Google And No Child Porn

The press has had a difficult time over the years figuring out the Web. At first, they wanted nothing to do with it, other than to frighten readers with stories about it being full of evil beings. Only after early adopters like the BBC and the Guardian established an online presence, and were roundly abused for so doing, did the rest realise where the future lay and follow suit.

Let's blame somebody else!

So now we have a situation where, as with so much else, papers use the Web to make money, while on the other hand laying into many of the major players as a means of generating cheap copy. The crusade by the Daily Mail against child pornography is a case in point: the shock horror stories about what convicted criminals had been viewing starts the ball rolling.

Then comes the righteous follow-up, which holds, more or less, that (a) child killers viewed porn on their computers, (b) they may have searched for it using a search engine, (c) the most popular search engine is Google, (d) Google has been accused of tax avoidance, and therefore (e) Google is an avaricious and amoral convocation of the greedy and evil, and deserves all that’s coming to it.

Moving right along from that momentary thought that the logic leaps in this series would have the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre laughed out of court, there is a problem here, and that is simply this: accessing child porn via Google, on the face of it, appears to be a singularly difficult operation. Because Google actively removes links to it.

“We are members and joint funders of the Internet Watch Foundation - an independent body that searches the web for child abuse imagery and then sends us links, which we remove from our search index. When we discover child abuse imagery or are made aware of it, we respond quickly to remove and report it to the appropriate law enforcement authorities” is their response to all the screaming.

Now, there is always going to be something out there that Google has not yet discovered, and therefore removed from its index. But, as Unity at Ministry Of Truth pointed out last week, this amount is vanishingly small. And the Mail’s righteousness campaign has another problem: there are lots of other search engines out there – plus those who know where they’re looking don’t need to search for it.

So why jump on Google? Simples. Everybody’s heard of it, most use it, and so it’s an easily defined target. But the Mail has a growing problem here, and that is one of credibility. Their Amanda Platell “exclusive” last weekend was either blatantly illegal behaviour, or, more likely, she actually saw a legal video where all the participants were over 18. So now Dacre and his attack doggies need to distract their readers.

That means getting them to “look over there” at Google. No change there, then.