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Old 06-21-2015, 03:36 PM   #37
FatDog
Witless protection Agent
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Posts: 290
Karma: 1002898
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Los Angeles
Device: Kindle
I remember I was working for Shopzilla (a search site that directs you to sites that sell you stuff). We had a UK version of our site and it covered the UK, Germany and France.

One feature was we collected search-terms to see what people were looking for and published the top 10 things at the bottom of our web pages. Kind of like a shopping "Trending Now" feature.

About 5 years ago I was about to leave work and a manger from another department came over pleading for help. The German authorities were threatening to block our site because the "Trending Now" was showing that people in Germany were searching for a lot of kiddie porn. Since this appeared on every page - it looked like were were encouraging the searches. It made no difference to the Germans that this simply reflected top search terms by their countrymen. They wanted it removed or they would shut down our site in Germany.

I tend to work at the back-end of the website, not the web-facing part, but nobody could figure out where the filters we used were and how to code new regular expressions to squash kiddie porn searches from showing up in the top 10 search terms.

I quickly added any word with the term "Kinder" inside to the filter. This solved the immediate problem. But this also tossed out any terms for Childrens clothing, costumes, toys, etc.

I then spent the next day looking up porn terms in German. I had to go home to do the research because the company internet tended to block porn terms by computers inside the firewall. Eventually I managed to 'tune' the filters to remove the adult content in the German language from showing up on every page.

It was amusing and somewhat disturbing.

Basically - Germany has been fighting a large pornography problem for several years.

I am against censorship and I know that every radical, oppressive argument includes a "we must protect the children" argument. But putting some time-of-day restrictions on scheduled TV shows is something I grew up with in the US. Not allowing adult book stores to be within a few hundred yards of elementary schools ... I can support this (mainly because of some of the pervy guys who hang around these places).

This DOES smell like the authorities making a ridiculous rule - but it's focus is to generate buzz to send a message to other smut peddlers that someone in power is looking at things.
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