“My biggest fear is that we lose a student as a result of this filter,” she said. The Trevor Project estimates that at least one LGBTQ+ person between the ages of 13 and 24 attempts suicide every 45 seconds.
Representatives from Impero did not return repeated calls and emails requesting comment about ContentKeeper for this story.
Securly’s vice president of marketing, Joshua Mukai, offered no comment on the idea that blocking LGBTQ+ advocacy websites through the “sexual content” category is discriminatory.
Reproductive health
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 Googled “abortion access Texas” and was stymied.
“Page after page was just blocked, blocked, blocked,” Perez said. “It’s challenging to find accurate information a lot of times.”
What students say:A digital book ban? High schoolers describe dangers, frustrations of censored web access
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,’” because of the filters, 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.
The breadth of the internet
Rockwood School District sophomore Brooke O’Dell most frequently runs into blocked websites when doing homework. Sometimes she can’t access PDFs she wants to read. Her workaround is to pull out her phone, find the webpage using her own cellular data, navigate to the file she wants, email it to herself, and then go back to her school-issued Chromebook to open it. When it’s website text she’s interested in, O’Dell uses the Google Drive app on her phone to copy-and-paste text into a Google Doc that she can later access from her Chromebook. She recently had to do this while working on a literary criticism project about the book “Jane Eyre.”
Recounting her frustration, O’Dell bristled at the need for any web filter at all.
“While you’re in school, they are in charge of you,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean they need to control everything you’re doing.”
In Forsyth County Schools in Georgia, which blocks a relatively narrow set of categories, records obtained by The Markup reveal a spate of blocked YouTube videos: several about Picasso as well as history videos, a physics lesson, videos of zoo animals, and children’s songs about the seasons and days of the week.
Mike Evans, the district’s chief technology and information officer, said the district tries to apply filters fairly. “We’ll always have different families on one side or another,” Evans said. “Some would rather have things more restricted if they don’t agree with any LGBTQ-type material or video that might be available, but we try to stay away from that type of (filtering) altogether.”
Among the 16 districts that released records about their blocked websites, 13 shared the categories tied to the blocks. Games and social media were the most frequently blocked categories, along with ads, entertainment, audio and video content, and search engines.
Sites labeled “porn” or “nudity” didn’t crack the top 10 categories blocked in any district. Only in Palm Beach County, Florida, and Seattle were they even in the top 20.
In Manatee County, Florida, students in the schools can’t access the local public library catalog; most social media platforms; or sites with audio and video content including Fox Nation, Spotify, and SoundCloud.
The Manatee County district’s chief technology officer, Scott Hansen, described a filtering policy that errs on the side of blocking. If a category isn’t seen as having an explicit educational purpose, it is blocked.
Hansen said he gets few requests from teachers to unblock websites.
But interviews with students and teachers around the country indicate many have simply resigned themselves to being kept from much of the internet. The overarching rationale for the filters — keeping students safe — seems unimpeachable, so few people try to fight them. And schools have the right to limit what they make available online. CIPA lets the FCC refuse internet subsidies to school districts that don’t filter out porn, but the law doesn’t identify any consequence for excessive filtering, giving districts wide latitude.
In a survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, nearly three-quarters of students said web filters make it hard to complete assignments. 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.
In the Rockwood School District, O’Dell recognizes that web filters prevent students from playing games on their computers, but she doesn’t believe technology should play that role.
“It’s not really teaching kids the responsibility of when to pay attention in class,” she said. “It kind of just takes that entire part of learning completely away.”
A stubborn status quo
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. Rockwood School District has a filter doing what the ACLU sued Camdenton for over a decade ago and the two districts are in the same state, just 150 miles apart. 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.
In Texas, Samuels, the Katy ISD grad who encountered blocks to LGBTQ+ web pages, 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.
Unfortunately, Samuels said, “Censorship is a winning issue right now.”
