Exclusive: Entertainment Corporations Creating Porn Panic?

Having watched the Porn Panic take shape over the past decade, it has always been obvious that there are various vested interests working behind the scenes. The free speech provided by the Internet has threatened long-established power bases, as well as anti-sex moralists, and it was of course inevitable that they would respond with attempts at censorship. Porn is a good excuse to introduce censorship, but rarely the underlying reason.

One of the groups with a clear interest in Internet censorship has been the entertainment industry, which has vigorously pursued individual actions against piracy websites through national courts. The Pirate Bay, for example, is blocked in multiple countries. But taking court action to block individual sites is expensive and easy to circumvent. The industry would clearly love to see industrial-scale blocking of sites that undermine its profits.

One imagines secretive board meetings where execs discuss how to build support for blocking.

Imagine no more! According to an email published by Wikileaks, a meeting was planned in late 2014 between execs at Sony, Fox, Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount/Viacom and Warner Bros. The express purpose was to discuss ways to lobby for ISP blocking in the US, and to discuss campaigns that might be run, including:

Building the record (and telling the story) that the sorts of sites at issue are dangerous.  It is not just copyright infringement.  Kids are one-click away from identity theft, graphic porn, malware, etc.  Parent groups, consumer protection groups and other third parties can be cultivated to speak out against such predatory sites. [My highlight]

This must, of course, come with a disclaimer: we cannot vouch for the authenticity of the email, and suggest you read it and decide for yourself: Full email available at Wikileaks.

As we have long said, it’s never been just about porn.

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7 thoughts on “Exclusive: Entertainment Corporations Creating Porn Panic?

    1. Ah yeah – that was a bit crappy wasn’t it? Typos have been eradicated

  1. That would make sense and I’m surprised how I couldnt see this in plain sight without WikiLeaks.

    it does make you think

    I can understand why Assange/ Snowden and Manning are an enemy to the US.

    I’ve suspected this moral panic/ censorship was not always about the porn but using it as a convenient excuse to gain leverage with those who could make censorship/ control happen

    Why do I think that?

    Because porn was never important while it helped the internet to gain critical mass to the industrial level it is seen at today.

    The internet is now a serious piece of real estate in that it influences more people, particularly the young generation with its social networking it is a threat to mainstream broadcast and press and indeed politicians as well as governements

    If porn has created the internet to what it is today then it is certainly the whore to be used by those abusing it for their goals of power and control and lets face it, the war to win it like any other war is going to be on the level of winning the hearts and minds of those it needs by playing on their sense of shame to not defend it.

    I cant blame corporate companies or anyone for that matter trying to protect their interests but I cannot tolerate them doing so at the expense of denying people their civil liberties.

  2. It is not just about civil liberties. There is also strong evidence that prudery results in appalling outcomes for children and young people. It is not just that the correlations are near perfect, and the mechanisms are well understood, it also the enormous differences, often an order of magnitude or more. I will give just one figure as an example, the gonorrhoea rate in the USA, arguably the most prudish western country was about fifty times that of the least prudish western countries (Denmark, Germany etc) last time I looked at the figures.

    1. It’s would be useful to have links to the relevant stats, in order to make meaningful comparisons.

      1. http://advocatesforyouth.org/storage/advfy/documents/fsest.pdf Is a good general introduction. They have picked on particular countries but the picture is similar across all the less prudish Western European countries. The UK is conspicuous by its absence but it is intermediate in body attitudes and surprise surprise also intermediate in outcomes.

        Some other generalist resources linked from the children and young people section of http://www.bn.org.uk/campaigning/briefings.php

  3. Why there is so much fuss about porn industry? I don’t get it. Everyone watchs it but keeps silent. One day I think that I am porn addicted but then I discover for myself a href=”http://uk.worldescortmap.com/ “>London escorts . And now I am cured=)

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