{"id":882,"date":"2013-07-22T19:23:11","date_gmt":"2013-07-22T09:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/?p=882"},"modified":"2013-07-22T19:45:58","modified_gmt":"2013-07-22T09:45:58","slug":"now-the-uk-wants-a-clean-feed-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/07\/22\/now-the-uk-wants-a-clean-feed-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Now the UK wants a clean feed policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

We went through this in Australia recently – a dangerous policy that involves censorship of internet pornography unless you take positive steps to opt out. It might sound good when\u00a0you say it quickly. After all, no one wants child pornography on the internet, right? And some<\/em> kinds of pornography, even apart from child pornography, may be pretty horrible and lead to nasty social consequences, right? The example often given is pornography that\u00a0somehow fetishizes\u00a0or glorifies rape.<\/p>\n

Now, my position has long been that that I don’t rule out narrowly drafted laws that might attempt to stop some kinds of porn, provided that<\/em>\u00a0evidence can be adduced\u00a0of an urgent need to do this to prevent serious, ordinary\u00a0harms. The harm doesn’t have to be strictly direct, but there should at least be a solid evidence-based case about both proximity and urgency… but\u00a0putting this case together\u00a0has so far eluded anti-porn crusaders:\u00a0the likes of Gail Dines, Melinda Tankard-Reist, etc. So, despite my general\u00a0advocacy of free speech, I am not adamantly against all censorship of pornography outside the scope of child pornography. For better or worse, some so-called “extreme pornography” is already banned in the UK.<\/p>\n

But so often, what we see is not well-evidenced argument but merely moral panic. And the solutions proposed are often dangerous. Here’s a set of my old posts<\/a> (from the old site) about the dangers of clean feed laws, from when this was a hot issue in Australia. And here is a pointed set of questions by Paul Bernal\u00a0<\/a>covering\u00a0some of the same territory.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We went through this in Australia recently – a dangerous policy that involves censorship of internet pornography unless you take positive steps to opt out. It might sound good when\u00a0you say it quickly. After all, no one wants child pornography on the internet, right? And some kinds of pornography, even apart from child pornography, may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,37,92,18],"tags":[79,100,307,50],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-in-the-news","category-law","category-politics","tag-censorship","tag-free-speech","tag-paul-bernal","tag-pornography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}