Chester's guide to: The controversy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (March 2008)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Chester's guide to: The controversy refers to a controversial article called Chester's guide to: Picking up little girls that describes pedophile acts of child sexual abuse from the perspective of an adult male targetting female children and young adolescents. The controversy about the article occurred in 2003, when an English newspaper started a campaign against the text and finally effected its temporary censorship in a search engine.

[edit] Newspaper campaign

At the 7th of February 2003 the newspaper Chester Chronicle published a cover story telling that the search expression chester guide (looking for a city guide of Chester) at Google returned the website in question as the second result. The lurid article falsely calls the site as a paedophile website and describes the text as real tutorial on child sexual abuse. Many readers followed the included protest appeal. Members of the city's council subscribed to the demand of removal from Google. The leader of Chester City Council openly admitted not to have checked the site since the introductory description had been enough for him to cause approaching Google and demanding a tightening of the law via Chester's MP.

At the 14th of February the newspaper shot again and reported that Google still had not removed the website. Google at first had answered the demands with the false note that the removal was not technically possible. In the following week however, Google submitted to the pressure and removed the website from its index, which was reported by the Chester Chronicle with satisfaction on the 21st of February.