UK Government considers forcing ISP's to adopt an 'opt-in' system to pornography

According to The Sunday Times (behind paywall), the UK government is currently considering plans to legislate ISPs into blocking pornographic content by default, and requiring subscribers to their services to opt-in specifically to whichever XXX-rated sites they wish to view.

 The idea is to protect children - and, I guess, vulnerable adults - from accidentally coming across the kind of extreme hard-core images which are easily available - that in fact, throw themselves at you via pop-ups should you not be savvy enough to have turned on your pop-up blocker.  Remember those embarrassing moments at work, in the early days of the web?

From Communications Minister Ed Vaizey: "This is a very serious matter. I think it is very important that it's the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children. I'm hoping they will get their acts together so we don't have to legislate, but we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years."

Next month the government is convening a meeting of some of the country's largest ISPs, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk (which also operates Tiscali and AOL), to a meeting next month for talks.  The hope is there that they will agree to ditch the current "opt-out" system - where people have to turn on computer "parental controls" to block pornography - in favour of the "opt-in" idea.

Personally, I think that this is a superb idea, and no, I don't think it smacks of 'nanny-statism', any more than making private shops open to over 18's only, not letting kids behind the wheel of a car, and of not serving alcohol to minors. It's about protecting children from harm.  Looking around the commentary available today, there are four main objections to the scheme  (leaving aside the ramifications of revenue loss to the Internet that this would involve: pornography, as it does, funding much of the Internet).

1. Looking at porn does no harm: naughty magazine have been pawed over by 12 year olds for a few generation and we'll all fine ....

This school of thinking (see the comments on TNW's post) is so seriously outmoded it's risible.  The kind of images available to us in tattered copies of 'Razzler' are nothing in comparison to the hardcore images which will hit your pre-adolescent between the eyes as s/he does their first tentative Google search using the F word.  Add to their distress the fact that many sites are programmed to make them difficult to exit, (referred to as “mousetrapping”); indeed, on some sites the exit buttons take a viewer into other sexually explicit sites. Do you really want young children to not only know that rape, bestiality, S&M practices exist, but also have the images seared across their brains forever?

In January of this year, Morality in Media (MIM) published a 10-page paper reporting evidence that exposure to hardcore adult pornography on the Internet can adversely affect children's sexual behaviour and attitudes about sex. The evidence includes published observations of clinical psychologists, police and prosecutors, educators, rape crisis professionals, social workers and others, as well as social science research.

"What then are the consequences of our nation's failure to protect children from online exposure to hardcore adult pornography?" asks the MIM report. "Common sense should inform us that when children are exposed to graphic depictions of adultery, bestiality, bondage, excretory activities, group sex, incest, prostitution, pseudo child porn, rape, sexual murders, teen sex, torture, and unsafe sex galore, their attitudes about sex, their sexual desires and their sexual behavior can be influenced for the worst. The evidence compiled in this paper supports that assessment."

2. If parents allow their children to access pornography on the internet, then it's lazy parenting, and why should everyone have their freedom curtailed because of it?

Let's stop for a moment here and consider what we are asking parents to do.  I have two young boys, both of whom play game sites like 'Moshi Monsters' and are required to use the internet for their homework (yep, Google searches), which means that they are likely to be online either playing or working for about an hour a day.  As per best practice, our computer is in the living room.  It is not therefore, in the kitchen, bathroom or my office.  Am I required to sit alongside my sons for every minute of that hour, ignoring nature's calls, my work and the need to feed my family?  Supervising your child for every minute of their online access just isn't practical. Oh, and it also means that even if I am Supermum and magic up the extra hour in the day (and control over my bodily functions) in order to do this, I have to trust that my boys' friends' parents are doing the same when my angels go round to play. Nope.  Does not compute.

3.  As raised in Slashgear's coverage, ISPs are apparently already complaining that such blocking measures would be both technically tricky and expensive to implement. TNW says: "How do you define porn? Sure, some sites are obviously explicit but what about sites which cover the academic study of pornography? What about message boards like 4chan which cover a wide range of topics including porn? Where is the line?"

This is a trickier question, although my heart does not bleed that they will have to finance this themselves. It’s worth noting that UK mobile data networks already have adult-content blocks in place, requiring validation – by credit card or other methods – that users are over 18 if they want to access websites carriers believe contain media unsuitable for minors.  How then they have succeeded in defining what is, and what is not, pornography?  As reported on msn earlier this month, adult content sites are closer to getting their own address on the Internet, albeit to be used on a voluntary basis.  Apparently, 189,000 "pre-registrations" for ".xxx" sites and expects to register roughly 500,000 new sites when it launches the registry in the second quarter of 2011.  This scheme would make it a great deal easier to set parental controls under the existing opt-out system - but I wonder what would happen should opting for an 'xxx' suffix also mean that households have to actively 'opt-in' to view?

4. Partners will have to talk to each each other (and in most cases that will be husbands broaching the subject with wives) about their need for access to online pornography, and agree which sites may be viewed and what parental controls they will need to use to keep children from opening those sites (accidentally or deliberately).

Indeed.

Read more...

The Giddy Social Whirl: The 2010 Giddies

Each week, Kate Williams looks social media up and down and tells it what for. This week, she looks back fondly on 2010

Hooray – Christmas a-cometh. Time to pull up a chair, throw another iPad on the fire, pour yourself a pint of snowball and quietly contemplate the passing year. To which end, we present The Giddies, our appreciation of all that was big about 2010.

It’s been a heckuva twelvemonth for Justin Bieber, the adolescent song-thrush whose relentless trajectory from bedroom warbler to pop overlord has, I’m sure, delighted you as much as it has me. His transition from chirpy pubescent to chippy adolescent, along with a fragrance range and what looks like an exciting line in pick-up strategies, has been a joy to observe.

Bieber is the only individual to feature in Facebook’s list of top status trends of 2010, making him a genu-wine social media heavyweight – though Fail Blog has simultaneously bestowed upon the lad the title 'FAILiest of the Year’. A sign, perhaps, that he has now delighted us long enough.

The notion of FAIL is not strictly a 2010 phenomenon – but this was indubitably its year. From BP’s oil spill and the fabulous fake @BPGlobalPR account it spawned, to Nestle’s Kit-Kat fiasco, to a misguided decision to answer a phone during class, it was barely possible to move in social media without slipping over – the floor was literally (sorry, figuratively) awash with fail juice.

Of all the freakish cultural phenomena birthed by social media, you gotta love #FAIL, which formalises humanity’s pleasure in the minor misfortunes of others and distils it into the neatest of hashtags. It encompasses both the malfunctions of global behemoths, and the delicious underperformance of private individuals (and amphibians), in this age of universal cameraphones. I admire its honest delight in the light and shade of the world, and I recommend it to you wholeheartedly.


It’s hard to dispute Time Magazine awarding their prestigious ‘Person of the Year title to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, when the 26-year-old has this year sat calmly through a screening of The Social Network (itself heaped with nominations) without casting ‘up yours’ shadows across the screen with two of his nail-bitten billionaire fingers. Alongside this remarkable achievement, Zuckerberg continues to transform the way we connect with the world: Facebook’s half-billion users now post a billion pieces of content daily, and the network is on track to bank $2bn this year, doubling last year’s revenues. If Zuckerberg's good enough for Time, then he's good enough for a Giddy: Person of The Year it is.

The Zuckster triumphed in the face of tough competition for the Time title from the famously publicity-shy Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. Such is the adulation inspired in the Twitterscenti by the diminutive blond bombshell that one daily expects to hear that the Three Wise Men are making their way up Newgate Street, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and meh for the pocket-sized libertarian.

The inevitable biopic recounting the hunt for the Wikileaks founder will surely be named ‘Assange Est Dans L’Arbre’ - with luck earning @antonvowl, winner of a special Giddy for Funniest Tweet of the Year, a princely sum. And on the subject of the biopic, if Sting doesn’t get the monkey role, there’s no justice in this world.

Talking of corporate heavyweights, as we were before that monkey-business, let’s squeeze a place on our list for Mister Steven Jobs. Firstly, he and that other zeitgeist-meister Simon Cowell both receive Golden Giddies for another year spent championing a brave two-man trend: if you are also male and like to tuck your top into your kecks, do let Si or Steve know – they’d welcome your support.

But beyond Jobs self-assured ownership of the poloneck-in-knickers space, the Apple CEO has had a cracking year, and it’s rumoured that the iPad 2, due to launch in April, will ship at a rate of 6 million per month.

So, despite Jobs’ consistently cack-handed grasp of all that messy consumer stuff – at one point he advised left-handed users to just, you know, stop – Steve ‘Big’ Jobs, as he’s admiringly referred to here at Giddy Towers, is quite certainly a man of 2010.

One doesn’t know quite what to think about blog network Gawker, which rounded off a very high-profile year by becoming the first interweb news site to be hacked to near-death. Gawker’s attackers – who aren’t connected to the ubiquitous 4Chan/anonymous hackers, but clearly take a sticky leaf from their book - made particular mention of Gawker’s arrogance in their rationale for the attack - and when a group of pustulent 15-year-olds criticize you for over-confidence, you must be doing something right. Gawker, we award you the Giddy for Truculent Egotism (whilst reserving the right to deplore any bad stuff that you may have previously done, or may do in the future.)

On which note, let’s have a giddy round of applause for China, for consistency and rigour in their attempt to wrap their bit of the internet in a special type of very strong cling-film. As part of this ongoing project, China this week launched its own microblogging service, which they’ve named, with characteristic directness, Red Microblog. Sample tweet: “I really like the words by Chairman Mao that ‘The world is ours; we should work together.’” Mull on that, Twitter.

But, friends, there can be only one winner of The Giddy Social Whirl’s highest accolade. For its rugged will-to-live in the face of murderous attacks by Facebook, Google, Facebook and Facebook, the Aren’t-You-Dead-Yet Concept of the Year Award goes to … Privacy!

We began the year with Mark Zuckerberg’s calm assertion that no-one cared about you any more. But it turns out that we do - even the young.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt got short shrift when he proposed that people who didn’t like StreetView photographing their homes could always move, and the search giant was forced to settle the Buzz privacy suit for $8.5 million. Facebook had to retreat from a radical loosening of its privacy settings, after widespread protest, and the EU is now proposing that we should all have the right to be forgotten online.

So, to Privacy! May the Force be with you, and may you live to fight another year.

Finally, a little holiday gift for you all, dear friends. This ostentatious nativity scene combines our love of the festive season and our connoisseurship of #fail; if it has anything to teach us, it’s that the Good Lord will punish over-ambition by squishing people. Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gawker et al, do bear that in mind.


Joyeux Noël, mes amis! And go easy on the eggnog.

For more social media snippets, follow @emodkate - or for more general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

Read more...

6 types of content moderation you need to know about

Moderation is generally defined as staying within reasonable limits that aren't not excessive or extreme and avoiding. In the context of community members content moderation, it refers to the practice of monitoring submissions and applying a set of rules which define what is acceptable and what is not. Unacceptable content is then removed.

There are 6 common types of moderation which, as a Community Manager or Moderator, you need to consider when deciding how to maintain some sense of order within your community.

1. Pre-moderation

When someone submits content to your website and you have it placed in a queue to be checked by a moderator before it is visible to all, you are pre-moderating. Pre-moderation has the benefit of ensuring (in the hands of a good moderator) that content you deem to be undesirable, particularly libelous content, is kept off the visible community sections of your site. It is also a popular moderation choice for online communities targeted at children, as a way to pick up on bullying or sexual grooming behaviour.

While pre-moderation provides high control of what community content ends up being displayed on your site, it has many downsides. Commonly thought to cause the death of online communities, it creates a lack of instant gratification on the part of the participant, who is left waiting for their submission to be cleared by a moderator. In turn, content that is conversational become stilted and judder to a halt if the time delay between submission and display is too long. The other disincentive to use pre-moderation is the high cost involved if and when your community grows and submissions cross a threshold of user-generated content unmanageable by your maximum team of moderators.

It is most suited to communities with a high level of legal risk such as celebrity-based ones, or communities where child protection is vital. If content is not conversational or time-sensitive, such as reviews or photos, it can also be deployed without affecting the community's dynamic too much.

2. Post-moderation

In an environment where active moderation must take place, post-moderation is a better alternative to pre-moderation from a user experience perspective, as all content is displayed on the site immediately after submission, but replicated in a queue for a moderator to pass or remove afterwards.

The main benefit of this type of moderation is that conversations take place in real time, which makes for a faster paced community. People expect a level of immediacy when interacting on the web, and post moderation allows for this whilst also allowing moderators to ensure security, beavhioural and legal problems can be identified and acted upon in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, as the community grows, cost can become prohibitive. As well as this, as each piece of content is viewed and approved or rejected, the website operator legally becomes the publisher of the content, which can prove to be too much of a risk for certain communities such as gossip ones which attract salacious and potentially defamatory submissions. Given that the number of times content is viewed will directly impact on the size of damages awarded should a court case result from publication of a submission, a short time frame for the review of content is advisable.

3. Reactive moderation

Reactive moderation is defined by relying on your community members to flag up content that is either in breach of your House Rules, or that the members deem to be undesirable. It can be utilised alongside pre- and post- moderation, as a 'safety net' in case anything gets through the moderators, or more commonly as the sole moderation method.

The members themselves essentially become responsible for reporting content that they feel are inappropriate as they encounter this content on the site or community platform. The process is usually to include a reporting button on each piece of user-generated content, that if clicked, will file an alert with the administrators or moderator team for that content to be looked at, and if in breach of the site's rules of use, to remove.

The main advantage of this method of moderation is that it can scale with your community growth without putting extra strain on your moderation resource or cost, as well as theoretically avoiding responsibility for defamatory or illegal content uploaded by the users of your website, as long as your process for removing content upon notification within an acceptable timeframe is in place.

However, if your company is particularly concerned about how their brand is viewed, you might not be willing to take the risk that some undesirable content will be visible on your site for any period of time, as you are relying on your members to see and bother reporting this content. In addition to this, a recent court case in Italy involving Google suggests that reactive moderation provides legal protection.

4. Distributed moderation

Distributed moderation is still a somewhat rare type of user generated content moderation method. It usually relies on a rating system which members of the community use to vote on whether submissions are either in line with community expectations or within the rules of use. It allows control of comments, or forums posts to mostly reside within the community, usually with guidance from experienced senior moderators.

Expecting the community to self-moderate is very rarely a direction companies are willing to take, for legal and branding reasons.For this reason, a distributed moderation system can also be applied within an organisation, using several members of staff to process contributions and aggregating an average score to determine whether content should be allowed to stay public or be reviewed. A popular example of such a member-controlled system in place is Slashdot. There are also companies such as SocialMod who leverage the Amazon service Mechanical Turk to offer a moderation service relying on thousands of workers to process content.

5. Automated moderation

In addition to all of the above human-powered moderation systems, automated moderation is a valuable weapon in the moderator's arsenal. It consists of deploying various technical tools to process UGC and apply defined rules to reject or approve submissions.

The most typical tool used is the word filter, in which a list of banned words is entered and the tool either stars the word out or otherwise replaces it with a defined alternative, or blocks or rejects the message altogether. A similar tool is the IP ban list. There are also a number of more recent and sophisticated tools being developed, such as those supplied by Crisp Thinking. These include engines that allow for automated conversational pattern analytics, and relationship analytics.

6. No moderation

As an ex-fulltime moderator, I can't in good conscience ever suggest not moderating your community at all. As a Community Manager, even less! But there are all sorts of reasons why you might choose not to regulate in any way the content submitted by your members.

Maybe you simply don't have the resource or finance, or you don't believe in any form of molding or control on content. From a legal standpoint, you might feel that your community is small enough to fly under the radar. Be that as it may, there are big benefits to using one of the moderation types covered above.

Without some form of moderation, your community will quickly descend into anarchy, and the atmosphere will probably become so unpleasant it will turn off potential new members. You could point to communities such as somethingawful.com forums as examples that anarchy and unpleasantness is not a bad thing, but dig a bit deeper and you'll see they employ a moderation system (as ambiguous and random it may be).

Basically, without moderation you are not in any control of your community, which leaves you wide open to all sorts of abuse, both anti-social as well as illegal. I don't recommend it.

Which moderation system do you use for your community?

[photo by Michael David Pedersen]

[originally posted on blaisegv.com]

Read more...

The Giddy Social Whirl: Moving

Each week, Kate Williams looks social media up and down and tells it what for. This week, she stumbles back in from the cold following a ghastly episode of broadband exile.


YESSS! The Giddy Social Whirl is back.

The keen-eyed amongst you may have noticed that I’ve fallen off the back of the social media van over the last week or so, due to as how I’ve been moving house.

To those of you who are currently contemplating such a thing, please know that were I ever to suffer such a catastrophe again (a purely hypothetical scenario; they will take me out in a box) I would, without question, employ a packing service.

Packing up the contents of even a very small family house is the project of a madman or a masochist. True enough, bespoke packers require an additional mortgage - but friends, these people have a system. They keep cables with their associated hardware. They don’t use black bin liners for important paperwork, then accidentally bin them. They tend not to mark twenty identical boxes as simply ‘kids etc’. Still, I’m sure the youngest will turn up when he’s hungry.

Suffice to say that the move a mere 100 yards up the road involved a great deal of chaos, and many bitter tears of recrimination and regret. But of all the grievous disruptions to my comfort and equilibrium, the most painful was internet-related: the move involved going cold turkey in the broadband department. Complete withdrawal.

Yes, yes, I have a smartphone. But the truth is that my thumbs are undergoing the same gravity-induced slippage as the rest of me. Anything more complex than ‘at garij want snax?’ requires a leaner digit than I now possess.

Like many, I’d previously contemplated life without the internet with a kind of perverse fascination. My online life and my physical one are surprisingly well integrated for a borderline sociopath, but nevertheless I’ve flirted with the idea of going off-grid - and in particular with the belief that a life without social networks might be a more productive one.

I pictured winter evenings gathered round a blazing radiator, playing Scrabble with my young. I imagined myself reading books as the evening wore on – and even, in my most delusive hours, toyed with the idea of writing them. I’m going to lay that one to rest right now.

Life without the internet sucks a kind of suckage that you wouldn’t wish to witness without a visor, and life without social networks is basically 1978. It’s no coincidence, in my opinion, that the recent cold snap has coincided with me being off Twitter: I believe that, by failing to arrange a seamless transition from old broadband to new broadband, I have unwittingly disrupted the timey-space thing and catapulted us all back to the winter of discontent. I’m very sorry about that.

However, I can now confirm that the situation has been stabilized; with luck the mantle of greying slush and popular malaise which now blankets the nation will soon be lifted. I have unpacked my bubble-wrapped self, marked my new surroundings with my unique musky scent, and am ready to GO.

***

Holy synchronicity - at the very top of my teetering inbox is the exciting news that Mark Zuckerberg’s house is for sale! Even better, this news comes via Gawker, so it’s almost certainly partially true.

But wait a minute. Have a look at those pictures. What strikes you about them? If you are thinking: hmm, that house is really a bit pants, and very much incongruent with what we expect the residence of a 26-year-old billionaire tech CEO to look like, then we are very much of one mind.

We Brits are very confused by the property expectations of our US compadres. On the one hand, all middle-class families in Hollywood films seem to live in palatial New England clapboards whose supersized entrance halls alone gobble up the square-footage of the average Hounslow semi. On the other hand, many real-life US celebrities appear actually to live in average Hounslow semis, albeit in more prestigious locales – and so it is with Mr Zuckerberg.

The house fails miserably on every level. It is modest, yet simultaneously overreaching in its ambition. Its aesthetic appeal is, let’s say, niche - but it is not so ugly as to make any kind of emphatic statement. It looks, frankly, jerry-built - and those bins? Untidy.

Perhaps it’s a British thing. We are a culture notoriously attached to our properties, and obsessed with what they say about us. So invested are our identities in our houses that we have more-or-less elected Kirsty and Phil as monarchs-for-life, and in the process fraggled our economy seven ways to Christmas in pursuit of the ruinous dream of near-universal home ownership.

So I’m intrigued by the fact that Zuckerberg, whose personal wealth has multiplied relentlessly and exponentially in recent years, has chosen to live there so long. I strongly suspect that he intended to signify that he is a man of the people who still knows the price of a pint of milk and wipes his own patootie – when of course he has only added to our impression that he is a mutant success-zombie so intent on global dominion that he would happily live in a branch of Chick-U-Like and barely register the smell of curdling trans-fats.

No matter. It seems that Zuckerberg may at last have understood that it’s time to mogulize up, and that ostentation and conspicuous consumption are what we little people expect.

After a hard day spent rolling back the privacy expectations of a generation, the man has a right – a duty - to relax in his own panic room with a bottle of Clos Du Mesnil ‘95 and a cigar the size of a festive Smarties tube. A certain amount of poor taste is acceptable, indeed unavoidable – but to carry it off we need opulence. Infinity pool, some luxe finishes, maybe some drones - at the very least a loyal factotum, who in my opinion should definitely look like Max from Hart to Hart.

A magnate should behave like a magnate. Any attempt to subvert this law only adds, in the minds of the populace, to the perceived evil quotient, and makes us very nervous indeed.


A bientôt, mes amis!

For more social media snippets, follow @emodkate - or for more general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

Read more...