Classification Board Classifies AbortionTV R 18+

Today, ACMA issued EFA with a final link-deletion notice for linking to the blacklisted AbortionTV page, which it has classified as R 18+.

Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) announced that its host had received a final link-deletion notice from ACMA today directing them to remove a link to a page on the AbortionTV website that EFA included in an article appropriately titled ‘Net censorship already having a chilling effect’.

ACMA Final Link-Deletion Notice issued to Sublime IP

EFA has since complied, replacing the original link with the following:

REDACTED. The original title of the page was “AbortionTV Pictures #6”, and can presumably be found using major search engines.

One of the ironies is that by issuing these notices, ACMA has probably driven more traffic to the AbortionTV website than any other organisation. If googling the text quoted above is too much trouble, people can always use the notice itself as a handy reference.

The other interesting thing about this notice, as Mark Newton points out, is that Andree Wright from ACMA testified at a Senates Estimates hearing on 23 February 2009 that the AbortionTV site was added to the blacklist because there was a substantial likelihood that it would be refused classification.

From memory, it was a page that contained no text, just pictures. The pictures were of aborted and dismembered foetuses. The graphic nature of the presentation without any contextualisation of the images meant that the images were judged on their own merits for their impact and their severity. We have kept a careful watching brief on the way the Classification Board has handled those types of images. On a previous occasion, we made a referral to the Classification Board on very similar material and it came back as ‘refused classification’. So we juxtaposed the two decisions and judged it on the images.

That meant that, at the time it was added to the blacklist, the content was ‘potential prohibited content’, which meant that the Classification Board had not actually classified the content.

This latest notice states that the content is ‘prohibited content’. That means that the Classification Board has now actually classified it, and the notice states that the classification is R 18+. Presumably, the Board classified this content after ACMA issued Whirlpool’s host an interim link-deletion notice.

Download: Sublime IP Final Link-Deletion Notice (298 KB)

Update: Nic Suzor pointed out that a summary of the Classification Board’s decision is available here.

Tags: ACMA, censorship, clean feed, politics