I’ve known for many years that access to this blog is blocked in mainland China. Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. I imagine it all depends on how recently I’ve mentioned the Tiananmen Square Massacre. As I write this, it’s not being blocked (I checked here), but that could change since I just mentioned the Tiananmen Square Massacre twice now.
However, thanks to the London-based Open Rights Group (which I stumbled upon in the sidebar on Charlie Stross’s blog), I’ve discovered that my blog is now banned by some of the ISP content filtering recommended by the U.K. government.
You may remember hearing that the UK had pressured ISPs into blocking pornography in their default settings. (People who wanted to receive it could remove the block.) But the blocking also included other categories such as malware, drugs, gambling, suicide, weapons and violence, obscenity, hate, cyberbullying, and hacking. This site is not particularly about any of those things, but I do discuss them in the context of analyzing public policy, and like most automated filtering, it blocks a lot of stuff that it shouldn’t.
I checked around on my blogroll, and surprisingly few of them are blocked. Scott‘s not, and neither is Popehat, despite their extensive discussion of criminality. Even Pete Guither’s Drug WarRant isn’t blocked, and all he talks about is drugs. On the other hand, Maggie McNeill‘s site about sex work is blocked kind of a lot, and anthropologist Laura Agustín‘s site about migrant sex work is blocked a little. It sounds like the Brits are threatened by the sexiness.
Or maybe I just say “fuck” too often.
You can check your site here.
(Title allusion here.)
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