Schools block more than obscene sites
Web restrictions raise censorship concerns
A middle school student in Missouri had trouble collecting images of people’s eyes for an art project. A high school junior couldn’t read analyses of the Greek classic “The Odyssey” for her language arts class. An eighth grader was blocked repeatedly while researching transgender rights.
All of these students saw the same message in their web browsers as they tried to complete their work: “The site you have requested has been blocked because it does not comply with the filtering requirements as described by the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) or Rockwood School District.”
CIPA, a federal law passed in 2000, requires schools seeking subsidized internet access to keep students from seeing obscene or harmful images online – essentially porn.
School districts all over the country go much further, limiting not only what images students can see but what words they can read. Records obtained from 16 districts in 11 different states show just how broadly schools block content, forcing students to jump through hoops to complete assignments and keeping them from resources that could support their health and safety.
Students are prevented from going to websites that web-filtering software categorizes as “education,” “news,” or “informational.” In some districts, they can’t access sex education websites, abortion information, or resources for LGBTQ+ teens – including suicide prevention.
Virtually all school districts buy web filters from companies that sort the internet into categories. Districts decide which categories to block, often making those selections without a complete understanding of the universe of websites under each label – information that the filtering companies consider proprietary. This necessarily leads to overblocking, and The Markup found that districts routinely have to create new, custom categories to allow certain websites on a case-by-case basis. Students and teachers, meanwhile, suffer the consequences of overzealous filtering.
The filters do keep students from seeing pornographic images, but far more often they keep them from playing online games, browsing social media, and using the internet for legitimate academic work. Records from the 16 districts include blocks that students wouldn’t necessarily notice, representing elements of a page, like an ad or an image, rather than the entire site, but they reveal that districts’ filters collectively logged over 1.9 billion blocks in one month.
The blocks raise questions about whether schools’ online censorship runs afoul of constitutional law and federal guidance.
Catherine Ross, professor emeritus of law at George Washington University, called the blocks “a very serious concern – particularly for those whose only access is through sites that are controlled by the school,” whether that access is limited because they can’t afford it at home or simply can’t get it.
“We’re setting up a system in which students, by the accident of geography, are getting very different kinds of education,” Ross said. “Do we really want that to be the case? Is that fair?”
Students in Texas are supporting a state law that would limit what schools can censor, and the American Library Association hosts Banned Websites Awareness Day each fall. The ACLU continues to fight the issue at the local level more than a decade after wrapping up its national “Don’t Filter Me” campaign against school web blocks of LGBTQ+ resources.
Yet as the culture wars play out in U.S. schools, Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the ACLU of Texas, said there are signs the problem is getting worse. “I’m worried there’s a lot more content filtering reemerging.”
The American Library Association has been calling for a more nuanced approach to filtering the internet in schools and libraries since 2003, when it failed to convince the Supreme Court that CIPA is unconstitutional.
In 2011, the FCC emphasized that blanket blocks of social media platforms are not consistent with CIPA, and the original law only says districts are required to block obscene or harmful images.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, called CIPA “a handy crutch” for censorship that is not justified by the law. “The FCC makes it clear that it’s not (justified), but there’s no remedy for the kind of activity other than going to court,” she said, which is too expensive and time-consuming for many families.
Lawsuits also have limited reach, often changing behavior in only one small part of the country. Battling discrimination carried out via web filters is like a game of whack-a-mole in a nation where much of the decision-making is left to more than 13,000 individual school districts.
And the question of what students have a right to see is only getting murkier. In 2023 alone, the American Library Association tracked challenges to more than 9,000 books in school libraries nationwide. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Schools could use the wide latitude the FCC leaves them to take a more hands-off approach to web filtering.
Cameron Samuels first encountered blocks to LGBTQ+ web pages during the 2018-19 school year while working on a class project as a ninth grader in Texas’ Katy Independent School District. The blocks, Samuels said, felt like a personal attack. Not only did Samuels find that the LGBTQ+ news source The Advocate was blocked, the teen also couldn’t visit The Trevor Project, whose site offers suicide prevention resources specifically for LGBTQ+ youth.
Samuels co-founded Students Engaged in Advancing Texas to fight for open access to information statewide. The group supported legislation introduced in the state legislature last year that would have prohibited schools from blocking websites with resources about human trafficking, interpersonal or domestic violence, sexual assault, or mental health and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ individuals. It didn’t go anywhere, but Samuels hopes it will in the future.
This article was co-published with The Markup, a nonprofit, investigative newsroom that challenges technology to serve the public good.