How Cameron’s plans to block on-line porn could also block political sites

(not satire)

Back in January I wrote a blogpost about how Internet Service Providers such as 3UK and O2 were censoring – flagging or blocking – websites like this one which include political content.

At the time some political commentators dismissed my discovery that political websites were being blocked as just mistakes or ‘over-sensitive filters’.

This is because they completely failed to understand the significance of what I had got the ISP’s to admit – that they had created a new category of websites they were censoring with what they call ‘mature content‘ – not just ‘adult content‘ which would include things like pornography.

Here’s a tweet to me from 3UK admitting the new category of websites they were censoring:

The blogpost was widely shared but – troublingly for me – not by the usual political people who read this blog but by techies who somehow had got to know about it and shared it because they understood the significance of what I had discovered.

The Telegraph even did an article about it  – but unfortunately it was published in the newspaper’s technology section not in the political section (and I eventually got an apology from the Telegraph reporter for not properly crediting me as the source of the info).

All this of course should have been significant political news. But it wasn’t.

So I’m wondering now that Cameron has announced there is to be a clampdown and censorship of adult content on the internet, will anyone other than a few techies notice if mature content – including political websites – is included in the censorship too?

By my past experience of our half-asleep political class in this country – both left and right – I seriously doubt it.

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Related articles by Tom Pride:

Satire like Porn? How 3UK are bringing Chinese-style political censorship of web to UK

How media hacks are desperately trying to keep up with social media – and failing

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