Computers and the Net

Yes, there is a huge amount of pornography on the Internet. Still, after almost three years on line I’ve hardly encountered any. Porn isn’t a problem for users who follow certain guidelines. Also, there are practical ways to change the Net and make life difficult for porn pushers.

The past few decades’ explosion in porn available in all media has carried over to the Internet. Playboy’s website averages an astounding five million hits per day. The U.S. Family Research Council (FRC) reports that the estimated 72,000 pornographic websites are among the most used on the Internet. The FRC states that porn is third in sales on the Internet, generating $1 billion annually.

The entire spectrum of pornography is available, from “soft” porn to the most perverse imaginable. The access controls in place are by far the least ever available for any communications medium. Interestingly, the FRC reports that the great majority of Internet users support the implementation of regulations to control children’s access to pornography.

Usually, to see porn on the Web one must deliberately look for it. It’s not hard to find. Porn is available via Web browsing, and is accessed especially through Usenet newsgroups. Also, most porn requires credit-card payment for access to site contents. Many have preview pages to entice viewers.

Pornographers also entice viewers by sending unsolicited mail broadcasts (called spamming), advertising their wares. These are descriptive text messages which provide inviting links to their sites. I’ve received several of these over the past three years.

Sometimes, searches on certain harmless topics unexpectedly give one or more links to porn sites in the results. Also, some search engines such as Yahoo include “Lesbian, gay, bisexual” as one of the major categories from which to begin your search.

How to avoid porn on the Internet

The following is a list of practical suggestions on how to avoid porn on the Net, especially for parents.

1. Don’t tolerate ANY mild porn, sex-related nudity, vulgar language, or sex scenes in your selection of movies, videos, television programs, and magazines. If you do tolerate these things (most people now do), you will cripple your children’s ability to discern right and wrong, and their ability to act accordingly. All porn addicts started out justifying “just a little” nudity, explaining “it’s not so bad,” “it was only a few minutes,” etc. Be courageously counter-cultural! An established healthy home attitude to all porn will make Internet moral decision-making much easier.

2. Disable your Usenet connection. The Usenet is a huge assembly of discussion forums. The worst pornography has its source in some of these forums. I never search Usenet for anything. The discussion levels are often low-grade. Crude language, bad attitudes, and a lack of common courtesy seem to abound in these anonymous realms.

3. Keep your computer in a high-traffic area of your home. Internet viewing should not be a private affair in homes with children, teenagers and-or young adults.

4. Consider using blocking or filtering software. These programs can prevent your computer from accessing offensive sites. There are problems with blocking programs, however. They are usually far from 100 per cent effective, and some are much better than others. Also, some do not filter out gay/lesbian sites and some block certain pro-family sites as being “intolerant.” The most popular filtering program, Cyberpatrol, deliberately blocks the American Family Association, for example.

Find out if your ISP offers a filtering service. One of my providers, Internet Direct, offers Netfilter as a free extra. It seems to be quite effective except that it automatically blocked part of one our LifeSite news pages because of some of the words in one of the articles.

5. If you get porn spam, immediately do two things: (a) forward the spam message to your ISP’s customer service, asking if there is some way that they can filter mail from the objectionable address; and (b) forward the message with a strong note to the customer relations department of the ISP from which the message originated. The ISP name is after the @ symbol of the address. Send to webmaster@the ISP and ask them to pass the message to customer relations.

6. For more excellent advice, go to http://www.enough.org/safeguards.htm.

Our role is not to flee from the Internet, but to transform it for good, and many people are doing just that. Mark Kellner, author of God on the Internet, states “For Christians to neglect the Internet is akin to giving up on a segment of society.” U.S. researcher George Barna reports that, “Hundreds of thousands of Christians are joining in the technological revolution every month.”

Let’s claim the Internet for God and life and family, and send the pornographers packing.