The Pros And Cons Of Censorship

One of the first attempts at censorship was the Communications Decency Act (CDA). It was determined that this act would be a violation of the first and the fifth amendment. Next came the Children's Online Protection Act, also referred to as CDA II which was also rejected because the first amendment’s “least restrictive means” test was not satisfied. Introduced next was the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which made quite a bit of a difference because it was signed into law in 2000 by President Clinton. This act essentially left the issue to be dealt with by schools, private surrogates and libraries to filter questionable content to minors. This act later became the law in the United States. When it comes to content controls there are a

One of the biggest problems here would be with the unreliabilities of the these programs to block the correct content, and to over-block content that shouldn’t be blocked. Automated controls definitely shouldn’t be handled by the government for reasons previously stated, as this would be a violation to the First Amendment. When it comes to parents and schools, I feel that they should be able to use content controls for the reasons of minimizing the chances of their children/students to view violent, deviant or inappropriate content. There are still some problems with this, because certain sites may accidentally be blocked and this would be detrimental to the child’s freedom of information. When it comes to libraries, it is imperative that they uphold their values freedom of expression and freedom of information. As per the text, “the American Library Association (ALA) is opposed to the installation of filters and endorses the idea of unrestricted Internet access for both adults and minors (Spinello 79).” The use of content filters might inadvertently block relevant information about a number of different things that could be useful to a person in their