A change to anything related to Google Search – the product so many of us rely on – is never going to go by unnotoced. This time around, Google has altered Image Search for US users to alter the way it handles that ever so important aspect of the web – adult content.
Adult content is an important part if the web. You may not like it, and maybe not even admit it, but pornography is one of the cornerstones of the web, and virtually everyone has used it for that purpose – regardless of gender or nationality. So, when Google changes the way it handles adult content, the web will notice.
While the United States is by far the largest producer of it, it’s also probably the most conservative and puritanical western country when it comes to attitudes towards adult content. It is no surprise, then, that Google is first rolling out its new policy for adult content on the other side of the pond.
So, what, exactly, does the new policy entail? Well, the general gist is that in order to find explicit images, you’ll have to be more… Explicit. Searching images for “fuck” will no longer result in explicit images. You’ll have to be even more explicit than that – just how much so remains to be seen. SafeSearch does not affect this.
Google issued a statement regarding the changes.
We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for – but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you’re looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting – you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in Web search.”
I am not a big fan of these changes – or regressions, as I prefer to call them – and not because it makes it harder for me to find adult content. No, the core issue lies with a company deciding what is explicit and what is not, most likely based on American puritanical views. When these changes are rolled out worldwide, Google will be exporting American values to countries that are more… Open and matter-of-factly about these things. Naked boobs? Big whoop. I’d rather see that than guns.
This is happening in more ways than one. With American companies dominating technology, it is to be expected that American values dominate as well. Just today, John Siracusa noted on Twitter that Apple’s iTunes Match had automatically replaced an uncensored version of a song with a censored one.
Google is free to make its product work this way, but at the same time, we are free to use other products. I don’t like companies telling me that naked people are somehow bad or immoral – I can make up my own mind just fine. I’d much rather Google apply this kind of ‘functionality’ to violence than to nudity and sex.
Children and adults should not have to wade through explicit content they are not looking for. Kudos.
You have SafeSearch for that. I’m not sure how this will pan out, it’ll depend on the explicit vs safe terms, I guess.
+1. Safe search is also on by default. What we don’t need, as adults, is hand holding by the Pilgrim Fathers. Is Google now going to extend this to Youtube and all the Girlies making FAP-bait titillation videos to get hits and drive their ranks/income with little or no real talent? e.g. channels like:
http://www.youtube.com/user/iwantmylauren
http://www.youtube.com/user/MissHannahMinx
I don’t care that they exist, I don’t care that they are mainly used by teenaged boys to fap at, but where do you draw the line?
Yes, as a default, hiding adult material is just sensible. Yes, you can make arguments about censorship and overly-sensitive attitudes, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that no parent wants their kids accidentally finding porn because they went looking for pictures of cats…
Blame the designers of modern English for putting two meanings on the word “pussy” No search engine will ever fix that without some HEAVY censor.
(Actually, in French, we also have a cat-related word with extra meanings, makes me wonder if associating cats with sex is a general feature of European languages… or if it’s just because we have spent so much time fighting with the Brits that we have ended up stealing some language constructs along with the women and booty.)
Edited 2012-12-13 06:55 UTC
“Pussy” used to be an exclusively American English term for the female reproductive area. British English used to use Fanny. We always knew the double meaning, but it wasn’t the common word used as I was growing up at all. Now with the advent of internet Porn, it seems to be deeply routed in even our version language. It feel very false still to me, sort of kitsch, as it reminds me of a 70’s UK comedy “Are you being served?” where an older lady would talk about her “pussy” the in joke was that we all knew the double meaning (but I swear that if it was ever commonly used here, it was out of favour the 80’s.)
Edited 2012-12-13 09:59 UTC
Thanks for the explaination. Differences between British and American English are always a bit hard to grasp for foreigners…
(Funny though, “Fanny” used to be a widespread girl first name around here only a few decades ago…)
Fanny in American English means “Arse”/”Ass” in general. It causes a lot of mirth, especially the term “fanny pack”, which we call “bum bag”.
The words “bush” and “beaver” are also sometimes used to refer to the same thing (especially with the presence of pubes), but those words are used less often enough that you’ll be more likely to see plants and furry little critters if you search for one of those. The number of humorous sexual slang terms that also have a more “proper” meaning is pretty high, and quite a few tend to be named after animals.
It goes the other way too. Hell, just look at the entire naming scheme of things as common as electrical cables and connectors/jacks. The “male” connector goes into the “female” receptacle. When the two genders are combined, they are “mated.” The whole thing is hilarious. Now if that’s not based on something perverted, then I don’t know what is!
Whoever named those should’ve been awarded some kind of comedy award, especially for using such sexually-suggestive terms throughout the entire process of something that probably everyone is familiar with. It happens to be more technical than most people care to know about, so people never tend to complain about it either.
Edited 2012-12-15 10:21 UTC
When you search for “bush” you get pages and pages of images depicting George W. Bush. Why can’t we have a filter for that? I’d much rather look at some actual bushes or even those hairy cunts than that stupid grin.
So a stupid cunt isn’t good enough for you?
LMFAO… I would’ve modded that funny if I could… good one.
I’m sick and tired of all of the “think of the children!” whining. If you’re so damned concerned that you kid might see something sexual, then don’t leave them to crawl the Internet unsupervised. It wasn’t created for children.
…spoken like a child!
As a father of three kids (12, 14, 17, my kids new about the birds and the bees by age 7 or 8). I really don’t care about boobs or even full frontal nudity, or bumping ugly’s by consenting adults . What I care about is the big dick in the mouth, or explicit up the ass, or fake-rapes that comes across with simple searches. As they said, all the content is still there if you like, you just need to be more specific/discrete. Not a bad idea from my point of view! I’ve always been a fan of the .xxx TLD as a way for parents to filter the worst of the content.
My $.02
TBM
No, spoken like a 50+ year old adult who is tired of parents trying to foist off their morals on everyone else.
Perhaps Google could filter by penis size to reduce your discomfort…
Really? What kind of “simple searches” of images on Google, with “Safe Search” turned on showed images like those? I’ve used Google image search for years and I’ve not found rape scenes, fellatio, or anal penetration when performing “simple searches.”
Besides, the previews are the size of postage stamps. It’s not like some child is going to be traumatized by seeing a 200×150 image.
If you want content filtered, then the filtering should *ONLY* take place if you turn some variant of “Safe Search” on. I have no problem with that. I’m even fine with them turning it on by default. But it’s ridiculous to filter content when the user has explicitly turned Safe Search off.
By not wanting any restrictions you are imposing your morals on me/us. In your system, you are allowing all kids to have access to all porn. So you are imposing your morals (or lack there of) on everyone else.
One of the first thing kids do is turn off safe search!
TBM
I’m not imposing anything on you. I don’t even want your children using the Internet, so don’t try to pin that on me.
Censorship of search results, whether to please parents, the government of China, the Family Research Council, the Taliban, or some other group, is never a good idea.
The Internet has had pornography on it longer than any minor has been alive. You remind me of the people who move in next to an airport and then circulate petitions to limit flights because they don’t like the noise.
I’ve got a lot more in the way of morals than you ever will. For example, I don’t try to blame others when I fail in my responsibilities.
Of for f***’s sake, then lock SafeSearch:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1446…
I don’t even have kids and I realized that Google must provide a way to lock SafeSearch on. Fifteen seconds later, I had the link above.
It’s terrifying that parents like you, who can’t even keep their disobedient kids from turning off SafeSearch, are allowed to have guns in their houses.
But what if someone clearly shows their intent by, for example, searching “blowjob?” You can’t get much more exact in what you want to search for unless you try the more scientific term “fellatio.” In either search, you will get next to nothing relevant to the search query and there is nothing in the options to correct this.
Try typing “pussy” and not only will you not see what most adult men think about when they think of the word pussy, you won’t even get any pictures of cats! What a joke. Failing “titties,” even typing “nipples” will bring up next to nothing. I don’t use Google to look up porn myself (there are much better sites and ways of obtaining it), but I have always been 100% against censorship.
If the religious people don’t want to view this stuff, fine, but to be pushing this censorship onto everyone that uses the U.S. Google search site to search is bullshit. There is not even an option to get rid of this offensive behavior. If there was (as there in fact was before this crippling update), there would be no problem.
Edited 2012-12-12 23:29 UTC
I’m with you 100% on this. While I don’t care to see boobs mixed in with normal image searches, I don’t think Google should be this aggressive about it. I can be my own net nanny, thank you.
Of course, there are other search engines out there…until Google swallows them up anyway.
Speak for yourself! 🙂
Terminology is also an issue here.
(1) is pretty universal. But is it blowjob or blow job? I bet the two get different results.
(2) is a scientific term. It won’t get you any porn, unless Google explicitly substitutes a more colloquial term. I’d have though you would get mainly medical journal and sex manuals.
(3) I’d never think to use that term to search for sex related issues. It’s not the usual word we use in the UK. I’d actually use minge, vag, fanny, c*nt or twat (though twat is more used as an insult.)
(4) sounds like a child’s term to me. We use “tits”. I’d have gone with norks, boobs, nips.
(5) nipslip would be the more helpful term, surely?
Yes, but my point was that you cannot get any more blunt and downright to the point than that. And the space? Come on–it’s highly common to be spelled both ways, so no matter what at least a few pictures should pop up.
On the Google site for the United States, before this change, if you just typed in “pussy” with the censoring turned off, almost everything would be be nudity and sexual. Now… there’s still no cats, and none of the “other” pussy, but the results are now loaded with pictures of fully-clothed women and other random crap–which doesn’t make sense in either sense of the word. No, no clothed crotch shots that I could find in my 25 seconds testing their newly-neutered image search function either.
Tits, titties, boobs, boobies, hooters, jugs, melons, rack, breasts–whatever, there are countless slang words and they’re all referring to the same thing. And unlike jugs, melons and rack, titties should be obvious enough to the point that something relevant shows up.
The intention was, if “titties” shows clothed ones with covered nipples, then surely “nipples” should result in actual, uncovered nipples. But even that didn’t work. Plus, nipslips are not even porn; I was specifically using words that would normally be guaranteed to result in tons of nudity and actual porn. Searching for nipslips wouldn’t be a very good way of putting the new engine to the test.
Ironically, if you add “naked” or “nude” to any single one of the search terms I’ve tried, you will in fact have struck the porn jackpot, and pictures that are expected (for the most part) will dominate the results. Additionally you will get a different set of images depending on the modifier you use, but it’ll pretty much all porn. But is it really necessary to complicate things and make it seem to “not work” to anyone actually seeking this stuff? This new image search simply doesn’t work as it’s expected (put another way, it doesn’t work how it should), no explanation why not, and again–no option to bring common sense functionality back.
Clearly the search terms I tested (potential exception: pussy, due to multiple meanings) are perfectly descriptive to be found with the “naked” and “nude” modifiers, which just confirms once again that Google is trying to censor the Web for their users. Yes, even “fellatio” with these modifiers works, though as expected don’t expect to find much decent (“blowjob” returns poor results too, though).
Edited 2012-12-13 11:32 UTC
Full on irony – all I get is vag with safe search off on the .co.uk site. Have you tried using that version of Google? (And will it even let you?).
Yes, it works as expected on Google’s UK site and just as the US site used to work with the filtering off before this update came out.
Also, it seems that “hardcore” may act as a strong modifier to actually get the new Google search to display what it is asked.
Odd your English and you think c*nt is so obscene you censored it.
Sorry after posting I find it was OSnews
Thom OSnews is censoring C.U.N.T
Edited 2012-12-13 11:47 UTC
What’s odd is how you can type a “forbidden” word and post it uncensored here at OSNews, but if you made a mistake and had to edit the post the word will then be censored. So if you want that word to remain uncensored, you have to leave the original post untouched.
Edited 2012-12-13 21:36 UTC
c*nt <- a test
Oh yes – if you edit the comment, it self censors. Weird! Retrospective prudism? It also loses any capitalisation!
Edited 2012-12-13 22:19 UTC
But if I post a new comment, cunt will be visible?
Yep. Weird, eh? I’ve used that little “secret” to my advantage for a while now, in fact…
That stuff was put in place once because we had a serious spam problem with people using racial slurs (those are edited as well). I had forgotten about it to be honest.
No point removing it now, as all energy is currently focussed on the next version of OSNews. It is ironic as f–k though (<= lol).
edit: wait, it allows f–k? So we did turn it off? Huh?
edit 2: ah, the feature kicks in after editing a comment. Curious. Bug!
Edited 2012-12-14 00:46 UTC
Damn! Now they know. Enjoy it while it still lasts everyone…
OSNews Staff: Please, take your time while, eh, “fixing” this bug.
By the way… that was hilarious.
Edited 2012-12-14 01:35 UTC
Will the next OS News have a published API? (REST or whatever?) I’d love to write a few apps for Android/iOS/WindowsPhone/Desktop OS to appify the content. I Spoke to Kroc and David about it, but the old site’s API was too limiting for what I wanted to try to achieve.
The new site will be using Drupal (instead of our current custom CMS) – so I’m guessing that’s going to be a lot easier. It’d be awesome to have applications for OSNews. Right now, Tess is working on moving everything over from the old CMS to Drupal (an arduous task, but lots of progress), and I believe she currently has a first very basic version running locally. In the meantime, I’ve been designing the new site’s front-end, and finally settled on a definitive design these past few weeks.
No idea how long it’s going to take from here on, but if you want to get (occasional) updates on progress, best to follow Tess and I on Twitter (@socketwench and @thomholwerda).
EDIT: god that sounded like a cheap trick to get followers. Sorry. It really isn’t .
Edited 2012-12-14 10:43 UTC
Well, I’ll say that I’m going to commit to at least creating an open sourced Actionscript 3 API wrapper and then I’ll then throw together a simple Adobe Air app (as that’ll run crossplatform on Android, Windows, Mac and Playbook and can be made to run on iOS with extra magic.) depending on time, I’d then use that as a basis to create something for WindowsPhone by making a .Net version of the API, probably a Windows client at the same time (as that’s a no brainer) and then weigh up iOS and Objective-C. Moving from ActionScript to .Net has been made a lot easier since HaXe started their .Net target back end. That’s probably the route I’d go. Actionscript to haXe to .Net (NB. Converting Actionscript code to haXe is reasonably straight forward as the language is more or less compatible with caveats, though I think it restricts the version of Flex one can use to 2.)
Basically, any open platform the client will be available, any closed platform the app will probably be available if I can be motivated enough to pay whatever the app store fees are for that platform.
So you do think that censorship has a place afterall since you use(d) it on this site?
You bitch about Google censoring pictures but you censor written speech… interesting. Seems like a double standard.
You censor(ed) to prevent racial slurs because it offends someone? So their opinions are less valid then your opinion. I think porn offends some people. Not me particularly, I’m more offended by censoring the written word then pictures. Although both are forms of communication.
Don’t Europeans have laws about religious insults? In the USA I can say “I think you’re a fucking ignorant dip-shit for believing in your stupid, unproved, BS god/religion!” And that is protected speech. I think what Google is doing is trivial in reality to that kind of censorship.
Europeans have no leg to stand on when it comes to censorship.
TBN
Well, there’s a fairly significant cultural difference between the US and Continental Europe on this point (Continental Europe excluding England, because the position in England has no principled or cultural basis and is totally bonkers). In Europe, the two ‘forms of communication’, as you put it, have had very different effects and are therefore treated differently. A European would say that unless you equate sex and violence, there’s really no basis for saying that the same principles must apply in relation to both.
In brief (heh), Europe is rather relaxed about nudity and tends not to censor in relation to nudity (hence those famous Italian pasta ads). The American paranoia about depicting the female nipple on the TV and in generalist media, in particular, tends to baffle Europeans – the feeling here is that exposure to the naked female (or male) form does little harm.
Europeans are, in general, a lot less relaxed about incitement to hatred or violence – several centuries of genocides and massacres of religious and racial minorities, the vast majority preceded by rhetoric of hate, have left a feeling that certain forms of rhetoric can do great harm. The US hasn’t been prone to these outbreaks, so is more relaxed about these types of speech.
Yep I did a search for pussy and did not even get any cats and nothing explicit unless you want to call the pic of Jesus giving the finger explicit. Next I put NSFW in front of the word pussy and woaaaa. I didn’t get cats but lots and lots of pussy pics. Next I tried the search term “pussy hole” and that was noting but pure porn pics even more explicit results than “NSFW pussy”. I also tried the term “creampie” That result was noting but porn purely explicit “creampie” pics. a search for doggie style returns mixed results but no XXX stuff however putting the word porn before doggie style and you get exactly what you searched for nothing but XXX doggie style….interesting. Its seems a bit inconsistent because the term “creampie” returned purely explicit pics without having to put “porn” or “NSFW” in the search
edit: Similarly a search for “cuckold” reveals nothing but changing the term to “wife cuckold” and you get exactly that XXX wife cuckold and nothing else.
Edited 2012-12-13 10:27 UTC
I got Jesus with “moderate on” (my usual setting), but with Safe search off, I get all the trimmings on the UK pages.
Spot on!
It’s far too easy to stumble on adult content without even trying to. I think anyone who has kids will welcome this.
Edited 2012-12-14 14:56 UTC
Children and adults should not have to wade through religious content they are not looking for, but I don’t see you arguing that Google should be blocking images of Jesus Christ being tortured to death.
I sort of agree. If you reduce the argument to that of protecting a child and making it slightly harder for adults to find pornography ( which they have every right to), then I am for controls. I don’t think the changes have made it more difficult to find adult material and the debate over synonyms is a bit silly (IMHO)…
I am sympathetic with the views expressed but wait till you have your own young kids poking about on the computer and your perspective changes a bit.
Point stands. I don’t care if my kid finds pictures of naked men or women. Big whoop.
I find violence a far bigger issue.
Then presumably you should be giving a cautious welcome to the updated image search. It’s trivially easy to find content that qualifies as both pornographic *and* graphically violent.
I’ll take your word for it.
But that’s like arguing that people who dislike fast cars should rejoice about the Google porn filtering because it’s trivially easy to find nude women posing with fast cars.
No, it’s not. It’s not like that at all.
If you’re too stupid to see the distinction, content filters are almost certainly the least of your worries.
Yes, it is exactly like that:
Sexual images that include violence will be hidden and sexual images that include fast cars will be hidden. And the filters are targeting neither the violence nor the fast cars.
Statistically speaking, the chance that you have an IQ as high as mine is less than 1 in 200 — even ignoring the fact that I had to explain something so simple and obvious as the analogy that I made.
Edited 2012-12-15 23:10 UTC
If the worst you find on the Internet with SafeSearch off are merely unclothed people, you’re running really boring searches. 🙂
In any event, Google’s decision strikes me as more of a business decision that censorship. People vote with their feet more than their ballots; I presume Google is responding to their market. If not, they’ll be irrelevant soon anyway. Or should be.
Just curious (and I don’t intend to be passive/aggressive here): As I don’t expect the Dutch to adjust to American norms, why do you seem to expect Americans to adjust to yours? Perhaps Europeans should rally behind a Eurocentric search engine that better fits your culture(s) instead of trying to tailor an American company toward that end?
I honestly think that if the Internet started to isolate themselves in regional islands with limited cultural connexions, so as to better please each country’s moral guardians, something of value would have been lost… Be it only because for some, the Internet has been a way to escape the arbitrary reach of said guardians so far.
Then again, perhaps it would indeed be a more sensible option than the current way of entrusting the US to control the core components of the internet and screaming foul when it goes wrong.
Edited 2012-12-13 07:20 UTC
To be honest the web is pretty cliquey the moment you got outside of your language comfort zone. That is why you can get Yandex, Biadu, Yahoo! Japan and yet someone in the UK would barely know they exist.
Well, afaik it’s fairly common for people to write in english even if it’s not their main language, as soon as websites get sufficiently big. It’s the latin of the 21st century so to speak.
It’s down to a difference in culture. Sex, nudity, pornography, etc. is still pretty taboo in some of the less progressive regions of the United States.
My attitude is with my children I don’t use any net censor, they need to deal with the world as it is. We’ve discussed the internet and pornography, if it’s a problem we will discuss it again. However, as an educator I have had to deal with both parents and students where pornography has been a problem. Arguably pornography is addictive, maybe and often is degrading, misogynistic, depicts sexual violence, dangerous and / or inappropriate sexual activity.
To equate pornography to pictures of naked men or women is disingenuous
Edited 2012-12-13 06:44 UTC
I have absolutely no doubt what so ever that you will change your position once you do have kids. Hypothetical kids and real ones have little in common.
Are you saying that just because you are incapable of “protecting” your own children from viewing whatever you personally deem as “inappropriate” for your kids, that everyone else should be penalized as well? How about people keep their own religious and personal philosophies to themselves and quit making the world a worse place for everyone else?
If someone is not willing or even capable of accomplishing the basic tasks associated with being a parent themselves, then maybe–just maybe–they shouldn’t have any kids to begin with? Set a good example by keeping your damn pants zipped unless you’re alone in the bathroom taking a piss or something (or at least wearing a rubber), unless you choose to be responsible for watching over your own kids.
Edited 2012-12-12 23:54 UTC
Congratulations, you’ve taken a single line throwaway generalised point and painted an entire lifestory for me. Well done. And I’m feeding the troll replying. Well done me too.
Elaborate, then? Your post seemed pretty clear to me, even with only one sentence.
By your comment, it certainly appeared that you were relieved (glad?) that Google is starting to more aggressively take over some of the your basic responsibilities of deciding what your kids see to make your life easier–which hints that you’d rather not deal with that responsibility if you don’t have to. The simple fact is, if a person can’t or doesn’t want to be in control what their kids do, then maybe they should reconsider having any in the first place have any. Sorry, truth hurts, but it’s common sense.
There are much better ways to accomplish what you desire without neutering an entire search engine and butchering everyone else’s experience. See: http://www.opendns.com/. That’s just one effective example that can filter your entire Internet service at the router level, which uses DNS to block entire categories of sites.
Edited 2012-12-13 21:29 UTC
He did a good job of selecting a quote that summarized your position and in refuting that position. Your sarcastic reply added nothing to the discussion.
Your argument boils down to believing that millions of adults should be inconvenienced in order to reduce the amount of pornography your child stumbles across while operating a computer unsupervised.
Probably for the same reason you don’t keep your personal philosophies to yourself. As for protecting children, it is NOT POSSIBLE to be with them all the time. Besides, this policy does not PREVENT anyone for finding whatever they want. It just makes it less likely that people who are not interested in the stuff YOU deem acceptable will stumble across it accidentally.
Obviously you are a pre-pubescent teen, since most adults can carry on a conversation or even a debate without using profanity as if that magically makes your point for you. I certainly hope you take your own advice and choose not to reproduce when you grow up. We have enough self-aggrandizing fools running around the world.
In general I think filtering hardcore porn from the search results is an okay idea and it’s not necessarily healthy for children to be exposed to such, but I don’t agree with the method Google went for here; Safe Search is the correct place to put this in as that is user-controllable and can be disabled — filtering of content without giving a consenting adult a way of disabling that filtering I cannot agree with. A user called “johjeff” here wrote a sentence that quite well summarizes why:
That is, a group of people deem what should be acceptable and opposing opinions will be filtered from the view of the larger audience. While what Google is doing here is still pretty benign, such filtering is still a very slippery slope and slipping even once will send you on a fast path to doom.
How about instead of thinking of it as censorship, think of it as trying to give correct results. As an adult I don’t search with “Safe Search” on, however if I want to search for “gay” for whatever reason….. doesn’t necessarily mean (imply) I want to see a bunch of guys slamming each other in the ass. The difference between “gay wedding” and “gay wedding porn” is signifigant.
I’m 51 years old and have chosen to not have children. So why should your decision to let your children ‘poke around on the computer’ affect me? The Internet was not created as an automated babysitter. You would not let your kids ‘poke around’ an unsorted warehouse of magazines, some of which contain sexual images, so why would you let your child ‘poke around’ on the Internet?
I’m 51 years old and have chosen to not have children
Lets, see, you have no children, for whatever reason, yet you try to tell those who have children how to edutate them.
The Internet was not created as an automated babysitter
It wasn’t created exclusively for porn eather, so? what’s your point.
You would not let your kids ‘poke around’ an unsorted warehouse of magazines
I don’t
so why would you let your child ‘poke around’ on the Internet?
Because the internet is not excusive for porn, is for information and education, but, nobody can’t avoid the improper use of it, common sense, have you hear of it?
Edited 2012-12-14 18:35 UTC
Two reasons:
1. I don’t like them.
2. I realize that, like you, I would not be willing to spend the necessary to supervise them.
Because you’re doing a very poor job on your own. I also don’t have houseplants, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to care for them.
Straw man. I never suggested that it was “exclusively for porn.” But that’s one thing that is on it and it’s stupid to let your kids prowl around on it if you don’t want them to see porn.
Well, that’s what the Internet is: and unsorted warehouse of content.
And the hypothetical magazine warehouse is not exclusively for porn.
I want Google to make it hard to find content aimed at children, because I don’t want to see that kind of content. That’s a perfect analogy to your position.
Who the **** are you to dictate what is “improper use of [the Internet”?
No, it is not for “education.” Highways are not “for education” even though school buses run on them. Your argument is utter BS. The Internet was created by the U.S. Department of Defense for military purposes.
As far as education goes, get some. Your writing makes it appear that you are borderline illiterate.
1. I don’t like them.
I think that pretty much summarise it, you don’t like children, so, you don’t care whatever or not they are exposed to inapropiated material, so, you are just a selfish person.
Who the **** are you to dictate what is “improper use of [the Internet”?
And who the f–k are you to tell what is good for children? just a bitter troll.
Edited 2012-12-14 19:42 UTC
Don’t you dare presume to tell me what “summarizes” my position. I’m the one telling you that you need to supervise your children rather than hoping some lame Google change will do your parenting for you.
I’m a more intelligent, educated person than you, that’s who I am. You’re the bitter one — angry that you had children and now feeling trapped. So you want to park them in front of the computer unsupervised so they don’t take any more of your time.
If you weren’t willing to supervise the kids, you should not have had them.
Edited 2012-12-14 19:47 UTC
Don’t you dare presume to tell me what “summarizes” my position
Yes I do, and I just did. and, I don’t spect to Google to do my parenting, but I do spect they don’t do it harder eather.
I’m a more intelligent, educated person than you, that’s who I am
After all you have wrote, I don’t think so at all.
You’re the bitter one — angry that you had children and now feeling trapped
In the contrary, I’ve always said to my wife and everyone I know that I didn’t really knew happynes till the day i holded my baby dauther the firsth time in my arms, there is no way to describe it, and also, the way she run to my arms after I get from work yelling “daddy, daddy”, that is happines, I’m sorry that you can’t experiment it.
Edited 2012-12-14 19:57 UTC
All children disobey at times. But what you say about my motivations means nothing.
Don’t try to blame Google for your refusal to supervise your own children. Google should not be censoring the Internet so that lazy parents can park their kids at a computer unattended.
You can’t even spell or compose a coherent sentence. You have shown yourself to be completely incapable of logical reasoning, skipping past any point that you can’t provide a counter-argument to. I would have replied earlier, but I’ve been testing a satellite that we have under construction.
A lovely little story, but when did you decide to let her surf the Internet, which is filled with pornography, violence, hate speech, vulgarity, bigotry, etc., without supervision?
Google has a right, but was not right, to censor search results; it’s their search engine, though.
There are countless things that parents object to their kids seeing. Some don’t want their kids to see violent images. Some don’t want them to see women’s heads uncovered. Some don’t want them to see information about evolution. Some don’t want them to see web sites that promote racism. Some don’t want them to see sites that depict drinking or smoking. Some don’t want their kids to see web sites that support Israel’s right to exist. Some don’t want their kids to see web sites about birth control.
Should Google try to hide all of those things because some group of parents objects to each of them?
Only….Google isn’t censoring the Internet.
Let’s not play semantic games. When Google purposely hides search results which would have otherwise shown up, it has the same effect.
That’s why the Chinese government forced Google to hide results for topics such as Taiwan’s independence and 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre.
That’s a bit different though. Those results where not available at all to people in the affected areas.
The only change Google has done now is that you have to be more specific when you want to find porn. Lets face it, if you use Google to search for porn you know how to do this and you’re probably doing it already.
This post shows how Google’s “porn” censorship harms users and legitimate, for profit, mainstream (non-pornographic) web sites.
It’s all about the unintended consequences.
Jalopnik, Wired, and other mainstream sites often refer to beauty shots of various collector cars as ‘car porn.’ Apparently, this is causing images to be excluded from some image searches.
When I searched for “Ferrari 599”, the image from this page on Wired, entitled Enjoy Some Gratuitous Ferrari 599 GTO Porn, was excluded, despite there being no sexual content:
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/07/ferrari-599-gto-official-pics/
But when I searched for “Ferrari 599 porn”, it’ was displayed as the first image on the first page.
So you say “well, just add the word ‘porn’ to each search just to avoid missing such images.” Not so fast. If you search for “Ferrari porn” you are faced with page upon page of hardcore porn (sex acts, fellatio, penetration, etc.) with a few images of Ferrari cars thrown in.
Let’s face it:
1. If you use Google to search for pictures of cars, you should not have to add the word “porn” to each search in order to see non-sexual images of cars on mainstream web sites.
2. Users should not have to wade through pages of hardcore porn in order to see a few pictures of cars that should never have been excluded from their original search
3. Wired, Jalopnik, and other mainstream, for-profit sites should not be unfairly excluded from search results, costing them clicks and advertising dollars.
4. If a 51 year old man can figure out that you need to add the word “porn” in order to see excluded images of Ferraris, fourteen year old boys will figure it out, too. And then they will be faced with images of fellatio, penetration, and group sex acts (with a few car pictures thrown in).
Game, set, match.
Exercise: Search for “laptop” or “notebook” and look for an apple logo. Coincidence?
Google is a search engine. It is not a portal for the internet, even though people tend to use it as one. I think many (most?) Google searches will be for URLs where people forget to type “.com” at the end.
I find myself using Google remarkably little. Most of it would be a lazy way to do Wikipedia search, and some that Wolfram Alpha would do better. Ironically, I use it most for shopping (which Google would make good money on), but I think a lot of people would instinctually head to ebay. Nowadays, many large websites have enough clout to stand on their own. There’s no reason to believe that you wouldn’t find out about a great big list of porn via Reddit or something.
The biggest problem for me personally with Google is self-censorship: When I’m at work I need to think twice before typing something into Google, even benign stuff, lest it be something sex related (Eiffel Tower, Lemon Party). If you think of Google as the gatekeeper for the internet, then yeah this will concern you, but for most of us, we can get links via Twitter or Delicious or Reddit or a plethora of other services, and I suspect it won’t make a single bit of difference.
Why are they making it harder to find what you want? 😉
All they did was ask you to update your filtering setting the first time you search for something objectionable. Censoring would mean they are preventing you from viewing what you want. They aren’t doing that.
EDIT: n/m
Edited 2012-12-13 02:02 UTC
Did you think your misspelling of “unnotoced” would go unnoticed?
All the people discussing the censorship aspect of this are missing the obvious and allowing themselves to be redirected towards the ‘for the children’ circlejerk! This has nothing to do with being family friendly or censorship and everything to do with datamining. Google just wants people to login and let them track their searches better and they know porn is one of those things people sign out of things, clear cookies and cache before and after.
Google is hoping they can convince their users to stop worrying and keep their cookies active all the time, allowing a more consistent datamining profile to be created. All the rest of the hot air is a distraction.
–bornagainpenguin
Yeah right. That is why they built a browser with a “porn mode” built in (incognito) – which essentially does all that shit for you.
Makes total sense to me…
galvanash replied…
Only if you trust that incognito or “porn mode” does what you think it does. I mean, sure–you’re right! it makes all the sense in the world for a company whose livelihood depends on datamining and advertising to offer people a way to hide from their snooping…
It’s also why despite some of the stupid user interface choices Mozilla has made over the last year and a half, I still prefer it and my set of extensions to Chrome. With how difficult it has been to get a true adblocking solution on Chrome I absolutely question their commitment to privacy!
–bornagainpenguin
I don’t need to trust it – I’ve seen the source code… And yes, it does exactly what I think it does.
Yes it does – because people want it. If you give away a product that doesn’t do what people want no one will use it… Yes, Google walks a tightrope balancing out what is best for them short term (data collection) and what is best for them long term (not pissing off users) – but in general they seem to do a pretty good job imo.
What doesn’t make sense is your conspiracy theory. Its ridiculous and has no basis in reality… In short because there is nothing about this feature that would elicit the result you imply – it has no material effect on tracking users. If you didn’t want to be tracked before, you would either use incognito mode or just disble/clear your cookies – you would still have to do the same thing now.
Fair enough, but I don’t see what that has to do with this particular feature. It has absolutely nothing to do with advertising…
Simple. Adblocking enhances privacy because all too often ads are the source of various spyware, malware, webbugs, beacons, etc… By blocking ads at the source I increase my privacy by forbidding such nasties to be downloaded to my machine. Again, the fact that Google made it so difficult to do true adblocking (not downloading anything from the blocklist) was a really telling hint…
–bornagainpenguin
The only reason the Internet exists.
I can’t let you say that. These days, we have piracy too
The reaction to this is just ridiculous. Google wants to target the largest audience they can, this is going to be popular with at least 75% of their user base – the highly vocal minority of course is going to scream bloody murder because they will (irrationally) think their rights are being violated or something, or that this is a form of censorship – not bothering to actually stop and think about why Google is doing this…
Im sorry to break it to you, but Google forcing you to add the word “porn” to you searches in oder to actually see stuff that is deemed by most people to be pornographic is NOT infringing your rights. That is all you have to do… add the word “porn”. Is that really such a burden?
Its a practical solution to a real problem. This isn’t about censorship or about “the children” – its about ensuring that it is difficult to accidentally get search results that might be objectionable to some people. That is the ENTIRE point, keeping people form accidentally getting porn in their results. SafeSearch does not accomplish this, because it is a global flag – sometimes you want porn, but that doesn’t mean you want your computer to ALWAYS display it (even when you kids are using it)… Its a sensible default with a simple override.
It is the equivalent of having to type “rm -f” when deleting a file- you add -f when you are sure that is what you want. Same thing here. Add “porn” when you are sure that is what you want.
ps. Im an atheist. I have kids, but Im not at all a prude (and this will work for like 2 more hours to keep kids from the porn anyway – they will figure it out before most of the adults do). Even still, this makes total sense to me and I don’t see any problem with it at all.
Mod me down if you like.
“Tittyfucking porn” sound a bit… overstated and redundant, doesn’t it?
Did you even try? If you are explicit enough, and “tittyfucking” is pretty explicit, you don’t need to add a qualifier at all – it works as is (assuming safeSearch is turned off).
The algorithm may not be perfect, but it is pretty good. Words that may have non-pornographic meanings (for example, “fuck” is commonly used as an expletive) are handled by default in a manner to filter out pornographic content, you have to be more specific in order to get them to return pornography
For example, “stupid fuck” filters out almost all porn images (although a few get through), “redhead fuck” doesn’t – lots of porn!
Is that really so bothersome? I really think everyone has just had a knee-jerk reaction to this feature – it is actually quite logical to me, no politics involved…
Yes, I did briefly test both with and without using “porn” as a modifier and omitting it led to very sub-par results. I already verified it a couple days ago with other similarly-obvious terms including blowjob. The words “naked” and “nude” seemed to act as very strong modifiers for bringing up expected results in my testing, but they both led to a completely different set of images.
Where do you get that idea?
After a quick search on google, I found that China was the biggest producer of porn (by revenue), followed by South Korea, Japan and then the US, far behind (producing like 10 times less than Japan). And if you count the revenue per capita then Germany, Brazil, Finland, Australia, the Czech Republic and about 20 other countries produce more porn than the US.
I’m curious where you get the idea that the US is the biggest producer of porn. Didn’t you confuse it with corn? Yes, the US is the biggest producer of corn, above China, but porn?
Edited 2012-12-13 07:59 UTC
It’s probably based on Thom’s personal experience (or should that be preference?). :-p
Hi,
If Japan makes 1 porn movie each year and sells 1 billion copies of it for $12345 per copy; then they might be the biggest producer of porn (by revenue) and the smallest producer of porn (by volume). If USA produces 1 billion porn movies each year and only sells 5 copies of them for $2 each; then they might be the smallest producer of porn (by revenue) and the largest producer of porn (by volume).
I guess what I’m saying is that maybe porn in the USA is just cheaper than it is in other parts of the world.
Here’s the facts:
“Despite the fact that an estimated 89% of porn is made in the U.S., China, South Korea and Japan are pulling in the most revenue from adult entertainment.”
“Even taken with a grain of salt, it’s clear the United States is not the world’s king of porn consumption, although it is one of the biggest. Where the U.S. is the clear leader, however, is in production—and especially in technological leadership.”
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blogs-and-comment/u-s-leads-the-way…
I thought this was pretty common knowledge.
Rather enlightening, especially this last bit;
Yeah baby, bring on the Sex-Droids!!
“pornography is one of the cornerstones of the web, and virtually everyone has used it for that purpose – regardless of gender or nationality.”
Read a long time ago about who the main buyers of PlayGirl magazine were: men. Women aren’t wired to watch porn. Unless they have been programmed into selling their bodies because they have no other worth (that’s what feminism caused).
You don’t realize most of your “innate desires” are programmed into you by this perverted western culture. That is why it’s disintegrating at an accelerating speed, and real relationships between human beings, women and men, are disappearing. That’s what pornography does to a culture.
Don’t worry, this financial implosion will destroy the rest of europe and the US, and the character of people will have to matter again. If all you have are video game porn watchers for men, your society will be doomed. And if you care for your daughters, you’ll segregate them from the filth of modern culture immediately.
…in the meantime, I’ll be over here HAVING FUN.
Yeah, And if you ever have a daughter other men will be having “fun” with her too.
Edited 2012-12-13 15:14 UTC
Because all women are fragile, incapable of enjoying sex, and totally incapable of, you know, living their own lives and making their own decisions without men protecting them and guiding them along.
The amount of misogyny in this thread is infuriating.
Nah, because your daugther may be the victim of a sexual predator who have his view of womem distortioned because when he was a child he accidentally saw this “armless” porn in the result of a search engine.
And now, if you think all those girls in pornography are “having fun” you are dullusional or simple don’t care about it.
Edited 2012-12-13 15:34 UTC
If this person was not properly educated about sex and porn because his parents tried to shield him from it, then, yes, that could indeed happen. However, that has little to do with porn – and everything with parents failing to properly educate their kids.
Let’s face it: the largest ring of organised sexual predators is the church. You think there might be a link between suppressing sexual behaviour and distorted sexual views?
Of course not. That would be silly!
I made no such claim, so stop trying to make stuff up.
Edited 2012-12-13 15:42 UTC
If this person was not properly educated about sex and porn because his parents tried to shield him from it
You have the premise that porn psycologycal damage in young children can be avoidted just with a “talk”, some parents have this type of aproach with his children but they just inmature to understand, other parents won’t even know their child has become adicted to porn, so don’t try to put all the blame on parents for this.
Let’s face it: the largest ring of organised sexual predators is the church.
That’s another big lie, the biggest number of sexual deprators are in public schools, of course, is not widely say because the goverment try to hide it, the percent of abuse in the Catholic is 0.7% of the total number of priest. But, the media and liberal always extrapolate this numbers, because at the end, they try to discredit the only source that till today tries to protect moral values.
I made no such claim, so stop trying to make stuff up.
Then if you are “having fun” at the cost of women being used as merely meat w/o wondering the arm she may be taking, then it makes you selfish.
Edited 2012-12-13 15:53 UTC
Tuned out here. I don’t read/view American news media. Sorry. You’ll have to come up with another silly excuse.
Well, if you are not getting that information from american(european)/liberal statements that the most number of predators are in the church, then tell me where do your numbers are coming from, and you are trying to excersice the same discredit in my comments when you call them “silly”, they are not silly, they are just uncomfortable to you.
Edited 2012-12-13 16:18 UTC
I think the problem is not with young children it is older children. Which does give parents time to empower them and make sure they understand what they are doing. I have dealt with children addicted to porn and is worrying because it gives them a corrupted view of sex and what they should want or expect.
Unfortunately I’ve also dealt with girls who have been sexually abused by adults I don’t want to discuss this other than to say a frank openness about issues of sexuality can help protect young people.
Finally lets not forget the sex is fun probably the most fun that most people ever have, girls have as much right to have fun as anyone else. Everyone should have the right to enjoy their own bodies without exploitation or condemnation, Knowledge will allow them to do this safely and responsibly.
Despite the fact that I enjoy sex as anyone but only with my wife, I find disgusting when grow men find that is ok to expose children to porn just because they are sick.
As someone has moderated, my last comment down I’d like to know why – perhaps you would like to comment?
It’s a shame I can’t mod you up.
Oh God no, it can’t be the parents fault. That’s a terrible idea.
It’s their goddamn job to know. In fact, knowing this kind of stuff about your child is the most important job you have. If you didn’t know then you failed your child.
(Yes, I’m a parent)
The Blame Game. It solves everything. Or not. Look, there are, and have been, instances of abuse in both settings but trying to blame one over the other solves nothing.
Thank you! Without that “yes, I’m a parent” closing, your opinion would have been discounted or discarded.
I don’t have children, but I know a damn lot more about being a good parent than many of the so-called parents on here (“so-called” because there’s a big difference between fathering a child and being a father to a child).
Nothing is their fault. It’s the Internet’s fault. It’s the search engine’s fault. It’s the fault of the adult web sites. It’s society’s fault. It has nothing to do with the fact that the parents parked the kid in front of a computer and didn’t monitor what the kid was doing. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that dad turned off Safe Search and was too brain-dead-stupid to have a different account with different settings for the kids. And when the kid swears he got to hornycoeds.com through searching for “butterfly” in Google, it must be true.
Lets not be as stupid as the other side of this argument.
Wow… just, wow. Hiev and arbour42, you really have some bizarre, screwed up views. I take it you’re Christians or follow some similar or related religion?
screwed up views
And reading your statements and your nick name from a video game, I can conclude you are not married, have not kids and doesn’t get laid, and ,that is why you are so desesperatly defending porn cause jerking in front of a computer monitor is the only thing that makes your sad life happy.
I am primarily defending against censorship of any kind, but this news story just happens to be about nude pictures in Google’s image search. What a coincidence that in this case I happen to be sticking to the topic at hand for most of my examples.
FYI, I am 100% against the censorship of “explicit” language in music, violence in movies and video games, and pretty much any other form of censorship. Period. Freedom of speech and expression, without nuts like you trying take every part of life away that goes against your own personal beliefs and agendas. Nice try, though.
By the way, this username originated from a gaming site I signed up to probably over a decade ago and haven’t used in many years, and I just kept it for simplicity and familiarity. What a crime. Are childish Slashdot-style attacks regarding usernames and resorting to stereotypes really all you can do?
That said, I’d much rather be in a world of video games than in some nonsense utopia like what you’re describing, where nothing is allowed aside from mindless bible-thumping and where all fun, amusement and everything natural ceases to exist. Give me Ms. Pac-Man or Galaga over your disturbing paradise any day.
Your method of beating around the bush, attacking those who don’t share your own faith in order to neatly sidestep the questioning of your own beliefs, is typical of hell-bent followers of the mainstream religions… so I’m not really surprised though.
Edited 2012-12-14 05:44 UTC
I am primarily defending against censorship of any kind
This is your problem, is not censorship, is filtering, is like saying an open triple A tv channel is censuring porn because is not exposing it, there is a place and time for each thing, that is what you don’t understand.
Wow… so removing images of what a small number of overly-insecure people deems as inappropriate for everyone is no longer considered censorship. Never mind the fact that Google doesn’t clearly explain why this has been done and how to get around it for those who don’t want to be restricted (or just put it where it’s expected, back in the options), so most people will be left with no other way than switching search engines.
The Internet is not broadcast television; everyone uses it differently. Not everyone is forced to see the same tame “family-friendly” garbage Fox wants you to see. I don’t think anyone would type “threesome” or “blowjob” by mistake, and those queries show intent as clearly as it could possibly be. Filtering the results of such obviously adult-oriented searches is most definitely censorship.
You can “filter” ads from ever being displayed in your web browser, but this is more often referred to by what it actually does: “ad blocking.” You can control your entire home Internet connection by “filtering” certain entire categories of websites using OpenDNS, but the end result is that you’re censoring your Internet connection by selectively choosing what web sites are able to be visited. In other words, blocking what you see as inappropriate.
This is effectively censoring for the majority of people, who will not know the tricks to bypass it, because Google doesn’t tell them. Some of these people will probably end up switching search engines as a result. Hell, if the competition didn’t mostly suck, I probably would have considered switching myself over this just over the fact that Google is trying to play net nanny here–and I don’t even use Google for porn.
Filtering, blocking, censoring… there’s not much of a difference here in the end result. “Filtering” is just a method of excluding/blocking/censoring content.
Edited 2012-12-14 21:16 UTC
Never mind the fact that Google doesn’t clearly explain why this has been done and how to get around it for those who don’t want to be restricted
Why did Google didn’t add an option for opt out? I don’t know, but what would that be relevant? if you want porn, you don’t go to Google images, that’s for sure.
Google is trying to play net nanny here
Some of these people will probably end up switching search engines as a result.
yeah, the ones looking for porn in google images for sure, how many of those freaks are out there? is a mistery.
Filtering, blocking, censoring… there’s not much of a difference here in the end result. “Filtering” is just a method of excluding/blocking/censoring content.
Yes there is, but as the rest of the complainers, seems like you want everybody to see porn as something armless and part of our every day life, so you don’t feel judged, and create all this whole argument about censorship just to mask the fact, that you don’t want to be judged for the sick things you look at the internet.
No, my whole point from the beginning (which you still seem to fail, more likely refuse, to understand) is that everyone should be free to decide what they want based on what they believe. Don’t want porn? Great, you’re all set right from the start; it should be blocked by default, to avoid offending anyone who just does not want to see it under any circumstances for whatever reason. You know–people like you.
Don’t want other people telling you what you should do? Once again, it should be a simple option that can easily be found on the settings page for those who want it. That would clearly be a choice for people to willingly make, not forcing anything onto anyone. You know… opt-in. Don’t want it? Don’t check that box. No harm done.
If anything, this would give the anti-porn people the advantage by blocking it by default just like it always has, so seriously, explain how the fuck this would be “forcing” any views onto anyone?
And speak for yourself–not all porn is “sick things.” There you go again, purposely using terms like “sick things” to describe everything down to an uncovered female nipple. You want to see some “real” sick things? Try goatse or some other shock site. Try some of the truly disturbing, highly-niche crap that probably no one in their right mind would want to see.
By the way, I said it before, Google is the last place I would ever go to actually seek any kind of porn from, but I have always kept the image filters off. Why? Because not only am I mature enough to handle a few tits if they do show up, I don’t want my results censored or skewed by any group of people over any belief that I do not share.
is that everyone should be free to decide what they want based on what they believe.
Then start your own search engine, you cannot trust that kind of labor to Google, they are a private company and private companies do whatever is best for their own interests not yours.
here you go again, purposely using terms like “sick things” to describe everything down to an uncovered female nipple.
I certainlty don’t consider nudity as porn, but, there is cheap nudity that certaintly should be blocked.
Edited 2012-12-14 22:59 UTC
Huh. I may be the odd one out here, but I don’t find goatse particularly disturbing, I’ve seen worse.
I’ve also seen worse, it was just an example.
Millions of adults enjoy eroticism. The “freaks” are those asexual weirdos who can’t understand why other adults would enjoy erotic material.
One of the most bizarre comments I’ve read on OSnews. One of the achievements of Feminism is that it has helped emancipate women and give the roles beyond reproduction and sex. Educated and skilled women now have something they can sell other than their bodies the sad thing that there are still women that if they haven’t got husbands to support them they have nothing that they can sell other than their bodies as they are excluded from work and education
Why be so offensive? Why are you so angry? Is it because you are so against porn and if so why? Or is it because you feel threatened by the sexuality of women? Do you object to pornography because it is sexually explicit or because it is often misogynistic and degrading or do you think sexually explicit is degrading? I think you need to think this through rather than just get offensive and angry
I agree. Here’s a little something that might help him out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6MkWC6q2VQ
That covers all the bases pretty well.
Warning: YouTube will probably warn you upon entrance and deny your entry if you do not have an account with a legal age for the show’s content, but the above linked video is all about the “War on Porn” and has a fair amount of nudity and adult language as well. However, assuming Hieve is of legal age to view nudity in his country and is mature enough to handle it along with the language, I would recommend that he watches it and lightens the fsck up…
Now that I’ve probably scared poor Hiev away, anyone else with a more open mind who meets the above criteria, enjoy… it’s basically this debate, but in show form, with some comedy and mild soft-core porn to finish it off. It’s entertainment at the very least.
Now that I’ve probably scared poor Hiev away
lol, how old are you man?
In previous times, it was clear only deviants watched porn. They were shunted to the side of society and people knew these deviants would only degrade the rest of the culture.
Now most boys watch it. Yes, boys aged 12 – 35, because all of them have adolescent minds, without self-control. And you are witnessing society disintegrate throughout the West and Asia.
Most porn actors, especially women, were sexually abused as children. And watching other people have (increasingly bizarre) sex is an empty, meaningless life. Your minds have been poisoned.
Like I said, to survive this economic collapse which is happening NOW, you will need strong men, and women who have not lost their femininity and are secure in themselves. Not today’s poor, insecure girls reduced to being sluts for adolescent males.
Why is half of the West popping anti-depressants? Because it’s an empty existence. Sex without deep love is isolating and empty. 10,000 years of experience backs that up.
The lunacy of your way of thinking is making drugs sound pretty good right about now, to recoup the loss of brain cells and reduced IQ level I’ve just experienced as a result of reading your post…
I feel as if my mind has been poisoned by reading your nonsensical religious beliefs. Not by watching porn.
What nonsensical religious beliefs? who told you that moral values are exclusive from religion? Your hatred for religion had made you dellusional.
Edited 2012-12-14 23:46 UTC
Point out just one verifiably completely non-religious person with such extremist views on something like porn, who also doesn’t have some personal agenda (ie. politicians, money, forcing their views upon everyone…). I have yet to hear of one, and if they do exist, they are extremely rare. Or better yet, how about just letting arbour42 speak for himself?
Edited 2012-12-15 00:07 UTC
Why would I have to show you one? If yo don’t believe me is your problem, look for it yourself. Moral values != religion, religion it self encourages this, but not all religions are the same and not all religions promote the same values.
Is like saying that every no religious person is fine with porn, and certaintly is false, but when I say that sexual perverts are pretty ok with porn then I’m pretty sure I’m right.
And this makes me say this, do I need to be religious to love my children? Do I need to be religious to condemn porn? do I need to be religious when I say that it downgrades men dignity? do I need to be religious to say that children exposed to porn is unnecessary and can lead to pyscoligical damage?
No, I don’t need to be
Edited 2012-12-15 00:27 UTC
Truth be told, it’s highly likely you’re religious if your views are like that.
^^^What she said.
Many morals can be independent of religion or even shared between different religions. But certain ones–like total condemnation toward nudity and sex in general–is to certain religions like flies to shit.
Hmm… maybe that was a bad example, because flies actually like shit, since it’s what the females lay their eggs in after getting f***ed…
Oh well, you get the point.
As a side note, the above poor analogy probably also just goes to show that flies aren’t religious. [okay… enough joking]
So… I guess we didn’t have rape and such back in the good old days, right? You know, back in the dark ages. All sunshine and happy puppies?
Porn doesn’t turn anyone into a sexual predator or rapist or whatever. These guys (because it’s usually guys) were fucked up long before they got to porn. Abusive parents is quite the common denominator.
In fact, porn might actually keep these guys from doing even more damage by keeping their needs satisfied artificially (ok, probably not but it’s an interesting thought)
Well, it’s really the exact same thing as violent video-games or TV-shows/movies: they do not really cause someone to become a homicidal maniac, the person who does go on a killing-spree because of these is already mentally disturbed from before and the trigger could just as well be something entirely different if such video-games or TV-shows/movies didn’t exist.
Most people seem to have completely forgotten the fact that there was the exact same kind of controversy regarding the radio and porn magazines back in the day; take a step back, look at the history, and you’ll see the same pattern repeating itself. That is, people like to blame whatever delivery systems and phenomenons that are then-current instead of just blaming the people themselves.
As for the claim about the existence of these kinds of contents preventing people from taking their fantasies out in the real world: it’s been proven several times by studies that this does actually apply to video-games. I can’t be arsed to google around for those papers as you’re adults and can do that for yourselves, but the point is that being able to live one’s fantasies in a virtual world where the most harm that can be done is verbal does work as a stress-reliever and does take off some of the pressure for trying to enact these fantasies for real. Heck, I can attest to this myself, too: I can fire up a game, go slaughter hundreds of people in various, imaginative ways, torture them if I feel like it, and so on, and I come off the game feeling satisfaction, not unfulfillment.
Exactly. People want to find something to blame, a scapegoat, when they either don’t know or understand what the real psychological problem is, or they simply don’t want to believe that–for example–their kid has had a mental problem long before he finally snapped went and shot up his school, so violent video games and movies are typically blamed.
Someone gets raped? Oh, it must’ve been that evil, evil porn that did it; after all, it’s not hard to persuade people who already dislike nudity and believe in some invisible imaginary deity in the sky to take sides with you. Oh, there were illegal drugs involved? Drugs make you feel good and have an effect on your brain… we don’t know a damn thing about what the drugs do, but the drugs must have had something to do with it!
Penn and Teller made an episode of Bullshit on the subject of violent video games, where they bring up lots of good points. Their comparison to the real, physical injuries that can eventually lead to paralysis, brain damage or death in the popular sport of football is especially interesting. Just look at what they did to that young gamer at the end of the show by giving him a real gun and allowing him to shoot it. Brought the poor boy to tears and he declined when asked if he would like to shoot it again. And this kid seemed to be no stranger to first-person shooters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaF9nbLo8as
Edited 2012-12-15 09:13 UTC
Wow. Talk about total disconnection from reality.
Thanks for sharing the Taliban perspective on all of this.
c*nt c*nt c*nt yeah c*nt
Edited 2012-12-13 17:46 UTC
Hypocrite <—- lets see if it censors that?
“While the United States is by far the largest producer of it, it’s also probably the most conservative and puritanical western country when it comes to attitudes towards adult content.”
I like to make up stories too. Writing fiction is fun.
At what point does nudity become “adult content?” Would a simple image of a naked woman or man standing straight be adult content? Does the view of bare breasts automatically make such an image “adult content,” or the sight of genitals?
I am asking this because, well, here in Finland nudity is not seen as a generally negative thing. Both adults and children often go to sauna together, for example, and this can include friends, too, not just family members. Seeing a nude person or breasts or either kind of genitals isn’t automatically a detestable thing or something children must be shielded from. Take for example the Finnish movie “Rare Exports:” you can see DOZENS of naked, old men in the movie and it’s still rated as a children’s movie.
Why is the above even relevant? Well, because it seems there are people here who seem to think that being exposed to anything at all that generally lies underneath our clothing will make kids grow up wrong, and well, that’s just inherently ignorant. Sure, straight up hardcore porn isn’t possibly the most appropriate content for young eyes, but there is no good reason for removing all nudity from the ‘net.
Here in the U.S., we can’t just make a big deal out of something minor. It seems that for whatever reason we have to blow it way out of proportion and extend it to condemn nearly every damn thing that is even remotely similar, and then make a huge pointless deal about everything. And usually these things are brought about by religious people, taking an extremist stance on some aspect of their religion any pushing to make everyone else abide by it just to please themselves.
The culprits are typically Christians. That religious cult tends to forbid everything that is natural and any other non-Christian beliefs, which ends up spawning outrageously nonsensical crap like this, that tends to demonize everyone and everything in existence.
Edited 2012-12-14 02:51 UTC
Over here in the UK there’s the same nonsense, only the culprits are typically feminists (acknowledging that there is a liberal fringe of the movement that’s anti-censorship).
Where I live a coalition of feminist groups managed to shut down the local strip clubs, sex shops and porn cinema (who knew that they still existed?). Through a year or two of picketing and lobbying, and tactics like accusing their critics of being “pro-rape”, they bullied the local authorities into instituting a “nil policy” for sex related businesses.
Ironically, considering your comment about Christians, one of the only “respectable” people (as opposed to the much demonised club/shop owners and employees) to speak out against their closure was a local Church of England vicar. He even joined a group of dancers from the strip clubs when they staged a counter protest.
As you’d expect, those feminist groups also push for legislation against porn on the internet, joined by various allies from across the political spectrum. Right now they’re mainly campaigning for a mandatory ISP level porn filter to be instituted, with people having to opt-out if they want to access adult content. But anyone who thinks they’d be satisfied with anything less than a blanket ban in the long term is very naive. These are people who often consider even the tamest topless/bikini photos to be obscene material that causes rape.
You’d think that a relatively secular and liberal country would be a bit more tolerant of such things, but it seems like there’s always another group of authoritarian prudes ready to step in and push for censorship and criminalisation.
In fact, I’d say that the UK is one definite exception to Thom’s comment about America being “probably the most conservative and puritanical western country”.
I know there have been obscenity trials targeting pornographers in the US, but I imagine that the First Amendment would protect individuals from being arrested merely for possessing porn. In the UK you get cases like the prosecution of Simon Walsh for possessing home made images of consenting adults:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/08/08/porn-trial-simon-walsh-a…
Edited 2012-12-15 01:27 UTC
I don’t see any evidence that strict nudity is being filtered at all (even with safeSearch turned on). If I do a search for “breasts” I see lots of breasts for example – what I don’t see are lots of screenies from porn movies. If I want to see those, I can search for “breasts porn” and get them. Same thing with most other body parts…
It has nothing to do with nudity, it is really about pornography.
While many people in the US are quite a bit more prudish about nudity, there is no denying that, I don’t think this feature has anything to do with that. It is purely about culturally accepted norms (in the US anyway) – there is “tasteful” nudity and then there is porn… Most people would prefer that images that come from pornographic sites not be included in their searches when that isn’t really what they were searching for in the first place.
It is a feature for the US engine after all – why shouldn’t it be tailored to US sensibilities? Again – Google is not taking anything away – it is still indexed and still searchable, it’s just been categorized a bit more strictly to make it harder to accidentally find it.
That is what bothers me about this discussion… People automatically jump to this assumption of the motivation for doing this – but that just isn’t true here.
Google is not removing nudity from the internet. They are not even hiding it. They are making searching for it more explicit – i.e. a search for “penis” no longer gives you a bunch of porn pics – because maybe that really isn’t what you want and since the porn pics outnumber the things that might actually be relevant by 1000 to 1, including all the porn actually makes searching less useful.
This is a technical solution to a technical problem. It makes searching for things that are NOT porn more effective – because the fact is that for every picture of the female anatomy that might be relevant to a student doing research, there are 100k or so porn pictures that will muddy up of the results. It is an improvement in the engine…
Yes, everyone uses the internet for finding porn. But it occasionally has other uses…
a related topic – ‘kids’ commonly ‘sexting’ each other regularly… been on the UK news (channel 4) the last few days.
Thought some here might be interest in some of the embedded interview clips herein:
http://www.channel4.com/news/generation-sex-explicit-pics-the-norm-…
http://www.channel4.com/news/generation-sex-the-new-rules-of-the-pl…
http://www.channel4.com/news/generation-sex-teenagers-law-porn
It’s not like you won’t be able to find porn using Google you just have to be more explicit in your search.
Yeah well, you can’t please all the idiots in the world.
(It took me two tries to figure out how to find porn now. Wow, if these guys have a hard time figuring it out it’s no wonder they need porn)
Edited 2012-12-15 03:29 UTC
If I search “ass” in bing it doesn’t display any results at all under strict or moderate safe search settings. If I turn off safe search entirely all I am left with is full on hard core pornography.
The same search in Google returns a lot of results like this: http://i.imgur.com/xVVE5.jpg (still NSFW ish)
That picture is sexy but now it is no longer buried in a sea of smut. The old method made finding anything but hard core porn difficult.
There is a bit of polarisation American vs European perspectives, which I’m not sure are accurate in the UK we have just avoided compulsory porn filtering.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20738746
With 35% of “parents” supporting compulsory ad 15% some compulsory filtering the NSPCC condemned the government for backing down on compulsory filtering on the grounds that children need protecting. Google making it slightly more difficult to get porn might be doing the minimum that it can do, to avoid legislation.
The idea that there is a cause and effect relationship between pornography and rape etc. is obviously non-sense, to say that violent or degrading pornography has no effect or is good for viewers seems to me to be equally fanciful. I am sure there is a place for eroticism, ethical pornography in allowing people to explore and enjoy their sexuality but I’m not sure I know that looks like.
Irrespective of my my or your opinion large and powerful lobbies (feminist groups, religious groups the NSPCC etc) would like to filter, restrict and control the internet and that includes in Europe.
Edited 2012-12-16 01:57 UTC
Ada Lovelace Naked
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=les%3B&gs_nf=3&gs_rn=1&gs_r…
Where are my pics?
Freakin eh, censorship sucks.
-Hack
It seems easy to force movies and games and tv and such to have ratings. Those ratings control who can go into a movie or should.
Why can’t parents (and I) get an ISP that is under strict control? People say stupid stuff like use a third program. Well that program isn’t enough. Kid’s can find ways to bypass it.
The analogy to this is like sending drugs in the business and bulk mail to children. Aren’t they screwed up enough? Isn’t it time to be good adults?