Association for Progressive Communications

Internet for social justice and sustainable development

Search

Content filtering in US libraries is haphazard

By Sex Work Awareness for GenderIT.org

NEW YORK, USA, 30 April 2010

Freedom of speech and its flipside, access to information, is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. However federally-funded libraries are required to prevent people under eighteen accessing “harmful” content. Kevicha Echols and Melissa Ditmore investigate the use of internet filters on public library computers and find that measures adopted by libraries range from installation of filtering software on all computers for child and adult use to no filters at all! The law is being implemented differently varying across city, county and state. Sectors of the society most likely to be affected by this ad hoc censorship are young people and the economically-disadvantaged who rely particularly on library computers to access online information. Photo: “FallWithMe”:http://www.flickr.com/people/fallwithme/

Full article at http://www.genderit.org/en/index.shtml?w=a&x=96450

(END/2010)

Post new comment

Subject:

Comment: *

Input format

Textile

Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <object> <embed> <div> <table> <tr> <td> <img> <iframe> <h2> <br> <hr />
Images can be added to this post.
You can use Textile markup to format text.
You may use [acidfree:xx] tags to display acidfree videos or images inline.
Email addresses will be obfuscated in the page source to reduce the chances of being harvested by spammers.
Each email address will be obfuscated in a human readable fashion or (if JavaScript is enabled) replaced with a spamproof clickable link.
Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.

generic