Interview: Two Censorware Experts

This week's interview topic might almost be called "Censorware: Threat or Menace." Our guests are both experienced anti-censorship activists; Jim Tyre is a founding member of the U.S.-based group , The Censorware Project and is also closely allied with Peacefire.org; Irene Graham is a Board Member of Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), an on-line civil liberties group (not related to EFF) who also maintains this site. Chosen questions will be forwarded to Jim and Irene Tuesday. Their answers will be posted Friday.

Comments

A conundrum

[jd]

Given the popularity of community-based systems (whether that's at the level of the family, a school, or the general public), and given the preference to have these set up as single-user machines, is there a serious alternative to filtering software? (A long-winded argument, to explain the question follows.)

Yes, I know the 1st Amendment argument, but let's reverse this for a moment. Let's say I don't want ads from Microsoft on my computer. I am entitled to set up filters, screening them out, and Microsoft's 1st Amemdment rights don't apply. I'm not stopping them speaking, but I have the absolute right not to hear, and my right overrides any rights to speak they may have.

But on a community-based computer, advertisers and sites I personally deem offensive to me can shove what they like down my throat, and there is nothing I can do to stop them. My boundaries, and my right to protect them, cease to exist.

IMHO, this is not OK. I should have the same rights not to see anything I choose not to see in the library or in the home. They're my eyes, and they don't belong to any damn advertiser or web master.

It's my opinion that the problem is not with the ability to filter, but rather the ability to choose -what- to filter. If a child (or an adult) chooses to not see sex & violence, that should be -their- perogative, and nobody else's, and no website should have the power to dictate otherwise. The converse should also be true, though if a child is frequently accessing material child psychologists deem age-inappropriate, their parents might want to see a family therapist.

(A child being blocked from age-inappropriate material isn't, IMHO, a 1st Ammendment issue, but a mental health one. If someone wallpapers over the cracks of a subsiding house, they can hide the problem, but it doesn't make it go away. If a child is prevented from expressing the symptoms of some family problem, it doesn't cure the problem, but it can make the child seriously ill.)

Children do not have a natural urge to look at stuff that has no meaning or relevence to their age. They -do- have an urge to explore, though, which should be encouraged. They encounter something meaningless to them, they'll probably ask about it and move on. It's not going to hold any interest for them.

There is an exception to this. Children from severely dysfunctional families, with seriously screwed-up family dynamics, where their parents are living a gigantic lie, 24/7, are much more likely to behave in ways that do not reflect their age. They'll start by being child adults, and grow up to become adult children. These are the sorts of kids likely to be repeat visitors to porn sites, cos they're the only kids who will find any meaning there. Sex gets approval, approval is what these kids often crave, so porn is a way to get that.

Blaming or shaming either group of kids is not going to do any good. Healthy kids are just that. Kids. Blaming them for being kids is stupid, and probably the act of an Adult Child, so hateful that their own childhood was stolen that they're hell-bent on robbing everyone else's.

Ill kids aren't to blame for being ill. They're simply kids under extreme circumstances. Send the whole family into therapy, and there's a chance you'll fix the problem. Throwing blame around fixes nothing, and just adds to the very disease that made the kids ill in the first place.