Google has announced that it will no longer allow advertising to depict sexual acts and other types of pornography.
The company sent an e-mail to advertising accounts saying that anyone using the Google AdWords system that it will restrict ads containing or linking to any sexually explicit content. The announcement follows a meeting in May between Google and groups such as Morality in Media, Concerned Women for America and Focus on the Family.
“We are grateful that they are realizing that their profits from porn are not worth the devastation to children and families,” Morality in Media said in a statement.
In addition to the new restrictions on advertising, Google has increased policies for apps that can be sold through the Google Play store. Apps that contain or promote sexually explicit or erotic content are no longer permitted and Google has removed several apps from the site that violated those policies.
Google has been part of the “Dirty Dozen” list released each year by PornHarms.com, a listing that shows the biggest contributors to sexual exploitation in America. Google is on the 2014 list, released just before the announcement of the changes. Other major companies on the list include Verizon, Barnes & Noble and Cosmopolitan magazine.
An expert in the field of addiction to pornography says that pornography in America has reached the level of a public health crisis.
Dr. Sharon Cooper said that the impact that pornography has on the development of children who are routinely exposed to the sexual images. The images that they see are hampering their ability to form healthy connections to sexuality and the proper role of men and women in relationships.
“It’s a very severe issue in our country,” Dr. Cooper told The Christian Post.
Dr. Cooper was speaking at a summit of the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation. The event, sponsored by the anti-porn groups Morality in Media and Pornharms.com, was aimed at raising the awareness of the harm of pornography on youth.
Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College, spoke about performers who are considered “mainstream” in America like Miley Cyrus or Beyonce whose performances contain elements of adult entertainment. She said the ease by which those performances are accepted by Christians helps create the highly sexualized culture that harms youth.
Dines also says the problem is now so large that it cannot be stopped on an individual basis.
“There’s nothing you can do on an individual level really. The idea of it being a public health issue is that you have to come together collectively as a group,” said Dines.
“This has become such a public health crisis that we have to bring together groups who normally would not come together to figure out what does a public health approach look like in dealing with the harms of pornography.”
A poster that promoted what it termed “abuse free” child pornography has been removed from a bus stop outside a major cathedral in Barcelona, Spain.
The advertising firm that manages the bus stops said the poster promoted “abuse-free child pornography,” bearing the word “freedom” in large letters over a picture of a half dressed underage girl.
The ad asked people to send them photos of themselves as children for posting on a website that promoted what they termed the abuse free images.
A spokesman for the advertising agency said the ad was placed inside one of the company’s glass display cases that can only be opened by employees of the company. The company did not say who purchased the ad or who placed the posters in the display case near the Sagrada Familiia cathedral.
No one knows how long the poster was displayed before a local reporter called city council officials about the poster’s content. The council had to ask the ad agency to remove the poster.
A teacher who was caught watching pornography was offered his job back by a Wisconsin school district after a state arbitrator and the state Supreme Court ruled he could not be fired for it.
Andrew Harris was fired from his job as a seventh-grade teacher for collecting, distributing and watching pornography on his school-issued computer. The investigation was launched after Harris started showing pornographic images to a female teacher in his school.
The teacher’s union then filed a grievance claiming his dismissal was unfair. A state arbitrator then ruled in favor of the teacher saying it was unfair of the school to fire him for viewing and distributing pornography from the computer. The arbitrator ordered the teacher to be rehired to his same job or a similar job and be paid back pay for the time he was out of work.
The cost of the back pay to taxpayers is nearly $200,000.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court validated the arbitrator’s decision by refusing to hear the case.
The school district then offered a similar position to Harris because they felt the $1 million spent defending themselves in the lawsuit was enough to ask from taxpayers.
Parents in the school district are outraged, demanding to know why a teacher who is watching pornography around underage kids is not a threat to the children. They also question how the teacher’s union could say this teacher did nothing worth being fired.
Google executives have said the search giant will block searches for child pornography.
In addition, the company says they have been reporting to authorities anyone they find who has been posting pictures of child sexual abuse to the web. The evidence handed over by Google has been used in multiple convictions of abusers.
The changes to Google’s search algorithm are also being applied to 150 different languages in an attempt to combat the sharing of child pornography worldwide. The company is also putting warnings at the top of pages where people search for illegal images that the images violate international law and advice on where to seek help.
Engineers at YouTube are also working on a system that will automatically identify videos with children being abused so they can be immediately flagged by the search engine.
In addition, Google is funding internships at both the Internet Watch Foundation and the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to help those groups track down child abusers.
Martin Daubney, former editor of a soft core pornography magazine, has turned his back on the porn industry and is now speaking out against the dangers of pornography for the youth of today.
London’s Daily Mail reported that Daubney has been conducting conversations with teen males about their pornography habits and a research study that has shown porn to be addictive. Daubney is now warning parents of the dangers of pornography on teen males.
Daubney is part of an upcoming documentary called “Porn On The Brain” where he expresses shock and dismay over the extent of teenager’s knowledge of porn.
“I was profoundly saddened by what I had witnessed,” said Daubney. “While teenage boys will always be fascinated by, and curious about, sex, what’s now considered ‘normal’ by under-18s is an entirely distorted view of intercourse and the way relationships should be conducted.”
“When you interview young women about their experiences of sex, you see an increased level of violence: rough, violent sex,” Professor Gail Dines told Daubney as part of the documentary. “That is directly because of porn, as young boys are getting their sexual cues from men in porn who are acting as if they’re sexual psychopaths,” she added. “Pornography is sexually traumatizing an entire generation of boys.”
South African police have announced the arrests of six men in connection with a child pornography investigation.
The six men are believed to have connections in the U.S, Canada, the U.K. And multiple European nations. Police say among the six are a school headmaster and two teachers. Continue reading →
A web company that is accused of helping child abusers share files on a hidden part of the internet has been compromised by malware.
The sites were using the service provider Freedom Hosting and had code attached to their pages that could be used by law enforcement to reveal the people visiting the pages. Continue reading →
British Prime Minister David Cameron released a plan Monday to limit access to internet pornography.
“I feel profoundly as a politician, and as a father, that the time for action has come,” Cameron said. Continue reading →
A resolution scheduled to be voted on Tuesday at the European Parliament includes language that would support a ban on online pornography in the EU.
The move is part of a bill to eliminate “gender stereotypes in the EU” and is meant to celebrate International Women’s Day. Continue reading →