LOS ANGELES—The impulse to follow Britain's porn-blocking lead has been percolating for a while in Canada, but a conservative MP is now indicating that she is ready to pull the trigger and introduce legislation that will emulate efforts underway in the United Kingdom to place porn-blocking filters at the ISP level as a default setting that can only be changed upon request of an adult.
"Winnipeg Conservative MP Joy Smith ... is formulating a private member’s bill that would automatically block access to online pornography," reported the National Post yesterday.
"If we can get a man on the moon, certainly we can figure out a way to protect children from unwanted porn,” said Smith last month in Ottowa, where the legislator hosted a "meeting for parliamentarians and other stakeholders ... with speakers including Gail Dines, a self-described radical feminist and sociology professor at Boston’s Wheelock College who founded the Stop Porn Culture group, and Julia Beazley, policy analyst at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada."
At the meeting, the anti-porners "warned about the increasingly violent nature of modern pornography and its effects on young users, with Dines describing the current global state of affairs as a “public health emergency situation."
Smith and her colleagues are not just interested in making Canada and the United Kingdom safe for children. The regulation of pornography, promised Smith, "is going to happen all over the world."
Canada, she added, needs to be a trend-setter. “Over 40 years of empirical research has revealed concrete evidence on the harms of pornography and the way it shapes behavior and attitudes of children and youth,” she said. “For this reason, Canada needs to take the lead to protect children and youth from this predator industry.”
That underlying premise is already getting flak. "Anti-Internet-censorship activist Bennett Haselton, founder of peacefire.org, a website that creates portals to get around blocked sites, said the burden of proof should be on anti-porn activists 'to show that what they are blocking is harmful somehow,'" noted the Post.
"'In the United States and Canada and most other developed countries," added Haselton, "an entire generation now has grown up that, for the most part, actually did have unrestricted Internet access, and they’re not mentally warped by it. There’s no evidence that they’ve been harmed by it."
Indeed, the creeping global conversation on porn often finds itself stuck between competing research that claim polar opposite results, with neither side in the scientific debate particularly interested in conversing with the other to find common ground. Neither does it help that the rhetoric being bandied about is so hyperbolic, as if the porn question is truly life and death rather than a rite of passage of sorts that all humans deal with, and for the most part, survive quite well.
Whether it turns out that, as Smith augurs, pornography is regulated globally remains to be seen, but one thing that is clear is that the call to impose mandatory filters on consumers even in their homes is spreading fast, and coming to a country near you.
