eat itcensored due to food-porn

As some of you might have gathered I spent an awesome weekend in Budapest recently. It was really totally awesome: we basically spent the weekend at a luxury hotel being pampered and visiting the sites. Only one thing managed to get under my skin that weekend. And I hadn’t realised how much it actually bothered me.

While in Budapest I did a bit of lnstagraming as well as reading Tumblr. I mean there is very little better than having a drink and reading tumblrs in front of a fire. The one thing that would have made that better would have been if half of the blogs I follow hadn’t been censored on the hotel wifi for being pornography.

Lest I be correctly accused of being a horny old man, let me clear something up. While l have viewed porn on occasion, l do not not follow pornographic tumblrs. What was identified as porn was:

  • anything tagged as “food porn”
  • anything containing parts of potentially human anatomy such as the recipe for spinach filled chicken breast
  • and last but not least a rant by someone about UK legislation to filter porn at an ISP level

Aside from the obviously bad implementation of this filter I have a problem with the fact that it seems some people think that this kind of thing is OK and should be done. Usually someone will then invoke the “poor vulnerable children” that have to be protected because they are with their negligent parents at a luxury hotel. Let me tell you something as the parent of tar vulnerable children: l would rather my children encounter porn on the net, which l would prevent to begin with, because l closely supervise my kids internet use, than have them encounter a censorship page and grow up in the belief that it is ok to restrict people’s access to information.

History has taught us that freedom of speech, both passive and active, is the most important tool to protect society from oppression. While we usually only consider censorship in terms of state actors, it is important not to forget that states are not the only ones setting norms. If we accept today that it is OK for some company to censor network access, we start down the slippery slope towards accepting censorship in general.

So this is not about whether that hotel had the right to filter the net access it provides, it’s about whether it should. Prudish groups have hotels believe that they are expected to filter any network access they provide. It is high time that they are told otherwise. After all how are they supposed to know that we expect them to stand up for freedom and not for some prudes idea of morality.

To that end I have decided to write a letter to the hotel I was staying at and explain my view to them.

Maybe I should also make up cards to put into rooms explaining that the hotel has decided not to filter network access and warning guests that they need to use their own judgment. Those I would send out to hotel chains all over the world.

Whatever I decide to do exactly, it is high time to stop this creeping censorship before it gets out of hand.