Example research essay topic: Sexually Explicit Material Amendment Guarantees - 1,373 words

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The Internet Censorship Internet Censorship The internet has become one of the most widely used means of media in the world today. It provides people with everything from getting directions from one place to another, to downloading entire books that can be read on the computer without ever having to visit a library or bookstore. However, the internet is also host to significant amounts of sexually explicit material-as many as 28, 000 hard-and soft-core pornography sites (Warren 52). The World Wide Web is open to anyone with a computer and a connection to the internet, which is one of the main reasons why it is under such scrutiny.

Someone can post anything from fixing a car, to building a bomb, from pictures of their family, to pictures of little children performing unspeakable sexual acts. All anyone has to do to access anything on the web is to just click on their web browser and type in the html address or, an even easier way, type in a keyword on a search engine and then be will automatically linked to sites that pertain to their search. There is, however, software out on the market that prevents children and others, who should not be visiting such sites, from accessing obscene and inappropriate web sites. These softwares are called filters. Filters are software systems that block or filter sexually explicit and other inappropriate material (Warren 52). Filters are used at home, in schools, at the work place, and in libraries.

They have in fact become so wide spread that sales will soon hit $ 75 million per year (Males 16). However, there is one flaw to filters, and that is no such software is capable of making sophisticated, legal distinctions: Images and speech are targeted if they contain key words in their descriptor; websites are blocked if they are known to be adult in orientation (Warren 53). In the process, literary, educational, and artistic material is often blocked. As a result, a federal district court has ruled that a Virginia library s filtering of sexual material, using such blocking software, constitutes a violation of First Amendment guarantees of free speech (Mainstream Loudoun). That decision, Mainstream Loudoun v Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library, 24 F.

Supp. 2 d 552 (E. D. Va. 1998), is the only case to date that applies First Amendment principles to internet access at public libraries. It leaves libraries across the country wondering about what they are supposed to do, leave all of the internet open to everyone and risk material offending passersby, or restrict the internet and infringe on what the court decided to be a First Amendment right. More than half of all public libraries now offer Internet access, and approximately 15 percent, about 1, 700 libraries, were using filters as of the summer of 1998.

Of these, almost 900 libraries had filters on all their computer workstations (Warren 53). Can and should the Internet be censored by filtering is a question bedeviling thousands of public librarians who have rushed to embrace this seemingly limitless and economical information source only to find that it includes a distinctly dark and dirty side, wrote librarian Jeanette Allis Bastian, in an article published in the Internet journal, First Monday (Bastian). One of the main reasons for disagreement on this issue involves people s First Amendment guarantees. Many people believe that they have the right to free speech and the ability to view whatever they choose on the internet. Americans remain deeply concerned about protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Internet, but they do not want the government to limit access to cyber porn, according to a study released October 20.

A Gannett poll released two weeks later, however, suggested such strong displeasure with some of the Internet s content that respondents appeared to advocate censorship (Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom). This study shows that the American people want a system that would block inappropriate material from youngsters but yet at the same time, allow material that an adult might want to wonder through later in the evening; a system that blocks what should be blocked, and opens what should be open. An example would be: a filter that can decide whether or not a site is pornographic or simply sexually educational. On the other side, you have people who feel that the non-censored internet infringes on their rights as well. What discourages pornography viewers from monopolizing the computers at libraries, or the unsuspecting patron who sits down at the computer to discover a pornographic image on the screen, downloaded by a previous patron or prankster? Courts have suggested the filtering of one or more, but not all, terminals.

Some librarians wonder how this approach would play out: Would this necessitate labeling machines as unfiltered (rated x? ) or filtered (rated PG) (Warren 54)? And then other questions are raised by this also. Should the staff at the library monitor the computer constantly to prevent use of an unfiltered machine by a child? And would children need to have a permission slip, signed by their parents, in order to use the unfiltered computers? Libraries freely make decisions about which materials to have and which to ignore. Deciding against the purchase of Playboy Magazine would not likely anger someone and invoke a censorship challenge.

First Amendment safeguards simply have not and would not be construed to mandate acquisitions. Yet, arguably, the Loudoun decision does just that by requiring libraries to acquire pornography and other materials that they would never purchase in print (Warren 54). This reasoning troubles librarians who believe they have a responsibility to refine and take out materials so as to make them appropriate for their communities. The un-censored internet also raises the question of whether or not children are safe while they surf the web, visiting web sites and chat rooms, talking to people they would not ordinarily talk too, talking to strangers.

People worry that their kids are being lured by online pedophiles to do the unspeakable, even being talked into going out and meeting with them. In 1995, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported ten or twelve cases of actual abduction and molestation of young Internet users per year. It is rare because the vast majority of kids is normal and has no interest in perverted new friends. Statistically, youths are far safer in front of an unregulated screen than with their parents, priest, or scout leader (Males 16). So the threat posed by the Internet is much smaller than children face in dozens of unregulated areas of everyday life, but the threat is still there.

Just as our parents told us not to talk to strangers while playing outside, parents nowadays should tell their children not to talk to strangers while playing on the Internet. Internet censorship should be something that concerns all of us because the Internet is here to stay and will have a major impact on our lives in the years to come. We are the future of America, and what we do today will have a significant impact in the America of tomorrow. If we censor the Internet, will more First Amendment rights be taken away from us in the future? Or will the Internet become a safe haven, away from all the worries and horrors of the everyday life? If we do not censor the Internet, will it become a dangerous, frightening place, unable to be allowed in our libraries due to its inappropriate material?

Or will the curiosity of the people today, fade away and allow our children to use the computer freely, accessing whatever they choose, with out worrying? Work-Cited Bastian, Jeannette Allis. Filtering the Internet in American Public Libraries: Sliding Down the Slippery Slope. First Monday (1997) Mainstream Loudoun v Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library, 24 F.

Supp. 2 d 552 (E. D. Va. 1998) Males, Michael. Mythology and Internet filtering. Teacher Librarian 28. 2 (Dec. 2000): 16 - 18 Two Studies Probe Porn as Internet Problem.

Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom 49. 1 (Jan. 2000): 10 Warren, Sarah E. Filtering sexual material on the Internet: Public libraries surf the legal morass. The Florida Bar Journal 73. 9 (Oct. 1999): 52 - 7

Research essay sample on Sexually Explicit Material Amendment Guarantees