The American Civil Liberties Union, in partnership with Yale Law School, has launched a campaign called “Don’t Filter Me” to assess censorship of web content in public high schools. The campaign asks students to check to see if web content geared toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities – a frequent target of censorship in schools – is blocked by their schools’ web browsers. Students can report instances of censorship to the ACLU LGBT Project.
Programs that block all LGBT content violate First Amendment rights to free speech, as well as the Equal Access Act, which requires equal access to school resources for all extracurricular clubs, including gay-straight alliances and LGBT support groups.
The ACLU has released a video showing students how to test whether or not their school is illegally filtering content, and provides instructions for reporting censorship. The video can be seen here: www.aclu.org/lgbt-rights/dont-filter-me
