Sex, censorship, and the Net

I don’t know what it is — the holidays, the waning days of the Bush Administration, or just something in the air — but the war over sex on the Net has reached a new and disturbing level.

To recap:

Last week, Ning gave the heave-ho its XXX-rated social networks, giving them ’til New Years Eve to pack up their toys and find a new home. YouTube tightened its chastity belt, pushing naughty if not exactly XXX-rated videos to the bottom of its slush pile.

A conservative Christian investment group issued a list of the most immoral video games, though the group’s ratings seem to hinge as much on the games’ endorsement of “alternate lifestyles” (i.e., pro-gay) as the degree of murder and mayhem inside them.

The Australian Supreme Court just declared Bart and Lisa Simpson “real” people in the eyes of the law, upholding the conviction of a man who had lewd images of the underage cartoon characters doing the nasty on his hard drive. (Thus giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “the land down under.”)

And for the first time in its existence, Wikipedia was briefly blocked for refusing to remove allegedly pedophilic images from its encyclopedia.

The last case is the thorniest, largely because the image in question — which appears on the cover of The Scorpions’ 1976 opus, “Virgin Killer” — really is something that could get you arrested if found, say, on your laptop as you passed through U.S. Customs.

A U.K. group called the Internet Watch Foundation received a complaint about the “Virgin Killer” wiki entry and added that page to its anti-child-porn blacklist, used by the vast majority of British ISPs. That caused large swaths of Wikipedia to be inaccessible across the pond; the IWF’s blacklist also blocked access to parts of Flickr and, yes, Ning (though apparently not the dirty bits).

Wikimedia Foundation, parent organization for Wikipedia, refused to remove the controversial image because no legal authority had ordered them to, the image had been in the public eye for more than 40 years, and was available elsewhere on sites like Amazon.

The IWF eventually backed down. The group’s well-meaning but poorly thought-out blacklist probably ended up driving far more traffic to that photo than if it had simply done nothing. So score one for the fans of unfettered free speech.

But that image, well… it is troubling, even if “the girl, when we met her 15 years later, had no problem with the cover” (according to an article cited in the wiki).

I’m uncomfortable endorsing any form of censorship. At the same time, I think Wikipedia could have easily blacked out parts of the image without damaging the article’s impact, or even hid it behind a warning screen that required a second click. News organizations do this sort of thing all the time. It’s an editorial decision, which Wikipedia geeks make thousands of times each day.

To me the most shocking part was not the image itself, but who insisted on it in the first place: executives at the Scorpions’ record label, RCA. Per guitarist Rudolph Schenker:

We didn’t actually have the idea. It was the record company. The record company guys were like, “Even if we have to go to jail, there’s no question that we’ll release that.”

The group ultimately had to pull the original album cover and reissue a tamer one. But imagine the unbelievable firestorm that would erupt if somebody tried to do that today.

Who’s right? Should wikis voluntarily censor themselves? Is this all much to-do about nothing? Vote with your fingers below, or eemail me direct: cringe (at) infoworld (dot) com.