WASHINGTON — The anti-porn group National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) is openly calling for major search engines to block traffic to porn websites.  Dawn Hawkins, chief executive officer of NCOSE, alleged that Google has a “pivotal role in leading people to child sexual abuse and sexual assault.” This “cannot be overstated,” she argued, citing commentary from New York Times opinion contributor Nicholas Kristof calling out XVideos for enabling the spread of illicit content on its platforms.

“As the Times rightly pointed out, search engines like Google and others must stop ‘leading people to rape videos,'” Hawkins said in a press release. “As a gatekeeper for the Internet, Google must take responsibility for preventing the spread of child sexual abuse material, rape, incest, racist and abusive content that is peddled by the pornography industry.”

By making such a call, NCOSE (formerly known as “Morality in Media”) is again trying to cause trouble for a legitimate industry by stoking the fires of a moral panic.  Moral panic builds upon the acts of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who are attempting to demonize or stigmatize a particular behavior or group of people in the hope of drawing out government regulators and law enforcement entities to adjust the law or regulations to the benefit of the moralists who are persecuting the particular behavior or the members of the targeted group.

By citing Kristof in what appears to be a coordinated media blitz, types like Dawkins feel validated in their confirmation bias because a prominent newspaper like the New York Times ran an opinion piece that feeds their blatantly one-sided messaging. 

It’s no secret that porn tube sites have proven problematic for many in the adult entertainment industry. Indeed, companies like these do what they can to be compliant and self-regulate, but these interventions require a whole industry commitment. Unfortunately, NCOSE and other allied organizations rely heavily upon misunderstood or blatantly false information to scare companies and consumers into accepting what they believe as fact.

For the current case, NCOSE is asking the most powerful search engine provider in the world to purposefully cut off all search results that list links, photos, and videos to what the anti-porn group considers to be “hardcore pornography” — even if the content is completely legal.

Asking Google to censor porn sites is just a lazy, uncreative ploy for attention. Then again, look at who we are dealing with here.