People uploading porn to YouTube? What, honestly, did you expect?

I wish people would stop getting on all shocked and horrified to find porn on YouTube pretending to be videos of kiddies’ favourite artists.

Does that mean I think it’s right, or good or healthy?  Of course not.

What it means is I wish people would wake up and understand that there IS no way to control the internet and its content (short of being China).  That means our precious kiddies have, do and will be accidentally, occasionally and often deliberately watching porn.  Of the hardest, nastiest kind.

The problem we have in society today is that it’s too unpleasant to even look at truth of that sentence long enough to digest what it really implies (far less the actual material out there that our kids are watching).

Yes, mums and dads.  Hardcore, abusive, nasty, dirty, depraved, degrading and soul destroying stuff that our under 10s are finding every day on YouTube – even before this ‘newsworthy’ attack.  I watched that nice child psychologist, Professor Tanya Byron, on BBC Breakfast tv a couple of months ago talking about going into schools to teach children a new ‘Green Cross Code’ for internet safety; Zip It, Flag It, Block It.  It’s utter nonsense.

Why?  Because Government and well-meaning professionals seem to have no idea about the scale or true nature of this problem.  Don’t believe me?  Then ask yourself this: what’s the first thing an internet-savvy person would do after creating an ‘internet safety campaign’ aimed at kids?  That’s right – grab that keyphrase.  But if you Google ‘Zip It, Flag It, Block It‘ you’ll see that Prof Byron has failed to do that.

What does this mean? Well, for starters it suggests that the people behind this initiative don’t really understand how the world of search and online marketing works.  That, in turn, makes me question how they can possibly have an realistic grasp of the scale or the nature of the problem.

And on a practical level, it delivers children, parents and educators searching for ‘Zip It, Flag It, Block It’ to commentators like me, newspapers and other indirect sources.  And if I can get on to the first page of Google (and I could have got higher on P1 if I’d put the phrase ‘Zip It, Flag It, Block It’ at the start of my post title and repeated in the headers but I chose not to) you can see how easy it is for a pornographer to hi-jack this search phrase to put his/her wares in front of kids. That’s a real world demonstration of how easy it is.

I don’t mean to be unsupportive, Tanya. I respect your intentions and in principle we should try to equip our children to deal with what they find online.  But until we’re honest about the world we’ve created online, about how much unhealthy stuff we – and they – are already consuming and until we are able to have a more enlightened debate about why it’s unhealthy in the first place, I really don’t think it will make much difference.

Like drug and alcohol use, the situation is worse so long as we’re in denial about what’s really going on – even if it’s only because we really don’t know.  Personally, I think the growing effect of the consumption of online content is more damaging than anyone is prepared to admit or is willing to discuss openly.

Remember, there’s no point reaching for solutions until we’ve learned to be honest about the problem.