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Study refutes AG: not as much porn on the Internet as you might think

November 14, 2006

In hearings last week on a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a confidential study was released that seems to point there's less porn on the Internet than some might think.

The suit is part of the ACLU's initiative to refute Justic Department claims that porn is so available on the Internet and can get through software filters, that criminal penalties are needed to thwart viewing of such content by minors.

The specific analysis by University of California-Berkeley statistics professor Philip Stark, was obtained by the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury-News yesterday. Reports about the study appear on the Merc's website this afternoon.

Before you start yelling "yea, what would you expect from a Berkeley professor," keep in mind that the U.S. Justice Department Commissioned this study.

The study noted that only six percent of random queries to Google's and Microsoft's search tools returned a sexually explicit web page, and that only one percent of all of a sample of random Web pages contained sexually explicit material.

So in other words, there ain't that much porn out there, and you have to look really really hard (pun not intended) to find it- espcially when filters are on. 

"One of the things we think came out of the government's study is that the chance of running into graphic content on the Web when filters are on is extremely low,'' said Catherine Crump, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.




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