Governments Getting Into Your Pants: Uganda Porn Ban and More

Last week’s headlines burst with news from Uganda, where the local government moved to ban internet porn, leaving the country’s nationals with less options to temporarily fix their love lives.

In particular, the Uganda Communication Commission (UCC) ordered the country’s ISPs to block local and international websites that offer pornographic content. While smaller providers have complied with the instruction, the big ones still reportedly give access to such websites.

The UCC did not come up with that request, however. It just complied with the instruction from Uganda’s Pornography Control Committee, a task force created specifically to kill off porn. It has compiled a list of sites that have to be banned.

The news come in the wake of another controversial move by the Ugandan government, which has introduced a tax on social media earlier this year. It looks like the country’s authorities are unstoppable in implementing their agenda via technological means and their controversial regulation.

Some Like It Hot, but not Uganda

The Pornography Control Committee that has started it all was started back in 2017, and tasked with “stamping out pornography by collecting and destroying pornographic materials, and to prosecute perpetrators.”

The Committee itself has its powers because of 2014 Anti-Pornography Act, which sets up a penalty for those involved in porn in any way at up to 10 years of imprisonment or a fine of about $3,000. Or both, depending on how pornographic you happened to be.

According to the Committee, even sending frivolous messages to your mate constitutes producing pornography, and is therefore as punishable as watching 2girls1cup (as if watching it wasn’t a punishment by its own merits). For reference, a magistrate’s court in Uganda may sentence a robber to the same number of years behind the bars. The question of whether watching porn is as bad as robbing people is still pending, apparently.

This all might seem like an extremely severe punishment, of course, until you find out that most other crimes, the real crimes for that matter, like murder or rape, are punishable by death in Uganda.

Nevertheless, in order to tackle the country’s biggest problem and put the world-conquering appetites of international and local porn to a halt, Uganda planned to order what it called a “pornography detecting machine,” allegedly from South Korea.

#Uganda's ethics and integrity minister on plans to procure a machine to detect porn and homosexuality. #LGBT pic.twitter.com/o26IfuGYTE

— Rachael Akidi (@rakidi) August 15, 2016

It sounds just as ominous as the Pornography Control Committee, yet, unlike the latter, nobody actually knows what it is. It has announced its deployment twice, in 2016 and 2017, yet none of those announcements has ever fulfilled, and no machine was created, let alone commissioned. So, instead of threatening people with a non-existent device, the government resorted to blocking pornographic content.

Unsurprisingly, locals weren’t very happy about those plans.

The gov't of Uganda bought a porn detecting machine.The same gov't is still looking money to buy a cancer Machine.#Mbarara #CancerCharity

— Payira 🇺🇬 (@Payira) August 2, 2016

Still, the adamant will of the Uganda government wasn’t that easy to thwart. Simon Lokodo, Uganda’s minister for ethics, called pornography “one of the deadliest moral diseases in this country” and claimed that the “machine [was] coming.”

This, in fairness, is hardly surprising from the government that has a position for an ethics minister. Not so far from the ministry of love, after all, isn’t it? And even strangely related.

Those efforts, that some might describe as ultraconservatism, aren’t something new in Uganda. Until 2002, the country had so-called miniskirt law in place, which prohibited the citizens of Uganda from wearing the outfit in question without even defining the length at which the skirt ceases to be midi and starts its doomed journey upwards. Added to that is the possibility that those who still dared to wear such skirts not necessarily could pass as a cisgender female. On top of that, the acts like the miniskirt ban are extremely frivolously interpreted by some locals, so people who are dressed improperly in their opinion face serious troubles.

“Anybody on the streets who sees a woman who is indecently dressed according to them, will take the law into their own hands. It’s going to be a country of lawlessness, it’s going to be a country of mass abuse of women,” a local woman told Deutsche Welle.

Added to that, homosexuality in Uganda is a crime, and engaging in same-sex relationship is considered a “conspiracy.” Non-reporting homosexuals to the authorities is also a crime. And the punishment varies from an enormous fine to 7 years in jail. So, as it looks, the government is extremely concerned with the private lives of their subjects, and its interest ranges from clothes to sexual behavior.

Finally, the Uganda government is not really known for its internet tolerance altogether. Earlier this year, they introduced a tax on social media which has once again outraged local citizens, and made VPN one of the most popular services in their midst. And before that, in 2016, the government shut down the internet access altogether during the elections. For security reasons, of course.

The general picture doesn’t look very hopeful for Uganda. However, it still would be unfair to think that their government is the only one in the world that tries to get into their citizens’ pants. Nay, it looks more like it’s a trait of the entire humankind.

Porn Haters Around the World

For some unknown reason, it’s hardly surprising that porn is completely banned in China. If you’re caught producing, selling, or, god forbid, distributing such materials, you’re facing a life sentence. Over this year alone, over 22,000 porn websites were shut down there.

In India, they have first banned porn altogether by ordering ISPs to cut the access to relevant websites and blogs, however, just a week later they backed down after a campaign led by numerous public figures.

One of them, novelist Chetan Bhagat wrote what looks like an epitome of this entire article, as well as of common sense in those matters:

“Porn ban is anti-freedom, impractical, not enforceable. Politically not very smart, too. Avoidable. Let’s not manage people’s private lives.”

Still, the U.K. seems to be just a little bit better than that with its planned system for age verification in order to access specific websites as part of the Digital Economy Act. While its deployment has been postponed until the end of 2018, it still garnered serious criticism from local figures. Those who do not comply risk getting banned from the internet and having to pay up to £250,000 (around $350,000) in fines.

Thus, Jerry Barnett of Sex & Censorship campaign group told the Wired the system would “fundamentally change the internet in the U.K. and possibly globally.” That’s because the British government will thus have the right to block any website without any court order. In order to access a porn website, a British citizen will have to purchase so-called “porn pass” at any newsstand in order to confirm they aren’t underaged.

Conclusion

Obsession with morality of other people isn’t just a trait of a typical conservative. It’s also a feature found in most governments that use conservatism as an excuse and a smoke screen in order to conceal the real problems of their nations. The history knows numerous totalitarian regimes that preferred to find those guilty among foreign powers or their own marginalized citizens instead of tackling the actual problems like poverty, corruption, and violence. And it looks pretty obvious that the demise of fascism in Italy and national socialism in Germany didn’t really affect those practices, notwithstanding the horrors of a global warfare they effectively unleashed.

Not that this trick was invented by Mussolini or Goebbels. The examples of blaming everything on those who can’t effectively protect themselves for various reasons dates back to at least the days of the Ancient Rome. Just as an instance, Nero, who is considered a ‘bad emperor’ by the Roman historic tradition, blamed the great fire in Rome on Christians, even though there was no proof they had been involved. Some even say it was him that started the fire in order to get inspiration for a poem, though it’s most likely fake news, as the reports of contemporary historians clearly suggest. Still, the idea that the emperor burned his capital to the ground and then blamed the innocent for that lived through millenia. Possibly because that’s something one would totally expect from powers that be.

Even in the U.K., where the authorities are clearly concerned about making sure that minors don’t watch something explicit rather than dictating their subjects how to live and what to see, the system for verifying user age can potentially open the gate for government censorship on the internet.

Virgil said, facilis descendus Averno. The descent to hell is easy. And the road there is paved with good intentions.

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