Examining Religious Bias In Filtering Software

the_rev_matt writes: "eSchool News has a great piece about the religious influence present in filtering software. Not that this will be a surprise to most /. regulars, but the research behind it is interesting. Now if only eSchool News could change their name to something less horrible..."

Re:Abstain or Protection?

[PurpleFloyd]

Note: this is slightly OT, sorry moderators.

So the school which is predominately protestant can use the filtering software to push out mormon, catholic, jewish, and muslim (oh yeah, and gays, and sex education materials, and abortion) sites because they got to choose for themselves?

I am a protestant Christian (ELCA Lutheran, to be precise), and I have no problem with Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, gays, lesbians, sex-ed, abortion, or many other things that more conservative Christians would have a heart attack over. I think the term you are looking for is "conservative Christian".

Also, a private school would be perfectly free to choose whatever filtering it wants -- even if it wants to allow only conservative Christian sites, for example, it is perfectly free to do that. Only public schools are bound by the Constitution. Of course, you are in turn perfectly free to not send your children there.