Banned on Google Deutschland

A site called Body Modification Ezine seems to be off-limits in Germany, or illegal, or Bad, or something. It’s so Bad the German government has kept it out of Google’s German search results since 2002. Really odd. This is very petty and low-level censorship, because accessing Google’s American results is easy enough from Germany, and accessing the site itself is no problem. But the German results are indeed redacted. This Wikipedia page gives a small explanation in German, but detail is scarce. Anyone know why? As far as I can tell BME isn’t related to any neo-Nazi scene.

Along with the Germans, US authorities decided a few pictures were Just Too Much in 2006, and pressure from Washington convinced BME to base its servers in Canada. The guy in charge of the site has apparently said:

When Germany came after BME for “endangering the youth” and demanded that I make changes to the site to comply with German law, my response was to simply not visit Germany again (and I’m a German citizen). When the US started to pressure us, we moved all of our servers and presence out of the country and backed off on plans to live in the US. No changes were ever made to the site, and no images were ever removed — if anything, the pressure made me push those areas even more.

Can Washington and Berlin really ban web sites and magazines just for running gross pictures and “endangering youth”?

     posted 16 May 2008 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. Yes. Jugendschutz / the “Prüfstelle für jugendgefährende Medien” putting something on the “Index”.... That’s why e.g. ebay (overdoing it a bit) bans people in Germany from seeing and bidding on items on say, ebay.co.uk showing British, US, or Soviet anti-Nazi posters from the Second World War. Why? They tend to show swastikas being smashed up.

    The same principle which led to someone a while back being arrested, charged, and taken to court for wearing a “Nazis raus” badge on an anti-racist demo in Bavaria (I think). Her crime: the badge showed a swastika. With a line through it. I seem to remember she lost the case, as the judge pointed out that he was bound to carry out the letter of the law, regardless of whether he thought it was ridiculous (or not).

    And re. this particular (or any) internet site: yes, legally, the government could have it (or sections of it) blocked from within Germany if they so wished. Or at least “request” German ISPs block it.

    — d.z. bodenberg    May 17, 02:09 am    #

  2. Aha, it has to do with preventing kids from reading “indexed” material. If an “indexed” web site can’t or won’t screen readers who are under 18, the government takes steps. Interesting. But a newspaper or radio show can also be “indexed,” and it’s hard to screen audiences for those, which makes “indexing” sort of a weaselly tool for the government. Very interesting.

    — Mike    May 17, 10:59 am    #

  3. I actually am more interested in the babysitting by state…I was thinking about this when a 1995 Simpsons episode was on TV with a “Viewer Discretion Advised” but I couldn’t figure out what I was suppose to be discretionate about. So why not newspapers being edited? My daughter is perfectly healthy and smart as a pistol whip, but if she wanted to she could swear like a sailor after shore leave in Borneo…well, not on my watch, but she knows the words and concepts. But I have to be warned because Homer might do something silly? She was reading the newspaper with me this morning, she’s eight, and she read more drama in three pages than FOX could fit into an entire Sunday night of cartoons. She even asked why Myanmar and Burma are both used in seperate stories (AP and NYT’s stylebooks need to have a lunch date). But then this idea that what she does on the internet is in a vacuume is just funny. The tubes scare people. I get steamed about this. I also let my eight-year-old daughter read the newspaper with me on a Saturday morning. (This included, this morning, the local military tab.) My rant.

    The big thing is asking where it ends that you can’t just be a parent and be smart about it. I worry about this, also with the “obama is elitest” crapola. Is it a negative to be smart about raising kids in a real world.

    I’ll stop now.

    e

    — e    May 17, 08:17 pm    #

  4. From what I hear, being sane about the way you raise your child is vigilantly prosecuted in most American neighborhoods.

    — Mike    May 18, 08:15 pm    #

  5. Love the blog…and I know the sentiment behind it because I hear it all the time. I’ve even blogged about this dumb anxiety against random stuff happening which babystates want to make us all scared about. Hell…if the world was so dangerous, I wouldn’t even drive! I think scare tactics are turning on people that use them, though. Meet the Press was interesting this morning because the Rs kept pumping up being scared of stuff that it was almost funny…in a not funny way. I even had someone tell me that hermit crabs were bad. This is another parent at my daughter’s school. You know why they are bad? They die so fast that the kids “suffer tragedy at the peak of their affection.” I am not kidding that this was the gist of the conversation. My God, if my kid can’t deal with a fucking crab dying, what is she going to do if I get hit by a bus tomorrow? My wife was not happy, because that’s basically what I said and I dropped the f-bomb—no kids present, of course. Sorry, Mike…I rant too much on this topic. Of course, I am spoiled to by the fact my eight-year old understands irony when most kids are counting with their fingers.

    e

    — e    May 18, 09:48 pm    #

  6. I would have said hermit crabs were bad because they clamp onto your nose and hang on while you try to escape by running across the beach. But I might have been raised on the wrong cartoons.

    — Mike    May 18, 10:57 pm    #

  7. No, Mike…that is Mr. Krabs…the Soprano of Bikini Bottom.

    e

    — e    May 20, 04:02 am    #

  8. Good God in Heaven, when I was researching my labiectomy post just days ago, I came across this same site while googling in Spain (no censorship problems here): http://www.bmezine.com/pierce/10-female/other/A41106/othnotaf.html

    Nix on the censorship, of course, but maybe we could just have a little old-fashioned societal outrage… — Zoë León    May 23, 12:06 am    #

  9. In a burst of random-appearance-on-blog-ness (hi Mike!) I have to say:

    BME is a great site. It’s a thorough and utterly unique collection of information about body modification from the mildest and most mainstream forms to things quite unusual and extreme.

    Interesting post, Mike – given Germany’s reputation for pro-kink attitudes, it’s a particular surprise/irony.

    — Davi    Jun 3, 06:38 am    #