Brazil Bans Bully And A Bunch Of Blogs

from the can't-stop-banning dept

Brazil seems to be really into banning things online these days. You may recall the totally pointless ban on YouTube to hide a single video (which a lot more people saw after the ban was put in place). Eventually the courts reversed the ban and even required the model whose video resulted in the ban to pay Google as compensation for the unnecessary ban. Even with that experience, however, it looks like the Brazilian courts are prone to overreacting and broadly banning anything it doesn't like.

First up is the news that a Brazilian court has banned the sale of the video game Bully. This would be the same video game that Jack Thompson went to court to have banned even though he had never played it -- and even though anti-bullying activists praised the game, noting that it really was no different than movies like Rushmore or Napoleon Dynamite. The judge's explanation for the ban is a bit weak: "The aggravating factor is that everything in the game takes place inside a school." I really don't see how that matters. The game is about a kid learning to deal with different cliques and factions in a school. That seems rather realistic. Does the judge think that real life cliques in schools will suddenly disappear if this game is unavailable? Perhaps Stephen King can head to Brazil and convince them why this is wrong.

On top of that, news is coming out that a Brazilian court has also banned access to Wordpress.com, one of the most popular blog hosting sites around. It looks quite similar to the YouTube situation, where the judge really just wanted a single blog banned, but without an easy way to do that, ISPs are blocking the entire site and every blog carried on Wordpress. This is, just as with the other bans, a total overreaction. Not only will it call more attention to the "problem" blog, it will piss off and inconvenience a ton of totally innocent people as well.

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Teachers Promote Sales Of Bullying Video Game

from the streisand-effect dept

In 2006, we covered the ridiculous campaign to censor Bully, a video game that anti-video game Jack Thompson started denouncing before he'd even had a chance to play it. Now some teachers' organizations are up in arms about the game's sequel, "Bully: Scholarship Edition." The teachers claim it promotes violence, but some anti-bullying advocates thought just the opposite about the original. Even assuming the teachers are right that the game glorifies bullying, the teachers' campaign still seems awfully counterproductive. There's no real evidence of a link between violent video games and real-world violence. American courts have repeatedly held that video games are protected by the First Amendment, so it's not like a ban would pass constitutional muster anyway, at least here in the states. But the biggest problem with the teachers' campaign is our friend the Streisand Effect: I bet a lot of our readers had never heard of "Bully: Scholarship Edition" until they read this post. I certainly hadn't before I started writing it. Getting singled out for condemnation by humorless teachers' organizations is the kind of publicity money simply cannot buy. The teachers' efforts are going to give the game more buzz than it would have gotten otherwise, and that will cause a lot more people to hear about it, which will lead to more kids playing it. Personally, I think the vast majority of kids know the difference between playing a game and bullying people in real life, so that doesn't worry me too much. But if the teachers' theory about the link between video games and real-world behavior is correct, their own campaign is likely contributing to the problem by making the game more popular.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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