Fault with Virgin Media filtering system wrongly points to IWF

Virgin Media experienced a blocking issue which is incorrectly stating that webpages are blocked due to the IWF URL List. 

The IWF URL List is a list of ‘live’ webpages where we’ve found images and videos of child sexual abuse.

We do not carry out the blocking but provide a list of individual webpages which ISPs, filtering companies and others use to block and filter the criminal URLs on their networks.

Fred Langford, IWF Deputy CEO&CTO, said: “A fault with Virgin Media’s filtering system was incorrectly signposting Virgin’s customers to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). We spoke to someone at Virgin who confirmed that the problem is now resolved, but because the block incorrectly pointed people to the IWF URL List, we received a few complaints which we’ve been responding to. 

“We never condone over blocking and we don’t carry out the blocking and filtering ourselves. We provide a list of ‘live’ child sexual abuse URLs to ISPs and filterers who block them at URL level to help stop the revictimisation of sexual abuse victims. As soon as the criminal images and videos have been removed at source, the URL is removed from our list. 

“It’s incredibly frustrating for us, and other companies, when services are incorrectly blocked. I’d like to reassure people that it’s not due to the IWF list.”