Let’s face it, everybody likes sex. Chances are some of you reading will have had a little too much festive cheer yesterday and missed out on your annual ‘Christmas Cuddle’ but some of you will have woken up with a smile on your face this morning, as you read this over a cold turkey sandwich or Ferrero Roche.
Some of you ladies reading will have received and devoured the first few pages of Fifty Shades of Grey and be looking at your partner in a whole new light. I’ll save you the bother, your man will welcome the ‘new you’ but will fail miserably living up to Mr Grey in the long run. Mostly because that book is fiction, you need only look at E.L James’ husband to see that she has a vivid imagination, like a drugged-up JK Rowling.
Thanks to Fifty and the internet we all know that sex comes in all shapes and sizes with a kink to fit just about any taste. Like Rihanna said, whips and chains excite her but we already know that she’s a glutton for punishment having got back together with Chris ‘wife-beater’ Brown.
S&M, gay, bi, three-way, dressing up, dressing down, spinning around, hell even squatting over some perspex and crapping on a willing participant are all, in the right place, acceptable, relatively safe – and legal.
So now let’s talk about something that isn’t – child pornography.
I’m pretty sure those two words are enough to have made most of you put down that turkey sandwich, or the Ferrero Roche back in the box – and for that, I’m glad. 99.9% of us would react in exactly the same way and would take being shat on underneath perspex as a preferable alternative to what I saw on Twitter – while your kids were tucked-up in bed and you were frantically wrapping their presents – in the early hours of Christmas Eve.
You probably saw/heard in the news that ‘Hackers‘, that favoured media term for things that happen on the internet that they don’t understand, had uncovered several child porn accounts on Twitter and released the details in order to, quite rightly, have them shut down.
Up until about 11:45pm on 23rd I’d had a lovely evening, a few cosy drinks and some kissing under the mistletoe, and a couple of days of being waited on hand and foot in prospect. And then I fired up Twitter.
I was met by a tweet containing the name of an account and asking me to help. I clicked the name, threw up, cried a little for humanity and then went to work, at just gone midnight. The account contained, in the cover photo alone, a hardcore child porn image. The ‘Twitpics’ – which could be seen on the left of the user’s Profile Page, were literally horrific, hugely illegal to own and soul destroying.
It’s important to note that I don’t blame the user who made me aware of the account, it was already doing the rounds and even trending at one point but this person clearly felt that with my not insignificant user count, I could probably help the cause.
Now, we all know from the ‘Tom Daley‘ incident that we ‘Don’t feed the trolls’ – after all attention is what they crave. Mentioning the account name is like handing them a virtual Big Mac. So not wanting anyone else to click the name and see what I’d seen – which for those of a sensitive disposition might just have ruined their Christmas – I proceeded to send a series of tweets, advising other users not to look and how to report it whilst not mentioning the name. A couple of hours in total and no actual mention of the account ID.
To Twitter’s, both company and users, credit it had been shut down by 2am – as had two similar accounts.
And then I encountered a very odd backlash, from a Twitter user called @flyinglawyer73 who effectively implied that I had acted only out of self-interest, promotion and for my own gain. Having had some festive cheer, after a few moronic tweets from him I told him to ‘fuck off’. So, I woke yesterday to find that he’d written a blog all about the events of early Christmas Eve. Now, feel free to read the badly written tome, but please pay particular attention to the libellous comments ‘Disgusted of Essex’ for starters – fucking cheek, I’m from Tunbridge Wells. My particular favorite being his firm belief that my actions were ‘naive’. Clearly with 448 followers to my 27,900, he’s the social media expert.
Frankly, Tony Halliday aka @FlyingLawyer73 aka Judicial Cat, ANY defence of child pornography or what needs to be done to have it removed from the internet or social media platforms that users love, is abhorrent. It’s lazy apathy like yours that led to 40 years of cover-ups and 400+ victims at the hands of Jimmy Savile and co at the BBC. Your apathy and attitude to the events of Christmas Eve are a joke, you are a joke and frankly you can still just ‘fuck off’.
Thanks to the power of social media (and no Tony, it wasn’t just me) Twitter was kiddie porn free on Christmas Eve, within a few hours. My conscience, and that of everyone else who did what they thought was right to have it removed, is clear.
I’ll happily be shat on under perspex, but definitely not online.
So just zip it Tony, yeah?
