Here is a blog from our friends at Safeeyes.com.  Parents if your looking for a great filter for your computer(s) this is it.

Mary Eberstadt recently opined in Is Pornography the New Tobacco? that pornography in today’s society has reached levels of acceptance and ubiquity equal to those of smoking in the fifties.

Time Magazine’s internet survey to determine the World’s Most Influential Person has neatly confirmed her hypothesis. 21-year old Christopher Poole (aka moot), founder of an internet forum with relaxed posting restrictions that allow users to upload pornography for public consumption, is apparently the most influential person in the world.

When I ran across Modern Catholic Mom’s post this morning, I couldn’t really believe what I read. A pornographer the world’s most influential person? Before checking the Time article, I decided I needed to see this forum for myself. I knew that the site must be NSFW when it was caught by my Safe Eyes filter on my Macbook. In fact, I had to completely disable the filter to access it (which only I can do as admin) and what I found was perhaps even more surprising than Time handing one of their biggest awards to a pornographer.

The forum leaves a lot to be desired aesthetically, and right in the middle of the category listing was an entire adult section, advertising everything from naked pictures to hardcore pornography, with all sorts of variations in between. My inquiries stopped there, but I instead clicked on video games to drill down and get a feel for what the site is like.

I about threw up. Seriously. In front of me was a completely disjointed, almost unreadable forum format, with random pictures—mostly of Japanese anime characters—littered throughout.

Time seeks to semi-justify Poole’s placement at the top by citing his traffic: 13 million page views a day, and 5.6 million visitors a month. And, surely with a wry smile, made this grudging acknowledgment:

Undoubtedly, many people will question moot’s worthiness of the title World’s Most Influential Person.

After looking at the rest of the poll results, not so much. Filipino boxer Manny Pacquioa received the most votes—over 19 million more votes than Barack Obama—but was edged by Poole on the influence scale, which is apparently some sort of objective measurement of the particular person’s influence over the voter’s life. I can’t, however, take any objective measurement too seriously that tells me that Kobe Bryant has over twice the amount of influence over people’s lives that the Pope, Dalai Lama, and Barack Obama have combined. (Other great ones: T-Pain over Vladimir Putin, Brittney Spears over Oprah).

As laughable as this poll obviously is, we have to question Time Magazine’s judgment in putting a site containing hardcore pornography that anyone can view into such a bright spotlight. Unfortunately, in a society where pornography is the “new tobacco,” we simply can’t rely on the media to be good stewards of the information they put in the public square and who might be affected by it.

It is up to families to control the media’s influence and decide what is right for themselves. Anyone who ran across this “award” as I did—with Safe Eyes installed on their PC or Mac—would have been able to read the blog post and the Time article but would have been blocked from viewing the forum. In other words, all of the good web, none of the bad.