Recently a number of commenters here suggested mobile phone companies in the UK were blocking some of the best men's rights sites so I've taken the time to investigate this issue further.



I appreciate that sites supporting men's equality sometimes don't mince their words, but the peaceful, pro-equality message of the sites campaigning for civil rights of the most disadvantaged people in our society is crystal clear and it's rare to ever see any inappropriate views and certainly nothing worthy of blocking (other than quotes of radical feminists of course).



I discovered that O2, one of the largest mobile communications providers in the UK has a "url checker" allowing anyone to see their blocking policy for a particular site. Essentially they have 3 levels of classification a total block, a "default block" (whereby people can only access a site if you request all censorship be turned off) and then a parental block.



I've checked a number of perfectly innocent men's rights sites, and somehow the company have decided to not only censor them by default, they even go as far as classifying them as "hate sites". Victims of these smears include the excellent antimisandry.com, angryharry.com and theantifeminist.com Furthermore I am yet to find a single misandrist site blocked in any form despite their content clearly being much easier to classify as sexist and hateful. Even many of your average Mumsnet or Guardian posts/articles are far worse than anything you'd find at any of the above sites as are the utterances of your average "equality" minister. There are indications that T-mobile have the same polices as O2 and I personally use that comapny so tried all teh above sites on my phone. All 3 attempts had the sites blocked saying i needed to be over 18 to access them. Again, I was unable to achieve such a message when accessing any radical feminist hate sites.



We need to give these companies the benefit of the doubt for now and hope this is a mistake. For now I'd ask that people check as many sites as possible and email them to complain about their censorship. A third party campaign against mobile censorship has a reporting facility here and the open rights groups also address the issue.



Even the writers over at Biased BBC have also been victim of this censorship so there appears to be a clear pattern emerging in terms of the type of thought-policing going on here.

Update - as an afterthought I also decided to check the status of this very blog on the O2 checker even though we're clearly on the moderate, professional and cautious side of the movement. To my horror and surprise even this very blog is classes as a hate site in spite of how cautious we've been in the language used in articles and in the commenting policy. Not one single post here is remotely controversial or hateful. I wrote on this issue here as I thought it was a safe place guaranteed to be free form censorship due to our policies but we've still become victims. We're blocked on t-mobile too, so that's now four of the most popular MRA sites blocked by these companies by default. This really is quite disturbing.

Further updates will be added here as more censorship and defamation is uncovered:

- O2 and T-mobile blocking: hereticalsex.blogspot.com and counterfem.blogspot.com

by John Kimble