Should public universities filter internet pornography?

Should public universities filter internet pornography?

Since the Supreme Court decided to implement the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), the idea of internet filtering has been a frequent procedure in the most of the public libraries. The act has become a primary strategy that is used in order to manage the content that young people are able to access in the libraries. However, debates have raised over the CIPA filtering mandate as many public libraries receiving e-rate funds have chosen to comply with rule. According to researchers, implementation of this filter software as required by CIPA is both helping and a negative affecting decision.

The Act is doing a great job in protecting children from exposure to unnecessary and shaming sexual images and acts. A society full of adults who care about what affects their kids psychologically and what is really capable of destroying them morally is a responsible and caring society. Their being rules that govern what children in a country are exposed to ensure that we don’t give a free pass to our children’s moral deterioration and that we are extremely concerning with molding our young people to individuals who are cautions about their morals. Therefore in this case the filters are justified.

If public libraries filter internet pornography they give assurance to parents on their children’s internet use safety. There is no parent who is okay with their kids being able to see explicit images at a young age. And so if a parent is assured that the library their children go to is safe enough to deny access to irrelevant content they will be more willing to let them study as they want or do their research without restrictions. So we can that public libraries filtering is a nice decision when it comes to assuring parents that their kids are safe in the public internet content access.

Filtering internet pornography reduces the distractions one is going to get involved in while using the internet. The internet has become the number one concentration enemy and we all find ourselves diverting to do something else in the internet other than what we went there to do in the first place. So with blocking some access is going to lessen what draws aback then what could be better than that. Not having access to things like pornography in the public library means that the students who went there to study will not get their minds blown away by watching pornography.

On the other side, filtering of internet pornography in public libraries has raised some concerns. The filters software do not only block the pornography websites about it also includes blocking of sites with valuable information to the young people. Like denying access to content concerning the use of tobacco, information about art galleries, lesbian debates in the internet and even important constitutional information. Denying of students to read about political essential viewpoints and controversial ideas from them is in no way a good act. Therefore this CIPA mandate is contributing to over-filtering of websites that is like deny of right to information.

Filters are blocking even to adults. Someone who is over 18 years of age doesn’t need any protection because at that time someone is old enough to be responsible of what they let occupy their minds. The public libraries can’t seem to unblock or disable the filters for adults on time and this means that even adults are facing the same fate of restrictions to websites with important content to them. This can only increase legal complaints and later cause country wide chaos where people need their right and freedom to information access restored.

Filtering in public libraries has caused increase in tiring monitoring. The blocking is so inconsistent because at some point the librarians or patrons has to authorize disabling of the filters to other users like the adults and if they have to monitor the whole process and make sure that the filter is restored back after the use of that specific person. And we can all imagine how tiring that whole process can be. The advancement of technology is supposed to assure us the decrease of labour but not lead its increase. So CIPA rules are taking us to where we all started it from.

In conclusion, I think the question of filtering has become more about the federal funds that moral protection. Most of the public libraries are complying with the CIPA rule in order to get the federal government internet access discounts and not to help curb young learners from having the access to internet pornography in their libraries. So how does this really help our society ethically if our motives are firstly driven by greediness other than the right intentions? The actions should be built on the right justifications morally for us to be so harsh on their implementations. Secondly, the implements should balance the effects that come with the internet filtering in order to ensure that there are no rights that are left unsatisfied.