Last week the Supreme Court of Washington, the state, not the district ruled that it was ok for a library to user filtering software on its public computers.

The problem was that the North Central Regional Library District filtered things that people wanted to look at, like Women & Guns magazine. The challenge was that such filtering is illegal under Washington State free-speech laws.

There is nothing good about internet filtering on library computers, let me get out of the way. Sarah Houghton-Jan did a piece on this topic late last week and she says it well with a ton of data and invective to back it up.

The idea with a case like this is that if he law was successfully challenged, no libraries in Washington State would be allowed to filter, hopefully setting up an awkward conflict with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, a federal law can demand that libraries do (filter).

All three opinions in the case compare the internet to a library collection. For the majority and concurring opinions, the library selects materials, so it should select websites as well. The dissenting justice opines that the library has selected the internet and shouldn’t refuse to circulate certain sites.

The justices aren’t the only ones robbing this train of thought. In Library Journal, Washington State Librarian echoes the same sentiment, saying “public libraries have long enjoyed broad discretion to select materials for their collections, and it makes sense that the same discretion would apply to the vast amount of materials on the Internet”.

Here’s my problem: the conversation here is about libraries as repositories of information, and their mythical role as gatekeepers to same, and it doesn’t serve us at all. I see a parallel here with OCLC’s 2008 study, From Awareness to Funding, that says “transformation, not information drives financial support”. In both cases, framing the library as only a provider of content or information hinders our ability to help our communities thrive.

Let’s pretend the problem is only about people looking at pornography on library computers. Porn is bad, right, and kids can’t have it, they’re too young. It’s misogynist too, so long as we’re taking the moral high ground, because pornography is ultimately about male fantasies and dominating women. So what do we do about it?

Lawrence Lessig, in Code gives four techniques for regulation: law, markets, architecture and social norms.

Internet filtering uses architecture to regulate. Filters put physical and logical constraints on what people can look at. Houghton-Jan does a great job describing how poorly this works and has the data to back it up.

Markets regulate through pricing structures and through supply and demand. If there weren’t free porn sites, the market would be a good regulator here. So would getting rid of net neutrality - it would be a lot easier to eliminate nudity on library computers if those sites’ bandwidth was squeezed out by more moral sites like foxnews.com.

Social norms regulate by having a community of people establish proper behavior. People who act outside of the norms are ostracized.

Law regulates by making it against policy, for example, to look at pornography on library computers. The law doesn’t do much on its own. It only works if the law or policy is enforceable.

Houghton-Jan reports that internet filtering doesn’t work:

it’s consistently found that 15-20% of the time, content is over-blocked (e.g. benign sites that are blocked incorrectly). And 15-20% of the time, content is under-blocked (e.g. sites deemed “bad” gets through anyway).

Could we do better with some other regulation techniques?

Here’s an example from a library I have been known to work at:

We patrons over a certain age the choice of filtered vs. unfiltered internet when they sign onto their stations. Unfiltered access isn’t a free pass, there is still a policy that says you still aren’t supposed to look at pornography or other sites that bother the person next to you.

The way it works is that if you are a patron and you are sitting next to someone and you think they are breaking the rules, you tell the nearest staff member. That person calls someone else, who asks the person stop and often to log off.

So this library regulates pornography through a combination of architecture (you can choose filtered internet access) and law. I would also argue that social norms play a regulatory role as well - using the internet at the library isn’t exactly private, and anyone sitting next to you or walking by can see what you see. Patrons are less likely to visit pornography sites in a public setting.

I’m not exactly sure how many computers we have in the building, but we report 483 in the whole system. I work in the big beautiful building that has a lot more space than the others, so call it 60 public computers, very conservatively.

Patrons are limited to an hour a day, and the big beautiful building is open 57 hours per week. Lets say they’re in use 80% of the time, which is also very conservative, so at minimum, 2,736 patrons (57 x 60 x 80 percent) use the internet at our big beautiful building every week.

Over the course of a typical week, patrons get asked to stop viewing “objectionable material” around 5 times. That’s my experience. I’m sure it is under-reported. Some patrons may not care what their neighbor is peeping at, and others may be intimidated or unwilling to give up a few minutes of their precious hour a day of internet to tattle. Let’s say that only 1 in 10 cases of gets reported, or 50 of 2,736 patrons are breaking the rules every week.

Rounding up, 2% of patrons are looking at “objectionable material” every week. Again, can I stress that I am erring on the side of “bad behavior”?

So in this case, the strategy of combining choice for patrons, library policy and social norms is at least 98% effective against pornography, if that’s really the goal, and as a bonus, never overblocks non-pornographic sites. It is far more effective than filtering.

Now, there are all kinds of problems with my anecdote. What I consider conservative estimates about computer use and “mis-use” might be dead wrong. These social norms might only apply in the library with the big room full of computers. Looking for information in a public space may constrain the freedom of inquiry we are trying to enable. And did I mention we have security guards who sometimes help enforce library behavior policies?

But the point is that the conversation about pornography and other “objectionable material” in the library should center on behavior, not content.