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Change the World: Help Mihaela Protect Children Using the Web

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Kids Are Landing on Porn Sites

Change the World!

Ilker at the thinking blog asked me to post about this. Little did Ilker know that earlier this week, I got an email from Germany. A young woman, Mihaela Lica asked me to visit Blogger Power: Safeguard the Web for Children. I clicked through. I read the title and the list of three bullets.

Would you do that? It’s four sentences. I’ll wait.

Four sentences was all that it took. I wrote Mihaela back — three more sentences, two names, and some smiles.

Mihaela
Hi Where are you located?
Do you skype? lizstrauss
I talk faster than I type.
Smiles,
liz

We Skyped for 26 minutes and 29 seconds.

One email, seven sentences, two names, three words, some smiles, and a less than 30 minute skype call led to this blog post and the four-question interview below.

This is real way to keep a child safe, the same way parents put a gate at the top of s stairway so that a toddler doesn’t fall. Will you help? Will you write a comment or a blog post about Blogger Power: Safeguard the Web for Children. so that the folks who can make the gate will hear that we need one?

After all, Mihaela got my attention with three sentences. I’m not going to tag you. I know that I don’t need to when the issue is as straightforeard as this.

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
12: Mihaela Lica on Safeguarding the Web for Children

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If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.

12: Mihaela Lica on Safeguarding Children on the Internet

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Tell Us How We Can Help

Mihaela Lica

Mihaela Lica has a soft voice that speaks clearly. She is warm, thoughtful, and easy to know. She wants the message of Blogger Power: Safeguard the Web for Children heard around the world. This week, Mihaela emailed me and we talked about how I might help.

Hi Mihaela, Welcome! Would you me about the problem and the solution you proprose?

Hi Liz. As you know, there are many anti-porn campaigns online, some quite aggressive. I think the reason why these campaigns fail is that their initiators fight against pornography as a whole. This is not a solution. We live in a free world and pornography is a matter of personal choice. It’s normal; some say it is even healthy that adults are consumers. But do we really have to drag children into this world?

As long as the porn sites will offer free tours, free previews or other free contents, there will always be a chance that kids stumble upon such materials. So we think that the simplest solution is that the porn webmasters make it more difficult for kids to access explicit adult materials by requiring a login. The idea is based on a real world fact: porn magazines are distributed in plastic foil wrappers. That’s the “login” offline. We are aware that some kids might still make accounts, but not so many as see nowadays porn pages by accident.

Skeptics will probably see this as a small step. Others will say that the porn webmasters will not change their ways because they want to make money. But kids are not paying customers. So the porn sites will not have so much to lose financially by applying such a measure. On the contrary: they will increase their possible clients database. And that’s an advantage.

I don’t say this is going to be easy. But I believe that the porn webmasters of the legal sites will understand our request and work with us. By showing civic conscience they have a lot to win.

How can I and the folks who are reading this help?

If you would just spread the word. Talk about this initiative. Ask bloggers to address a polite request to the porn webmasters to determine them to “help keep minors out by adding a simple registration gateway” as Jon says. We welcome any kind of support except material support. No money, no donations! No tricks! Just words. Or images. I think any kind of support is welcome: even a nofollow link to the Blogger Power official website might help! We can only thank our bloggers by adding links to their entries on a special page. Artists may show their support by creating a banner, button, graphic… whatever they want. Those who don’t have blogs may comment on Blogger Power (we have a special comments page), on your blog, on any blog that posts such an entry. Every voice matters!

If webmasters want to support our initiative but don’t have blogs, they could place a support banner or logo somewhere on their site. We’ll link back. This is the only way we can say “thank you”. We’ll even link back to pages that support the initiative without linking back to Blogger Power. As we cannot monitor links in real time (we only count on Technorati) it would help if our supporters contact us shortly at bloggerpower@yahoo.com and give us the exact URL to their post.

So this is what we need: awareness. I see bloggers joining for “cool stuff” like Tino Buntic’s 2000 bloggers. I find it hard to believe that they wouldn’t join for something that could change the Web for the better. I believe in people! I do believe that we all understand how important it is to act responsibly, especially online.

Once again: THIS IS NOT ABOUT RESTRICTING ANYONE’S FREE SPEECH!

And one more thing: if porn webmasters understand our request and implement the registration form prior to giving free access to explicit content, we’ll give them credit! We’ll thank them as well. This is fair play!

Mihaela, why write to me? Why ask us?
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