EU Censorship News

The French government has announced it will move to block five of the world's major porn sites unless they introduce identity verification for all users to ensure that users are over 18.

Adult websites Pornhub, xHamster, XVideos, XNXX and Tukif are in the firing line.

The move by France s Higher Audiovisual Council looks to force the websites to comply with a law introduced last year which made it compulsory to carry out age verification checks for adult content.

The council said the sites current tactic of simply asking users to fill out a check-box stating they are over 18 is not satisfactory and that they are breaking the law by failing to introduce better controls.

The move sees France align with European neighbours Germany in their efforts to bring about change in the adult industry by taking action against sites and organisations that do not prevent children from accessing adult content.

It will be interesting to see how porn users respond to the censorship and the dangers of handing over ID to be associated with porn use. The British Government will surely be monitoring the situation carefully. Options available to users are to subscribe to a VPN, use the Tor browsers, seek out unblocked porn websites, or possibly share porn via different media. After all a year's worth of porn viewing can be shared on a single memory stick.

One can be sure that the French internet blocking mechanisms will surely by well analysed in what will become a hot topic for millions of interested people. One suspects that the security services will be somewhat unimpressed if millions of people start using encrypted services to circumvent the state censorship.

French president Emmanuel Macron has criticised the European Commission for its woke nonsense a week after it withdrew controversial politically correct language rules following an outcry from politicians. Macron said in a speech that the commission should focus on recovery, power and belonging. He said:

A Europe that comes to explain to people what words they should or shouldn't say is not a Europe to which I totally adhere. It's nonsense, basically.

Macron added that the sense of European identity had withered away in France as well as European nations.

His scathing attack came a week after the European Commission pulled back from an internal PC language guide which advised officials to use inclusive language such as holiday season rather than Christmas and use gender-neutral terms instead of man-made and ladies and gentlemen.

A German court has ruled that authorities are justified in banning three unnamed porn websites based in Cyprus from operating in Germany due to rules requiring age verification.

The Duesseldorf administrative court said it had rejected complaints by the sites' two unnamed operators, who argued that the age verification regulations in Germany didn't apply to them because they were based in another European Union country.

The court said the decision taken by the Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia state to ban the sites in Germany didn't breach national, European or international law.

The names of the sites weren't released by the court. The ruling can be appealed.

The city of Vienna is taking an offbeat approach to the social media censorship of art and has turned to using the adults-only online platform OnlyFans to put its most explicit artworks on full display.

The tourism board for the Austrian capital is now presenting art from four of Vienna's most revered museums, including the Albertina Museum and the Leopold Museum, on the adults-only platform in response to the blocking of some artistic content containing nudity on social media.

In July, the Albertina Museum's TikTok account was suspended -- and later blocked -- for displaying works by the Japanese artist and photographer Nobuyoshi Araki that showed a partially-obscured breast. Back in 2019, Instagram said that a painting by the legendary Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens violated its community guidelines. Earlier this year, when the Leopold Museum marked its 20th anniversary, a video uploaded to Facebook and Instagram which contained work by Koloman Moser was rejected because it was flagged as potentially pornographic by the platforms.

Now, these works and more of Vienna's 18+ content can be found on full, unfiltered display on OnlyFans -- a subscription-based website best known as a platform for sharing and viewing pornographic content.

A French court on Friday, has rejected a claim brought by two children's campaigns calling for the blocking of major porn websites in France.

The judge rejected the claim because the court facing time pressures had not been able to hear arguments from the sites' publishers.

The anti-porn campaigners had hoped for the blocking of nine top porn sites, including PornHub and Xvideos.

One of the ISPs being asked to censor the porn, Orange, noted that it already offered tools such as parental controls to limit children's access to online pornography.

Samuel Comblez of e-Enfance, one of the children's campaigners, said: It's not a completely lost battle, adding that it was now examining other ways to restrict access to the sites.