UK lawmakers access adult content in Parliament

Responses to freedom to information requests in the UK have revealed that British Members of Parliament and other staff members at the institution accessed pornographic websites more than 300,000 times in a year, or over 820 times a day on average.

According to a report published in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper, the figure covers ‘attempts to access websites categorised as pornography’.

The report maintains that the devices that were monitored as part of the system were all linked to the parliamentary network, which is used by MPs, peers and their staff, and the data is for the period between the summers of 2012 and 2013.

The Daily Mail however quoted an unnamed House of Commons spokesperson who insisted that the data includes unintentional access-attempts including pop-ups, and therefore does not reflect deliberate efforts to find such content.

“We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users due to the ways in which websites can be designed to act, react and interact and due to the potential operation of third-party software,” the House of Commons spokesperson is quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

In addition, the data shows wide variations in the monthly access figures – the month of November 2012 saw 114,844 attempts to look at porn while there were just 15 such attempts in the month of February 2013.

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