Less than 24 hours after a student senate resolution asking the university to unban Reddit on campus Wi-Fi, the Catholic University of America has reversed course, restoring access to the forum-based website for all students and faculty on campus.
The university’s IT department blocked the website, citing “certain content” and “phishing and malicious links” on the site’s forums.
University attempts to restrict access to websites are nothing new. CUA banned 200 pornographic websites in 2019 at the behest of its student government — a ban FIRE opposes because it undercuts CUA’s stated commitments to free expression and academic freedom. (Bans on pornographic speech nearly always sweep into their ambit not just “hardcore pornography” but huge amounts of clearly protected expression.) It’s hardly just porn: campus messaging apps have been a frequent target of university administrators, from Yik Yak in 2017, to Fizz and Sidechat in recent months. But at public universities — and at private universities like CUA that choose to promise their students and faculty members expressive freedom — these bans are unacceptable incursions into free speech and academic freedom.
Furthermore, such online platform bans are increasingly futile: they generally don’t keep students from accessing information the university doesn’t want them to see. It’s far too easy to turn off Wi-Fi or to fire up a VPN that allows students to bypass college-made content controls. Imposing a ban nonetheless sends a signal: some content is too dangerous for you to see, and we’re going to decide for you what that content might be. That message is antithetical to a university where students are supposed to learn how to work with others, find resources, and access information.
CUA says it is in the business of encouraging its students to engage with those on campus and across the world. But once you start down the road of banning websites based on their content, you face the same slippery slope to censorship as always. If CUA must ban porn sites because of their content, well, Reddit has objectionable content too. Doesn’t it need to be banned? What about X? Facebook? There is no natural limit to this principle, only the preferences of those in power at the time.
The university’s restrictions have a more pernicious effect on academic freedom, too. Online social media like Reddit have provided the basis for myriad forms of faculty research. Academics have studied how Reddit’s user-driven content-moderation influences political discourse and used its subreddits as a natural experiment on online social development. In other words, put hundreds of millions of people in one place, and researchers will want to study it.
Banning it from the campus network would demand they get awfully creative in order to do so. Though students can easily evade the ban by switching off Wi-Fi on their phones, faculty members may have a harder time using their personal hotspots to download petabytes of Reddit data to research. The result: academic research involving Reddit is chilled.
And a Reddit ban cannot be plausibly based on security concerns. Though CUA vaguely referenced “phishing” content on Reddit, such content is present on any site where users interact with others, and students and faculty can still access X, Instagram, and myriad other social media sites where they are subject to such content. Not to mention email, which is by far the riskiest platform for phishing.
CUA’s policy was both underinclusive in not targeting other, equally risky social media websites and overinclusive in targeting everything on Reddit, not only content threatening university network security. Such a double-bind is something we often see at FIRE. It almost always means policymakers aren’t thinking through the ripple effects of their rules.
A culture of free expression demands more from university rulemakers than vague explanations and underexamined repercussions.
Students at CUA expect more, too. They spoke up, calling on the university’s IT department to investigate its content controls to ensure a ban like this does not happen again. Hopefully, this abortive effort serves as a lesson to CUA administrators: the best way to avoid backlash for censorship is to never open the door to it in the first place.
FIRE defends the rights of students and faculty members — no matter their views — at public and private universities and colleges in the United States. If you are a student or a faculty member facing investigation or punishment for your speech, submit your case to FIRE today. If you’re faculty member at a public college or university, call the Faculty Legal Defense Fund 24-hour hotline at 254-500-FLDF (3533).
