Inside America’s School Internet Censorship Machine

Around dinner time one night in July, a student in Albuquerque, New Mexico, googled “suicide prevention hotline.” They were automatically blocked. The student tried again, using their Albuquerque Public Schools district–issued laptop to search for "contact methods for suicide." Blocked. They were turned away again a few hours later when attempting to access a webpage on the federally-funded Suicide Prevention Resource Center. More than a dozen times that night, the student tried to access online mental health resources, and the district's web filter blocked their requests for help every time.

In the following weeks, students and staff across Albuquerque tried and failed to reach crisis mental health resources on district computers. An eighth grader googled “suicide hotline” on their take-home laptop, a ninth grader looked up “suicide hotline number,” a high school counselor googled “who is a mandated reporter for suicide in New Mexico,” and another counselor at an elementary school tried to download a PDF of the district’s suicide prevention protocol. Blocked, blocked, blocked—all in a state with among the highest suicide rates in the US.

Thanks in large part to a two-decade-old federal anti-porn law, school districts across the US restrict what students see online using a patchwork of commercial web filters that block vast and often random swathes of the internet. Companies like GoGuardian and Blocksi—the two filters used in Albuquerque—govern students’ internet use in thousands of US school districts. As the national debate over school censorship focuses on controversial book-banning laws, a WIRED investigation reveals how these automated web filters can perpetuate dangerous censorship on an even greater scale.

WIRED requested internet censorship records from 17 public school districts around the US, painting a picture of the widespread digital censorship taking place across the country. Our investigation focuses on Albuquerque Public Schools (APS), one of the largest school districts in the US, which provided the most complete look at its web-filtering systems. APS shared 36 gigabytes of district network logs covering January 2022 to August 21, 2023, offering an unprecedented look at the kinds of content blocked by US schools on a daily basis. Our analysis of more than 117 million censorship records confirms what students and civil rights advocates have long warned: Web filters are preventing kids from finding critical information about their health, identity, and the subjects they’re studying in class.

“It’s just like another form of oppression,” Brooklynn Chavez, a senior at La Cueva High School in northeast Albuquerque, says of the district’s filters. “It’s like an awful kind of feeling.”

It’s a problem that’s not going away. This summer, APS installed Blocksi web filters on all student and staff devices. According to our analysis and interviews with APS staff, the results seemed to be disastrous. During the nearly three months APS used the Blocksi filter, it blocked more than a million network requests a day, on average, including searches for mental and physical health services; words related to LGBTQ+, Black, and Hispanic communities; websites for local youth groups; thousands of student searches for harmless information; and tens of thousands of news articles.

“It will basically shut down your internet,” Shellmarie Harris, director of educational technology at APS, says of Blocksi’s keyword filtering technology. “Kids, teachers will not be able to get into anything.”

APS, which installed Blocksi in May, stopped using the filter on most of its devices in August due to its restrictiveness, Harris says, and returned to the GoGuardian filter it used before the switch. Our investigation raises questions about the appropriateness and implementation of GoGuardian's filter as well.

In May, before the district switched to Blocksi, the GoGuardian filter blocked an eighth grader from searching for “suicide prevention.” It prevented a third grader from searching the word “latina” and a sixth grader from searching “black man.” When an 11th grader googled “Obergefell v. Hodges ruling,” instead of a list of websites with information about the landmark United States Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, the student saw a gray screen with APS’s logo and the message: “Restricted. This website has been blocked by your administrator.”

It is difficult to determine who exactly is responsible for a given content restriction. While APS administrators set the network policy for the entire district, individual teachers can also choose what to filter with GoGuardian—including whether to turn off the internet entirely for a particular student or class during a lesson, according to Harris. Outside of school hours, parents can also use the Blocksi and GoGuardian parent apps that APS provides to set their own restrictions on their kids’ school-issued devices.

Blocksi did not respond to multiple requests for comment or answer detailed questions about censorship of APS web activity.

Jeff Gordon, director of public relations for GoGuardian, tells WIRED, “GoGuardian regularly evaluates our website categorization to ensure, to the best of our ability, that legitimate educational sites are accessible to students by default.” He said more than 7,600 school districts use the company’s web filter and referred all questions about whether the blocked activity in Albuquerque was appropriately censored to the district.

Sithara Subramanian, an 11th grader at La Cueva High School, says she began to run into her school’s GoGuardian filter on a regular basis around the time remote learning ended. “It got kind of intense when we went back to school, like educational websites were being blocked,” Subramanian says. The censorship has been particularly frustrating for her biology and anatomy studies. “It felt like they were trying to restrict our education rather than enhance it.”

“My son says the filters make the internet useless,” Sarah Hooten, the mother of Henry, a 13-year-old former APS student, tells WIRED. Henry says that he couldn’t use YouTube to look up information for a report he was assigned about rainforests. “I know it’s partly to do with blocking kids from doing what they aren’t supposed to be doing,” Henry says. “But it’s also just the school not understanding what they are blocking.”