The Family Online Safety Institute: Protecting your online future

The ICRA system encourages content providers (webmasters) to self-label. That is, it is the content providers themselves that add their own ICRA label to their sites declaring what types of content are present or absent.

What is to prevent a content provider mislabelling? Can you trust an ICRA label? Yes.

Mislabelled site procedure

In ICRA’s experience, deliberate and persistent mislabelling is extremely rare, however, a number of steps are taken when such sites are found or reported through the formal complaints mechanism.

If ICRA identifies, or is notified by a third party, that a content provider has clearly and unambiguously used an ICRA label inappropriately*, the following procedure will come into effect. Each stage assumes that the previous action was unsuccessful and that the inappropriate label persists.

  1. ICRA will attempt to contact the content provider and ask them to alter or remove the label.
  2. ICRA’s Chief Executive Officer will take up the case and use such means as are available to contact the content provider and insist that the label is altered or removed.
  3. The Executive Committee of the organization will review the case and decide on the most appropriate course of action. The Terms and Conditions under which ICRA labels are used, whether generated on the ICRA website or elsewhere, are extensive and allow for a variety of means to be used, including legal redress.
  4. ICRA may publish details of the website/resource and include it in a template block list for use in filtering software such as ICRAplus and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

* Inappropriate means that a website is not labelled as containing content that is in fact present. For example, a site that declares “none of the above” in the nudity and sexual material section, and yet clearly contains images, descriptions or portrayals of one or more of the elements identified in that section of the ICRA questionnaire. ICRA may call on members of its Advisory Council or other independent experts to resolve disputes over whether a label is appropriate or not.

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