At the risk of apologetics, there is a lot of weight to this excuse.
The metrics that classify porn vs non-porn would have been generated by a net-nanny system, and we all know how accurate they are, right?
With the collusion of ad and referral networks you see when you watch your own network activity, I’d find it easy to imagine that (say) collegehumor would be classed as ‘porn’ due to boobage, and each intentional pageview on (say) buzzfeed triggers a handful of unintentional network requests to collegehumor ads - which each get logged as individual “porn accesses”.
- I used to manage a proxy server for a university, and the ‘acceptable use’ filters. It’s pretty easy to fire false positives unwittingly.
Even more so if they have censorware in place that actively blocks stuff. Inline iframe ads for off-colour sites injected into borderline sites would simply not show up - and result in the ‘borderline’ site actually looking tamer and safer. Yet each pageload would also ping the adserver and be logged as an attempted access.
