NY Times providing child porn

[jason]

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Alex Halavais has taught some courses at SUNY Buffalo on pornography, and provided a small article to the ACM Siggroup bulletin I co-edited a couple of years back. His recent blog post is interesting: NY Times providing child porn

A lot of newspapers have been shy to link outside of their own news organization: so much so that it is almost a truism. They followed the corporate credo of keeping users on the site. That has changed over the last few years, with more and more traditional news sites willing to include hyperlinks.

He goes on to talk about how NYT, while talking about issues around child pornography actually provides links to sites that while not illegal, are on the boundary. The legality of even linking to these sites, let alone viewing them is open to debate now that it is possible that virtual child pornography, where someone claims to be or acts as if or appears to be under the age of 18, even if a counter claim is presented, is a possible crime. This is tied to the fact that an image of a child nursing or bathing can be cause for charges, though I assume not conviction.

I decided to not even link to the NYT article, let alone read it, but rather fall back to linking to Alex’s post. It is interesting to note that even looking for research material about issues surrounding child pornography could be a problem, as you might run into the material. When looking for material to teach with I made sure that I restricted my google search with “site:gov.ca” to only search canadian government sites. Perhaps site:edu might be ok as well.