Claire Perry, the Prime Minister’s “special adviser on preventing the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood”, has three demands which she claims will save the world from the horrors of porn.
First, that internet service providers and other internet companies block child pornography at its source; second, that any sort of simulated rape pornography is banned; and third, that pornography is banned from public WiFi.
On the face of it, these all seem like reasonable demands. I mean, if you oppose them, you must be some kind of filth peddler or mad porn obsessive, right? Or you might just be a person who understands how the internet works, and therein lies the problem. Let’s tackle Perry’s demands one by one and explain, patiently, why she is wrong.
Firstly, her request that internet service providers block images of child abuse “at their source”. It sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? Indeed, it’s so reasonable that they already do, and indeed have been doing since 2007.
It’s done through a system called Cleanfeed, which is a rare example of a British state-funded IT project that works like a charm. They way it works is, any time a website is reported as illegal to the police, it’s added to a list.
Any sites on that list are inaccessible from British ISPs. It’s a very secure system, and very hard to work around – it works so well that we’ve exported it to Canada and Australia.
Perry also wants Google to “do more” to block child porn. As I’ve said before on these pages, Google (and other large search providers), already have enormous departments devoted to blocking it, with thousands of employees checking YouTube for offensive images.
On top of that, very little of the material that so offends Perry is available though a simple Google search; most of the illegal stuff is hidden in Internet Relay Chat file servers or on the dark web, accessible only via anonymising browsers like Tor.
One of the reasons Perry thinks all of this is justified is because she thinks Google makes a fortune from porn. It’s a common assumption – even my charming colleague Jake Wallis Simons made the point in the Telegraph podcast recently.
The truth is, they don’t. Google makes the vast bulk of its money from paid search, and porn keywords aren’t lucrative for it at all. The real money is in things like business services. For example, Google makes about £30 every time someone clicks on “invoice discounting” through a sponsored link and about £12 every time someone clicks on “car insurance” but less than £1.50 every time someone clicks on “phonesex” – and phonesex is one of the most common Google searches for pornographic content.
There are a tremendous amount of zombie statistics that fuel this belief. It’s common to see “facts” like “36 per cent of the internet is pornography”, “one in four internet searches is for porn” and “one third of all downloads are porn”.
Some of these stats were true, once. For example, the “36 per cent of the internet is porn” statistic comes from 2004; even if you believe it was true then (it’s from a very suspicious source) that was almost a decade ago: before broadband was common; before social networking, before the internet proliferated through every part of our lives The stats show it hasn’t even been remotely true since about 2007.
And that’s the claims that were once true. To claim porn sites are “busier than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined”, as Radio 4’s Moral maze did last night, is just nonsense.
Yes, there’s quite a lot of smut on the internet, but there’s nowhere near as much as Claire Perry thinks, the vast bulk of it is totally harmless porn as opposed to violent images, and it’s nowhere near the hugely profitable business Perry claims (there’s a wonderfully nerdy post debunking all of Perry’s stats here, if you’re into that sort of thing).
What about those violent images – things like simulated rape pornography and so on? Surely Perry is right, and that should be banned? After all, it was linked to the Mark Bridger killings, wasn’t it? Well, I’m not so sure. As well as the fact that Perry habitually blurs the line between conventional porn, consensually filmed rape fantasy and actual images of rape, I think there’s a worrying line of connection between arguments like “Porn made him do it” and “She was wearing a short skirt, which made him do it”.
Lawyer Myles Jackman goes into the arguments well here: it’s excusing the rapist of culpability for his actions. There’s no evidence linking enjoying violent fantasies to actually carrying out violence, in the same way that because my girlfriend likes dressing like a pirate, that doesn’t mean she’s going to rob any Spanish galleons any time soon. There’s also no evidence of the nebulous “cultural harm” that Perry claims exists.
Finally, Perry’s other demand is that explicit content should be banned from public WiFi. Firstly, this makes me wonder what is going on in Ms Perry’s local Starbucks in Devizes, but there is (perhaps) a reasonable argument for this.
The argument runs that people surfing dubious websites are able to anonymise themselves by using public WiFi, so they are much harder to track down. Unfortunately, that’s not an argument that Perry has made; and secondly, it’s also largely nonsense.
First off, the vast bulk of public WiFi blocks explicit content anyway; second, generally if someone is savvy enough to know they can disguise their IP address, they are also web-savvy enough to know the sort of tools you can use to easily bypass the sort of crude filters most public WiFi uses.
That’s the problem in a nutshell, though. Claire Perry isn’t web-savvy enough to realise her own proposals are total nonsense. Her objections are based on beliefs, not on evidence or fact.
It’s shabby and embarrassing that we are blundering into making policy based on what Ms Perry feels might work, rather than the truth.
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