Don't Filter Me is a project of the
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...
dedicated to fighting
LGBT
' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity.
The LGBT term is a ...
-related
internet censorship
Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains (such as Wikipedia.org) but exceptionally may extend to all Inte ...
that happens in
public schools in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
.
History
State-funded schools in the United States use
content-control software
An Internet filter is software that restricts or controls the content an Internet user is capable to access, especially when utilized to restrict material delivered over the Internet via the Web, Email, or other means. Content-control software det ...
to restrict their students' access to pornographic websites, in accordance with the
Children's Internet Protection Act
The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is one of a number of bills that the United States Congress proposed to limit children's exposure to pornography and explicit content online.
Background
Both of Congress's earlier attempts at restr ...
of 2000.
The products most commonly used to do this filtering treat websites that offer information about
LGBT
' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity.
The LGBT term is a ...
topics and organizations as pornography, even though these websites do not contain sexually explicit content.
One such commonly filtered website is
The Trevor Project
The Trevor Project is an American nonprofit organization founded in 1998. Focused on suicide prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth, they offer a toll-free telephone number wher ...
,
a website devoted to suicide prevention among at-risk LGBT youths. The
White House
The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. ...
publicly praised the Trevor Project in 2011.
Other sites that are commonly blocked include
GLAAD
GLAAD (), an acronym of Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is an American non-governmental media monitoring organization originally founded as a protest against defamatory coverage of gay and lesbian demographics and their portrayals ...
,
PFLAG
PFLAG is the United States' first and largest organization uniting parents, families, and allies with people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+). PFLAG National is the national organization, which provides support to ...
(Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), the
Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network
GLSEN (pronounced ''glisten''; formerly the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network) is an American education organization working to end discrimination, harassment, and bullying based on sexual orientation, gender identity and gender ex ...
(also honored by the White House),
the
Matthew Shepard Foundation
The Matthew Shepard Foundation is an LGBT nonprofit organization, headquartered in Casper, Wyoming, which was founded in December 1998 by Dennis and Judy Shepard in memory of their son, Matthew. The Foundation runs education, outreach, and adv ...
,
DignityUSA
DignityUSA is an organization with headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, that focuses on LGBT rights and the Homosexuality and Catholicism, Catholic Church. Dignity Canada exists as the Canadian sister organization. The organization is made up of ...
,
Day of Silence
Day of Silence is GLSEN's annual day of action to spread awareness about the effects of the bullying and harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) students. In the United States, students take a day-lo ...
,
Campus Pride
Campus Pride is an American national nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization founded by M. Chad Wilson, Sarah E. Holmes and Shane L. Windmeyer in 2001 which serves lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) and ally student leaders and/or campus ...
, and the
Human Rights Campaign
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is an American LGBTQ advocacy group. It is the largest LGBTQ political lobbying organization within the United States. Based in Washington, D.C., the organization focuses on protecting and expanding rights for LGB ...
(the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group and political lobbying organization in the United States).
A student attempting to access these sites is usually confronted by a page warning, "You have been denied access as it is characterized as LGBT. Your Internet usage is monitored and logged."
Some
American conservatives are supportive of blocks on these and similar websites since they consider them to be promoting the so-called "
homosexual agenda
"Gay agenda" or "homosexual agenda" is a term used by sectors of the Christian religious right as a disparaging way to describe the advocacy of cultural acceptance and normalization of non-heterosexual sexual orientations and relationships. The ...
".
Filtering tools that prevent students from accessing websites related to positive LGBT organizations often permit access to sites that promote an anti-LGBT viewpoint, sites aimed at convincing LGBT people to change their sexual orientation, or sites that can be considered
hate speech
Hate speech is defined by the ''Cambridge Dictionary'' as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thoug ...
against LGBT people. Websites not generally blocked by this kind of filtering include the
Family Research Council
The Family Research Council (FRC) is an American evangelical activist group and think-tank with an affiliated lobbying organization. FRC promotes what it considers to be family values. It opposes and lobbies against: access to pornography, emb ...
(an American conservative Christian group and lobbying organization) and the
National Organization for Marriage
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is an American non-profit political organization established to work against the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. It was formed in 2007 specifically to pass California Proposit ...
(a political organization dedicated to working against the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States),
as well as
Exodus International
Exodus International was a non-profit organization, non-profit, interdenominational ex-gay Christianity, Christian umbrella organization connecting organizations that sought to "help people who wished to limit their homosexual desires". Founded ...
and
People Can Change
Brothers on a Road Less Traveled is an American nonprofit organization supporting men who wish to reduce or eliminate their homosexual desires. Formerly known as People Can Change (PCC), the organization was founded in 2000.
Formation and purpos ...
, both of which advocate
conversion therapy
Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to align with heterosexual and cisgender norms. In contrast to evidence-based medicine and cli ...
to change a person's sexual orientation to heterosexual.
Neither the
American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the largest psychiatric organization in the world. It has more than 37,000 members are involve ...
or the
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
consider
conversion therapy
Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to align with heterosexual and cisgender norms. In contrast to evidence-based medicine and cli ...
a legitimate medical practice or homosexuality to be a
mental disorder
A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitti ...
.
Companies that filter content for schools often include anti-LGBT content in their "religion" category.
Filtering software can also block content beyond the websites themselves. Students would, for example, be permitted to read ''
Bowers v. Hardwick
''Bowers v. Hardwick'', 478 U.S. 186 (1986), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld, in a 5â4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults ...
'', the 1986
Supreme Court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...
decision that upheld a Georgia law to criminalize sodomy, but prevented from reading ''
Lawrence v. Texas
''Lawrence v. Texas'', 539 U.S. 558 (2003), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that most sanctions of criminal punishment for consensual, adult non- procreative sexual activity (commonly referred to as so ...
'', the 2003 Supreme Court ruling that asserted
sodomy laws were unconstitutional.
The
ACLU
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...
contends that this filtering is discriminatory and violates the
First Amendment
First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1).
First or 1st may also refer to:
*World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement
Arts and media Music
* 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...
rights of students in public schools.
In February 2011, the ACLU launched the ''Don't Filter Me'' project to combat this censorship and discrimination in viewpoint that was happening in state-funded schools.
Response
Because of the Don't Filter Me project's efforts, some software providers who sell these filters implemented changes in their products. Companies such as
Lightspeed Systems
Lightspeed Systems is an educational software company based in Austin, Texas that builds and sells SaaS content-control software, mobile device management, alert software, and classroom management software to Kâ12 schools.
History
Founded in 1 ...
and
Fortinet
Fortinet is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and sells cybersecurity solutions, such as physical firewalls, antivirus software, intrusion prevention systems, and endpoint secur ...
took action on their own and changed how their products categorize the websites in question.
A number of school districts took steps to unblock LGBT-themed content that is not sexually explicit. The
Rowland Unified School District and
Oroville Union High School District
Oroville Union High School District is a public school district in Butte County, California, United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily ...
were among the first to take action because of the work of the Don't Filter Me project.
Many other school districts followed suit and updated their filtering software to allow LGBT sites to be accessed from school computers. Conservative Christian groups like
Alliance Defending Freedom
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF, formerly Alliance Defense Fund) is an American conservative Christian legal advocacy group that works to curtail rights for LGBTQ people; expand Christian practices within public schools and in government; and ...
urged school districts not to comply with the ACLU's requests.
In August 2011 the ACLU sued the Camdenton R-III School District of
Camden County, Missouri
Camden County is a county located in the U.S. state of Missouri. As of the 2020 Census, the population was 42,745. Its county seat is Camdenton. The county was organized on January 29, 1841, as Kinderhook County and renamed Camden County in 1 ...
, which had refused to change its filtering software, or the filtering behavior that that software created. This led a federal judge to issue a
preliminary injunction
An injunction is a legal and equitable remedy in the form of a special court order that compels a party to do or refrain from specific acts. ("The court of appeals ... has exclusive jurisdiction to enjoin, set aside, suspend (in whole or in par ...
to the district, ordering it to stop using software produced by the compan
URL Blacklistthat blocks access to sites discussing LGBT issues. In her decision, Judge
Nanette Kay Laughrey
Nanette Kay Laughrey (born 1946) is a Senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri
The United States Di ...
wrote "URL Blacklist systematically allows access to websites expressing a negative viewpoint toward LGBT individuals by categorizing them as 'religion', but filters out positive viewpoints toward LGBT issues by categorizing them as 'sexuality'."
The school district later settled, and agreed to stop blocking the sites in question, to be monitored for 18 months, and to pay $125,000 in fines and court costs.
References
External links
{{Portal, Freedom of speech
Don't Filter Me form to report your school's web filter
Internet-related activism
Internet censorship
Internet censorship in the United States
Student rights
American Civil Liberties Union
LGBT and education