In the wake of high-profile book bans in schools and public libraries across the country, and amid politically-charged debates over LGBTQ+ rights and abortion access, The Markup sought to understand the scope and impact of less-examined “digital book bans,” in which internet access for K-12 students is censored, but receives significantly less attention.
A team of Markup journalists spent months requesting records from school districts, challenging records denials, traveling to talk to students, writing software to test school district blocking patterns, analyzing censorship records, and interviewing students, teachers, attorneys, constitutional law scholars, and advocates.
We anchored our reporting in the experiences of students who are routinely censored, so we could investigate why. To reach them, reporter Tara García Mathewson traveled to the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, to talk to students and families in the Rockwood School District, which blocked LGBTQ+ resources, abortion information, Wikipedia, YouTube, social networking, search sites and more, representing one of the most aggressive filtering systems of any district examined by The Markup. She spent hours doing phone and Zoom interviews with students in Texas, California, Michigan, and New York to round out her understanding of the filters’ harms.
The team revealed how web filters across 16 school districts in 11 states thwarted basic research and web browsing, forcing students to resort to workarounds like using personal cellphones, and relegating students with no other internet access to an inferior educational experience. It also showed inequities across districts, where some students were blocked from health and safety resources, including suicide prevention resources for LGBTQ+ teens, abortion information, and sex education, that other districts made available.
The investigation also raised questions over whether districts have improperly exceeded the regulations that mandate internet filtering. To qualify for federal internet subsidies, school districts must keep students from seeing obscene and harmful images over their schools’ networks. But experts said some blocking the team identified—for example, of supportive LGBTQ+ sites, while anti-LGBTQ+ sites are allowed—crossed the line into unconstitutional discrimination. Other censorship, like blanket blocks against all social media sites, ran afoul of guidance from federal regulators. The vast majority of blocks the team reviewed were not required by federal rules.
The Markup presented its findings to readers through five distinct articles: A main story with an interactive chart letting readers explore the blocked websites, a gallery showcasing the experiences of five individual students with online censorship, an interactive survey to let students test and report the extent of blocking at their schools, a detailed explanation of the team’s reporting methodology, and a guide to help high school students obtain public records showing blocked websites. A team of engineers and designers created eye-catching visuals, including animated graphics and stylized pullquotes.
The focus on information available at public school libraries is often on physical books. This deeply sourced and dogged reporting digs into the topic of online information available in public schools across the U.S. The main article provides an explanation in plain language of what’s happening in school libraries and internet access. It include the harms, or potential harms, that that blocked information might have on students in the short-term for a class assignment, and longer term for how they might come to feel or believe about themselves or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community as an example. This investigation uses technology, FOIA and crowdsourcing to discover a content censorship criteria and presents it in a clear and beautiful way. This team also explains its behind-the- scenes effort so everyone can learn, or get inspired by their cases, to amplify potential impact.
