UK Bans Naked Girls And Talk Of Naked Girls From Wikipedia
“BUT, yer honour. I was researching Scorpion album covers on Wikipedia for a book on The Who’s influence on Germanic soft-rock. I am not a peado had have never been a paedo”.
So comes the defence. But it does not wash, at least not with a number of UK internet providers which have now blocked a Wikipedia page showing an image of a naked girl.
Visitors to the page are now met with the words “Sex case, sex case, hang him, ‘ang ‘im, ‘ang ‘im” and a knock on the door.
A shadowy “online watchdog” called the Internet Watch Foundation has warned one and all that the picture may be illegal.
A spokeswoman for the IWF, which lists its members as including the BBC, AOL (UK), Ask and News International, boasts that as many as 95% of British users would now be unable to access the page.
Wikipedia volunteer David Gerard observes that not only the picture but the text too has been blocked lest anyone who views it be turned on to studded leather jackets, finger perms and a place “Where the children of tomorrow dream away”.
Says he:
“Blocking text is a whole new thing – it’s the first time they’ve done this on such a visible site.”
Anorak applauds the directive and notes that from now on the word “naked” will be re-edited as “clothed” and searches for “girls” will result in pictures of fully grown men in skirts and regulation knickers.
Germans singing in English has also been banned.
Posted: 8th, December 2008 | In: News Comments (4) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
December 8th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
“censor”, of course
December 8th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
If they sensor Amazon.com, too, I’m sure they will get sued …
December 8th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
This is Britain, you only censor something if sufficient people have been offended under the harm principle. IE like the Ross messages thingy, all well and good until there were a lot of complaints. To do anything else (like getting offended for people or pro-active harm prevention – which has no basis in UK Law) smacks of Nazi Germany to me.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:31 am
This record cover is NOT child porn. It may be indecent and tasteless, depending on your taste, but it is obviously nothing to do with child abuse. The unelected and unanswerable IWF have made a huge mistake here.
If we can make enough of a protest about this maybe we can slow down the inevitable collapse of our culture into an opressive state-directed tyranny….