ACLU Files First Legal Case of LGBT Filtering Campaign

Education Week:  The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday announced the first lawsuit of its "Don't Filter Me" campaign, which will be filed against Missouri's 4,100-student Camdenton R-III School District for alleged improper Web filtering practices toward educational lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual content.

The ACLU says the district is using a filtering system that is built upon the commercially managed URL Blacklist, which provides lists of sites by category to subscribers who usually then feed the lists to a cloud-based filter system or build their own. The district, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, indicated in the Lake Sun Leader last Friday that it disagreed with the ACLU's position.

"The ACLU said we were using that specific type of software, and we are not," Superintendent Tim Hadfield told the Lake Sun. "Our district technology administration has created a system for the district. We do not specifically filter sites promoting alternative lifestyles. We do specifically block sites that are inappropriate and will continue to do so."

The suit is being filed on behalf of LGBT advocacy sites such as Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, the Matthew Shepard Foundation, Campus Pride, and DignityUSA, which ACLU attorney Joshua A. Block says have been blacked out at district schools because they fall into a "sexuality" category. The category is mistakenly blocked even though it does not pertain to pornographic material, and includes sites that hold educational value, he said. At the same time, he said, the school's filter permits access to sites that oppose LGBT lifestyles.

"We haven't yet detected a single anti-LGBT website that is being blocked by the filter," said Block, who added that the plaintiffs in the suit are only a small sampling of sites that are being blocked. "It's sort of jaw-dropping, when you keep flipping the pages, how many things are blocked by this. With many other schools, including schools that use the same filter, we've been able to have follow-up conversations and solve the problem with them. But this [district] has been very intransigent."

Block said that, through correspondence, the district initially claimed that its filtering system was not based on URL Blacklist, then reversed its position and said the list acted as a framework for the software the district created. The Camdenton district did take action to unblock the four sites that initiated the complaint, including the homepages for Day of Silence, The Trevor Project, the GSA Network, and the Gay, Straight, Lesbian Education Network, Block said, but went no further.

Superintendent Hadfield did tell the Lake Sun that the district would continue to unblock sites based on student requests, provided the content on those sites does not violate district rules.

The ACLU launched its "Don't Filter Me" campaign in February, announcing its aim to defend rights protected by the First Amendment and the federal Equal Access Act. The latter legislation, enacted in 1984, was passed to force public middle and high schools to allow equal access to extracurricular clubs, regardless of political, social, or religious orientation. It was lobbied for by religious groups who sought the right for students to form after-school Bible study clubs, but has since become a legal pillar for school gay-straight alliances.