Report: Internet Filters Don’t Keep Minors Away from Porn

Internet filters and parental locks fail to keep minors away from pornography, according to a report.

The discovery was made by Oxford Internet Institute researchers Victoria Nash and Andrew Przybylski, who researched “adolescent exposure to online sexual material,” and revealed their results in a paper.

“It’s important to consider the efficacy of Internet filtering… Internet filtering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily ‘underblock’ due to the constant development of new ways of sharing content,” declared Nash. “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.”

“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,” the paper proclaimed. “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.”

The paper continued to express that because the findings over the years have been “decidedly mixed,” evidence claiming internet filters stop young people from accessing pornography is “currently weak.”