The iPhone’s New Parental Controls Block Searches for Sex Ed, Allow Violence and Racism (VICE/ Motherboard)
Read the full article by Samantha Cole at Vice.Motherboard.com
Apple's iOS 12 explicit content filters block sex educational materials, but allows porn subreddits and white supremacist content.
The parental controls in the iPhone’s new iOS 12 are blocking innocuous sexual education content on Safari, while allowing websites like the white supremacist Daily Stormer and searches for bomb-making instructions through its filter.
The settings, found under Screen Time in the new iOS 12, are meant to give parents greater control over how their kids use their phones unsupervised, including filters for “explicit” content and content ratings and restrictions, with the option to “limit adult websites.”
As first reported by sex education platform O.school and tested by Motherboard, the filter blocks longstanding educational sites like Scarleteen and O.school, but allows sites like The Daily Stormer, an extremist neo-Nazi white supremacist platform that publishes articles about how women “secretly want to be raped.” Teen Vogue, meanwhile, is blocked.
“Where does this leave kids? Incredibly vulnerable,” Andrea Barrica, founder of O.school, wrote on the site’s blog about this issue. “Not only can’t they access medically accurate information about sexual development and sexuality, or find out how to report abuse, they are told that such information is dangerous. Meanwhile, it provides them access to the most virulent, inaccurate sex and gender information on the web.”
Barrica also pointed out in her article that what's restricted is sometimes based on how the search is gendered: "how do I jerk off" shows search results, but "what is a vibrator" is blocked.
This is yet another example of sex educators and their content being censored by the tech industry. Social media sites where they do most of their outreach and fundraising, like Facebook, Patreon, and YouTube frequently downrank them in results or suspend them because an algorithm or moderation decision made a decision that they’re too “adult” or sexual.