These two search giants accounting for 95% of search traffic on the internet have agreed to tighten up their algorithms on searching for paedo material.
"Google communications director Peter Barron said the changes, which had cleaned up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of children, would make it “much, much more difficult to find this content online”
Fair enough and good stuff, so thought I. But according to that link there’s a lot of people who think it will make not one blind bit of difference;
“But Jim Gamble, former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) told BBC Breakfast he did not think the measures would make any difference with regard to protecting children from paedophiles.”
Will making this kind of stuff harder to find on Google/Bing actually make any difference when it comes to protecting children, or is this just at best waste of time that will make no difference?
People searched for child porn on Google? That ever worked? Look, if you want to find child porn and actually give a damn, you’re going to look harder than the first page or two of google search results. I’m not sure how to share particularly much experience here without coming across as a pedophile, but let’s just say that at this point, if you’re not on TOR, you’re probably not serious about finding child porn.
I never understood how people got away with internet child porn until about eight weeks ago, when I read the story about the “Silk Road” website that got shut down (which was mostly about drugs, not child porn, but same “underground web” concept.)
Using Google to find something illegal or terrorist-y is kind of like putting a sign on your front lawn saying “I AM A CHILD PORN FAN OR A TERRORIST OR POSSIBLY BOTH, COME ARREST ME.”
If anything Google and Bing are going to make it harder to catch the dumber child pornographers.
Personally, I’d like to see evidence that child porn harms children. Yes, children were harmed in the making, and, yes, people who have proclivities to harm children will be drawn to it. But there seems to be this idea that child porn causes future child abuse and I’m just not buying it.
To me, it seems a lot like the argument that adult porn increases the incidence of rape, even though there’s evidence to suggest that availability of porn does just the opposite.
At the very least, changes being made by Google or Bing are irrelevant. It may protect people from accidental exposure, but it’s not stopping people who want to find it.
I find it hard to understand how they could have done this effectively and legally - as looking at child porn is illegal - so they have no way to legally test it. I guess they could try and make sure it doesn’t come back with any porn (there are algos that can digitally tell NAKED people).
But that’s the problem. People are buying it, which makes a market, which leads to creation of a supply, which leads to harming children in the making of child porn.
Exactly. I don’t see how you can disagree much with this argument.
That said, I think making it harder to search for these things does indeed help in the long run even if it only catches the stupid, lazy people. Mostly because the vast criminals are stupid and (eventually) lazy, so this should disrupt the market a decent amount. If you doubt this, just look at how many people who commit crimes Google things like, “how to get away with murder”, before they murder someone.
I also don’t see this really preventing the dissemination of child porn. Any real distributors of such things are smart enough not to be indexed by search engines, or will be shut down by the feds toot sweet. (the FBI has figured out how to use google too you know).
The only effect of this that I really see would be in reduce traffic to legal adult websites that try to steer stupid pedo seekers in their direction with false promises of underage models.
And to make it look like Google and Bing are being proactive to quiet the knee-jerk “but what about the children” crowd.
This is sort of how I feel. I can’t believe that most of the trafficking of the content is done through websites that are indexed by Google. Instead, I’d guess people form communities and share it amongst themselves. How can it really be all that different from how other illegal material is passed around? It seems to me not all that different from removing the ability to access the websites of drug dealers from the website thinking it will make it harder to find illegal drugs. Sure, it’ll stop someone who is naive enough to do a google search for buying pot, but we’re talking about a tiny population there.
So, sure, it’s a nice sounding gesture, but I don’t think it will have any meaningful impact on the real problem. They need to find a way into those communities and break up the distribution rings that way. After all, I don’t think it’s the random guy who does a web search that’s as much a contributor to the problem as the much as the guys creating and distributing it.
I do not think people are buying it. Every time I see in the news some pedophile ring arrested they were mostly doing it for their own pleasure and consumption and for exchange among them. I do not think they are selling anything or, at least, that seems to be the least of it and most of those involved are in it as a hobby, not to make money.
I believe western society has gone nuts over this issue. Totally insane. If children are traumatized by being fondled by a pervert uncle it is mainly not because they were fondled but because they live in a society where that is shameful and disgusting and you should be traumatised or you are a sick pervert yourself. Sort of like getting pregnant before marriage 50 years ago.
In any case, this is just PR plain and simple. Today any corporation of any size has to periodically make statements about how they are for clean air, sustainable development and against child porn. And help young talent and victims of hurricanes and floods. it is nothing more than that.
Aren’t they? Seems to me most of the real villains involved in this stuff figure they might as well get some money as well, credit/debit cards were how Pete Townshend and Chris Langham got themselves in trouble.
Surely there’s got to be some proportion of paedos who are stupid enough to just Google/Bing this kind of stuff? It’s not like being inclined that way automatically gives you the tech savvy to delve into the ‘shadow internet’. Alternatively, would Google’s block make it harder for them to figure out where to even find the aforementioned ‘dark corners’ of the internet?
I expect that the main result will be to make it harder to search for non-child porn images & stories about children. Anything that happens to ping on their algorithm will be made invisible; you’ll miss it and not even know it isn’t visible to you.
Quite possibly, depends on how refined the algorithm. And however much people may believe in free markets, nobody is going to want to be known as “the search engine that doesn’t filter out pedo-friendly pages” so competition may not step in.
In two recent murder cases in the UK, the perpetrators did exactly that. They were both stupid, but it is likely that accessing such material led to an escalation that resulted in two girls being killed.
While I accept that only stupid offenders will be caught by these new filters, it may prevent casual or initial gateway viewing that could lead to a more dangerous addiction/involvement.
Yes indeed, and stuff about the fight against child porn, and about the causes or treatment of pedophilia, or of its effects.
I am actually rather surprised, though, to hear that it has ever been possible to just Google for such stuff. Are the people who put it out really dumb enough to put it on sites that will be spidered by Google (which means, in effect, sites that relatively legitimate sites openly link to)? If so, why don’t the police just Google for these sites and then shut them down?
Keep in mind that until relatively recently the whole Chris Hansen type stings and many other Child Porn type Law Enforcement efforts were unknown to the general public. So in the first few years of the internet being popular - it was possible that people would think law enforcement would treat this as something akin to copyright violations or whatever.
I think to many the idea of spending 10, 20 years, (or even life) in prison for simply having certain types of files on your computer seems a tad excessive.
Some of the child porn stuff was set up on virtual/free servers - outside the US and where it wasn’t always easy to shut down. As most of the western world has shown zero tolerance for these types of things - it is much easy to catch them - and put the sites out of business, but it wasn’t always this way.
Believe it or not some of the people that early on would get these shut down were legal adult websites. They did not like the attention these types of sites brought - and were always concerned that the govt would overreach in making new laws.
I can imagine some people who are searching for child porn to be stupid enough to look for it on Google, but not for the people actually making it, and definitely not those who actually trade it. The whole thing is an underground thing.
I mean, we’re talking about something that gets removed even from 4chan. Anonymous will even attack people for hosting child porn.