Archive for the ‘Censorship’ Category

Book bans have become a powerful censorship tool in Colorado. Libraries and patrons hold the line. – Rocky Mountain PBS

Rocky Mountain PBS: You have extensive experience fielding book challenges, which is when library patrons ask for materials to be removed or restricted, can you situate for us the state of book banning in the US at the moment?

James LaRue: Well, we have seen the largest rise in attempts to remove or restrict library resources, not just books. So it's digital resources, it's programs, it's exhibits, it's speakers. It's almost everything a library does.

We've seen the greatest increase in challenges across the country since the founding of the American Library Association in 1876. So it's, Surf's up.

RMPBS: Over the course of your career, you mentioned in the book, how [censorship] accelerated. What are those changes that you've seen in the types of people challenging library materials and the tactics that they use?

JL: So I think there are four reasons that people censor books. The first one is just personal prejudice. Somebody walks into the library, they see something that triggers them for whatever reason could be childhood trauma, could just be a cranky day and they say, I don't like this. Get rid of it.

And then the second one that I really encountered when I was in Douglas County, and this was 1990 through 2014, there was a big shift in America that went from, let's say, fair parenting, like the latchkey children to a suddenly very protective, and then maybe too overprotective from what I call the, you know, the helicopter parent to the Velcro parent. They're just stuck right on their head, and they follow their kids everywhere.

And then, the third one that I saw when I was at the office for Intellectual Freedom from about 2016 through the end of 2018, was what I would call a demographic panic. And this was where suddenly it was almost as if America looked around and said, As of 2014, under the age of five, America is majority nonwhite.

That's not going to change. And all of a sudden, the people that said, The national narrative is all about me, became aware that all these books were finally showing up in the library that reflected these perspectives of previously marginalized people. And so they were like, now 97% of the collection about me is not enough, and it needs to be 100%.

And then from the Left, we began to see challenges as well, where it's like, Well, 3% of these new voices is not enough. Let's expand the number of those offerings. And while we're about it, let's go back and take a look at those books that have bigotry or homophobia in them and clean those up, too. And so that was that demographic panic.

And then the fourth phase happening very much in 2021. The surge, I'm sure, was very directed at trying to win the midterm elections. And so the idea is, let's flip America's outrage switch, make everybody very, very angry, and they'll send in money and they'll vote for me. So I think that's how it's changed.

That, and also the difference of tactics, fascinates me.

Back in the day, at Douglas County, somebody would fill out a form. I'm upset about this. I read the book and here's what I object to, and here's what I think you should get instead. Now, what happens is 15 to 20 people show up unannounced at a public comment session at a school board or a public board meeting, and they have 25 or 30 books that they want to get rid of all at once.

And their tactic is, I'm going to find the naughtiest bit in this book, and I'm going to read it out loud to make everybody squirm and say how uncomfortable they are, and then say, I demand that you remove this. And if they don't, then immediately it's political threats. You're on the school board you should be recalled. You're a superintendent, principal you should be fired.

You're a librarian and what we're seeing now is legislation across the country to say not only criminalize the book, but criminalize the people who provide access to them.

RMPBS: Do you feel that that constitutes the kind of panic? You also said [in the book] that sometimes these types of moral outrages or these types of tactics are cyclical. How do you perceive this particular moment?

JL: I ran across something I read back when I was in high school, and it's a 1951 book that came out, by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer. And at that time, like many of the best minds of his generation, he said, We just got through this WWII. How did it happen that the world went crazy? You know, I mean, all of a sudden you had Mussolini and you had Stalin and you had Hitler.

And, as he talked about that, he says, well, there are a number of things that seem to have to be in place before the world goes crazy. And one of them is there's a loss of national narrative.

There's a frustration and victimization.

Germany, between WWI and WWII is still paying reparations. And it's like, well, we have this, you know, terrible problem. We don't feel like we're on top of the world anymore, who do we blame? So the scapegoating and then the targeting of many institutions, like fake news, like higher education, like libraries, famously book burning in Nazi Germany.

So you can't help but say, 1938 looks a lot like today. Where before they had Stalin, now we have [Vladimir] Putin, and we have [Recep Tayip] Erdogan and Xi [Jinping] and a rising tide of authoritarians across the world. And so I think it's not so much panic anymore now. I think it's flat out authoritarianism. That's very, very sobering.

RMPBS: It is. I think that you provide a framework in the book for understanding what's going on and coping with it. One of the ideas that I really thought was interesting, that I would love for you to expand on, is the idea of books as inoculation. And that response, in terms of when parents feel that a book is not appropriate for their child or for a particular age group, that, in fact, the book and whatever it contains can act as a sort of vaccination.

JL: Well, my favorite one was when I was at Douglas County. All of a sudden, fairy tales were what everybody was coming after. I said, fairy tales? What's that about? And my favorite one was the little Red Riding Hood, where, you know, she's going through the woods and she meets the wolf, and she's got a bag that has a bottle of wine and a baguette in it, and the wolf runs ahead and eats Granny and is about to eat Little Red when the Woodsman shows up, conks the Wolf, slices him open and Granny steps out whole.

And at the very end, Granny and the Woodsman are having a glass of wine and the complaint was, Granny is a drunk, you know, you're promoting senior citizen alcoholism! I wrote back to say that, Well, if I had just been eaten by a wolf and sliced open, Id want a drink, you know, and I don't think that's out of line.

That doesn't seem outrageous to me.

But the more I started looking at fairy tales, it was like fairy tales have been around for a long time. And the Grimm Brothers fairy tales are very Grimm indeed. A man by the name of Bruno Bettelheim, an Austrian psychologist, he said that the purpose of fairy tales is to help children name their fears and work out strategies to deal with them, because, in fact, the world is sometimes a scary place.

I learned from parents that over-protectiveness, it's like they understand that all these dark and interesting stories are very attractive to children. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and they understand that children are drawn to the woods, but they don't want wolves in the woods. And the problem, of course, is that children need to know how to deal with wolves.

RMPBS: I find that to be a very useful framework for understanding both the parental psychology and the fascination that children may have. Because the flip side of the book banning and the censorship is that then these books go on to become bestsellers and sought after by a lot of the library patrons. So can you speak a little bit to that?

JL: Well, there's so much to talk about there. I just read a Washington Post article that went back and said, of the 1000 challenges that were made to school libraries across the country, they were all filed by 11 people.

The American Library Association did a study and found that, regardless of political party, about 70% of Americans say, We are opposed to censorship.

One of my favorite stories, and I know this sometimes embarrasses my friend who's the director there in Wellington, Colorado. There was a woman who showed up, she was the pastor's wife and said, Here's 15 books that are obscene bestsellersThey need to be removed. And the, the next month, a bunch more people came inlike three times as manyand said, Well, wait a minute, is this how we want to be known? Is this how we want people to think of our community as a place where we censor? We don't.

Then the following month, the board decided to ban banning. And so I feel like at this moment of rising authoritarianism, it's very, very few voices. They're very persistent. They're very loud, and they make all kinds of claims.

This is a moment where I think we need to have civic courage, both for library administrators and for a citizen governing bodies to say, We hear what you're saying. We'll certainly pay attention to that. But we don't write the books, right? The library doesn't.

We buy the books that are produced by our culture.

There was a study done in Wisconsin, probably 30 years ago, about what percentage of children's books featured people of color. And at that time, the population was somewhere around 28% Black.

And it was like less than 0.2% black characters in children's literature. And so as those demographics have shifted and the publishing has tried to say, Well, we need to reflect the base of our potential customers. So we're beginning to see more of these books showing up, and then we get back into that demographic panic.

RMPBS: When you talk about civic courage, I understood from the book that there is a process involved when there's a book challenge and there's a feedback mechanism. So it's designed to have engagement, engaging with both good faith and bad faith arguments and getting to what the core of the complaint is.

JL: That's correct.

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Book bans have become a powerful censorship tool in Colorado. Libraries and patrons hold the line. - Rocky Mountain PBS

Boundaries of Expression podcast: Tiananmen Square and 35 years of censorship – ARTICLE 19 – ARTICLE 19

Thirty-five years ago, in June 1989, the Chinese government launched a brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, where students, workers, and others had been amassed in non-violent collective action for political and economic reform across China. To this day, no one knows how many were killed, but estimates are in the thousands. China continues to censor all memory of those events from national history both within the country and beyond its borders.

On the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Boundaries of Expression explores the legacy of the crackdown and the impact of a generation of censorship in a conversation with human rights activist Fengsuo Zhou, a former Tiananmen student leader, and Michael Caster, Asia Digital Programme Manager, ARTICLE 19.

Presenter: Jo Glanville

Producers: Michael Caster and Jo Glanville

Studio manager: Aamir Yaqub

Mixed by Julian Wharton and recorded at Bison Studios, London

Archive: CNN

Listen on Apple podcasts

Listen on Spotify

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Boundaries of Expression podcast: Tiananmen Square and 35 years of censorship - ARTICLE 19 - ARTICLE 19

Why Would a Comic About Censorship Get Banned? – Publishers Weekly

Banned Book Club, a fictionalized account of Hyun Sook Kims experiences growing up in South Korea and becoming radicalized after forming a club to read forbidden literature, rendered as a graphic novel with art by Hyung-Ju Ko, struck a chord when it was released in 2020. Per PWs starred review, its messages of hope are universal, as are the poignant reminders that change can happen when people are willing to speak up. The title has also, ironically enough, been challenged in several U.S. school districts, accused of anti-police sentiment and creating dangerous anarchists in our schools (per a challenge filed in Clay County Schools in North Carolina).

We didnt intend for Banned Book Club to be a metaphor for what was happening to the U.S., but it accidentally became that, says Ryan Estrada, Kims coauthor (and spouse). Estrada has become an outspoken advocate for libraries, in one case flying 7,000 miles from South Korea to Kentucky to address a challenge. (He was successful.)

A follow-up, No Rules Tonight, is due from Penguin Workshop in October (this time drawn by Estrada). PW talked with the married coauthors about their advocacy and what fans can look forward to with No Rules Tonight, which returns to 1980s South Korea and joins the high schoolers on a getaway field tripwhere romance blossoms away from constant adult (and government) oversight.

Hyun Sook, how did it feel to be a student living in a repressive society?

Kim: If you criticized the president, they put you in jail. In my university, there were undercover policemen, so we always had to be careful if we discussed the books that we read. They tortured people, and many of my friends were beaten or taken away to the army and then disappeared. I realized the world that I knew was a lie, and I wanted to learn the truth about the history of our country and the outside world.

Why did you seek out these banned books?

Kim: I thought, okay, why are those books banned? Its just that the books talk about the world, about society, about justice. But South Koreas leader at that time, the dictator Chun Doo-Hwan, didnt want the people to know the truth.

Has Banned Book Club been banned in South Korea?

Estrada: No. Korea learned so much from what they went through. Theres a lot of movies on the same types of topics as Banned Book Club, and former president Park Geun-hye, whose father was the one that started all the censorship, tried to blacklist any filmmakers or authors that were writing about that kind of thing. But the people were like, oh no, weve seen what happens, youre not doing this, and they rose up and removed her from power and put her in jail.

How did you feel when Banned Book Club was challenged in the U.S.?

Kim: Shocked. How can it be happening in America?

How does No Rules Tonight relate to Banned Book Club?

Estrada: When your life is controlled so much and you have one night of freedom, what do you do with it? After we wrote Banned Book Club, we had a lot of stories left over. We set them all during one night, Christmas Eve, and show that one of the best things you can do to make the future world a better place is to be your real, true authentic self and lead by example.

Did your editors try to tone down the book to hold off possible challenges?

Estrada: No. All the editing was feedback that made the story better. No one was saying, This is going to offend people. They encouraged us to explore diverse stories. In Banned Book Club theres a queer character, Suji, but because everythings so repressed, shes afraid to talk about it. So, in No Rules Tonight, we got deeper into her story. Theres also a trans character. We wanted to reflect on the parts of society that are affected by these bans, so we had these characters learning about Korean history and famous Korean folk heroes that were trans.

Return to the main feature.

A version of this article appeared in the 06/10/2024 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: It Cant Happen Here

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Why Would a Comic About Censorship Get Banned? - Publishers Weekly

New Legal Challenge: Meta slapped with lawsuit over censorship in Moldova – EU Reporter

Moldovan politician Ilan Shor and his legal team are preparing a lawsuit against Meta, the company owning among other things social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, following the closure of several accounts connected to the Moldovan opposition.

On June 6th, Meta closed several Facebook and Instagram accounts of Moldovan oppositional politicians and sent out warnings to accounts which followed them. The closures come in light of the upcoming Moldovan presidential elections which are due during the fall and correspond with the Moldovan government's efforts to limit the possibilities of the opposition to take part in the elections. Over the past year, the Moldovan Government has shut down over 60 media outlets in the country and prevented thousands of political candidates from several oppositional parties from standing in elections. These actions have been criticized by international human rights groups as well as the EU.

It is outrageous that Zuckerberg and Meta are interfering with our national elections and enabling the Moldovan Government to oppress the opposition and prevent them from exercising their democratic rights. We will challenge any attempt to police free speech and defend our citizen's rights to free and fair elections, reads a statement from the Political Bloc Victory, headed by Ilan Shor.

Meta has a pattern of censoring oppositional views around the world. Most notably, in 2020 Meta banned the accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump only to reinstate the accounts two years later.

In Vietnam, the company has been making repeated concessions to Vietnams authoritarian government, routinely censoring dissent and allowing those seen as threats by the government to be forced off the platform[1]. In India, the company has been accused of supporting the government's effort to undermine critical voices and independent media[2]. The same abuse from meta has been reported across several African countries[3].

The main social media platforms are controlled by a few private companies, by allowing them the power to collectively ban citizens whenever they want, we are ultimately giving them the ability to dismantle our constitutionally protected institutions and liberties. Our legal claim aims to defend everyones basic right to express their views and challenge the collaboration between these companies and authoritarian Governments, says Aureliu Colenko, a lawyer in Ilan Shors team.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/19/facebook-meta-vietnam-government-censorship/

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-services-are-used-to-spread-religious-hatred-in-india-internal-documents-show-11635016354

[3] https://www.cima.ned.org/blog/the-facebook-papers-how-authoritarian-governments-are-pressuring-platforms-to-stifle-free-speech/

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New Legal Challenge: Meta slapped with lawsuit over censorship in Moldova - EU Reporter

Anderson Cooper Calls Out China’s Censorship of Tiananmen Square Anniversary Coverage – Adweek

CNN anchorAnderson Cooperset aside the final moments of Tuesday nights Anderson Cooper 360 to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when Chinese soldiers brutally cracked down on pro-democracy protestors in Beijings city center. But that segment didnt air in China, as censors immediately cut CNNs live feed. In a dramatic moment, Cooper acknowledged the censorship on-air, even displaying the color bars that viewers inside China were seeing.

It comes as no surprise that seconds after we teased this story at the end of the last segment, Chinese censors took our signal off the air, Cooper said of the real-time censorship that occurred during the commercial break. The host then proceeded with his scripted introduction acknowledging the anniversary of whats known within China as the June 4th Incident. The picture-in-picture color bars first appeared at the 23-second mark and remained in place until the conclusion of the three-minute segment.

Cooper was later joined by CNNs senior international correspondent Will Ripley, who offered additional context about what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and how difficult the story was to report for international outlets. CNN had to hide its videotapes in the U.S. embassy before tourists smuggled them in a suitcase and flew them to Hong Kong, Ripley explained, noting that escape plan wouldnt be possible now that the territory is controlled by China. Its a very different situation today.

Cooper once again called attention to the color bars in the corner of the screen, saying: Were showing you the color bars that is happening in China right now. Were being censored these color bars went up and the signal is now being blocked.

Ripley noted that the censorship is part of Chinas approach to removing all mention of Tiananmen Square from the public record within its borders.As you see from the color bars, China has essentially tried to erase this momentthis date June 4, 1989from its history.

I have friends who grew up in China, who are highly educated people but they didnt even know about the Tiananmen Square massacre until they moved out of the country and learned about it on the free internet, Ripley continued. Chinas internet is heavily censored.

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Anderson Cooper Calls Out China's Censorship of Tiananmen Square Anniversary Coverage - Adweek