Internet Child Safety Laws Will Lead To Helpful Sites Being Blocked; Just Look At Schools

Various states and the federal government are proposing and passing a wide variety of “kid safety” laws. Almost all of them pretend that they’re about conduct of social media sites and not about the content on them, but when you boil down what the underlying concerns are, they all end up actually being about the content.

There are demands for age verification and for blocking certain kinds of “harmful” content. This content often includes things like pornography or other sexual content, as well as content about self-harm or eating disorders.

We keep trying to explain to people who support these laws that stopping such content is not as easy as you think. Indeed, attempts at removing eating disorder content have often resulted in more harm, rather than less. This is because there is user demand for the content, and they start seeking it out in darker corners of the internet, rather than on the major sites, where other users and the sites themselves are more likely to try to intervene and guide people towards resources to help with recovery.

A new article from the Markup highlights how schools are discovering just how difficult it is to stop “dangerous” content online, and their default is to just completely block sites — including tons of sites that are actually really important and useful in helping kids. In some cases, these are due to schools trying to comply with CIPA, the Children’s Internet Protection Act from 2000.

A middle school student in Missouri had trouble collecting images of people’s eyes for an art project. An elementary schooler in the same district couldn’t access a picture of record-breaking sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner to add to a writing assignment. 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 trans 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—especially porn. 

None of this should be a surprise. After all, the American Library Association rightly challenged the law after it passed. The district court said that because filtering technology sucks, it would block constitutionally protected speech. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court eventually said the law was fine.

Of course, the law was never fine, and it does not appear that the filtering technology has gotten much better in the two decades since that ruling came out.

The Markup obtained filtering records from a bunch of schools and found that they are aggressive in blocking content, possibly in a manner that is unconstitutional. But, tellingly, a lot of the content includes things that might help LGBTQ youth:

But the Rockwood web filter blocks The Trevor Project for middle schoolers, meaning that Steldt couldn’t have accessed it on the school network. Same for It Gets Better, a global nonprofit that aims to uplift and empower LGBTQ+ youth, and The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which supports openly LGBTQ+ candidates for public office nationwide. At the same time, the filter allows Rockwood students to see anti-LGBTQ+ information online from fundamentalist Christian group Focus on the Family and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal nonprofit the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group in 2016.

According to the article, the school district’s CIO believes that they should block first, and then only unblock if someone makes “a compelling case” for why that content should be unblocked.

And it’s not just info for LGBTQ youth either. Information on sex education and abortion was also blocked in many schools, making it difficult for students trying to research those topics.

Maya Perez, a senior in Fort Worth, Texas, is the president of her high school’s Feminist Club, and she and her peers create presentations to drive their discussions. But research often proves nearly impossible on her school computer. She recently sought out information for a presentation about health care disparities and abortion access.

“Page after page was just blocked, blocked, blocked,” Perez said. “It’s challenging to find accurate information a lot of times.”

[….]

Alison Macklin spent almost 20 years as a sex educator in Colorado; at the end of her lessons she would tell students that they could find more information and resources on plannedparenthood.org. “Kids would say, ‘No, I can’t, miss,’” she remembered. She now serves as the policy and advocacy director for SIECUS, a national nonprofit advocating for sex education.

Only 29 states and the District of Columbia require sex education, according to SIECUS’ legislative tracking. Missouri is not one of them. The Rockwood and Wentzville school districts in Missouri were among those The Markup found to be blocking sex education websites. The Markup also identified blocks to sex education websites, including Planned Parenthood, in Florida, Utah, Texas, and South Carolina.

In Manatee County, Florida, students aren’t the only ones who can’t access these sites — district records show teachers are blocked from sex education websites too.

There’s a lot more in the article, but it’s a preview of the kind of thing that will happen at a much larger scale if things like “Age Appropriate Design” or “Kids Online Safety” bills keep passing. These bills seek to hold companies liable if kids access any content that adults or law enforcement deem “harmful.” We can see from just this report that, today, that already includes a ton of very helpful information for kids.

And this is already causing real harm in schools:

In the Center for Democracy and Technology’s survey, nearly three-quarters of students said web filters make it hard to complete assignments. Even accounting for youthful exaggeration, 57 percent of teachers said the same was true for their students.

Kristin Woelfel, a policy counsel at CDT, said she and her colleagues started to think of the web filters as a “digital book ban,” an act of censorship that’s as troubling as a physical book ban but far less visible. “You can see whether a book is on a shelf,” she said. By contrast, decisions about which websites or categories to block happen under the radar.

But at least, right now, under CIPA, those are limited to just computers on school campuses. If we get some of these other laws in place, it will be internet-wide blocking of some of this content as service providers seek to avoid any potential liability.

This is why opposing these laws is so important. Having them in place will do real harm, using the law to censor all sorts of useful and important content all in the false belief that the laws are “protecting” children.