Home / Kids' Safety / Tools for Families / Tools blocking hateful or intolerant content
Tools for Families
Tools blocking hateful or intolerant content
These tools prevent access to material that promotes discrimination or hatred, typically including Nazi, Ku Klux Klan, anti-Semitic, and other sites showing intolerance or hate.
Most of these tools will prevent access to most material of this sort, but none are fool-proof. A tool that uses multiple blocking and filtering strategies will limit access to more sites, but it may also block out educational content that makes reference to hate groups. For example software that uses "keyword blocking" to block the word "Nazi" will block out history sites about the Holocaust as well. Even the tools that work only when certain words appear together or near each other are likely to block out sites like the Simon Wiesenthal Center's page on the growth of hate groups online, or an article on white supremacist activity on the Southern Poverty Law Center site.
It's the company that makes the software that determines what gets blocked. The values or criteria it uses may be different from those of your family. For example, some of these tools block out sites that are anti-gay, while others do not consider an anti-gay site one that promotes hate.
We suggest you check our tool search engine to see if the company publishes its criteria for filtering, its list of filtered sites, or the key words or phrases that it uses to filter or block material. You may also want to visit the company's Web site and seek out product reviews.
Remember: No filtering or blocking system is fool-proof. Parents will always need to remain involved in their child's online life. Kids will always need to know what their families' rules are and how to stay safe.
