 Porn rules the net
Tallulah Habib
The internet is one-third porn, the number of violent games online has grown by ten percent and the number of sites about online games that reward negative behaviour has more than quadrupled in the first few months of 2010, says a new study - giving naysayers much ammunition in the fight against the internet.
The study was conducted by SaaS (Software as a Service) provider Optenet, which analyses millions of URLs. It showed that pornography makes up 37% of the total content on the internet and there are more and more sites promoting violence, terrorism and drugs.
Ana Luisa Rotta, director of child protection projects at Optenet, reckons we should also be concerned about increasing MMORPGS (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) like Evony and World of Warcraft. "There is a growing trend for online role-playing games to encourage negative behaviour, by rewarding violent and brutal activities within online games."
 Think of the children
Rotta's concern stems from a fear for innocence. "When you consider that more than one third of the internet’s content is pornographic, combined with the overwhelming increase in young people now curiously visiting websites with such ease of access, it is becoming increasingly imperative that adults take responsibility for the management of home PC security.”
Then again, she's paid to say such things, being hired by a security firm.
Closer to home, Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, Malusi Gigab, has similar concerns about the internet, proposing a Bill to ban digital pornography in South Africa... “To protect children from pornography, and to protect women from the indignity of being seen by children as objects of pornography.”
But is this a responsibility we should place in the hands of the state? And is the state actually able to do anything about it?
Where the buck stops
Gigab proposed that internet and mobile service providers should be responsible for blocking harmful content and fined severely if they let anything slip through. However, how far is this from the Great Firewall of China – where access to the world is controlled by a “nanny” who decides what we can and cannot see. And who defines what is “harmful”? Back in 2007, blogging site Livejournal fell victim to a “child pornography purge”, which, in theory, should have been celebrated as the site removed any trace of child porn by deleting blogs left, right and centre. But then, too late, it came to the fore that they had also deleted a bunch of innocent blogs writing about child protection issues, fan fiction and books or movies that dealt with themes of child abuse. By censoring the net, we may come up against the same problems.
The other issue with making ISPs responsible is that they may not be successful – look at countries where they try to control piracy. People find a way. There are evens bloggers and activists in China who manage to break through the firewall and access whatever websites they want to.
There is no argument that there is harmful content on the internet – everything from “how to make a bomb” to message boards that celebrate rape, but the internet in of itself not evil. Once we start giving over control of the internet to someone – whether the government or a world institution – we risk losing the ability to speak freely, to explore without limits and to discover new ideas.
There are other ways of limiting what we see, of protecting our children. Private security, as Rotta suggests, is one. But how about simply avoiding the sites we don't like and explaining to our children the difference between what is right and wrong? |
