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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.
School districts all over the country, like Rockwood in the western suburbs of St. Louis, 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.
Some of the censorship inhibits the ability to do basic research on sites like Wikipedia and Quora. Students have been blocked from going to websites that web-filtering software categorizes as “education,” “news,” or “informational.” But even more concerning, especially for some students who spoke with The Markup, are blocks against sex education, abortion information, and 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.
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The filters did sometimes keep students from seeing pornographic images, but far more often they kept students 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 just 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 just a month.
“We’re basically trapped in this bubble, and they’re deciding what we can and can’t see,” said 18-year-old Ali Siddiqui, a senior at a San Francisco Bay Area high school.
The Markup requested records from 26 school districts. Many we selected because they had made headlines for banning library books; others we chose because government records showed they had purchased web filters or because they were mentioned by students interviewed for this article. Although 10 districts did not release the records—almost all claiming it would compromise their cybersecurity—we were still able to compile one of the most comprehensive datasets yet showing how U.S. schools censor the internet.
The blocks raise questions about whether schools’ online censorship runs afoul of constitutional law and federal guidance. The Markup’s investigation revealed that some districts, including Rockwood, continue to block content that’s supportive of LGBTQ+ teens while leaving anti-LGBTQ+ content accessible, something a Missouri court ruled was unconstitutional over a decade ago. What’s more, many districts completely block social media sites, something the Federal Communications Commission said in 2011 was inconsistent with CIPA.
The districts examined by The Markup varied significantly in what they blocked. While many districts blocked YouTube and most blocked social media, only a handful blocked sex education websites.
Catherine Ross, professor emeritus of law at George Washington University and author of a book on school censorship, 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?”
Survey data show how these inequities play out. The Center for Democracy and Technology asked teachers last year whether internet filtering and blocking can make it harder for students to complete assignments. Among teachers in schools with high rates of poverty, 62 percent said yes; among teachers in schools with lower rates, 50 percent said the same.
Though banned books get more attention than blocked websites in schools, some groups are fighting back. 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 resources for the LGBTQ+ community. 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.”
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