Here's why the Porn Ban faced such a backlash: Six Indian cities among global top 10 for porn searches

Remember the outrage over the (temporary) porn ban in India a few months back? Indians were either startled at not finding their favourite sites one morning, or were aghast at this curb on the freedom of expression. [caption id=“attachment_2460612” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image.[/caption] While most sites returned and many people’s online activity went back to normal, the outrage over the porn ban was widespread from celebrities to normal citizens on social media lashing out against the ban. Now, Google Trends data might just tell us the reason for the immense outrage over the porn ban. The latest data shows that six of the top ten cities in the world that type ‘porn’ as a keyword on the search engine, are in India, according to a report by The Times of India. New Delhi leads the list of ‘porn searches’, followed by Pune, Mumbai, Howrah, Unnao, Kuala Lumpur and Bengaluru in that order, continues the report. FYI, Unnao is a small town in Uttar Pradesh. And if the fact that so many Indian cities top the list of porn searchers surprises you, the type of porn they search will probably disturb you. The Times of India report says that the highest number of searches for ‘animal porn’ were from Pune, followed by New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. ‘Rape porn’ was widely googled in Kolkata, Howrah, New Delhi, Ahmedabad and Pune. Unnao actually had the most number of Google searches for ‘child sex’. While we are not suggesting that this is the sole reason for the porn ban protests, it does show the wide penetration that online porn has in India, irrespective of region and social conditions.