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24 July 2017

Age verification rules won't just affect porn sites – they'll harm our ability to discuss sex

Relying on censorship to avoid talking about sex lets children down.

The British have a long history of censoring sex. In 1580, politician William Lambarde drafted the first bill to ban "licentious" and "hurtful... books, pamphlets, ditties, songs, and other works that promote the art of lascivious ungodly love". Last week, the UK government decided to have another crack at censorship, formally announcing that age verification for all online pornographic content will be mandatory from April 2018.

It is unclear at this point what this mandatory check will entail, but it's expected that you will need to submit your credit card details to a site before being allowed to access adult content (credit cards can’t be issued to under-18s).

The appointed regulator will almost certainly be the British Board of Film Classification who will have the authority to levy fines of up to £250,000 or shut down sites that do not comply. These measures are being directly linked to research conducted by the NSPCC, the Children’s Commissioner and the University of Middlesex in 2016, which surveyed more than 1,000 11 to 16-year-olds about viewing online pornography and found over half had accessed it.

Digital minister Matt Hancock said age verification "means that while we can enjoy the freedom of the web, the UK will have the most robust internet child protection measures of any country in the world". And who can argue with that? No sane adult would think that it’s a good idea for children to watch hardcore pornography. And because we all agree kids should be watching Peppa Pig rather than The Poonies, the act has been waved through virtually unchallenged.

So, let’s put the issue of hardcore pornography to one side, because surely we are all in agreement. I’m asking you to look at the bigger picture. It’s not just children who will be censored and it’s not just Pornhub and Redtube which will be forced to age check UK viewers. This act will potentially censor any UK site that carries adult content, which is broadly defined by the BBFC as "that it was produced solely or principally for the purposes of sexual arousal".

I am a UK academic and research the history of sexuality. I curate the online research project www.thewhoresofyore.com, where academics, activists, artists and sex workers contribute articles on all aspects of sexuality in the hope of joining up conversations around sex that affect everyone. The site also archives many historical images; from the erotic brothel frescoes of Pompeii to early Victorian daguerreotypes of couples having sex. And yet, I do not consider myself to be a porn baron. These are fascinating and important historical documents that can teach us a great deal about our own attitudes to sex and beauty.

The site clearly signposts the content and asks viewers to click to confirm they are over 18, but under the Digital Economy Act this will not be enough. Although the site is not for profit and educational in purpose, some of the historical artefacts fit the definition of "pornographic’" and are thereby liable to fall foul of the new laws.

Thank you for your work in disproving that human, namely female sexuality is just some modern moral shortcoming.
— Tiffany (@duafe) July 21, 2016

And I’m not the only one; erotic artists, photographers, nude models, writers, sex shops, sex education sites, burlesque sites, BDSM sites, archivists of vintage erotica, and (of course) anyone in the adult industry who markets their business with a website, can all be termed pornographic and forced to buy expensive software to screen their users or risk being shut down or fined. I have contacted the BBFC to ask if my research will be criminalised and blocked, but was told "work in this area has not yet begun and so we are not in a position to advice [sic] you on your website". No one is able to tell me what software will need to be purchased if I am to collect viewers' credit card details, how I would keep them safe, or how much this would all cost. The BBFC suggested I contact my MP for further details. But, she doesn’t know either.

The thing I love most about @WhoresofYore: they beautifully show that humans have always been wonderfully sexual. https://t.co/Mb4Ma4uifv
— Tagg (@taggianto) July 21, 2016

Before we even get into the ethical issues around adults having to enter their credit card details into a government database in order to look at legal content, we need to ask: will this work? Will blocking research projects like mine make children any safer? Well, no. The laws will have no power over social media sites such as Twitter, Snapchat and Periscope which allow users to share pornographic images. Messenger apps will still allow users to sext, as well as stream, send and receiving pornographic images and videos. Any tech savvy teenager knows that Virtual Private Network (VPN) software will circumvent UK age verification restrictions, and the less tech savvy can always steal their parents' credit card details.

The proposed censorship is unworkable and many sites containing nudity will be caught in the crossfire. If we want to keep our children "safe" from online pornography, we need to do something we British aren’t very good at doing; we need to talk openly and honestly about sex and porn. This is a conversation I hope projects like mine can help facilitate. Last year, Pornhub (the biggest porn site in the world) revealed ten years of user data. In 2016, Brits visited Pornhub over 111 million times and 20 per cent of those UK viewers are women. We are watching porn and we need to be open about this. We need to talk to each other and we need to talk to our kids. If you’re relying on government censorship to get you out of that tricky conversation, you are letting your children down.

The NSPCC report into children watching online pornography directly asked the participants about the effectiveness of age verification, and said the children "pointed out its limitations". When asked what intervention would most benefit them, this was the overwhelming response: "Whether provided in the classroom, or digitally, young people wanted to be able to find out about sex and relationships and about pornography in ways that were safe, private and credible." I suggest we listen to the very people we are trying to protect and educate, rather than eliminate.

Dr Kate Lister researches the history of sexuality at Leeds Trinity University

› Stephen Hough Q&A: “Silence is the necessary soil for any thought to flourish”

Photo: Getty

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18 July 2017

How Labour activists are already building a digital strategy to win the next election

Momentum volunteers are developing, coding and designing online tools to get Jeremy Corbyn elected.

Part way through Momentum’s launch of its digital hub, participants join in with a “Clivestream” – a Google Hangout with the Labour MP Clive Lewis – projected on to a wall, calling in from a field at Tolpuddle Festival.

The stunt is intended to fuse the future of socialism with its deep historical roots. The festival is held annually to remember the 19th century Tolpuddle Martyrs, early trade union activists whose harsh treatment sparked massive protests. “[Tolpuddle] is often seen as a turning-point in the rights of working people,” says Lewis, before the call is briefly gate-crashed by an animal rights campaigner approaching from behind in a “Spanish Civil War Ale” T-shirt.

“In terms of what you guys are doing, you’re basically on the cutting-edge of 21st century socialism,” Lewis continues. “And its ability to be able to connect through to hundreds and thousands and millions of people. You’ve seen in the last election, how powerful the technology [is] and the growing impact it’s having on our democracy.”

The symbolism of the video link is not lost on those present.

“I think it’s really significant to have an MP livestream in from Tolpuddle, which is obviously a traditional left-wing event to commemorate the Tolpuddle Martyrs, livestreaming into an East London hackathon done by Momentum,” says Joe Todd, Momentum’s press and communications officer.

At the launch, a young and diverse group of around 60 volunteer coders, developers, and designers, meet at Newspeak House in Shoreditch – a “community space for political technologists”. Most are Londoners, but some have come from as far afield as Yorkshire, and even Paris. Momentum hopes to replicate this at regular events in different cities across the UK, as it aims to develop the technological tools to help Labour win the next election.

Although this officially isn’t until 2022, Momentum doesn’t want to be taken by surprise again if a general election is called early. The group built its carpool site to help activists know where to canvass, called My Nearest Marginal, in about a week when the last election was called. “No one slept, basically, for the whole of the campaign,” recalls Todd. "We went on an absolute bare-bones budget.”

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By planning a long-term digital strategy, Momentum hopes to improve on Labour’s 2017 election performance. Its social media team is developing tools to analyse the success of videos and posts among each demographic (one in three people on Facebook viewed its videos during the campaign), in order to expand its reach further.

The team is also building its own online payments system – it had been using PayPal, which charges a fixed fee, meaning “losing about a quarter of our donations to the one per cent”, according to digital officer and former Bernie Sanders staff member Erika Uyterhoeven.

She is not the only former Sanders campaign worker interested in Corbynism. Supporters of the two left-wing politicians built a fruitful relationship during the election campaign, with activists coming over from the US to help train canvassers. Ben Packer, who helped code during the campaign, says: “I’m just trying to help people steal our stuff… Even though the issues are somewhat country specific, they’re analogous – you want a better National Health Service, we want some national health service; the tech is the same.”

He’s currently trying to build an app for Momentum that allows anyone to create an event, which will then appear to other members in the area.

Much of the technology being developed is used for internal Labour Party votes as well as external election campaigning – the phone bank app, for example.

Momentum members are currently being canvassed to vote in potentially crucial conference committee elections. Yet activists at the digital hub launch said such internal party organising won’t lead to deselection attempts.

Todd dismissed recent stories about a “deselection list” of MPs floated on a local Momentum branch’s Facebook group, saying it was “patently not a deselection plot”, and the story “really lowers journalistic standards”.

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Momentum’s membership is up to 27,500, from 5,000 before the leadership challenge to Corbyn last year. Add in Labour’s polling lead – the most recent YouGov survey put it eight points ahead of the Tories – and “momentum” is a feeling as well as a name.

The group thinks it has the Tories on the run, and finds the idea of the Conservatives copying its strategy laughable. “If you don’t have the political programme or the vision that mobilises people and makes them enthusiastic and passionate, the technology’s useless. So the Tories can steal it all they want,” says Todd.

However, he sees no prospect of this happening any time soon. Looking at Theresa May’s potential successors, he says: “Their most inspired choice seems to be David Davis, which is a real indictment of the party” (perhaps Davis could make “Momentum’s most inspired choice” his leadership election slogan).

The activists recognise criticisms as well. While the enthusiasm and expertise represented by the digital hub may well attract more young people, it seems less apparent that it would win over older working-class voters in the Midlands and North.

“There was a swing against Labour in some places, and I don’t think the strategy should be to replace those seats with seats in the South, it needs to be a coalition,” Todd acknowledges. Yet he argues that “Momentum’s a lot more than what you see today”, referring to members across the country who are “embedded in all sorts of communities”.

How closely this central structure of Momentum is linked with its members across the country is up for debate, especially after controversial constitutional changes earlier this year. Rida Vaquas – who wasn’t at the event but is a member of Momentum’s governing National Coordinating Group – argues: “There is very little way, if any, that local branches can co-ordinate Momentum’s national activity in line with their own work, as local branches are no longer represented in Momentum’s democratic structures.”

When asked whether they do a good job co-ordinating national social media activity with local branches, Harry from the social media team admits: “Not really, that’s something we need to work on”. Ruth Berry, digital officer, sees the Hub as a promising way for “communicating with our membership across the country”, as “local groups can now use this digital hub to feed into us what their problems are, and how they can be best fixed”.

In a recent article, Tony Blair panned the electoral offerings put forward by both sides in June – particularly as far as Brexit strategies were concerned – calling them “two competing visions of the 1960s”.

Still, the campaign being built at Momentum’s digital hub appears as innovative as it was electorally useful at the election. However, Berry is adamant that Momentum has no cause to be complacent now: “We haven’t won a general election yet, so our work isn’t done.”

Thomas Zagoria is a Danson Scholar studying History and Politics at St Anne's College Oxford.

Rudy Schulkind is a Danson scholar who recently graduated in philosophy and politics from St Anne's College Oxford.