EBSCO, think of the school children
I am disappointed that you have not done enough to be removed from the Dirty Dozen List this year. Please remember your company is selling educational material, which means children are your clients! While I understand from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation that you have made several improvements to decrease the amount of sexually graphic content on your products, particularly elementary databases, please do more. Unfortunately, EBSCO has failed to clean up middle school and high school databases, and continues to expose minors to sexually graphic and violent content including live links to pornography websites. Further, EBSCO products sold through libraries often allow children from any age range to log into databases meant for older students. This failure to appropriately age-gate content renders much of the improvement in elementary school databases insufficient. Sexually graphic, erotic content is not an academic resource and EBSCO products that are not specifically for middle schools or elementary schools are still accessible in most schools. So please expand your content audit, publisher audit, and review process to prevent pornography and sexually explicit material from appearing across all of your products. Please pursue aggressive filtering and algorithms to prevent explicit content from entering your systems across ALL of your platforms. The value of your product is in its curated academic content, so please do not rely on schools themselves, often overworked librarians and teachers, to police the content you are providing. Your leadership will transform the whole industry.
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