When Natasha Kaplinsky used to do the breakfast news show on the BBC she brightened up many a grey morning. Now she has her own news show over on Channel 5, a channel that put the sleaze into British telly until they realised that people had gotten over real live boobies as a ratings winner. Note to Channel 5, Channel 4 did it best when they were getting extra viewers with their “Special discretion required” warning triangle. Indeed Channel 4 do everything better than you, including the news.
So what has this got to do with Second Life? Well “ace undercover reporter” Jason Farrell has infiltrated the seedy underbelly of Second Life again, first it was wonderland, now he’s found some other might be paedophiles as exemplified by this news report.
The report is however typical guff from Farrell, why he picks on Second Life isn’t that great a mystery though, SKY News are holding a debate about this in their Second Life studio on Wednesday at 9am GMT, when I’m at work and plenty of Americans are in bed. The cynic in me thinks that they’ve gone out of their way to find this story to create a platform for their debate.
The debate will focus around whether real world rules should apply in virtual worlds, with input from child online safty experts. I hope that in the debate someone points out the blindingly obvious, the main grid is 18+. I welcome any debate that points out that parents need to be aware of what their children are doing on the internet, but by the same token I find it hard to believe that paedophiles will be flocking to Second Life in the hope of picking up real children, because the door clearly says 18+ and whereas some continue to sneak through the door, perverts looking for young kids will go to places where young kids hang out.
Now this isn’t to say I don’t find some of the imagery here disturbing. I personally find the whole adult AV’s having sex with child av’s very disturbing and I’m glad it’s banned. However why isn’t Farrell dealing with the much darker issues of actual child pornography which are a festering sore on the internet itself?
Yet again Farrell fails to point out that Second Life is an 18+ environment, if he was finding adults on the teen grid his stories would have more merit because that would be a case of adults knowingly seeking out children. However he dresses as a child av in an 18+ world where people are roleplaying a taboo that is against the TOS and reports it as if there’s a festering issue of paedophillia here.
I hope Jason Farrell AR’d all involved. I also hope the debate will be sensible.