WEB PORN

Mark Ward, Technology correspondent for the BBC news says today that “many things in porn are exaggerated, including the statistics regularly quoted to show how much pornography is on the web”.

He notes the increasing interest in the debate and the “need to get a good sense of its size and reach” because of the “influence pornography is having on children, teenagers and their understanding of what sex is all about”.

Then he goes on to discuss the possible figures and why then may be wrong:-

“A lot of different statistics were quoted in those debates. However, few stand up to scrutiny. One figure that cropped up again and again is that 37% of the internet is made up of pornographic material. Many of those people who quoted the figure took it from a press release put out in June 2010 by net filtering firm Optenet. A spokesman for the firm told the BBC: “The statistics are not up-to-date and I would not use them to reflect the reality of the web nowadays.”
That might just be because there is a lot more data around. According to estimates from Scandinavian research centre Sintef, 90% of all the data the human race has ever produced has been generated in the past two years. That explosion is due to the rise of the web, smartphones, social media and the “big data” projects in which businesses, governments and scientists are involved. But it is worth asking if 37% was ever accurate, even in 2010. Optenet said the figure came from a “representative sample” of about four million URLs taken from its database of web content. However, that same year the largest study ever done into human sexuality published a very different figure for how many of the web’s most popular sites were devoted to porn. The academics behind the research based their results on analysis of the million most frequented sites in the world. Most people now turn to the web to see pornography. Their estimate? Just 4% of those websites were porn. So, why do people pick the big numbers instead? “Big numbers are more sensational and make for good press,” said Dr Ogas. “But those big numbers have always been an urban myth.” Three years on, the amount of porn online was likely to make up even less of the total, he said, thanks to consolidation in the porn industry and the rise of sites that duplicate and syndicate content.

…and so on – it’s quite a long article.

But I think he might be missing the point. Does it really matter if there are loads of images or just a few?

In other words, how much is too much?

Surely, the point is that if our children can access porn immediately by googling XXX or some other very simple topic then anything that they can access is relevant – even just one or two images is enough? As Eleanor Mills quite rightly points out in an article entitled “Generation Porn” in The Sunday Times where she points out that we are allowing our children to see adult material that a decade or so ago would have been accessible only in a sex shop or an extreme fetish club and that the effect is devastating: they think these gross scenes are normal and set out to copy them as they take their first steps in sexual activity”.