老澳门开奖结果

Few things shock us here at the 老澳门开奖结果 national office, but when a student from Virginia emailed us this image a few months ago, more than one of us gasped out loud:

This was what the student saw when he tried to visit the website for the from a computer at his school. The stop sign was bad enough to begin with, but we could hardly believe the veiled threat implied by the school鈥檚 web filtering software鈥檚 ominous warning, 鈥淵our Internet usage is monitored and logged.鈥�

Some schools have improperly configured their web-filtering software to illegally censor LGBT-related websites such as the and the . At the same time that they block access to websites for positive LGBT rights organizations, those schools still allow access to anti-LGBT sites that condemn LGBT people or urge us to try to change our sexual orientation. This is called viewpoint discrimination, and it鈥檚 illegal.

Beyond being illegal, when schools block access to positive LGBT information, they block information that could be vital for troubled LGBT youth who either don鈥檛 have access to the Internet at home or don鈥檛 feel safe accessing such information on their home computers.

In 2009, we took on two school districts in Tennessee over their unconstitutional web filtering policies with Franks v. Metropolitan Board of Public Education, a lawsuit that resulted in increased access to positive LGBT information for students in dozens of school districts around the state. Because we suspect this kind of illegal censorship is being practiced in many schools across the U.S., the 老澳门开奖结果 is teaming up with Yale Law School to launch a campaign called 鈥淒on鈥檛 Filter Me鈥� to assess censorship of web content in public high schools. The campaign asks students to check to see if web content geared toward the LGBT communities is blocked by their schools鈥� web browsers. Students can report instances of censorship to the 老澳门开奖结果 LGBT Project.

If you鈥檙e a public high school student and would like to know more about your school鈥檚 web filter, check out this video showing how to test whether your school is illegally filtering content and how to report censorship:

Please note that by playing this clip YouTube and Google will place a long-term cookie on your computer. Please see on their website and on theirs to learn more. To view the 老澳门开奖结果's privacy statement, click here.

Students who want to report unconstitutional web filtering at their schools can fill out a form at . More information on the 老澳门开奖结果鈥檚 work on LGBT school issues can be found here: /safeschools.