Online Censorship in Schools ‘More Widespread’ Than Expected, New Data Shows

Aleeza Siddique, 15, was in her Spanish class at a Northern California high school earlier this year when a lesson about newscasts was disrupted by her school’s internet filter. Her teacher had the class open their school-issued Chromebooks and explore a list of links she had prepared from the Spanish-language broadcast news giant Telemundo. The students tried, but every link saw the same page: a picture of a padlock.

“None were available to us,” Aleeza said. “The site is completely blocked.”

She said her teacher rotates to fill the 90-minute class with other activities. As she recalls, they browsed vocabulary lists and independently clicked online quizzes from Quizlet—a less dynamic use of time.

New information released this week Some of this blocking by the D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology shows how often it happens across the country. The nonprofit digital rights advocacy organization conducted its fifth annual nationally representative survey of middle and high school teachers and parents, as well as high school students, on a range of technology issues. This year, nearly 70% of both teachers and students said web filters interfered with students’ ability to complete assignments.

Nearly all schools use some type of web filter under the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which requires districts to use a federal electronic rate program for discounted Internet and telecommunications equipment to prevent children from seeing graphic and obscene images online. A 2024 research by The MarkupNow part of CalMatters, it found more blocks by school districts than required by federal law, some of which are political, reflecting a culture war over what students can access in school libraries. This study found that school districts block access to sexuality education and LGBTQ+ resources, including suicide prevention. It also found that websites that students looked up to for academic research were routinely blocked. Because school districts tend to set different restrictions for students and staff, teachers can as offended by filters as anyone else because of how they make lesson planning difficult.

Web filtering is ‘subjective and unverifiable’

Markup’s report inspired additional survey questions to better understand how schools use filters as a “subjective and unverified” way to limit student access, said Elizabeth Laird, the center’s equity director for civic technology and the report’s lead author. information.

“The scope of what’s blocked is, I think, broader and more valuable than we knew to ask last year,” Laird said.

While past surveys have revealed how often students and faculty report disproportionate filtering of content related to reproductive health, LGBTQ+ issues and people of color, this year the center asked respondents whether they thought content by or related to immigrants was more likely to be blocked. . About a third of the students said yes.

Aleza would say yes after her experience with Telemundo. The California teenager said how often she encounters blocks depends on how much research she tries to do and how much of it she does on the school computer. While taking a debate class, he regularly ran into blocks while researching controversial topics. An article on LGBTQ+ rights in Slate magazine got him a block screen, for example, because the entire news site was blocked. He said he avoids the school Chromebook as much as possible, doing homework on his personal laptop away from school Wi-Fi whenever he can.

Fully three-quarters of teachers who responded to a recent survey said that students use solutions to access the Internet without filters. Laird found the number surprising. That way, web filters don’t prevent students from accessing the websites they want to access and get in the way of completing school work. “It raises the fundamental question of whether this technology is actually doing more harm than good when trying to prevent students from accessing harmful content,” Laird said.

Nearly one-third of teachers surveyed by the Center for Democracy and Technology said their schools block content related to the LGBTQ+ community. About half said information about sexual orientation and reproductive health was blocked. Black and Latino students were more likely to say that content related to people of color was disproportionately blocked on their school devices.

For students like Aleeza, blocking is frustrating both in practice and in principle.

“The amount they are policing is actively interfering with our ability to get an education,” he said. Most of the time he doesn’t know why the website is running the block page. Aleeza said it was arbitrary and her school needed to be more transparent about what it was blocking and why.

“We should have the right to know what we are being protected from,” he said.

Audrey Baime, Olivia Brandeis and Samantha Yee, all members of the CalMatters Youth Journalism Initiative, reported for this story.

This was the article was originally published on The Markup republished under the title Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.