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Students shouldnt need to be speaking up on behalf of their right to books, and yet, in todays America, its students who are being forced to defend books about people of color, about queer people, and about inclusivity. We saw this in York, Pennsylvania, earlier this fall. We saw it in Downers Grove, Illinois, where Proud Boys showed up to a school board meeting, and that group, along with other politically-aligned censorious groups, were the reason meeting rules at the district were changed. This week, its students in Ankeny, Iowa the tenth fastest growing community in the U.S. who are demanding books remain accessible in school libraries.

The Ames Tribune covered the student comments at the latest board meeting, including this one from high school junior Natalie Jasso:

Being who I am and growing up in my community and my family, Ive had to deal with my own adversities because I am a bisexual African American young woman, she said. The looks I get from other parents, the whispers that I get in classthe most common phrase I receive is, You have two moms? with the most disgusted look on their face.

She continued, As a teenager who grew up with negative feedback in both racial and LGBTQ issues in the community of Ankeny all my life, reading books like All Boys Arent Blue and other great literary works that hit these topics really hard have really helped me acknowledge who I am and what I hope my community can be and what it means to me.

Read through the rest of the student comments, as they highlight precisely whats been said elsewhere, but from the mouths of those directly impacted by these challenges.

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More, the article itself represents what The New York Times explores in a recent piece about the things being ignored at school board meetings when political discourse over issues like masks and library books. Beyond the realities of living through a global pandemic which has killed nearly 800,000 in the U.S. alone, these meetings and the focus concerned citizens are taking is ignoring the reality of the twin student mental health crisis and extreme pressure school teachers, support staff, and other employees are having.

You want to jump up and say, This is not really what we need to be talking about! said Deborah Wysocki, who teaches 8th grade science, to The New York Times. We really need to be talking about the fact that there are 29 students in a room that holds 24. Or we need to be talking about the fact that your learning support students children who need the attention of education assistants arent getting it so that those assistants can go babysit kids in the auditorium who dont have a substitute.

This pressure from the buzzword mafia is not only creating burnout, frustration, and exacerbating mental health challenges in schools. Its happening in public libraries as well.

Last week, interim library director Martha Furman of the ImagineIF Library system in Kalispell, Montana, announced her departure from the library. Furman cites overreach from the board as why shes stepped away, and as the librarys senior librarian Sean Anderson said, hes not interested in moving into that position (or the also-vacant assistant director position) because the behavior of the board has now driven out two directors. He said that the board needs to value the work librarians do and be there to support them, rather than support their own political agendas, religious beliefs, and other affiliations.

The vice chair of the ImagineIF library board said he had no idea how library collection development worked, but he had a lot of opinions about it. According to the Daily Inter Lake:

[Vice chair Doug] Adams further questioned the librarys affiliation with the American Library Association, an organization he sees as having a radical leftist agenda disguised as intellectual freedom.

My goal is to disassociate with them completely and rewrite policies, Adams said.

Ones goals on a library board should be to support the library in its role as a place to provide information and access to information freely, without judgment or hindrance. Its not to rewrite policies.

School and library employees have been in a pressure cooker for years, with the pandemic only amplifying the systemic issues that have been ignored. And now, rather than address those issues, parents aligned with groups dedicated to anti-critical race theory and anti-mask agendas are only making progress more and more impossible. Its going to continue to get worse, and were going to continue seeing some of the most well-educated, hard-working, dedicated, and severely underpaid people in the workforce leaving these roles and choosing new jobs where they dont have to fear for their lives leaving a school board meeting.

Before digging into this weeks book challenges and censorship, which offers a mixed bag of good news and not-good news, its worth sharing this piece from The Washington Post about the continued growth of news deserts across the U.S. This matters because of the stories being missed, the issues being overlooked that are big issues in some communities but not big enough for major papers to cover, and because of how the growth of book challenges and censorship is linked to the loss of local news.

As always, here is our toolkit for how to fight book challenges. If youve got ten minutes or ten hours this month, you can do something to ensure intellectual freedom a First Amendment right remains intact.

Two more important reads for the week that are worth highlighting on their own include this piece from George M. Johnson on their book being banned in ten states and Ashley HopePrez on what happened after her book was challenged and banned in Texas.

And this is worthy of a whole deep dive in and of itself, but absolutely essential reading: the dark money behind the anti-critical race theory fervor.

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Students, Teachers, and Librarians are Fed Up With Book Challenges: This Weeks Censorship News, Dece... - Book Riot

The White House is seen at sunrise, from the South Lawn Driveway in Washington, U.S, December 7, 2021. REUTERS/Tom Brenner

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WASHINGTON, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The White House will launch an initiative on Wednesday to award grants to innovators working on technology to bolster democracy by developing tools that enhance privacy or circumvent censorship, a White House official told Reuters.

A total of $3.75 million will be awarded to winners of the grants, the official said.

The project, part of U.S. President Joe Biden's Dec. 9-10 "Summit for Democracy," aims to promote democratic values "in the face of asymmetries in the way democratic and autocratic actors leverage and derive value from emerging technologies," the White House will say in its announcement.

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As part of the program, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will work with the United Kingdom to offer grants to advance and boost the adoption of technology that promotes privacy and protects intellectual property.

The Open Technology Fund will offer grants to international applicants for technology that enables content-sharing and communication without an Internet or cellular connection, with the goal of bypassing an internet shutdown.

Finally, regional competitions in Democratic countries will identify entrepreneurs that create and advance technologies that foster democracy.

More than 100 world leaders have been invited to the White House's virtual Democracy event, which aims to help stop the erosion of rights and freedoms worldwide. China and Russia were not invited.

(This story officially corrects second paragraph to show total award amount will be $3.75 million)

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Reporting by Alexandra AlperEditing by Sonya Hepinstall

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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White House to fund tech to evade censorship and increase privacy - Reuters

This is the story of a war fought right at the birth of the internet. And what was at stake was crucial: who owned this new world, who made the rules and what would they be.

In the 1980s, before the invention of the World Wide Web, there was a nascent thing called Usenet. It was a collection of message boards for the small number of people in academic and technological institutions who knew of its existence.

People like Brad Templeton, who until then had only used computers to play games and do spreadsheets.

Usenet was an epiphany for me. I understood that the real goal, the most important use of computers was talking with other peoplerecalls Brad.

There were pages on Usenet devoted to conversations about atheism or sex or winemaking or technology.

It was like a town square. Every night, your computer would call other computers and exchange everything new with them, and then you could have a discussion with people from all over the world.

Brad accessed Usenet through the University of Waterloo, in Canada where he had studied, as it was not something that anyone could connect to from home.

Usually it needed a computer in a lab, at a computer company or a university.

So the audience was highly educated, generally well off, probably not as ethnically diverse and tech-savvy. An elite.

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Disclaimer: This article is generated from the feed and not edited by our team.

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The tasteless joke that triggered the first internet censorship (and marked the web forever) - Market Research Telecast

Yoon Suk-yeol, presidential nominee of the main opposition People Power Party (center), poses with university students after a meeting with student party members, near Sillim Station in Seoul on Nov. 26. (PPP)

A revision to the Telecommunications Business Act and a related law went into effect on Friday, requiring large internet platforms with annual sales of 1 billion won or the number of daily users 100,000 or more to remove illegal content from their servers.

The revision was made last year amid public outrage over revelations that underage girls were coerced into obscene acts in front of cameras and the footage was shared in pay-to-view online chat rooms in what was dubbed the "Nth room" incident.

The law revision is also called the "Nth room prevention law."

But the legislation has spurred censorship criticism, with the leader of the main opposition People Power Party likening it to the government opening the letter envelopes of all people to make sure no illegal content is exchanged.

On Sunday, PPP presidential candidate Yoon said his party will seek to amend the related laws again in a way that prevents crimes and ensures privacy is not violated.

"The Nth room prevention law lacks the ability to prevent another Nth room crime, but gives an absolute majority of innocent people fears of censorship," he said in a Facebook post. "Article 18 of the Constitution stipulates that the confidentiality of correspondence of all people should not be violated."

Yoon's ruling party rival, Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party, has defended the revised law, saying it does not amount to censorship because freedom of expression should be exercised in ways that do not infringe upon other people's rights.

"What I'm doing for fun should not give pain to other people," he said during a meeting with college students in the central city of Gumi. "In the case of the Nth room obscene materials, too much damage is done to other people compared to the freedom exercised." (Yonhap)

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Yoon to seek revision to 'Nth room prevention law' amid allegations of censorship - The Korea Herald

A few days ago, Senator Mario Monti, a guest at In Onda su La7, said of the Covid pandemic: We have not used a communication policy appropriate to war.

It will be necessary to find a system that reconciles freedom of expression but extracts information from above. With the constant talk of Covid, only disasters happen. War communication means there has to be a dose of information. We need to find less democratic ways of communicating.

Open heaven. The usual controversy among Italian fans immediately broke out: who accused him of wanting to censor information and who said he was kind and applauded. But the question is not strange.

It should be the moral duty of every good journalist to impartially convey all opinions on a particular issue. When the question is of a political or social nature, impartialitythat is, presenting each partys main arguments in the field to ensure that each side has equal spaceis key.

But when applied to science, integrity can present problems: it may appear to require a reporter to present different competing viewpoints on an issue as if they have equal scientific weight, when in reality they are not at all.

So: How do we do information in times of epidemics? Should we give everyone a voice? Should we give a voice only to those who claim that Covid is a deadly disease that kills millions, or even to those who say that Covid is like a trivial flu? Just for those who claim that Covid vaccines protect us from infection, disease and death, or even those who say they are experimental gene therapies and cause long-term adverse effects that are unknown to us because the research was done too quickly?

I dont leave talk unspoken because they support nonsense, said Tg di La7 directors Enrico Mentana, and Tg1, Monica Maggioni. Is it control or correct information?

This issue is fundamental because in times of epidemics providing incorrect and unscientific information can lead many in the public to act in a way that puts their lives and the lives of others at risk.

Many repeat a phrase like a mantra: Science is democratic, scientists argue among themselves and all their opinions must be respected. this is not true. In science there are no opinions but only facts that have been verified by experiments. The scientist first formulates a theory, then conducts an experiment to prove whether that theory is true or false, and if in the end all goes well, he says: These are the facts.

To undermine an earlier theory, you have to produce facts, not opinions. This is the scientific method. Journalists must know this, and they must be able to distinguish between a scientific fact and a rumor.

Two extraordinary events occurred during this pandemic: all countries of the world decided to publish and make available online all data related to cases of illness and deaths caused by Covid, and the numbers of vaccinations; Previously available for a fee only, all scientific journals on the planet have decided to make all scientific articles related to Covid available to anyone, precisely because of the exceptional medical and human interest they are receiving. Primary sources are available, at hand, to all, the public and journalists.

However, during the Covid epidemic, we had to witness the sad spectacle of doctors and scientists who said in the press or on television: Covid is like influenza, the number of deaths from Covid-19 is much less than they tell us, without a single journalist showing him the official data or Thousands of scientific articles have been published and he is objecting to No, look, the Corona virus kills millions, it is many times more deadly than influenza.

who claimed that the virus did not exist because it had never been isolated, without a single reporter showing them hundreds of articles in which the virus had been isolated and sequenced; Who ruled that drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin treated Covid without anyone knocking under their noses dozens of articles that showed that these drugs were useless and even dangerous.

After months of a tight lockdown that reported almost zero infections and deaths, I was able to witness the sad sight of a ruling doctor: The virus is clinically dead, it may have changed without a journalist daring to object. No, look, there isnt a single scientific article that says this virus has mutated and gotten better, its still killing millions of people.

Almost every day I hear experts describing themselves as repeating that Vaccines against Covid are experimental gene therapies, they are dangerous, and they cause a huge number of adverse effects and deaths, without the objection of any journalist: No, look at the data available to everyone, tested, safe and effective vaccines .

What behaviors caused by these unfortunate phrases? How many people left home without taking precautions while the virus was still spreading? How many have been persuaded not to get vaccinated? And what responsibility do these journalists bear, who have not raised a single question or a single objection?

Recently Ive also heard experts claim that the Green Corridor is an unfair measure because those who are vaccinated transmit the virus as well as those who have not been vaccinated, and those who deny this are lying.

However, no journalist objected that no scientist had ever said that a vaccinated person was not infected and could not become infected. But in order to infect someone else, you first have to be infected with the Coronavirus, that is, you have to have it inside your body, and I hope it is clear to everyone now that if you are vaccinated you are less likely to get sick, if you get sick you recover early, and you risk dying a little.

But if those who were vaccinated get sick less and get better faster, they are less likely to have the coronavirus in their bodies, and so they can pass it on to someone else more difficult, and thus infect them less. Do you think the anti-aircraft gun type vaccine kills the virus before it enters our bodies?

However, all scientific articles show that a vaccinated person infects and can be infected much less than the unvaccinated because if the virus enters his body, the vaccinated remains infectious for a few hours, because his immune system is immediately ready to fight and defeat the vaccination, while the unvaccinated remains infectious for days or even weeks.

No journalist has remembered dozens of scientific articles showing that a vaccinated person is much less likely to become infected than unvaccinated people, because vaccinated people are able to eliminate the virus from their bodies much faster than unvaccinated people. It can infect others for a shorter period. In practice, the vaccine can infect others for 24-72 hours, those who have not been vaccinated for weeks or even months.

When 99.9 percent of scholars support a thesis that has been verified by empirical facts, and 0.1, on the contrary, is not verified, if you interview or invite an expert who supports first place and an expert supports that opposite, you give the impression that there is Peer discussion does not exist and you are playing with reality.

Youre hiding behind a screen of a level playing field, pretending to be neutral and instead being biased, and youre also on the wrong side. And during a pandemic, giving a voice to nonsense that is not supported by empirical facts can also mean the death of your conscience.

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Not to manipulate the TV and not to give it space is not censorship but correct information - Wire Service Canada