Dumb Internet Filters Risk Making UK Libraries Less Useful

The growing use of controversial Internet filters (censorship) in the United Kingdom is nothing new and many Libraries have implemented them, but a new study suggests that this approach could be damaging public access to the very information that libraries are supposed to provide.

Admittedly Libraries have a difficult balancing act to perform. On the one hand they need to provide freedom of access to information, which must be upheld by ethical and professional standards. But on the other hand librarians also have a duty to protect their most vulnerable users (e.g. children), which can sometimes create an ethical dilemma.

A new dataset compiled by the Radical Librarians Collective (here), which represents a group of librarians that aim to uphold the best aspects of their profession, has pooled together feedback from 200 local authorities on the extent of Internet filtering in their libraries.

The data reveals that many libraries have a top-down approach to content filtering, which often imposes wide blocks against various different content categories and rarely offers a separate profile for children or a process for accessing blocked content. In all cases the usual categories, such as porn, gambling and child abuse, are blocked and often anything related to sex, drugs, abortion and racism etc. can also be filtered out by a large number of libraries.

Example – Aberdeen City (Public Libraries)

Filtering Type: Websense

Annual Cost: £48,369

Blocked Categories: Nudity, sex, lingerie and swimsuit, adult content, marijuana, abused drugs, dynamic DNS, suspicious content, elevated exposure, emerging exploits, illegal or questionable, intolerance, militancy and extremist, parked domains, security, tasteless, violence, weapons.

Separate Filtering Profile for Children: Yes

Blocked Categories for Children: Abortion prolife, abortion prochoice, nudity, sex, lingerie and swimsuit, adult content, sex education, bandwidth, prescribed medications, marijuana, abused drugs, dynamic DNS, extended protection, gambling, games, illegal or questionable, web chat, organizational email, text and media messaging, general email, intolerance, militancy and extremist, parked domains, advertisements, application and software downloads, paytosurf, online brokerage and trading, instant messaging, security, facebook, linkedin, twitter, social web various, youtube, alcohol and tobacco, personals and dating, gay or lesbian or bisexual interest, social networking, blogs and personal sites, tasteless, violence, weapons.

The problem of course occurs when you attempt to block a topic like racism, weapons or sex, which takes on a completely different meaning in the educational environment of a library where literature may be neither good nor bad and often provides for a historical context. Learning about the history of racism or investigating abortion is a lot harder when such content is completely restricted.

We were also a bit perplexed to see vague or nonsensical categories like “security“, “parked domains“, “dynamic DNS” and simply “suspicious content” cropping up so often and that is on the adults-only profile. Indeed we found it kind of comical that in the Aberdeen City example they had “adult content” blocked via the adult profile, especially as this tends to imply a much wider array of content than porn.

Lauren Smith, a PhD candidate and researcher who contributed to the project, told The Register that some of the blocks (e.g. abortion) are probably “completely inadvertent” and were most likely included as a “sub-category of sexual content“, which would have been implemented by the council’s IT department and not assessed by the library staff themselves.

Smith also highlighted an example of how one researcher was investigating Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) but found themselves restricted because access to related content had been blocked. Similarly back in 2013 we reported on an example of how the British Library had blocked access to an online version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet because the text contained “violent content” (here).

Another problem is that very few people complain about such blocks or ask for them to be lifted, perhaps because most do not know whether such blocks could be lifted upon request or they’re simply uncomfortable with asking a member of staff about the issue (e.g. particularly when researching a very sensitive topic). In any case only a tiny number of libraries actually have a policy in place for unblocking (e.g. York, Anglesey, Derby etc.).

Not that the Government will care about such things, to them filtering is an easy fix and the question of whether or not it often goes too far is not one that they seem to have put serious thought towards.