Well, officially the BPjM is the youth protection office, but it also prevents adults from getting some games and other media, so... Well, let's head to the topic!


For legal reasons I won't include a link to the leak here, and nobody should.

Among the filtered links are non-accessible websites, a lot of pornography with animals, supposedly also with children (I didn't go on any links to sites I didn't know for obvious reasons, but from the website names the animals part was clear), and also some known violent porn websites.

There are some song texts filtered, the empty Newgrounds user profile http://nazi.newgrounds.com/, a Wolfenstein F2P download link http://splashdamage.com/content/wolfenstein-enemy-territory-barracks, an entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, political websites (especially national socialist ones), the listing of the game Dead Island on Amazon.co.uk, a completely legal music seller named Discogs has the entire catalogue filtered (this could be reason enough for legal action against the BPJM by them!), suicide forums, a Call of Duty 4 gameserver called Deutsche Front, and the list goes on and on.

Now you know how bad censorship in Germany really is, and thank God they did not manage to enforce it on our providers!

Also, in the mean time the BPJM admitted to spreading child pornography via its list and for this reason threatens legal action against people who link to it.
https://netzpolitik.org/2014/bpjm-leak-warum-wir-erstmals-einen-link-aus-unserer-berichterstattung-entfernen-oder-verbreiten-wir-kinderpornografie/

Sure, I see why the youth is protected by most links. But if they go there, parents should rather ask themselves how their children got to those sites. No upcoming nazi is stopped by being unable to download a Wolfenstein game, or being unable to watch some obscure nazi websites. No child is protected by filtering a vinyl and CD seller catalogue. And there is no use to filter Newgrounds profiles.

This is EXACTLY what politicians tried to do here with the excuse of 'protecting children from paedophiles' to justify it.

thats always the reason given no matter if truly enforced or not, same with terrorism as excuse to go all out big brother on users

The hell? That's a great site, I use them as a music encyclopedia all the time. Wonderful for finding obscure releases, alternate versions, and release date information. Quite curious as to the "reasoning" behind this choice.

And of course politicians go for the visceral excuses ("pedophiles! terrorists! criminals!"), because they cannot intellectually justify their attempts at censorship. I think you can make a case for banning material which is produced by causing harm, or which can itself cause harm. But all too often that's a smokescreen to cover the real motivation, which has to do purely with money and control.

There is speculation that Discogs had once some nazi or neo-nazi music offered, but of course reasons behind the censorship are unknown. It seems to me they did never much research on the list anyway.

They satirical website bonsaikitten is also on that list.

Yah, they probably sold some Oi! music, that stuff is often on vinyl. But you are correct, the likeliest reason is laziness combined with a wide broom.

Gotta love the irony, they use fascist methods to contain fascism

Yeah, Merkel is really no better than Hitler, it's sad.

Not surprising at all, but do people see through? And if they do, when will they rebel? Too much at stake, I guess.

It's down to group dynamics, and populace dynamics at the higher scale. Change happens, but not always in the right direction. Sometimes it comes like the butterfly effect, rippling out from a small event, and sometimes from a mass upheaval.

Working for change is always difficult, since humans are at heart creatures of habit who crave novelty only when it doesn't upset the status quo. And change is always fighting against a well-provisioned foe who has have every intention of holding it back as long as possible.

Every time these douchebag types try to do something evil like controlling what people are exposed to, they use the "protecting children" card. It's like an I WIN button for them because the sheeple suck it all up. And all the sheeple really need to do is ask themselves...do these people really give a fuck about children? And if they really care for children, how come they aren't helping orphans and children who are being abused every day? Then it becomes obvious...

Politicians will also push towards getting a game or company down this way because they think they can milk them for more money to leave them alone. This was seen for one of GTA 4 games where the guy playing it started making off the wall comments of 'you're running over children!' when there were no children in sight, and trying to get certain games banned or bad press when in fact they didn't do anything wrong.

ReviewTechUSA talks a little on this...

well what other jobs are there for people that can only talk and every word they say is a lie?