Censorship Part 2: Filtering
In the case of Mainstream Loudoun v. Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library, the core issue is whether a public library has the right to restrict access to the Internet using filters or other methods. The Loudoun County Library installed filters on their Internet accessible computers, and it was found to be a First Amendment violation based on several factors: the library's justification for the blocking policy, the sites blocked by the filter, and the amount control the library had over the filtered sites. The case was brought against the library by a group of people and organizations whose sites were wrongfully blocked by the filter installed on the Loudoun County Library's computers.
One major issue in the case was the nature of the Internet, which is still a new technology with which many are unfamiliar. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Internet and not a lot of agreement in how it should be viewed or addressed. The plaintiff in the Loudoun case compared the Internet to a set of encyclopedias, and filtering the Internet to blacking out inappropriate entries in the encyclopedia volumes. The defendant countered with an analogy of their own: the Internet as an Interlibrary Loan system in which restricting Internet access is merely not acquiring certain materials, not censoring them as the plaintiffs would claim. The Judge in this case found that the reality of the Internet made the encyclopedia comparison the more viable analogy because of the nature of the Internet (i.e. each "item" is not purchased individually; it is an "all or nothing" situation). The American Library Association agrees with the judge about the nature of the Internet:
Selecting the World Wide Web for the library means selecting the entire resource, just as selecting Time means selecting the entire magazine. A library cannot select Time and then decide to redact or rip out the pages constituting the "American Scene" feature or the "Washington Diary." That would be censorship. (2000)
Since many people are not as computer literate or Internet savvy as most librarians, it falls to the information professionals in the libraries where filtering becomes an issue to educate library users in the nature and structure as well as the Internet-use policy of the library. This kind of instruction will not only be a valuable service to the community, but it may quell the controversies regarding filtering that may have otherwise erupted. Users who are more comfortable with the Internet and its contents will be more likely to contribute meaningfully to a discussion on filtering in the library because they will be able to speak with experience and without the fear of the unknown hanging over them.
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