Porn-Blocking Software Impedes Access to Health Info

The most restrictive settings on pornography-blocking software shut out the highest proportion of health sites without delivering substantially higher gains in pornography restriction, researchers have found.

The findings are significant because the Internet has become an important tool for finding health information, especially among adolescents. There is concern that blocking software cannot perfectly discriminate between pornographic and non-pornographic sites, especially those containing information relating to sexuality.

In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School looked at the effect of pornography-blocking software used in schools and libraries.

They found that blocking settings had a greater effect than the choice of blocking product. At the least restrictive settings the software products blocked 87% of pornography and 1.4% of health information. At a moderate setting the blocking rate was 90% for pornography and 5% for health information and at a high setting pornography blocking rose a fraction to 91% but health information blocking increased substantially to 24%.

Blocking rates rose substantially for health information relating to sexuality. Even at the least restrictive settings, 10% of health sites found using search terms relating to sexuality, such as “safe sex” and “condoms”, and homosexuality were blocked.