Legislation does not work. Filtering software does not work. How can we balance our desire to keep pornography away from children, and our first amendment rights? I have an idea.
Libraries and schools face this dilemma: either they buy filtering software which also blocks educational sites, or face the wrath of politicians and parents for not protecting children. Leaving beside the question of whether we want our educational dollars spent on filtering software (as opposed to new textbooks, for instance), such software simply doesn't work. Or rather, it works too well.
Justice Potter Stewart famously said of obscenity, "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." The problem with filtering software is that a computer heuristic can't get a hard-on. It doesn't know chicken breast from breast cancer from hot xxx teen breasts. It doesn't know the difference between cum shot and cum laude. It can be highly effective at blocking pornography, but at the expense of blocking nearly everything else in its path.
So we need to generate a dynamic list of URLs that contain objectionable material. We need to do so cheaply. And we need to involve human judgment. It seems to me that this is an ideal problem for distributed computing of the sort that makes SETI such a successful project. We could call it KIWIS (for I Know It When I See It, missing the i's at the end, but IKIWISI just doesn't sound as good and it isn't a fruit or a flightless bird).
We have, of course, a ready pool of potential volunteers: our nation's porn surfers. Here's how it might work. Let's say George is surfing for porn. He finds something new. He likes it. He pulls up the KIWIS Porn Index window and adds it for inclusion on the Index. The KIWIS Index site then asks him if he'd like to review more sites, and gives him a list of several to check. He looks at them and reports whether they qualified as pornographic or not. George may not be able to define it, but he knows it when he sees it.
I think this approach would create an effective and accurate filter. First, human judgment is involved. Second, each site would be reviewed multiple times before it is added to the kill-list. (Perhaps some brave librarians could be recruited to make a determination on sites where there is significant disagreement as to the objectionable nature of their content.) Third, it would be cheap. Heck, maybe even free.
Why would someone volunteer?
1) Egoboos, of course. Perhaps each volunteer will get a anonymous nick. That nick can gather points -- say, 10 points for submitting a URL to the list, 20 points if that URL is entirely new, and 1 point for reviewing a URL from the list. It's amazing what crazy things people will do for meaningless points.
2) There may also be, among some volunteers, a recognition that keeping pornography out of schools and libraries is a good thing. And that it makes censorship less likely, resulting in more high-quality xxx porn for them.
3) Access to the list of forbidden URLs, naturally.
So, anyone want to build it?
| Civil Liberties | Distributed Culture |
The worry is that somebody would try to rig such a list, to take away access to one side or another's sites. So we'd see pro and anti abortion activists playing this game ...
Comment #1 :: link :: July 1, 2002 09:00 AMWell, if a site was heavily "contested" (lots of people disagreeing as to its inclusion on the Index) then the folks running the Index would have the final say. So there'd be little point in trying to rig the system, since it wouldn't work.
Comment #2 :: link :: July 1, 2002 09:00 AMHers’s one instance where I would tend to think that the Market would serve its purpose. Enough people working on this would probably tend to flatten out the extremes pro and con (though the errors would likely be toward inclusion, of things such as some of the Benetton ads) toward a consensus.
Comment #3 :: link :: July 1, 2002 09:00 AM
