Researchers have debunked the myth of Internet pornography - its volumes are incalculable

The volume of pornographic information posted on the Internet is incalculable, journalists concluded. The point is not that there is an infinite amount of it. Quite the contrary, it seems that there is actually much less adult material on the Internet than is commonly believed. But it seems impossible to calculate exactly how much pornography - bytes and sites - the World Wide Web contains.

It is generally accepted that the share of pornography in total Internet content is 37%, notes the BBC and suggests that this opinion arose after the publication of a study by Optnet in 2010. However, this assessment is not accurate, if only because over the past three years the situation could have changed significantly, notes the BBC.

And in general, it’s not a fact that it was accurate even in 2010. For example, another study was conducted that gave a shocking result: the share of pornography on the Internet was only 4%. It's all about the research methodology, explains the BBC. So, in the first case, to estimate the volume of porn, each Internet page on which the corresponding content was located was counted. And in the second case, only entire porn sites were counted.

But the second method of assessment cannot be considered objective, because porn sites continuously grow in number of pages as new materials become available. So the resource considered as a unit in the second version of the study may actually turn out to be a repository of thousands of pages of information for adults.

There is another way to calculate the share of pornography in the total amount of Internet information - by the volume of traffic coming to adult sites. But there are pitfalls here too: on porn sites, every mouse click opens new windows and pages that increase the volume of traffic, but do not necessarily contain similar content.

In other words, it is virtually impossible to calculate the volume of “indecent” content. But at the same time, every time another pseudo-statistical data appears in the media, the public happily picks it up, and often the highest possible values ​​are the most popular. A striking example is the same 37%: this number is still in use when discussing the topic of Internet porn, although the data is clearly outdated and, quite possibly, initially unreliable.

"Big numbers are sensational, journalists love them, but in reality they tend to be typical urban legends," one researcher in the field explained to the BBC.

But even if we assume that pornography actually occupies at least 4% of the Internet, this is still a huge volume, experts note. According to the findings of the Scandinavian research center Sintef , 90% of all information ever produced by humanity was created in the last two years - all thanks to the development of a variety of gadgets connected to the Internet. Thus, even a small percentage of this data set represents a huge amount of information.