The Ministry of Digital Affairs yesterday blocked people from accessing content from http://metufang.net/, also known Chuan Yi Si Fang (創意私坊), after entertainer Mickey Huang (黃子佼) was reported to have downloaded sexual images of minors from the Web site.
“We received an official letter from the Ministry of Health and Welfare at 6:30pm requesting that we terminate normal domain name resolution service for the Web site, as per the Sexual Assault Crime Prevention Act (性侵害犯罪防治法) and the Child and Youth Sexual Exploitation Prevention Act (兒童及少年性剝削防制條例),” the digital affairs ministry’s Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC) said.
“We then coordinated with Internet service providers to stop the resolution service,” the center said.
Photo: Liao Chen-hui, Taipei Times
The Taipei District Court in December 2021 ordered the suspension of the Web site’s domain name, information from the TWNIC showed.
Internet users were prevented from accessing normal resolution service, in turn making the content on the Web site inaccessible.
However, the site’s administrators switched to a different domain name and it continued to operate.
Legislators from across party lines yesterday asked Minister of Health and Welfare Hsueh Rui-yuan (薛瑞元) at a meeting of the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee why his ministry had appeared to be slow in blocking the public from accessing illegal content on the Web site.
Hsueh said that there are two ways to prevent the public from viewing a Web site.
First, should the ministry’s Sexual Images Processing Center ascertain that a Web page contains illegal sexual images, it would then tell local governments to ask online platform operators to take them down, he said, adding that the Web site would be blocked from the public if the illegal content was not removed as requested.
Second, prosecutors can suspend a domain name for a criminal investigation, he said.
However, both methods are too slow to contain damage caused by harmful content, Hsueh said.
“We hope that the Sexual Assault Crime Prevention Act and the Child and Youth Sexual Exploitation Prevention Act can be amended to authorize the health ministry to instantly make these Web sites inaccessible to the public,” he said.
The Ministry of Digital Affairs on Tuesday said that — as soon as it received an administrative order from the Ministry of Health and Welfare — users seeking access to Chuan Yi Si Fang would be shown a formal message, in Chinese and English, that access to the domain name had been terminated as its content contravened the Child and Youth Sexual Exploitation Prevention Act.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) yesterday said that both acts had already given the Ministry of Health and Welfare full authorization to issue an administrative order to block the Web site.
“However, the health ministry chose to follow the Enforcement Rules of the Child and Youth Sexual Exploitation Prevention Act (兒童及少年性剝削防制條例施行細則), which stipulate that emergency actions can only be taken if Internet service providers are unreachable,” Hung said.
Hsueh then promised Hung that his ministry would issue an administrative order to the Ministry of Digital Affairs yesterday afternoon.
Before access to the Web site’s domain name was terminated, the site’s administrators appeared to have shut it down voluntarily, as the IP address linked to a page saying “unable to connect to the Web site.”
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