The battle against pornography in the Internet has just reached a new milestone: the Philippines now wants to block porn on the Internet.
In a memorandum issued last January 30, the Philippine National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) instructed Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to install software that can identify and filter out pornography sites in the Internet. The memorandum is now enforced by the government.
What does this mean? Users in the Philippines will not be able to visit pornography websites so long as they are in the country, or if they are using the country’s ISP. The NTC, together with other government agencies such as the Department of Justice and the Philippine National Police will join forces in combating the widespread cyber pornography in the Philippines.
This is a significant milestone in the Philippines as the country slowly emerging as the “webcam child sex tourism” capital of the world. The country is currently one of the top supplier of the said form of cyber porn.
This was revealed by a study conducted last year by Terre des Hommes, a European Anti-Child Abuse and Exploitation body. In less than two and a half months during a project the team ran, Terre des Hommes researchers were able to identify over 1,000 adults who were willing to pay children in developing countries to perform sexual acts in front of the webcam.
Pornhub, the world’s largest porn site with an average daily visitors of 35 million, has recently published their statistics on porn viewership in the Philippines for 2013.
According to Pornhub Insights, the Philippines ranked 26th in worldwide traffic to the popular porn site but ranked a solid 15th when it comes to mobile traffic.
- Filipinos like watching porn late at night between 11pm to 1am.
- Mobile users generally spend more time on Pornhub than their PC counterparts.
- On average, Filipinos will visit around 9 pages in a little over 13 minutes.
- Two of the top searched terms across all devices are “pinay” and “Filipina”, followed by “Japanese” and “teens”.
- 53% still use a desktop when visiting Pornhub. 37% of the traffic comes from various mobile devices while 10% are from tablets.
- Windows Desktop is the most popular platform (49.9%) of choice, followed by Android mobile (21.9%) and iOS tablets (8%).
With the widespread of internet pornography in the Philippines, it is no wonder the government is stepping in to put a stop to all these. Would the censorship work?enablejsapi=1&html5=1&
As a reader Adeno Sine pointed out on The Philippine Star, blocking cyber porn from being viewed from filipinos does not solve the core problem of how the country is becoming the main supplier of cyberporn content all over the world via the Internet.
“Their problem is still there. Filipinos won’t be able to watch Pinoy Pride x-rated stuff, but others can, or is the government simply going for some generic censorship of anything they deem x-rated? I don’t think the Philippine government even understands how the internet or modern technology works. They’re more concerned about appearing prudish and religious than actually solving problems that truly affect their citizens.” – Adeno Sine
Also read: Singaporean creates browser extension to bypass UK porn filters, puts country on world map
Featured image credit: Telegraph