Does Filtering Stop the Flow of Valuable Information? A Case Study of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) in South Dakota‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION In the mid-eighties, United States Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, "called for opposition to violent and pornographic media due to the influence of these stimuli upon the fantasy life and the real life 'action' of millions of vulnerable adults and children." (1) He argued that this media was a "felony against the human spirit" and "atrocities of despair." (2) Since that time, filtering has become the great hope of those troubled by all the offensive and unwanted material on the Internet. (3) It offers not only a way to process the unfathomable amounts of information on the Web, (4) but also a way for parents to shield children from offensive material. (5) Indeed, given the flood of information in the media today, and the desire of parents to exclude harmful media material from their children's consumption, free speech may come to mean the freedom to filter. (6) The effect of Internet filtering on free speech concerns formed the focus of the study reported in this article.