Feds Claim Internet is One Percent Porn
It turns out that the internet isn’t all porn, in fact the internet is 99 percent porn free.
According to a newly released U.S. government study, only one percent of the sites indexed by Google and Microsoft contain sexually explicit content. The study goes on the conclude that less than 6 percent of all searches return any sexually explicit results at all.
The government’s new study, conducted by Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, was commissioned by the Justice Department in the hopes of reviving the 1998 Child Online Protection Act.
The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Child Online Protection Act in 2004, ruling that it would also stifle the free speech rights of adults on the Internet. The court went on to say that filtering software may work better than such laws.
Stark’s research also looked at software filters and found that the strictest filter they tested, AOL’s Mature Teen, blocked 91 percent of the sexually explicit Web sites. I’m no mathematician, but I think that means the odds of children finding porn on computers with filtering software are, uh, low.
The less restrictive filters typically blocked about 40 percent of sexually explicit sites in Google and Microsoft’s indexes. There were no details on the amount of legimate, non-sexual content such filters mistakenly blocked.
The ACLU, which has long fought the Child Online Protection Act, is citing the new study as evidence that software filters are an effective alternative to legislation.
Additionally Stark’s study found that roughly half of all sexually explicit sites are foreign and thus beyond the reach of the Child Online Protection Act, whereas software filters retain their effectiveness regardless of the origin of the content.
The burgeoning field of image recognition software holds some promise that in the future software filters will get smarter and more effective, but in the mean time the debate over legislation will likely continue.
