More than 100,000 people have signed a petition calling for more to be done to ensure that internet service providers (ISPs) block pornography.
The news comes as a ten week Government consultation on the issue gets underway.
SafetyNet’s petition urges “the Government to force Internet Service Providers to make accessing pornography an adult only opt-in service”.
Phenomenal
The campaign was started earlier this year, in a bid to protect children’s innocence online, by Premier Christian Media and Safermedia.
Peter Kerridge, CEO of Premier Christian Media, said: “It’s phenomenal how quickly the Safetynet campaign has gained the support of over 100,927 members of the public; and this number continues to increase daily.”
He added: “The public has clearly spoken out in support of this issue and it is our hope that the Government will now listen, and introduce legislation which will force ISPs to turn the porn default setting to ‘off’ and protect our children from adult content.”
Conviction
Miranda Suit, co-Chairman of Safermedia, said: “This figure demonstrates clearly that the British public share our conviction that internet pornography is playing a crucial role in the sexualisation of our children.
“Since this petition was launched, there has been a constant stream of news backing up our case, that hardcore online porn is shaping the sexual culture of our young people and doing untold harm.”
The Government launched a ten week public consultation, proposing three possible solutions, on tackling internet pornography last week.
Filters
One of the proposed systems would involve a default ban where users who wished to access adult material would need to “opt in” to do so.
Another of the proposed systems would force users to choose whether or not they wish to install filters and blocks.
The third would present users with a list of content types that will be blocked unless they choose to unblock them with a simple action such as removing a tick from a box.