14 DAY TRIAL // Singapore has recently banned two adult websites offering free videos as a move meant to protect young users living in the country, the Singaporean authorities said according to Reuters. Although the names of the websites have not been disclosed, people are already speculating that the banned pages were two online video sharing services, similar to YouTube, which allowed visitors to view adult content.
A few days ago, Singapore arrested a local blogger who posted racist comments on his website, as a move to show the Internet users that such actions are not tolerated.
According to Reuters, the Singaporean Internet users are pretty outraged by the ban, some of them already looking for alternatives to access the restricted websites. "I will definitely surf the Internet by proxy from now on, to be defiant so as to preserve my rights," one user was cited by Reuters.
In fact, banning websites has always attracted criticism, even if it's intended to protect a certain category of users from accessing potentially harming content. It seems like the local authorities took the decision to remove the access to the adult websites after lots of users reported the content appearing on them.
At this time, it's not clear whether the authorities take into account the possibility of restoring the access to the banned websites anytime in the future.
YouTube, Google's video sharing service, suffered similar bans in multiple regions of the world but, compared to the adult websites, the Google video sharing service usually got this punishment due to offensive content appearing on the page. However, YouTube often resolved the issue by restricting access only to a certain clip, and not to the whole website, an impossible solution in the case of adult websites because they are entirely providing prohibited content to their users.