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UK ISPs filter access to Wikipedia

Monday 08 December 2008 Comment

It was noticed this weekend that Internet Service Providers in the UK began filtering access to online encyclopedia, Wikipedia after users attempted to edit the content of an article based on the heavy metal band, The Scorpions (featuring the cover of their 1976 album ‘Virgin Killer’ in which a young, underage girl is pictured topless).Edits made to the page forced ISPs to heavily censor the established free Encyclopedia, causing wide debate over the topic of censorship in the UK.
 
On Saturday the site contained the following announcement:
“Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well.”
 
 
Filters were applied by Virgin Media, Be/ O2/Telefonica, Easynet/ UK Online, PlusNet, Demon and Opal to halt access to the article in question, and visitors to the page were greeted with a 404 error page.
 
However, in applying these filters and rerouting traffic through a small selection of IP addresses the ISPs in turn made it impossible to track down where the offending article editors were logging on from. A debate has now been sparked discussing the relevance of the Internet Watch Foundation UK, with the argument being that content, such as The Scorpions album art, could be found easily through any online research tool – like Google Images, and the filtering of Wikipedia was a knee-jerk reaction. 
 
In response, a spokesperson from the IWF commented:
“The content was considered to be a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18, but hosted outside the UK. The IWF does not issue takedown notices to ISPs or hosting companies outside the UK, but we did advise one of our partner Hotlines abroad and our law enforcement partner agency of our assessment. The specific URL (individual webpage) was then added to the list provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child.”
 

 

 

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