“Millions of Kiwis are bombarding blacklisted child-sex-abuse sites”

Spotted this when reading Stuff’s homepage on my phone over the weekend:

This is an obvious case where rewording a statistic makes it incorrect. When you read the full article, it’s a lot clearer:

“The Department of Internal Affairs has already blocked 34 million attempts within New Zealand to access at least one of 582 child sex abuse sites blocked by government filters since 2010.

And the number is rising, with roughly a million requests a month within New Zealand being blocked in the first half of this year.

However, while the stream of blocked requests was huge, the actual number of people consuming child sex abuse material in New Zealand was small and most of them were being caught, he said.”

According to Statistics New Zealand, 2.8 million New Zealanders were connected to the internet in 2012.

Update: David Farrar and Whale Oil blogged about this too and the headline has since been changed.