Re: USA Today poll on Library Internet Filtering (fwd)

On 4/29/98, Craig A. Summerhill <craig[_at_]cni.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Bob Stock <bstock[_at_]ucla.edu> wrote:
> >
> > As of April 28, at 8:27 p.m. ET, the voting is as follows:
> >
> > 60.9% no filtering
> > 13.7% filtering for kids' computers
> > 22.2% filtering for all computers
> > 3.1% no Internet access at all
>
> And what am I to infer from this if the average age of participants in
> the poll is 13 years of age? Anybody who believes that a voluntary poll
> done on a Web site in the Internet is even marginally representative of
> a random sampling of the population at large is naive.

Regardless of how foolish the poll is, it will influence some legislators. Free speech is a right, but it is not a right that cannot be lost if nobody cares to defend it. Libraries are coming under increasingly broad public pressure to censor their readers. I hope CNI members do take this threat seriously.

Susan Harris
<susan.harris[_at_]sonoma.edu> Received on Wed Apr 29 1998 - 20:23:06 GMT