It's only $2.99 for three days!"
Valacosa to congress: children are not the "target audience" for pornography!
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
The idea is completely ridiculous. First off, 20 years for using a misleading meta tag? Does that sound appropriate? Particular if you consider how easy it could be to do (you copy the template from some previous site for another site and forget to update the meta tags).
And who judges whether a tag is valid or not? While there may be a few that are clear cut, most will be highly ambiguous and down to some arbitrary decision process, and likely used backwards (i.e. find a site you do not like, then see if you can find some law it breaks, such as this one).
Again, it used 'think of the children' to role in crappy, unenforceable laws which steal away people freedom, and solve a non-existent problem. I have two daughters, and frequently searched various keywords such as Barbie, and never encountered any pron sites. The only, and obvious, solution to the minor problem of children accessing inappropriate content is for parents to be responsible in how their children can access the net.
Just how screwed up do you have to be to consider a nipple to be threat to a child's development?
Better to concentrate on ensuring that child can grow up in a world that has freedom of speech, a clean environment and open minds than one that views sex as somehow dirty.
So, can you offer a single good reason why anyone would reasonably use "Barney" or "Barbie" or "Pokemon" as keywords for a site featuring a naked woman with semen all over her face?
What if the guy is called Barney, the woman is called Barbie, and... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
You're missing the point though. Trying to censor content based on fuzzy guidelines is not helping promote freedom. If a pornography site is number 1 in Google for the keyword Barbie, complain to Google that it's keyword matching rules are broken and get them to delist the site. Don't just get your government to go round censoring things you disagree with. Once they start on that path, where will they stop? If porn can be censored what about pro-Muslim sites using words like 'Jesus' in their keywords? Oh the horror! It must be censored too!
By the way, I'm not American so I don't really care, I'm just making some suggestions that you can choose to ignore if you wish.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
First of all, what kind of a phantasy is that? Why would a porn site "trick little kids into visiting pornographic sites by using meta keywords" in the first place? Little kids don't have credit cards. Plus, I can't speak for the US, but I would guess you already have laws against showing/selling porn to kids under a certain age.
And you seem to lack imagination. There is no way to legislate this because the English language simply has too few words to express all there is to express. What if it is a site where not the model is called Barbie, but it's about a person's fantasies about Barbie. What about the keyword "Hamster"? Knitwork? Farm? And so on and so forth. Go to the usenet binary groups some time to get an idea of how broad a field human sexuality is.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
...is the other way around - those sites that advertise "Free Porn - Nude Celebrities" and when you go to them there are no nudes, no celebrities, no porn, and nothing is free. What a rip!
I agree completely. And what's worse is when I'm innocently looking for porn and I get to Mattel or Toys-R-Us. Do you know how embarresing that is for my co-workers to think I'm shopping for little girl's toys? They know I don't have a daughter. I have to lie and say I'm shopping for my niece.