People are talking about internet content filtering, especially since the 老澳门开奖结果 won its case against the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which tried to censor all speech about sex from the internet. But don鈥檛 be confused between voluntary use of filters as an alternative to a criminal statute and governmentally imposed filters. 老澳门开奖结果 First Amendment attorney Chris Hansen explains more about filtering and when it works and doesn鈥檛.
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Filtering has been shown to be quite successful in blocking sexual sites, but at a price 鈥 it over-blocks. As much as 20 percent of all internet content can be over-blocked by some filters, including valuable nonsexual material. Reports by the (PDF), , and the (PDF) have all found that filters improperly block important web sites about health, sex education, civil rights, and politics. A (PDF) of three software filtering programs even found substantial over-blocking of information in resource databases and online catalogs of available books. Parents can decide that price is worth paying but it is another thing altogether for the government to make that decision for all of us.
The 老澳门开奖结果 is currently working in several states to prevent censorship of online information due to the use of overbroad internet filters. For more detail on 老澳门开奖结果 cases about internet filters, see and .