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IWF Backs Down On Wiki Censorship
jonbryce writes "The Internet Watch Foundation, guardians of the Great Firewall of Britain, have stopped censoring Wikipedia for hosting what they considered to be a child porn image. They had previously threatened to block Amazon for hosting the same image." Here is the IWF's statement, which credits the Streisand Effect for opening their eyes: "...in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. ... IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."
Agreed. And that new law about S&M porn is pure moralistic censorship with a thin, fabricated "think of the women/children!" justification.
Going after legitimate businesses like kink.com and insex.com is counterproductive to what SHOULD be the real concern: pornography that features nonconsensual acts.
Those kinky porn models enjoy what they do and get paid well for it. In fact, if you check out the 6th preview video for all of the segments featured on www.free-hardcore.com, you'll notice that pretty much every model that does a shoot says they'd like to do it again. Which is probably pretty shocking to all of those censor-happy prudes in government, considering the subject matter and the fact that they themselves are probably not interested in such sex acts. Otherwise they'd have to realize how stupidly ridiculous all of this is.
According to their statement, they have decided to never take any future action against the same image if it is hosted outside the UK, but if they find it hosted in the UK, it will be "assessed in line with IWF procedures", which means they will threaten the web site with prosecution.
Which of course means that those of us in the UK we will have to be content with seeing it on Wikipedia, Amazon and so on, or with buying it in record shops, or with reading books containing the picture, and so on, and so on.
It wasn't Wikipedia blocking people from the UK specifically.
It was Wikipedias' limits on edits from anonymous users from a single IP. A side effect of the filtering was that all traffic from the ISPs being filtered by the IWF was that all of the requests came from the IWF IP, so it looked like everyone in the UK was sharing a few/single IP address.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The IWF never admitted to doing anything wrong. They merely realized that the knowledge and publicity of this event harmed their main goal and purpose of censorship, and in fact had the opposite effect of making this image more widely known and seen.
This example is one good reason to (at least) make the blacklist completely public and transparent. When a government (or in this case pseudo-government) and highly public agency want to hide things then corruption will inevitably follow. Transparency will always be better than sneakiness. If a public agency that effects the public does nothing wrong then they should have nothing to hide.
Wikipedia says they do not censor. Yet they'll remove videos of male masturbation from -- the page on masturbation. They'll even remove images of people having sex and replace them with ridiculous drawings or drawings. They don't do that for other pages. Go to the page on a lion and they'll show you a big image, in colour, of a lion. No one says: "Well, a big image showing all the parts of the lion, and in colour, is just not necessary. Everyone knows what a lion is: A detailed image is not necessary to get the point across." But go to the Talk pages for fellatio or ejaculation and you'll see this exact argument used there. I would say they do censor. I think it's duplicitous of them to say that their official policy is "Wikipedia is not censored." And of course they censor child pornography from their pages, because it is illegal in Florida, where their main servers are.
Do you have a link to the article where it has that Playboy fact? It sounds like trolling.
Here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Ionesco
It took me less than a minute to do a search for that.