argument essay

Argument Essay Sample

Educators, IT specialists and other concerned parties claimed that the filtering technology can protect children from accessing offensive online material such as pornographic and violent material.
Do you agree? If not, Support your argument with evidence and suggest the solutions.

In the contemporary society, the Internet plays an increasing crucial role in every field of society. The reason is that the ubiquitous Internet provides a considerable amount of information, entertainment and communication for people. However, a major issue has been intense controversy about the Internet that is flooded into enormous objectionable information such as bad language, sexual explicitness and violent content, which jeopardizes seriously the children physical and mental development. Therefore, some educators, IT specialists and other concerned parties claim that the adoption of filtering technology could provides the optimal protection The Essay is provided by UK Assignment http://www.ukassignment.org
for children from accessing offensive online materials; however, the possibility of negative effects should be examined. The aim of this essay is to discuss validity and feasibility of internet filtering. This will be supported from three aspects: the possibility of failure to filter objectionable information, the inflexibility for school as well as parents owing to unapparent filtering rule and the education of children in media literacy could be better solution. 

According to Di Nome, the filtering system is described as adopting technological measure to scan and filter internet contents for pornography, hate speech, violence and other materials deemed inappropriate（cited in Gehman et al, 2003）. In terms of the different uses of the filtering system, it can be categorized as the local software on users’ computers, or the censorship list in ISPs service terminal. Search engines even can contain filtering system to design children-orientated version to hinder illegal information. Nevertheless, no matter which types of the filtering system, they are generally based on URL filtering and keyword filtering (Flood & Hamilton 2003).

Therefore, one extensive criticism for filtering systems has been focused on its URL-based filtering and keyword-based filtering resulting in failure filter and incorrect blocking. The major drawback for keyword-based filters is argued that it over blocks a large amount of the benign information. Spear (1999) claims “the keyword filters are most unsophisticated filtering devices”. This methodology only compares the text of web pages to a list of offending words or phrases and then removes the words from the page or blocks the objectionable pages. Consequently, some legitimate sites will be blocked due to the occurrence of filter-sensitive words or phrases. For instance, based-keyword strategy filter the word “sex” to prevents enormous pornographic sites, whereas at the same time it also blocks sites providing beneficial information about musical sextets, Essex, safer sex, sexual orientation, including the web site of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network… (Rosenberg, 2001). Furthermore, any sites on the internet which related to free speech issues are very like to be restricted because they will of necessity contain deemed-objectionable words. An example offered by Rosenberg is that the American Civil Liberties Union has been blocked by many filtering software (Rosenberg, 2001).
URL-based filtering is deemed more accurate technology than keyword-based filtering in many situations. As it uses automatic web crawlers to search for pages with “suspicious” content, human reviewers then review each page and set blocked websites (Rosenberg, 2001). However, one remarkable problem is pointed out by Spear (1999); he comments that URL-based filtering is a totally based-individual standpoint filter. Designers determine the type of sites that could be block in the light of their own subject perspective, majority of who lack a background in library science (Spear, 1999). Moreover, there are tremendous sites on the internet and many pages are updated everyday. The URL-based filtering technology is like to result in under block some offensive contents due to inability of affording real-time protection.

These who support filtering system assert that although filters system could incorrectly block benign contents, it greatly contribute to block large percentages of objectionable web content. They quotes that the American courts adopt internet filtering software as an “equally effective” but “less restrictive alternative” way to keep the internet a safe place for children instead of criminalizing internet content (Cited in Hunter, 2000). However, this claim could be unwarranted. Hunter in his article “Internet Filter Effectiveness: Testing Over and Underinclusive Blocking Decisions of FOUR popular filters” question this proposal and test the four popular filters. He finds out that “filters fail to block objectionable The Essay is provided by UK Assignment http://www.ukassignment.org
content 25 percent of the time, while on the other hand, they improperly block 21 percent of benign contents.” It means that filtering system result in nearly 50% incorrect.
 
The second reason for against filtering systems is that unapparent filtering rule result in schools and parents failure to incorporate internet into children educating. Filtering companies constitute filtering lists and determine blocked contents in lights of their principle. And most companies keep their filtering lists as a commercial secret and refuse to disclose to customers. Though some general criteria filer rules and parameters are provided with schools and parents to select blocking sites, the actual sites are not given. As a consequence, schools and parents hard to change if they found that legal contents are incorrectly filtered by filtering software. An example of schools have failed incorporated internet in schooling is in Santa Ana, California (Pownell D & Bailey G, 2003). Students and employees alike are restricted, not only from obvious sites which contain pornography and hate, but also from sites associated with sports, finance and entertainment.  So when the teachers want to use internet in teaching, the restriction of filtering technology will become a large barrier to improve the educational achievement.