No matter how often people run afoul of the Barbara Streisand effect, there are some people – and some organisations – who never quite get around to understanding the futility of their own censorious instincts. Take a rather curious organisation by the name of ‘Straight Pride UK‘, a […]

I’m perhaps one of the last people you’d expect to see stepping up to defend Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) but you’d be wrong because there are principles that come into play whenever a blogger, even one as notorious as Guido, is subjected to an unjustified, hectoring attack […]

If there is one thing I learned very well back in the days that I worked in and with the Public Sector it’s that once you get above a certain level of seniority, the staff become highly adept at creating unnecessary work purely for the sake of creating […]

A little over a month ago you may recall that there was a bit of a short-lived furore over claims that female TV presenters routinely disappear from our screens once they reach the age of 50. The source of this claim was a Labour Party policy review group […]

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last three weeks or so debunking a variety of spurious claims about online porn. Amanda Platell claimed to have watched a child porn video she found using Google, but that proved to be an old commercial porn video in […]

Warning: May contain actual evidence. Three weeks ago, I published a couple of articles in the space of two days that conclusively debunked Amanda Platell’s claim that it was easy to find child pornography online using nothing more than Google proving, first, that a porn video she described […]

Having parked its [septic] tanks on Google’s lawn, the media’s efforts to generate a full blown moral panic around the existence of online pornography continued this morning with an appearance on the BBC’s Breakfast News programme by Susie Hargreaves, tbe current CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation. To […]

In the wake of the convictions of Stuart Hazell and Mark Bridger for sexually motivated murders of children, the papers are awash with speculative commentaries on online child pornography. The Daily Mail (of course) wants to know ‘What WILL it take for Google to block child porn?’ even […]

Yesterday I provided what I believe to be conclusive evidence that a ‘child porn’ video that Amanda Platell claims to have viewed as ‘research’ for an article published online by the Daily Mail on 24th May 2012 and as a double-page spread (pp18-19) in the print edition of […]

Note: I don’t usually do content warnings but I have tagged this post as ‘NSFW’ – ‘Not Safe For Work’ – because of it’s textual content which includes a fairly frank commentary on pornography and, in particular, on a legally produced and marketed commercial porn video, dating from […]