A student from Virginia emailed this image to the ACLU a few months ago:
He saw the image when he tried to visit the website for the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)
from a computer at his school. The stop sign was bad enough it, but it
was also paired with a veiled threat, implied by the school’s ominous
warning, “Your Internet usage is monitored and logged.”
Some schools have configured their web-filtering software to illegally censor LGBT-related websites such as the GSA Network and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. At
the same time that they block access to websites for positive LGBT
rights organizations, those schools still allow access to anti-LGBT
sites that condemn LGBT people or urge us to try to change our sexual
orientation. This is called viewpoint discrimination, and it’s illegal.
The
ACLU has teamed up with Yale Law School to launch a campaign called
“Don’t Filter Me” to assess censorship of web content in public high
schools. The campaign asks students to check to see if web content
geared toward the LGBT communities is blocked by their schools’ web
browsers. Students can report instances of censorship to the ACLU LGBT
Project.
