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UK will not block porn in the internet

by on17 December 2012



Realised that people did not actually want it

Moves to block access to porn on the internet in the UK after ministers realised that people did not really want it. For a while now British politicians have been claiming that parents desperately wanted to stop their kids from seeing porn. However a a public consultation found only 35 per cent of parents wanted an automatic bar while 15 per cent wanted some content filtered, and an option to block other material.

That sort of statistic can be satisfied by ISPs encouraging parents to switch on parental controls rather than anything draconian from government. Claire Perry, the MP who led the campaign, said she was "disappointed" and the child protection lobby NSPCC claimed parents' voices were not being heard. Which is a little odd because porn was supposed to make you go blind, not deaf. An automatic block would mean users would have to actively request that pornographic content was made available by their ISP.

Perry, the Conservative MP for Devizes in Wiltshire, led the campaign and handed over a petition to Downing Street containing more than 115,000 names. She claimed that government and ISPs needed to do more to keep children safe online.

We guess the downside of going to public consultation is that you discover that people often do not agree with knee jerk views on morals. For what is worth, ages when the UK porn was highly censored also gave birth to some of the nation’s great paedophiles, such as Garry Glitter and Jimmy Savile.

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