Wikipedia has plenty of problems — mostly stemming from being synonymous with online misinformation. But Jack Stuef over at FWD took a deeply disturbing look at one issue you might not expect: Wikipedia’s admins wilfully refuse to remove child porn and there’s almost nothing you can do to remove it yourself.
Stuef ran into the situation after running into an image of a boy’s penis on the site. He tried to contact an admin, but hit a bureaucratic brick wall. Which is shocking enough, but even more so when you consider Wikipedia’s history on the matter. Even founder Jimmy Wales was shouted down by the militantly-free-speech userbase after he deleted some suspect photos.
Groupthink web spaces have been notoriously slow to ban child porn. Reddit’s jailbait section was defended fiercely and only finally closed on the technicality that one of its moderators totally lost his shit. When it comes to crowdsourced, explicitly-sexual under-aged images, it seems you’ve got to go after Capone’s tax records. [FWD]
Pedobear image credit: Jim Cooke at Gawker; original image from Richard Laschon/Shutterstock