Study: Internet Content Filters “Not an Effective Intervention”

“Results suggested that caregiver’s use of Internet filtering had inconsistent and practically insignificant links with young people reports of encountering online sexual material,” stated OII researchers Andrew K. Przybylski and Victoria Nash in an article published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. “Our findings underscore the need for randomized controlled trials to determine the extent to which Internet filtering and related technologies support versus thwarts young people online, and if their perceived utility justifies their financial and informational costs.”

Przybylski and Nash asserted that while content filters are widely used, “the efficacy of filters is poorly understood.”

“Despite their wide adoption in the developed world, filters are expensive and imperfect technologies in three key ways,” the researchers wrote. “First, in financial terms, they are costly to develop and maintain, and even if offered free at the point of use, their costs are ultimate borne by the consumer or taxpayer. Second, in practical terms, they present the problem of underblocking, a phenomenon in which new problematic sites, content, and apps may slip through. Finally, in informational terms, filters also present the problem of overblocking, wherein the content is unnecessarily blocked, restricting access to necessary health, cultural, and social information.”

Ultimately, these shortcomings mean filters offer “only imperfect protection, and impose informational costs on children and adolescents seeking legitimate information,” the researchers added.

“Overblocking weighs most heavily on those who lack accessible sources of information offline,” they added. “Research suggests that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning adolescents, for example, are particularly reliant on the Internet for information about health and relationships.”

While Przybylski and Nash did not find that filters provide no protective benefits at all, their research leads them to question whether state-funded filter use in schools is worth the costs – both in terms of the money spent by the UK government and the informational cost to students imposed by over-blocking of content which isn’t remotely “pornographic.”

“Our findings raise the question of whether mandatory state-funded Internet filtering in schools should still be regarded as a cost-effective intervention, while also providing a clear rationale for investigation of other preventative methods, such as age verification tools, or educational strategies to support responsible behavior online and promote resilience,” the researchers wrote.

Przybylski said the researchers were “also interested to find out how many households would need to use filtering technologies in order to stop one adolescent from seeing online pornography.”

“The findings from our preliminary study indicated that somewhere between 17 and 77 households would need to use internet filtering tools in order to prevent a single young person from accessing sexual content,” he added. “Results from our follow-up study showed no statistically or practically significant protective effects for filtering.”

Nash said she hopes the research “leads to a re-think in effectiveness targets for new technologies, before they are rolled out to the population.”

“From a policy perspective, we need to focus on evidence-based interventions to protect children,” Nash said. “While Internet filtering may seem to be an intuitively good solution, it’s disappointing that the evidence does not back that up.”