People Seek to Bring U.K. Porn Filter to the U.S., Fail

In August, David Cameron, prime minister of the United Kingdom, announced that the government would be cracking down on porn by instituting automatic filters with national service providers to block porn. The next few months saw citizens all over the United Kingdom calling their internet service providers and effectively outting themselves as perverts as they requested access to anything deemed by their government as “obscene.”

What you probably didn’t hear about is that similar efforts were launched in the United States. Last month, a man in Greenbrae, California initiated a petition on whitehouse.gov asking the Obama administration to erect very similar blocks in the land of the free and home of the brave.

“We are asking for greater protection and responsibility from Internet Service providers and our country,” wrote the author, who went only by the letters M.G. “We are asking that people who are interested in porn should have to seek it and choose it. They should have to ‘Opt In’ for it by making arrangements to receive it with their Internet Service Provider.”

Never mind that porn doesn’t really happen by accident anymore, thanks to the unbelievable paranoia of engines such as Bing and Google. In this age of corporate and overreaching government prudery, the only places where adult content may float along accidentally are social networks. A government filter would be all but useless against the likes of Tumblr, Facebook or Google. Unless, of course, the filters targeted such sites.

On November 4, the DailyDot reported that the petition had only gathered 4,330 signatures out of the 100,000 required for the United States government to consider action. That’s only 4.33 percent. Just three weeks later, the petition was effectively dead. For all the rights we’re letting the government stomp on in this country, freedom to browse doesn’t seem to be one of them. Everyone pat yourselves in the back.

The U.K., unfortunately, is not seeing much luck with petitions to get the government to reconsider its stance on adult content. Currently, there’s even a petition circulating asking the government to consider action against social networking sites, which are not abiding by the national porn filters. Author Leah Umpleby writes:

The creators of Facebook manage to remove pages or group that broadcast controversial humour, but I have witnessed many pornographic videos on Facebook that have not been taken down, despite being reported many times. The videos are graphic and are often of girls under 18. These videos need to be taken down as soon as they are uploaded, there are people as young as 13 on this site!

Here’s a useful hint: if someone posts something you don’t want to see, unfriend them. It’s so easy, it almost sounds like a miracle weight-loss spam ad, doesn’t it?

Header image by Jonathon Coleman.