Is US prudishness ruining the internet?

If you want a free press...

...it helps to own the press. Actually there are plenty of outlets for anything-goes stuff, starting with blogs hosted in friendly countries. The kerfuffle about censorship by Facebook et al is the typical whining of those who want to impose their stuff on others and think somebody should be compelled to display it for them. It's a scenario that's been repeated over the decades about film, print, telly, and now social networks. The proper response, as always, is to tell these people to go forth and multiply. Facebook owns Facebook's output, period. Likewise Myspace, blogspot etc. Those who don't like it can pick up their marbles and go play elsewhere.

"Complaint Culture" Indeed

That's straight to the mark - "Complaint culture" in whatever doesn't fluff the pillows. I'm afraid it affects a lot more than the internet, these days.

Here's a drink between libertarians. Cheers.

Let's think a little less about sex?

IMHO people are thinking too much about sex. It sells well, and thereby it's by far the easiest way to attract people to anything you like, especially if you have nothing interesting to sell or say.

Are they protecting freedom, or just their own business? I am afraid many women are going to pay for this sex paranoia.

Moral Minorities?

Please... Craigslist shutting down their "adult services" section was not an impulsive reflex to appease some evil nanny state/corporate cabal. It was done because there was a boatload of illegal prostitution being brokered on it, including child prostitution. Tits not available on Facebook? So what? Facebook is simply trying to protect their market of narcissistic, Farmvilling tweeners whose parents will ban them from the site if it ends up being known as a porn repository.

Is it seriously being suggested there are insufficient images of mammary glands available on the Internet? Really?

How about steering a little of the conspiracy theory toward the countries that have set up nationally controlled firewalls (i.e. China, Saudi Arabia, etc.)? Oh wait, we can only bash on Evil Western Civilization, or more specifically, the USA and UK.

link failure

I love how you link to thw 'twitter censor' page, wherein a guy made 10 rapidfire posts and was shocked when the near-dupes were deleted. And then there are the dozen or more posts discrediting the original.

but don't let that stop you from using it as evidence that the US is "ruining the internet" with censorship - an accusation which is particularly ironic given that the uk -government- is censoring and making criminal everything from nipple clamps to cartoons.

Yeah right

Because it is SO hard to find porn on the net, with these damn merkins censoring everything.

If you want a version of Facebook that lets you post nudie pics of yourself, you can find one in 5 seconds flat. Of course, it will not have as many users, but that is because most people do not want to see your nudie pics, and stay on Facebook. And that is true whether on the web or in real life.

You might as well complain that the supermarket wants you to wear clothes. If it let naked people in, they would lose most of their customers.

Not just US...

Comment I posted on Oulu's 65degreesnorth website:

"Little bit of work required on the swearword filter. Laughed like a drain when I saw “****bly” censored when I actually wrote “k.n.o.b.b.l.y” (without the dots)"

WTF???

Why some countries are OK with 'fuc*k' and others not? I guess it's "Won't someone think of the children?" attitude.

(Icon, 'cos Pirates of Penzanze is on telly, and in a week it's International "Talk-like-a-pirate" day, me ol' scurvy bilge-rats).

Thanks, Jane Fae

Wow - where to start commenting on this? So many big points to go at. However, I think I'll just stick with the point that this is not "Anglo-Saxon prudery" - the restrictions on freedom of sexual expression run deep in other societies too: I'll cite China and various Islamic countries in defence of that statement. Okay, the UK and the American State governments have a long and not very pleasant history of intruding in the sexual activity of their citizens. This should not be taken as a general societal ill.

I think it is fair to say that an "Anglo-Saxon" attitude to sexuality (or personal freedom in general) is a Millian "if it doesn't hurt me, get on with it". Whenever there has been a restriction on freedom, it has usually been a small number of people in government and law enforcement that have made it an issue. This has become a major issue since we have adopted a rights-based theory which says that anyone's opinion is prima facie as valid as anyone else, and that there is some right not to be offended which is protectable. This is, of course, nonsense, but it has gained traction in legal and policy-making circles, and this speaks directly to the topic of your article, since it *is* sensible, from a company perspective, to adopt a low-tolerance attitude to complaints, no matter how few. For instance, I am constantly amazed at how many complaints investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) have only one or two complainants, and are based on "I'm offended/worried by X, so it must be banned".

It is beyond time that it we realised that there is precisely NO right not to be offended, that if something doesn't suit an individual, that individual has a right to ignore it unless it *directly* affects them, or has a reasonable chance of affecting them, seriously (so, for instance, it is quite acceptable to make a protest about the number of guns in society, but not the number of prostitutes). However, I don't know how this is going to come about, because the debate is never had, because, you know, it is well ... not nice!

Slow News Day?

Honestly, blaming Facebook or craigslist or US or Anglophiles or any other boogieman for some sites placing limits on what content they will allow is just so Web 0.5. No one forces anyone to use these sites or services nor do they prevent some other enterprising group from creating their own, less prudish, sites.

The internet is about choice, if you don't like what some Anglophiles come up with, there are any other alternatives available to choose from. Sure, nobody may ever view these other sites but then choices always have consequences.

I'm much more concerned about FB and other sites privacy invasions than their content restrictions.

btw, FIRST!

2 peoples divided by a common language.

And that was said by someone with an American mum.

You can proudly show 100,000 people being murdered in an illegal invasion but one nipple for 0.43 of a second and there will be a national outcry!

What!

"If concepts of personal freedom and social liberty were more ingrained in Anglo-Saxon culture"

What! Because we are a bit prudish about nudity? Kind of forgets all the ingrained victories for liberty since 1215, including Magna Carta, Parliament, the Bill of Rights, the American Constitution, Constitutional Democracy, Universal Suffrage, and 100 other freedoms the Anglo Saxons were among the first to champion. Europeans may have a liberal attitude to nudity, but this concept of personal freedom didn't stop the rise the regimes of Napoleon, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Ceauşescu, etc, etc.

Sure we have our setbacks, Charles I, McCarthyism, the last Labour Government, etc. but the long term trend is definitely in one direction, and cooperate America’s attitude to boobs, is an idiotic reason to question how ingrained concepts of liberty are in the Anglo Saxon culture.

You could delete the world "prudishness"...

... and still have a valid article.

Somehow the Yanks have got the idea that they "own the internet" and can dictate to everyone else what is or isn't acceptable content which is more than a little ironic given their First Amendment!

Of course, as with many others, what they really mean by "Freedom of Expression" is "Freedom to say or show things that *we* agree with".

"Proodery"?

Actually I'm more worried about their fundamentalist, religous fanaticism! Wars have been started over this.

Special relationship? Keep it, I'll take my chance with the French - at least we can keep them under control with our archers.

Paris - because, no doubt, her French is exemplary..

US not the whole problem.

It's not US prudishness - it's everybody's prudishness. Say something bad about Islam, and you'll be buried under rants and death threats. Say something unkind about the King of Thailand, and they'll throw a hissy fit. France and Germany raise a fuss over anything to do with Nazis. Australia tried to throw up a curtain of purity. We need not even give details about China.

And each and every one of them wants to make their obsessions illegal.

Unintended Consequences

Oddly enough one of the more liberal blogging sites in the US is the sexuality orientated "Adult FriendFinders / Passion" conglomerate where large numbers of bloggers (mainly female) chatter about all subjects under the sun - and not all about sex as you might expect. While posts on the site are "moderated" discussions cover a great many subjects on the blogs that would get you banned at most other sites.

More like religious prudishness is ruining pretty much everything

Be it christian, islamic, macintologic - it's not a corporate driven problem, it's a problem caused by those with imaginary friends and/or those who worship men in black turtle-necks. If it were a corporate problem, there'd be no corporations producing porn.

It's also a problem of curtailing to a minority, which has been caused by the pendulum swinging too far in the "political correctness" spectrum.

It's also a product of an excessively litigious US society which has thrown away the concept of personal responsibility and replaced it with "foreseeable consequences" which is much more lucrative in a court room.

At the end of the day, I prefer freedom of choice over "freedom from porn", freedom to decide what's appropriate for myself & my family over having to settle for whatever some company selling electronic toys or purveying internet services decides is appropriate for the braying masses.

Not just prudery

The US social networks may be overely censorious when it comes to English langauge posters, but I bet they struggle more when it comes to foreign languages like French, German and Japanese. Has anyone in Facebook heard of Gaelic? Does Facebook think that Basque is an item of clothing?

Anyway, on to other unappealing American exports.

MacDonalds? Bleah. (In fact, all fast food burger/chicken/etc. outlets? Bleah).

Customer service? Want a refund on a faulty Apple product? Sign a confidentiality agreement first. (http://www.reghardware.com/2009/08/03/apple_ipod_explode_silence/). You might be allowed to piss off the customer in the US because they're too poor to sue. But over here there's laws about that kind of thing, and we get the government to do it for us :-)

Guns? Ask the Mexican police where all the weaponry that the drugs gangs are busily using comes from.

Watching American TV is a bit like climbing a greasy pole. You get three parts through the story, and then it goes back two. This is to account for the number of ad breaks the US companies put in, and their perception of their audience's attention span. That may work in the US (where no one really watches telly anyway). Alas our lazy European broadcasters can't be bothered to make their own.

It's noticable how American beer, apart from the lamentable bud, hasn't really made it across this side of the pond. We can be grateful for that, at least.

Having said that, Sierra Nevada is reasonably OK, though disturbingly it comes in an American pint bottle - TOO SMALL. If they start succeeding in exporting their 'definition' of a pint, it really will be time to revoke their independence.

Time For

GNUPorn, I guess.

And also GNUbook and GNOOGLE. Can someone call Richard Stallman ?

My idea would revolve around something Bittorrent-style. Everybody would host part of this thing on his/her PC/DSL line.

Gnoogle would probably be hampered by the huge I/O requirements of an intersection operation. (E.g. my PC has the index for "football" and someone else's has "american" - both PCs need to perform lots of I/O to determine the set of documents containing "american football").

Lots of cultures involved

Surely FaceBook has a right to have rules in place regardless of what you think? If you don't like the rules FB puts in place, don't join! It's quite simple and nothing to do with the conspiracy that the world is hurtling back to the 1600's.

I think almost social networking is balls and I only participate in one, an art sharing site, and even they have rules on nudity and safe-guards in place to ensure that nudity is automatically hidden. You have to join and you have to be a paid-up member of the site to unlock the nude-art sections.

One of the problems we have is that the world is now smaller, in that we are now able to draw in people from cultures and countries all over the globe at a seconds notice. You're no longer talking about a small group of people in a similar culture, say county or city level in one country. So what one culture considers disgusting is acceptable to another. Thinking here that the Japanese consider Hentai ( comic/draw porn ) to be acceptable, we may not. The German's consider that blood should not be shown in video games, most other countries have no issue, but Germany has less of an issue with semi-nudity in advertising that other countries.

The US corps thrive on having things the same the world over, McDonald's eateries are designed to be identical all over the globe, the US corps have an issue when cultures clash and they seek to level them all, thus having to drop to the lowest common denominator, in the case of nudity, that is simply banning it and ensuring no one is offended.

I'm not defending it, I believe we should all have the right to make our own decisions, but when it comes to the green and lawyers screwing millions out of each other's clients, just 'cos a nipple was shown at the wrong place, wrong time, you can understand why the US corps my seek to "Puritanise" the rest of the world to protect their own pots.

Almost there

It's "das Bild", although when you talk about the paper it'll be "die Bild" (-Zeitung). Refer to Mark Twain for details (http://german.about.com/library/blmtwain01.htm)

Who runs the Star Chamber?

"US courts have long been more supportive of commercial porn than UK ones and if Americans seem a tad more squeamish when it comes to bare flesh, they are far more resistant to attempts to censor speech".

That may be so, but what we see is the reality, not the theory - Apple, Facebook and others are censoring what *they* consider unacceptable as has been noted. So the real questions are who has the right of control over content and power to censor?

Plus there's the issue of jurisdiction dictating what is and is not allowed legally and the power to challenge any implementation. America may have robust First Amendment and Free Speech principles but it doesn't necessarily protect such rights for non-Americans.

If it is accepted that all governments have the right to protect its citizens in the way they believe they should and need to be protected the only solution, in a global village which crosses jurisdictions, is to 'dumb-down' to the lowest common denominator or accept the "my rules apply" of a single jurisdiction.

Perhaps we need 'regional Facebook' rather than 'global' where cultures clash? The crux of the problem is that we want to use their service but do not want to play by their rules, want them to adopt ours (and that cuts both ways). Immovable object meets unstoppable force; the conundrum can be noted but it's not easy to solve.

Anglo-saxon?

What is Anglo-saxon about a country in which, in large areas, half or more speak Spanish and large, probably majoriy parts of the rest originate ancestrally from anywhere but Northern Europe? Or do you call Africa, Italy, Celtic Ireland, Spain, S. America, E. Europe "anglo-saxon"?

Could we knock this one on the head and so help to stop lumping N. Europeans, particularly British, with a very foreign culture and attitude of another large, commercially powerful area on the other side of a very large sea?

Liberty

"If concepts of personal freedom and social liberty were more ingrained in Anglo-Saxon culture, the agendas of moral minorities would not be so far advanced in either national governments or private sectors."

They used to be but over the last century and a half have been eroded from the public consciousness by what can only be described as a concerted effort of brain washing by various governments.

Ask the average person to define liberty, or even better rights and where they originate from. In the the US they would say the constitution (false, the constitution defines the bounds of government) while in the UK they would look at you like you just raped their puppy. Rights exist because we do, not because government grants them to us.

Forget live and let live, people can speak out about anything they disagree with, it is simply that people don't understand how to separate their own morality from rights. You do not have the right not to be offended, you do not have the right to attempt to get government to beat someone up because you were offended but you do have the right to state you were offended and call the person whatever horrible names you choose because you were offended. What is so hard to grasp about this concept?

Commercial rules

In a free economy businesses are going to go for where their profits lie. Facebook's customers are not the freeloaders using the service, but the advertisers who fund it. The reality is that they have their own ethical standards relating to their market position and therefore Coca-cola is probably not going to want it's ads running over the Anal-fisting fanclub. The risk of alienating the much larger group of people who disapprove of the activity is far higher than the profit lost by not catering to every sub-group in society.

In some senses this may actually be more democratic than the government approach which does seek to ensure space for minority groups. In a free society, corporations and individuals are free to self-censor in the same way that they are free to form supportive groups.

There are plenty of spaces for those who want to have their "adult" based social network. They just exist in paywall restricted areas because they need to self-fund.

One persons freedom to express themselves naked conflicts with anothers freedom to not be exposed to pics of their penis because they happen to be your friend. I suspect 99% of the world's population is more conservative than the values of the UK - the internet is much 'freeer' than the prevailing societal attitudes as it stands. If the rules were too restrictive, people would move services, but the reality is that they are happy with it.

Welcome to the real world.

article in brief:

"Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Apple Google"

Solution? Stay away from these crappy companies and their agendas. Turn off your TV sets. 200 channels is no choice at all when they're all owned by 5 companies. When Facebook censors your shit, don't post there. Tell your friends not to post there either. Start your own website. Start your own hosting company. You are not powerless. Take action. Do something. Don't buy an iPhone. simple. easy. solutions.