The Urgent Need for Internet Censorship Essay

Edward Said, literary critic, has described exile as something “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience,” and as something that can be “potent, even enriching.” In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne experiences an exile after being marked as an adulteress which intrigues the reader because of its ability to change her substantially throughout the novel. Hester’s exile is intriguing because she often is near other people, but she remains on the outskirts of the town, and of society. Through the years, this exile leads to Hester’s complete transformation proves her incredible strength, even when faced with such tragedy.

    Ashcroft vs. ACLU, 00-1293, deals with a challenge to the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which Congress passed in 1998. The law, which is the subject of this essay, attempts to protect minors from exposure to Internet pornography by requiring that commercial adult websites containing "indecent" material that is "harmful to minors" use age-verification mechanisms such as credit cards or adult identification numbers.(Child)

“This legislation grew out of the fact that by 1998 roughly ten million American children had access to the Internet, and at the same time, studies indicated that children were unable to understand the potential effect of revealing their personal information online and parent failed to monitor their children’s use of the Internet.” (Koby)

In the article “The Internet: A Clear and Present Danger?” written by Cathleen Cleaver presents a straightforward claim of the need for government laws to administer what is being displayed on the internet. The article begins with a few realistic examples of what is possible to occur to internet users when someone obtains a free entry to their confidential information in their computers. The point she addresses mostly throughout the article is how dangerous it is for children. The example she uses to demonstrate the danger it may have on children is that a pedophile could chat with your child, disguising as a “twelve-year-old.” They may establish an “online relationship” and arrange to meet someday after school, with the intention of molesting

and schoolmasters as mere drones…” (Irving 2096). Because of this, Ichabod can, at times, be viewed as a mother-surrogate. His profession is domestic; he educates children (albeit for tender), and during his free time, “found favor in the eyes of the mothers, by petting the children […] and he would sit with a child on one knee and rock a cradle with his foot for hours” (2096). Ichabod’s connection with domestic life, children and “the hearth”, strongly suggest his identity as Irving’s feminized male, or genteel model.

The internet became a very popular and huge way of getting millions of different kinds of materials and information for everyday use in the later 80's early 90's. It became easy for anyone to access millions of different kinds of materials ninety nine percent of which is decent according to our governments standards and one or less percent which is considered to be material the is indecent or harmful to minors.(ABC) These facts maybe deceiving however because there are millions of internet sites so the internet may only be one percent indecent but that means there are thousands upon thousands of sites that are indecent.(ABC) The biggest question is how can we protect our children from these indecent sites? The government believed that

Tears begin to fall down a child’s face. Her body goes into shock out of fear. Her mother warned her about watching inappropriate content, and there it was, right on her computer screen. This could not have happened though. All she was doing was casually browsing the internet before a pop-up appeared. Although it may seem hard to believe, the major cause of events such as this is the lack of censorship on the internet. Internet censorship relates to the removal of offensive, inappropriate, or controversial content published online. The current problem with the internet is that there are few restrictions on what can be published or viewed. Several sites on the internet only offer a warning about inappropriate content that can easily be

One major flaw of the CDA is that it uses "community standards" to judge what is considered legal on the Internet. Unlike most forms of media, the Internet has no defined community; it is a decentralized, ungoverned body that is accessible to every person with a computer and a telephone line in the world. If there are "community standards," to which community do they belong? Do they belong to the communities of the Netherlands where prostitution and marijuana are legal, or to the communities of Bible-belt American, where family values are top priorities? The CDA went beyond its jurisdiction by claiming that "community standards" was the device with which to measure indecency. The standards of conservative lawmakers should not be the standards that gauge the appropriateness of the Internet, and these lawmakers are wrong to assume that their morals are mirrored in "community standards" throughout America.

Have you ever seen the television show on NBC Dateline To Catch a Predator? Well if you haven’t, Chris Hansen, the host of the show, has a set up to catch predators online who are trying to meet younger children and arrest predators for trying to seduce young children. This is just one case of why parents are becoming more worried for their children to be using the Internet. Parents strive to find ways to keep their children safe while using the Internet and there are several ways you can do that right at home by protecting your children, having the computer in a high traffic place, and blocking websites.

Athletes suit up and perform on a daily and weekly basis. Week in and week out, athletes draw in thousands and thousands of fans to speculate the flashy performance. They give the best effort, putting themselves at risk, doing anything possible to insure a victory. Players spend hours of hard work and dedication to perform the best they can. Through the dedication and performance of these athletes, speculations have aroused that athletes should begin to receive pay. Some people believe that collegiate athletes should be paid due to their performance as professional sport athletes do. The idea may sound fruitful, but it also poses many problems. I believe that collegiate athletes should not be paid due to the scholarships available, the yearly college budget, and the decreases in interest in grades.

The Internet has incurred a tremendous amount of growth and opportunity for the country as well as the world; elevating communication, information, and commerce to a new level. With all this unprecedented innovation, the Internet has also brought controversy that challenges the very foundation of rights that countries like the United States were founded on. With countless websites containing unregulated and objectively offensive content, and the public having an ease of access to this content will result in severe damages to the development of the youth if no censorship is put in place for them to view this content. Additionally, markets are being exploited by piracy which has resulted in billions of dollars being lost by the domestic economy

While elementary and middle schools have obvious needs for restrictions, Internet access at the high school level isn't as black and white. High school students are sensitive to their given rights, yet are officially minors under the law; teenagers are ever nearing adulthood, but are sometimes viewed as immature. So, high school administrators are challenged with designing an Internet policy that meets the educational needs of the students and the moral demands of society. Although software is being designed to "censor" the content of the Internet, student trust and responsibility might be a more reasonable route.

The Internet is a global network of vast information. With a few clicks, an individual can have access to up to 200 million web-sites filled with educational and recreational information. The Internet is not regulated in anyway (Carnegie Library 1). It is accessible throughout the entire world from the North to the South, to the early morning sunrise and dark sunsets. Different ethnicity and backgrounds come together linked upon this network resembling a connection of one body in unity. Sadly, issues arise creating concern for users, focusing particularly on minors. Pornography is one of the inappropriate materials on the Internet for minors. This material is harmful to young impressionable minds. Pornography is tearing and

Censorship is not limited to repressive regimes or network television. Weather we know it or not censorship is happening all the time throughout the day. We censor ourselves, we listen to censored music and as students we see the internet being heavily censored in school. The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) was signed into law in 2000; the law requires any public schools or library to filter any inappropriate content from the computers being used by minors. Since the law has been put in place, schools across America have installed programs that use keywords to designate certain types of websites off-limits to students while using the schools internet server. The problem with these filtering programs is that they block many sites that are not pornographic or obscene in nature, Instead they tend to block sites dealing with controversial but not inappropriate content. Although the CIPA was created to protect, it has been used as a soft form of censorship in schools.

“While most teenagers (60 percent) spend on average 20 hours per week in front of television and computer screens, a third spend closer to 40 hours per week, and about 7 percent are exposed to more than 50 hours of 'screen-time' per week”(Many Teens Spend). Many parents agree that they would rather not have their children view indecencies on the Internet and television, and the government should control the obscenities on the Internet. Others believe that it is the parent’s responsibility to control and censor what their children are watching on the Internet and television.