[Foundation-l] 86% of german users disagree with the introduction of the personal image filter

[Stephen Bain]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Tobias Oelgarte
<tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Depending on the settings of the user some kind of Javascript will hide
> the images. This "passed along" labels could simply be used to exclude
> the image as the whole, making the "show image" button disappear.

That would depend on the implementation, but even if the 'show image'
button were not present, the caption (which includes a link to the
image description page) would still be there, indicating that an image
had been blocked.

> The provider itself isn't able to filter the image or the
> content, since this is a lot of working time and time costs money. But
> if we choose to label the content for no fee, we open a new field for
> partial censorship.

Blocking of HTTP requests to images subject to any filters by an ISP
or some other intermediary would be fairly trivially avoided by
requesting the image from a mirror, or via a proxy etc. The community
has plenty of talented javascript coders who could implement such a
workaround.

Moreover as above, the caption will still be present (and, depending
on the implementation, the 'show image' button will be present but
ineffective) and so the user will know that an image has been blocked.
To avoid this, the ISP or intermediary would have to alter the HTML in
transit to remove the caption to conceal the censorship. But if they
have the capability and the desire to do that, then there are many
more potent avenues for censorship they could already engage in,
particularly avenues involving modification of the article text. The
marginal risk presented here does not seem to be high.

On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 6:32 AM, Tobias Oelgarte
<tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> What would someone living inside such a group think if the content is
> already labeled that way, that he should not look at it. Isn't it social
> pressure put on the free mind, especially if other members of the group
> are around?

I find this 'social pressure to activate filters' line of argument
quite flimsy. If a person would be under such social pressure, how are
they not at present under enough pressure to avoid using Wikimedia
projects (or at least articles where such pictures would be expected
to be present) entirely?

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com