Researchers find that filters don't prevent porn

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: July 14, 2018 at 19:43:54 GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Researchers find that filters don't prevent porn
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]
>
> Researchers find that filters don’t prevent porn
> By John Biggs
> Jul 13 2018
> <https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/researchers-find-that-filters-dont-prevent-porn/>
>
> In a paper entitled Internet Filtering and Adolescent Exposure to Online Sexual Material, Oxford Internet Institute 
> researchers Victoria Nash and Andrew Przybylski found that Internet filters rarely work to keep adolescents away from 
> online porn.
>
> “It’s important to consider the efficacy of Internet filtering,” said Dr, Nash. “Internet filtering tools are 
> expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily ‘underblock’ due to the constant development of new ways of sharing 
> content. Additionally, there are concerns about human rights violations – filtering can lead to ‘overblocking’, where 
> young people are not able to access legitimate health and relationship information.”
>
> This research follows the controversial news that the UK government was exploring a country-wide porn filter, a 
> product that will most likely fail. The UK would join countries around the world who filter the public Internet for 
> religious or political reasons.
>
> The bottom line? Filters are expensive and they don’t work.
>
> Given these substantial costs and limitations, it is noteworthy that there is little consistent evidence that 
> filtering is effective at shielding young people from online sexual material. A pair of studies reporting on data 
> collected in 2005, before the rise of smartphones and tablets, provides tentative evidence that Internet filtering 
> might reduce the relative risk of young people countering sexual material. A more recent study, analyzing data 
> collected a decade after these papers, provided strong evidence that caregivers’ use of Internet filtering 
> technologies did not reduce children’s exposure to a range of aversive online experiences including, but not limited 
> to, encountering sexual content that made them feel uncomfortable.21 Given studies on this topic are few in number 
> and the findings are decidedly mixed, the evidence base supporting the widespread use of Internet filtering is 
> currently weak.
>
> The researchers “found that Internet filtering tools are ineffective and in most cases [and] were an insignificant 
> factor in whether young people had seen explicit sexual content.”
>
> The study’s most interesting finding was that between 17 and 77 households “would need to use Internet filtering 
> tools in order to prevent a single young person from accessing sexual content” and even then a filter “showed no 
> statistically or practically significant protective effects.”
>
> The study looked at 9,352 male and 9,357 female subjects from the EU and the UK and found that almost 50 percent of 
> the subjects had some sort of Internet filter at home. Regardless of the filters installed, subjects still saw 
> approximately the same amount of porn.
>
> “Many caregivers and policy makers consider Internet filters a useful technology for keeping young people safe 
> online. Although this position might make intuitive sense, there is little empirical evidence that Internet filters 
> provide an effective means to limit children’s and adolescents’ exposure to online sexual material. There are 
> nontrivial economic, informational, and human rights costs associated with filtering that need to be balanced against 
> any observed benefits,” wrote the researchers. “Given this, it is critical to know possible benefits can be balanced 
> against their costs. Our studies were conducted to test this proposition, and our findings indicated that filtering 
> does not play a practically significant protective role.”
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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