UK Filters And The Slippery Slope Of Mass Censorship

from the slip-slip-sliding-your-freedoms-away dept

We've covered the ridiculousness of the UK's "voluntary" web filters. UK officials have been pushing such things for years and finally pushed them through by focusing on stopping "pornography" (for the children, of course). While it quickly came out that the filters were blocking tons of legitimate content (as filters always do), the UK government quickly moved to talk about ways to expand what the filters covered.

The pattern is not hard to recognize, because it happens over and over again. Government officials find some absolute horror -- the kind of thing that no one will stand up for -- to push for some form of censorship. Few fight back because no one wants to be seen as standing up for something absolutely horrific online, or be seen as being against "family values." But, then, once the filters are in place, it becomes so easy both to ignore the fact that the filters don't work (and censor lots of legitimate content) and to constantly expand and expand and expand them. And people will have much less of a leg to stand on, because they didn't fight back at the beginning.

That appears to be happening at an astonishingly fast pace in the UK. Index On Censorship has a fantastic article, discussing how a UK government official has already admitted to plans to expand the filter to "unsavoury" content rather than just "illegal." James Brokenshire was giving an interview to the Financial Times last month about his role in the government’s online counter-extremism programme. Ministers are trying to figure out how to block content that’s illegal in the UK but hosted overseas.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140418/15545526961/uk-filters-slippery-slope-mass-censorship.shtml