Internet Porn Censorship

Recently Pornhub decided to have a little fun with classic nude art house in notable museums. Pornhub explained in a blog post:

After a year of being cooped up and isolated, it's no wonder there's talk of the emergence of a New Renaissance. Now that the world if finally starting to open up, we wanted to do our part to inspire and reintroduce people to some of the most famous cultural institutions with fresh eyes and realize how lascivious art can really be!

Introducing Classic Nudes, an interactive guide to some of the most provocative scenes in six renowned art museums around the world. And as for those of you who think art is boring, put your faith in us because even though porn may not be considered art, some art can definitely be considered porn.

We'll help you skip the SFW masterpieces and head straight to the erotic paintings and sculptures at The Louvre, The MET, The Museo del Prado, The Uffizi Gallery, The National Gallery in London, and The Musee d'Orsay. With the Classic Nudes mobile site, you can now take a sexy tour with audio commentary from our very own Brand Ambassador Asa Akira who gives an oral history of the curated collection of nudes, orgies, and bushes. And as if hearing what Asa has to say about these racy scenes isn't convincing enough, you can also expect a surprise happy ending with MySweetApple who helped bring these artworks to life.

Now thelocal.fr reports:

The Classic Nudes series has been ruffling some feathers since it was posted online earlier in July, with the Uffizi museum in Florence threatening to sue. Bosses at the Louvre have said only that they are dismayed, while the Musee d'Orsay has remained silent on the subject.

Offsite Comment: The Online Safety Bill won’t solve online abuse

 2nd July 2021. See article by Heather Burns

The Online Safety Bill contains threats to freedom of expression, privacy, and commerce which will do nothing to solve online abuse, deal with social media platforms, or make the web a better place to be.

 

Update: House of Lords Committee considers that social media companies are not the best 'arbiters of truth'

21st July 2021. See article from dailymail.co.uk , See report from committees.parliament.uk

A house of Lords committee has warned that the government's plans for new online censorship laws will diminish freedom of speech by making Facebook and Google the arbiters of truth.

The influential Lords Communications and Digital Committee cautioned that legitimate debate is at risk of being stifled by the way major platforms filter out misinformation. Committee chairman Lord Gilbert said:

The benefits of freedom of expression online mustn't be curtailed by companies such as Facebook and Google, too often guided their commercial and political interests than the rights and wellbeing of their users.

The report said:

We are concerned that platforms approaches to misinformation have stifled legitimate debate, including between experts.

Platforms should not seek to be arbiters of truth. Posts should only be removed in exceptional circumstances.

The peers said the government should switch to enforcing existing laws more robustly, and criminalising any serious harms that are not already illegal.

Adult creators on OnlyFans are feeling violated. Some customers are viewing their content then getting refunds via fraudulent chargebacks.

The creator is left to reimburse the money when a customer disputes a payment with their credit card company, despite the scammer already having accessed their content. This is very typical of online companies where customers are considered always right in their claims against traders.

Creators have said that these chargebacks can come through up to six months after viewing the content.

Myles Jackman, a British obscenity lawyer who specializes in cases related to pornography, tells Newsweek that it is usually a case of:

Man purchases sexual services, has a happy time, and then afterwards feels guilt, remorse and shame, and also the loss of money, and so tries to get the money back.

Platforms like OnlyFans really need to raise their game, in terms of representing the rights of the performers in a much more proactive fashion

It's not just about the financial loss, it is also an issue of consent. Creators did not choose to let their bodies be seen for free, and it can be upsetting to know that they have inadvertently done so.

 

Offsite Comment: Only Non-Fans at the BBC

17th July 2021. See article from bbc.co.uk

OnlyFans, a social media platform best known for explicit content, has boomed during the pandemic. But from receiving terrorism videos to racial abuse and rape threats, a BBC investigation based on the experiences of dozens of women reveals concerns about how the British-run site is structured, managed and moderated.

euConsent is a consortium of twelve pro-censorship academic institutions, campaigners and technology providers championing internet age verification in the name of child protection. The consortium is being funded by the EU Commission to design, deliver and pilot a new Europe-wide system age/iD verification system and to ensure that younger children have parental consent before they share personal data.

The consortium doesn't seem to have much interest in keeping adults safe from their ID and porn viewing data being used by scammers, spammers, thieves, commercial exploiters and of course state authorities.

Pro-censorship campaigner and chair of the consortium John Carr has now announced that the group has had its first meeting. He noted:

An Advisory Board has been established and I agreed to be its Chair. The Board comprises representatives of a wide range of stakeholders: European regulatory authorities, children's rights organizations, tech companies and politicians. We held our inaugural meeting last Friday.

[notice no mention of porn viewers or adult internet users].

The Board will hold the project team accountable, helping them as they establish the standards. The Board's collective and individual insights will contribute to a system that is workable with existing technology and facilitates the creation and implementation of effective regulations. Any new technologies which may emerge will know what they must be able to do if they are to be recognised as an acceptable tool.

Our Big Brother government is seeking ways for all websites users to be identified and tracked in the name of child protection. But for all the up and coming legislation that demands age verification, there aren't actually any methods yet that satisfy both strict age verification and protect people's personal data from hackers, thieves, scammers, spammers, money grabbing age verification companies, the government, and the provably data abusing social media companies.

The Observer has reported on a face scanning scheme whereby the age verification company claims not to look up your identity via facial recognition and instead just trying and count the wrinkles on your photo.

See article from theguardian.com .

Security expert Alec Muffet has also posted some interesting and relevant background provided to the Observer that somehow did not make the cut.

See article from alecmuffett.com

India's National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) is moving forward with proceedings to ban the access of children to Twitter in the country until the platform completely removes all pornographic material.

NDTV reports that on May 29, a letter was issued to the secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information and Technology to initiate a ban on the access of children on Twitter on an immediate basis till the time Twitter makes its platform safe for children by ensuring complete removal of child sexual abuse material and pornographic material and reporting of cybercrime cases to the authorities in India.

It is unclear how NCPCR intends to effect age verification for the 1.3 billion Indians, mostly adults, that would be affected by a potential block.

According to NCPCR chief Priyank Kanoongo, Twitter was found to have given false and misleading responses during the enquiry conducted by NCPCR for the presence of pornographic material, an offense under the POCSO Act. The POCSO Act is a 2012 law to provide for the protection of children from the offenses of sexual assault, sexual harassment and pornography.

The German media censor, the Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media, wants to force the hosting provider of the porn website xHamster to lock out German users.

A year ago, the State Agency for Media in North Rhine-Westphalia began to issue porn portals such as PornHub with an ultimatum: Either they establish age verification systems or there is a threat of network blocking.

Several proceedings are currently pending at the Dusseldorf Administrative Court are being contested by porn companies who argue that they label their websites according to an international standard designed to make it easy for parents to block offers on their children's devices.

However, German legislation takes the opposite approach: Portals that are harmful to minors should only be accessible if the users are proved to be of legal age. Tobias Schmid, the director of the State Agency for Media in North Rhine-Westphalian, said:

In the end it is very simple: Anyone who wants to earn money with pornography in the German market has to adhere to German laws.

The agency has now been able to determine the hosting provider for xHamster. This is not trivial, as many porn portals disguise their IT infrastructure with the help of cloud services. The media censor has now written an official to the web host.

OnlyFans is attempting to attract new investors and brands by moving away from its reputation for adult content and material as it aims to reach a $1 billion valuation.

Bloomberg reports that the company is particularly focusing on getting more athletes and celebrities on the site, along with other backers who can help it become a more mainstream media platform and lessen its reputation for porn and NSFW content.

The London-based website has seen astronomical growth in the last year and a half, with the platform growing at a rate of 100% a year, with more than 100 million users.

Update: Just a rumour

28th June 2021. See article from gizmodo.com.au

OnlyFans has confirmed to Gizmodo Australia that it is not banning adult content. OnlyFans told Gizmodo:

OnlyFans will always be an inclusive home for all creators -- including adult

The fear comes after Bloomberg reported that the company is aiming to become more of a mainstream media site and lessen its reputation for adult content. However, it's worth noting that this doesn't mean OnlyFans will ban, remove or even punish sex workers on the platform. Rather, it appears that OnlyFans is just trying to diversify its creator base and remind people that it's not exclusively for porn.

Comment: Disastrous

11th May 2021. See article from bigbrotherwatch.org.uk

Mark Johnson, Legal and Policy Officer at Big Brother Watch said:

The Online Safety Bill introduces state-backed censorship and monitoring on a scale never seen before in a liberal democracy.

This Bill is disastrous for privacy rights and free expression online. The Government is clamping down on vague categories of lawful speech. This could easily result in the silencing of marginalised voices and unpopular views.

Parliament should remove lawful content from the scope of this Bill altogether and refocus on real policing rather than speech-policing.

 

 

Offsite Comment: Online safety bill: a messy new minefield in the culture wars

13th May 2021. See article from theguardian.com by Alex Hern

The message of the bill is simple: take down exactly the content the government wants taken down, and no more. Guess wrong and you could face swingeing fines. Keep guessing wrong and your senior managers could even go to jail.

Content moderation is a hard job, and it's about to get harder.

 

 

Offsite Comment: Harm Version 3.0

15th May 2021. See article from cyberleagle.com by Graham Smith

Two years on from the April 2019 Online Harms White Paper, the government has published its draft Online Safety Bill. It is a hefty beast: 133 pages and 141 sections. It raises a slew of questions, not least around press and journalistic material and the newly-coined content of democratic importance. Also, for the first time, the draft Bill spells out how the duty of care regime would apply to search engines, not just to user generated content sharing service providers.

This post offers first impressions of a central issue that started to take final shape in the government's December 2020 Full Response to consultation: the apparent conflict between imposing content monitoring and removal obligations on the one hand, and the government's oft-repeated commitment to freedom of expression on the other - now translated into express duties on service providers.

The draft Bill represents the government's third attempt at defining harm (if we include the White Paper, which set no limit). The scope of harm proposed in its second version (the Full Response) has now been significantly widened.

See article from cyberleagle.com

 

 

Offsite Comment: The unstoppable march of state censorship

17th May 2021. See article from spiked-online.com

Vaguely worded hate-speech laws can end up criminalising almost any opinion.

 

 

Offsite Comment: Drowning internet services in red tape

 18th May 2021. See article from techmonitor.ai by Laurie Clarke

The UK government has unveiled sprawling new legislation that takes aim at online speech on internet services 203 stretching from illegal to legal yet harmful content. The wide-ranging nature of the proposals could leave internet businesses large and small facing a huge bureaucratic burden, and render the bill impractical to implement.

 

 

Offsite Comment: UK online safety bill raises censorship concerns and questions on future of encryption

24th May 2021. See article from cpj.org

 

 

Offsite Comment: Why the online safety bill threatens our civil liberties

26th May 2021. See article from politics.co.uk by Heather Burns

With the recent publication of the draft online safety bill, the UK government has succeeded in uniting the British population in a way not seen since the weekly clap for the NHS. This time, however, no one is applauding. After two years of dangled promises, the government's roadmap to making the UK the safest place in the world to be online sets up a sweeping eradication of our personal privacy, our data security, and our civil liberties.

 

 

Offsite Comment: Misguided Online Safety Bill will be catastrophic for ordinary people's social media

23rd June 2021. See article from dailymail.co.uk

The Government's new Online Safety Bill will be catastrophic for ordinary people's freedom of speech, former minister David Davis has warned.

The Conservative MP said forcing social networks to take down content in Britain they deem unacceptable seems out of Orwell's 1984.

Davis slammed the idea Silicon Valley firms could take down posts they think are not politically correct - even though it is legal.

See full article from dailymail.co.uk

 

 

Offsite Comment: On the trail of the Person of Ordinary Sensibilities

28th June 2021. See article from cyberleagle.com by Graham Smith

  The bill boils down to what a mythical adult or child of 'ordinary sensibilities' considers to be 'lawful but awful' content.

 

 

Offsite Comment: The Online Safety Bill won’t solve online abuse

 2nd July 2021. See article by Heather Burns

The Online Safety Bill contains threats to freedom of expression, privacy, and commerce which will do nothing to solve online abuse, deal with social media platforms, or make the web a better place to be.