(openPR) - Trier, Germany, March 31, 2007 – Good news for the 130 international bloggers who posted support entries for the Blogger Power (bloggerpower.wordpress.com/) campaign: their voices were heard. The debate was lifted out of the blogs and MyBlogLog community comments and brought into the offline world where it’s supposed to raise awareness and trigger concrete actions.
On March 29, the local Trier branch of the German CDU (Christian Democratic Union – Trier City) has invited Mihaela Lica to introduce this ambitious project to the members of the party, especially to the youth organization. The dialogue led to an in depth analysis of the online and offline social puzzle and even revealed the alarming reality that way too many German adults are unaware of the potential dangers of the Internet. For some of the participants it was unconceivable that an innocent search term like “Disney cartoons” might lead to a pornographic website with no secure means to prevent the access of the minors to its contents.
Blogger Power: Safeguard the Web for Children is a project initiated by Mihaela Lica and Jon Harmon. In the words of Jon Harmon, this project aims “Nothing less than a global initiative to encourage sites hosting adult content to help keep minors out by adding a simple registration gateway. This is not about restricting free speech or in preventing legal adult sites from making money. This is only about helping reduce the exposure of pornographic images to children.”
Christoph Engerle (CDU youth organization) underlined that pornography is not isolated online, but a part of the daily life even in schools: teenagers listen to music with dubious texts and download on their wireless phones and iPods pornographic content. The general conclusion was that something has to be done to alert parents and educators and determine a better supervision of the online activities of young children. Christiane Hasselbach (CDU youth organization) suggested an aggressive media campaign, while other participants preferred to think of calmer procedures. No matter what course of action will be taken, the local politicians will advocate the Blogger Power idea to the higher CDU forums.
“Sure, something needs to be done, but the decision cannot be made at once.” – said Udo Koehler (President, CDU Trier City). “Today we’ve just set the foundation of what we hope to be a successful project. We need to meet again and analyze each idea in detail to decide which is the best course of action. What Blogger Power has achieved so far, with no funding and basically no real support from higher organizations is astonishing, gives us hope and inspires us to go on.”
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