LOS ANGELES — A late-2021 U.K. survey of top parental control apps on Google Play found that practically all of them were blocking LGBTQ and sex-education sites as “adult content.”
Ninety-two percent of the 12 leading parental control apps surveyed by the U.K.-based Top10VPN review site effectively “blocked sites of leading LGBTQ organizations, including Stonewall, The Trevor Project and LGBT+ Switchboard,” Forbes magazine’s Jamie Wareham reported.
The apps that blocked the most LGBTQ content, according to the survey, were ESET Parental Control and MMGuardian, which blocked “trusted U.K. charities LGBT Foundation, Mermaids, Stonewall and Switchboard LGBT+.”
“Strikingly, despite blocking many LGBTQ sites, the apps had a 90% failure rate for specifically filtering out websites centered around conspiracy theories or misinformation, such as InfoWars,” Wareham wrote. “They also had a 73% failure rate for blocking extreme ideological content, such as the ‘r/TheRedPill’ subreddit and the racist far-right British National Party's website.”
“Twenty percent of the apps also wrongly blocked educational content on subjects from government-recommended websites such as Planned Parenthood and NHS Sexual Health,” the article revealed.
The Lucrative Business of 'Filtering'
Siyang Wei, policy coordinator at LGBT Foundation, told Forbes that “the over-censorship of LGBTQ+ content is a well-documented feature of private tech companies' attempts to filter 'safe' content, whether this is done by parental control apps or by platforms themselves. This not only discriminates against LGBTQ+ content, but prevents young people from accessing information, services and communities that could be vital to their wellbeing.”
"As it stands, the [U.K. government's proposed] Online Safety Bill would further incentivize this kind of discriminatory over-censorship, and codify it into law," Wei added. "These findings add to the mountain of evidence suggesting that without a clear definition of 'harm' and written safeguards developed in consultation with representative organizations and communities, the Bill risks promoting rather than preventing harm to marginalized people.”
In the U.S., War on Porn crusaders have been campaigning for the default activation of parental control apps — known as “porn filters” — on every device that can access the internet. A Utah law instituting such a requirement passed last year, with an unusual amendment specifying that it would go into effect if a number of other states passed similar laws. A Mormon legislator in Arizona recently introduced a copycat bill.
“Porn Filters” are sometimes developed by overtly faith-based businesses, with the result that mandatory filtering laws pushed by religiously-inspired politicians end up generating lucrative government and private contracts for fellow anti-porn crusaders.
