Ukraine Relies on Diplomacy to Fight Porn Online

Of course no one will argue that there are certain types of online content that are growing into a huge problem, especially with porn getting a prominent placement on multiple online properties. This problem is disturbing enough for various legal actions to be taken to protect internet users from being exposed to objectionable content but in some countries measures taken are on the verge of absurdity.

The recent example is Ukraine where the National Commission for Protection of Public Morality is concerned with content of some sites and chooses to rely on diplomacy to fight it. The commission is mostly concerned with porn content that appears on blogs in LiveJournal - which is a blogging platform of choice for many people of the former Soviet Union. But instead of working directly with LiveJournal to figure out how such situations could be handled and prevented in the future, Ukrainian authorities have promised to send requests to have the content removed directly to the Embassy of the Unites States in Ukraine.

From now on the commission will monitor content of blogs published on LiveJournal and when they find objectionable content they will contact the US embassy to demand that it’s removed - instead of contacting LiveJournal owners and managers to ask them do the same which seems like a logical and simple way to have it done.

It looks like diplomatic actions is the only measure Urkainian authorities can think of at all as they have already done the same with the Russian social network Vkontakte.ru: when the commission found out that the network is also used to distribute pornographic content via multiple groups (and the network is rather popular in Ukraine as well as in Russia), they have requested that the Russian embassy investigate the situation and take measures to have such content removed.

And while the Ukrainian bloggers are already very much concerned about the activities of the commission that seem to hint at upcoming large-scale censorship of online resources in the country, to me the most ridiculous fact is that the problem is taken to the national level and diplomatic channels are intended to be used to settle things that are normally regulated by communicating directly with the owners of the websites that are used to disseminate the objectionable content instead of contacting the government of the country where the site in question is registered.

I have a feeling that it looks very much like the echo of the Soviet Union era when everything was controlled by the government and international relations were only possible via certain channels - hence trying to use the same principles even for the industry that is usually considered to have no boundaries at all. And honestly, I can hardly imagine the US government contacting LiveJournal and asking the company to put a stop to actions of their bloggers because Ukrainian government is unhappy about them.

Via (in Russian)