Filth producer screams foul
Monday, February 18, 2008
HOW saintly of a certain producer of the so-called "adult films" to have publicly requested that Internet giants Google and Yahoo establish "strong barriers" to keep children from viewing online pornography! This person, who shall remain unidentified throughout this editorial, accused the search engine and portals of failing to take any significant steps toward that purpose. "This is not about First Amendment rights, it's about protecting children," he said self-righteously in a report run by The Brunei Times over the weekend.
"(The) major Internet service providers (should) aggressively verify ages of people seeking to buy adult content," he said, even as he justified his industry as something that was not much different from "running any other studio except that our product is pretty much exclusively about sex."
For their part, Yahoo and Google have defended their efforts to keep underage Internet users from accessing "grown-up" content. Yahoo said in response to an AFP inquiry, "We have focused on protecting children from online pornography through our safe search feature, filters for offensive language, privacy preferences and parental controls." Google says it works with non-profit groups including Common Sense Media, Family Online Safety Institute, and i-Safe to tutor families and teachers about children staying safe online.
Regardless of the fact that the Internet is indeed a jungle which parents all over the world should understand in order to protect their children from its dangers, nobody should ever be duped into thinking that the producer of that despicable filth had behaved like a responsible citizen of the world, which he actually has helped polluting with his products. Just because he made noises about "protecting children", that person is far from the champion of the interests of the world's children.
By making those very noises, he was actually shifting the responsibility over his filth toward other parties. By claiming that porn was the same with any other industry (like what? Garment or hydrocarbon?) but that children should be protected from the products, he was trying to deceive the society that distribution, rather than production of porn, that should matter.
Granted there are other industries seeking to appease their conscience (if there's any such thing) by creating programmes that would blunt the edges of the harm they have wrought in society. Take, for instance, the tobacco producers who gain billions of dollars from young smokers (who took up the bad habit because cigarette ads told them it was cool to smoke) and contribute a fraction of their profits to anti-smoking campaigns for the young people.
But porn producers are in a sleazy class of their own. This particular person was basically saying that "I produce filth, but children are innocent and should be protected, so why don't other parties carry out the protection while I carry on with creating even more filth?"
Children are indeed innocent and must be protected, but the society comprises both children and adults whose lives are intertwined. The society must be protected as a whole. Do we even need to bring up the mid-2007 bust of an international paedophile ring (that involved 700 people, and that made use of the Internet to stream live videos of children and infants being brutalised and raped and sodomised in real time) to get our point across? Did the children in this case need to be protected from Internet porn? It is true that sick, deviant people may brutalise the powerless and the innocent (in this case the children) even without the aid of Internet porn, but it will certainly abets them.
Why this level of outrage? Because we realise that the Internet has indeed opened up a jungle even for us in Brunei Darussalam. While we'd like our children to get from it all the benefits, we'd also wish to protect them from the dangers — not by sealing off the jungle, but by fighting the filth infiltrating it.
"(The) major Internet service providers (should) aggressively verify ages of people seeking to buy adult content," he said, even as he justified his industry as something that was not much different from "running any other studio except that our product is pretty much exclusively about sex."
For their part, Yahoo and Google have defended their efforts to keep underage Internet users from accessing "grown-up" content. Yahoo said in response to an AFP inquiry, "We have focused on protecting children from online pornography through our safe search feature, filters for offensive language, privacy preferences and parental controls." Google says it works with non-profit groups including Common Sense Media, Family Online Safety Institute, and i-Safe to tutor families and teachers about children staying safe online.
Regardless of the fact that the Internet is indeed a jungle which parents all over the world should understand in order to protect their children from its dangers, nobody should ever be duped into thinking that the producer of that despicable filth had behaved like a responsible citizen of the world, which he actually has helped polluting with his products. Just because he made noises about "protecting children", that person is far from the champion of the interests of the world's children.
By making those very noises, he was actually shifting the responsibility over his filth toward other parties. By claiming that porn was the same with any other industry (like what? Garment or hydrocarbon?) but that children should be protected from the products, he was trying to deceive the society that distribution, rather than production of porn, that should matter.
Granted there are other industries seeking to appease their conscience (if there's any such thing) by creating programmes that would blunt the edges of the harm they have wrought in society. Take, for instance, the tobacco producers who gain billions of dollars from young smokers (who took up the bad habit because cigarette ads told them it was cool to smoke) and contribute a fraction of their profits to anti-smoking campaigns for the young people.
But porn producers are in a sleazy class of their own. This particular person was basically saying that "I produce filth, but children are innocent and should be protected, so why don't other parties carry out the protection while I carry on with creating even more filth?"
Children are indeed innocent and must be protected, but the society comprises both children and adults whose lives are intertwined. The society must be protected as a whole. Do we even need to bring up the mid-2007 bust of an international paedophile ring (that involved 700 people, and that made use of the Internet to stream live videos of children and infants being brutalised and raped and sodomised in real time) to get our point across? Did the children in this case need to be protected from Internet porn? It is true that sick, deviant people may brutalise the powerless and the innocent (in this case the children) even without the aid of Internet porn, but it will certainly abets them.
Why this level of outrage? Because we realise that the Internet has indeed opened up a jungle even for us in Brunei Darussalam. While we'd like our children to get from it all the benefits, we'd also wish to protect them from the dangers — not by sealing off the jungle, but by fighting the filth infiltrating it.
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