Re: Facebook censorship and internet porn

On Dec 11, 2010, at 7:42 PM, Jon Louis Mann wrote:

>> ..."net nanny" software block and report any
>> search for any string containing the word "breast"
>> ...that may prevent a woman from learning how to
>> examine herself for cancer or her options if she
>> is diagnosed...
>> ...policy of removing pictures of breastfeeding. I
>> know of a few images that disappeared even though
>> they were privacy-restricted in such a way that the
>> only possible audience was clothing-optional-aware
>> and I doubt there were any complaints to speak of,
>> so I may very well be wrong. The rules seem to be
>> somewhat variable, and the only consistent cases
>> seem to be ones with one or both nipples visible.
>> one friend who pushed that about as close to the
>> limit as they seem to tolerate -- the one of her
>> in *only* a skirt and pasties is still up...
>> Charlie
>
> thanks for the link, charlie all is explained:
> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/breastfeeding-facebook- 
> photos/
>
> i found this on facebook:
> http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39521488436
> evidently there are a lot of riled up women about
> this.  evidently, some few were using breastfeeding
> as a way around the facebook restriction on frontal
> nudity. i still think this is a tempest in a teapot.
> personally, i think free speech is being abused on
> the internet.  i do not want my eight year old to
> accidentally access porn when clicking on some spam
> site, or by googling white house.
> i don't want to censor the internet, but perhaps
> there should be a separate internet isolating any
> porn related material?
> jon

This would be an excellent idea if the porn industry could be  
persuaded to go along with it.

As perverse and counterproductive as this sounds, said industry, as a  
whole, seems bent on the exact opposite, and in fact, in many cases  
the less scrupulous players in the industry go to great lengths to  
invade inboxes and hijack web searches specifically to avoid being  
confined to the target market that would be happy to go find them  
wherever they are.

This was made abundantly clear by the somewhat paradoxical maneuvering  
surrounding the proposed .xxx TLD for porn domains.  The idea of a  
porn-specific TLD made perfect sense, as it would have provided a  
place where interested adults could easily have gone looking for  
whatever they wanted, and would have made the process of blocking porn  
from underage computer users (or any others whom society feels the  
need to protect from porn) relatively trivial and straightforward.

The problem, and this seems to be endemic to the industry as far as I  
can tell, is that the industry would very much rather do business the  
way it does now and take every possible tactical and/or strategic  
action available to make sure they're not only net-ubiquitous, but  
that they actually crowd out legitimate web search results for  
completely unrelated subjects, and appear in your inbox even if your  
junk mail filtering is strong enough that you end up filtering out  
your friends before you filter out the porn ads.  Rather than target a  
perfectly willing and sex-positive demographic that would be happy to  
pay for their premium content, they would rather make the maximum  
possible nuisance of themselves trying to convert maybe one in a  
thousand or so of the largely sex-negative remainder of the population  
that doesn't want to see anything they have to offer.  As well as make  
themselves maximally available to your kids.

I've observed this in relation to just about everything there is to do  
with the industry, and seen it time and time again.  And it's always  
completely puzzled me, because to me it's always seemed to be a bad  
business policy as well as ensuring they remain marginalized.  But I  
don't run that industry.

As for free speech, deciding what's abuse of it and what's legitimate  
use of it is a formitable philsophical problem indeed.  Likewise,  
which restrictions on it are legitimate and which are overbroad and  
possibly draconian.  There's room for considerable debate along that  
boundary.  I believe that there is, in many cases, abuse of freedom of  
speech in the industry, given their aggresively confrontational  
marketing strategies, but I would not dare point out specific examples  
as unambigiuously abusive or not, because I doubt I could debate  
either side to the extent that someone else could not come up with an  
equally or even more compelling opposing view.

And I repeat my assertion that our society (particularly that of the  
USA, and even more particularly that of some regions of the USA and/or  
specific segments of the population) is not exactly objective or even  
rational on this subject, and is influenced by social and cultural  
standards that I consider dysfunctional and destructive at the very  
least.  Not the least of which is the perception that nudity == sex,  
or the related perception that sex == bad/dirty/evil.  Or a whole list  
of others.  So there are likely to be many strong opinions that are  
fairly indefensible from a truly rational perspective -- widely held  
and commonly agreed on, perhaps, but still indefensible ..

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed  
and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless  
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H.L. MENCKEN