GoGuardian is an educational company that monitors students’ school accounts. The program is able to have your teachers (through GoGuardian itself) block access to certain websites, control tab usage and your ability to share links, and view your browsing history. This is used in an attempt to keep students on track during school hours. However, this article is about the unfairness of GoGuardian’s filtering.
You may have noticed if visiting YouTube from a school device that you are unable to access certain videos, or the comments are disabled. You also might not be able to view certain websites. This is because of either GoGuardian’s AI filtering, or your teacher manually restricting you from certain websites.
Although teachers blocking Google or allowing a small amount of tabs open is annoying (and in my opinion unnecessary), it isn’t what I want to talk about. I believe GoGuardian’s flagging system is unreasonable and wrong.
YouTube
Before I talk about how GoGuardian filters the web, I want to discuss the way it censors YouTube. It restricts anything that contains restricted content, such as substance use, tragedies, sexual content, mature language, crime, war, politics, and natural disasters. If you look at this list, you might notice some of the topics you learn about in school. These topics are often discussed in a health or history class.
Websites
There have been countless times where GoGuardian had flagged something on a website that had never appeared there. An article titled “What is the multiverse—and is there any evidence it really exists?” by National Geographic had been flagged for having the word “colon”, though the word has never even appeared on the webpage. In other cases, GoGuardian’s filters block access to legitimate information just because of a keyword that was used appropriately on the site. Prairie View A&M University’s webpage about black history also flagged when the site contained information about a black cowboy and writer, Nat Love, whose historical nickname contained a keyword that GoGuardian deemed restricted. The word “fist” was also censored when Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists while standing on the Olympic podium in 1986. If GoGuardian monitored their AI, and fixed how they censor information on websites, situations like this would have never happened.
