As a child, I would always be fascinated when the next-door neighbours lured me into their house with a penguin biscuit and the promise of a kitten. You see, their house was an exact mirror image of ours – stairs on the other side of the hall, toilet on the right not the left, and what we used as a garage was their soundproofed sex dungeon. The BBC blogs can be a bit like that. For instance,as David spotted, Rory Cellan-Jones’ dot.life blog has a story about the reactionary, wrong-headed, knee jerk perceived-paedo response of the Internet Watch Foundation to a 25 year old album cover on the Wikipedia page of a German metal group.
For a start this is through the looking glass because it’s usually Cellan-Jones himself that’s 25 years out of date (his intriguing exposĂ© of this “LOL-cats” phenomenon is scheduled for 2016) but also because the comments mostly eschew the expected knee-jerk “SAVE ARE PRESHUS KIDDIES” reaction.
But only because there’s no point in saving the kids when you could be having a dig at Brown & Co.
I can view the page [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]from CHINA !!! This is what the UK has become – more censorious than China.
Maybe the picture wouldn’t be so offensive if the album wasn’t entitled “Virgin Killer”.
malau69
Maybe your post wouldn’t be so idiotic if you had a sense of perspective.
This is how all Stalinist governments work.
First they choose to censor something that most people would find reasonable to censor, such as the image of a naked child.
Before you know it, all wikipedia pages relating to opposition politicians and opposition parties will also be unavailable.
I see IWF are ‘supported’ by both the Home Office and the Dept of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, enough said !
zzkevinm
zzkevinm, one day there will be a statue to you in Hyde Park. When we’ve defeated the suppressive government regime and freed our tongues again, people will visit and lay flowers at the foot of your bronze, by the sign that says “zzkevinm saved us all by warning us about censorship on the internet then doing fuck all about the creeping horror that he supposedly identified, but he did have a wank to some Buffy fanfic later in the afternoon.”
Tip of the iceberg which leads down the innevitable road to the Thought Police. No unelected body has the right to tell me what is and is not illegal, full stop.
Custador
But if you could be a rolling stone on that road maybe you could smash the glass ceiling the iceberg’s resting on and make an omelette with the chickens you’ve counted. Those are the chickens of unfettered thought making the omelette of free speech, as if the metaphor wasn’t perfectly obvious.