Leader: What porn?

The Home Office has been rapped on the knuckles today for a radio ad which inadvertently sent listeners to a website that, it is alleged, promotes pornography.

To make matters worse the ads were intended to inform children about a website that offers advice on how to stay safe online.

The Advertising Standards Authority upheld the complaint of one listener but to be honest you'd have to have a pretty good nose for porn to follow the threads here and sniff out some smut.

The radio ad promoted the ThinkuKnow.co.uk website but the good folk at the Home Office didn't think to point out they'd opted for the ultra-modern 'u' spelling, rather than the traditional 'you'.

That was incredibly stupid. And, as a result, some listeners probably found themselves on the website ThinkyouKnow.co.uk, which apparently promoted adult content.

But to be fair to the Home Office, while the people who wrote and produced these ads were clearly fools, their actions hardly exposed anybody to porn. The site listeners found themselves on was a fairly standard parking site. You'd have to follow quite a few links before you found some porn.

That ad no more exposed people to porn than Google or Internet Explorer and suggestions to the contrary have lost any sense of perspective.