MORALITYVILLE—What better day than April Fool’s for the obsessed folk at Morality in Media to rage about their favorite subject? That would be porn. This time they have identified a “dirty dozen” of the nation’s top porn facilitators. They even created a web feature on pornharms.com to galvanize the masses.
“Warning! Are you aware of the top 12 facilitators of porn in America? With your help, we will successfully target, expose and shame 12 top enablers of our country’s pornography pandemic.”
The American Library Association is one of the dirty dozen. So what’s the beef with the librarians? “For years,” complains MiM, “this self-styled champion of First Amendment freedoms has worked to encourage public libraries to keep their computer unfiltered. The ALA’s misguided campaign has resulted in countless patrons of all ages being able to access or being inadvertently exposed to hardcore adult pornography and even child pornography on library computers.”
Even worse, according to MiM, “The ALA has also filed lawsuits (and LOST) against legislative enactments requiring use of filters, and continues to disseminate questionable information to libraries about their responsibility to filter pornography.”
And let's not forget that the ALA was the plaintiff in one of the earliest lawsuits against the federal recordkeeping and labeling law, 18 U.S.C. §2257.
The ALA page, which provides actions items for motivated believers, also contains supposedly damning quotes from former ALA president Judith Krug. For example, “Parents who would tell their children not to read Playboy ‘don’t really care about their kids growing up and learning to think and explore.’”
Facebook is also on the list, which is somewhat odd considering its reputation as an environment historically hostile to the adult entertainment industry. According to MiM, “child pornography is regularly shared on Facebook and women and children are trafficked on the site.” The problem, they claim, is that while “Facebook policy prohibits ‘pornographic content’ they do not devote sufficient resources to effectively police their site,” instead relying on users to notify them of problems.
“Facebook has the resources to develop better detection tools, yet they have not made this a priority,” states MiM, with nary a mention of Facebook’s integration in 2011 of Microsoft’s PhotoDNA to scrub the 200 million images uploaded daily by its users against a database of 10,000 images (out of 48 million images and videos) of child sexual abuse collected by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NSMEC). Facebook, by the way, was the first company to use the technology, an achievement unnoticed by MiM, which would be happy if the social network giant became a cyber cop, monitoring its users every move.
Google is also singled out, or more specifically app store Google Play, for containing untold thousands of porn apps. “Whether you are looking for these apps are not, you’ll be forced to see them and search among them; if you are a parent, your children will have to too,” warns MiM. Google Play does not offer any actual porn apps, of course, but maybe MiM meant that they were actually indecent, or apparently so to the discriminatingly sensitive MiMers.
Others Dirty Dozen miscreants, per MiM, include Attorney General Eric Holder, the entire Department of Defense, Twitter, Wikipedia, Barnes & Noble and Comcast.
April Fools... not!
