ASSESSING FOR BIAS IN AOL'S INTERNET-FILTERING SOFTWARE FOR KIDS

SEARCHING FOR WEBSITES ON
POLITICAL PARTIES AND CANDIDATES

THE TEST FOR BIAS IN ACCESS TO POLITICAL PARTIES AND CANDIDATES: To assess for bias in the AOL's "age-appropriate" internet-filtering software, regarding which websites it blocks and to which websites it allows access, I activated the parental controls for one of my screen names. The age level I chose was "kids" (the level recommended for 6 to 12 years of age).

Only 1 out of 13 presidential candidates (Natural Law Party) and 4 out of 11 political parties were NOT blocked. Even taking into consideration AOL's (incorrect) explanations for their criteria for blocking sites, there is no discernible reason why access would be allowed to the Republican Party and Constitutional Party, for instance, and not to the Democratic Party. I can see no other logical reason--and, believe me, I have spent days trying to find one--but that AOL's criteria is in some way biased against Democratic/liberal websites.

The political parties NOT blocked were the Republican Party, Natural Law Party, the Libertarian Party, and the ultra-radical-right Constitution Party (formerly the U.S. Taxpayer's Party). I believe this also shows a conservative-website preference in AOL's internet-filtering software program.

I reviewed every one of the political sites (where the websites were active) and I could see no obvious difference (as far as "age-appropriate" content) between the sites that were allowed access and the ones that were not. It did not have to do with any certain words used; for instance, "abortion" and "gay" and "lesbian" were used on many sites I encountered in my search, including political websites and many Christian websites. It did not have to do with the negativity of the websites (both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee have some negative content on their sites, in about equal amounts). Then, to assess for any possible political bias, with AOL's "age-appropriate" internet-filtering software activated ("kids" level, ages 6 to 12 years), I attempted to access Presidential Election 2000 candidates, political parties, and voter information sites. I did this by manually typing in the political party's website address in the web browser window (since some of the political parties did not come up in the AOL search engine results; even when, for example, I searched specifically for a certain political party, as I did for "Democratic Party" and "Democratic National Committee"), as well as by clicking on links returned by the search engine, and links in websites returned by the search engine.

Rest of the article:

www.politicalamazon.com...

i know as well that this kind of filtering, was done by shops-online, checking if u had cookies from the competence shops or u have been in another kind of online store, and depending on that, they would have change the prices for you while you try to buy something, not everybody paid the same amount of money for the same object.

And i�ve seen it with my eyes, specially with book-stores...
Internet will be useful, but is also becoming really dangerous for a lot of things, is not just a communication system, but biased controlled system (not all i know that the net is HUGE but believe me they have enough agencys and serves and spies...)

Anyway the article is amazing....