It’s National Library Week, so I’ve been thinking a lot about knowledge and the idea that knowledge should be readily available – for all. An informed populace is crucial to the health of the nation and a bulwark of democracy. The ability to think, to reason, to avoid being fooled, all these notions are tied to reading and easy access to the wisdom of the ages.
And this is exactly why libraries – and their contents – are under siege these days.
HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery recently told readers:
“Librarians are living in constant fear. They have become the targets
of Republican politicians and far-right groups like Moms for Liberty
Liberty that are hellbent on burning books about LGBTQ+ people,
people of color and racism. Some librarians are quitting their jobs
because of constant harassment; others are getting fired for
refusing to clear shelves of books that conservatives don’t like.”
If that’s not bad enough – and it is – Bendery informs us there’s another evil twist in the tale: “The GOP’s censorship campaign has shifted from book bans to legislation threatening librarians with jail time.” Idaho’s tried several times to enact such legislation; this February, West Virginia passed a bill “making librarians criminally liable if a minor comes across content that some might consider obscene.” Idaho, Iowa, Alabama, and Georgia are also considering various means of keeping books they don’t like off the shelves...and they’re not alone.
The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom shared some frightening statistics: “The number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92% over the previous year, accounting for about 46% of all book challenges in 2023; school libraries saw an 11% increase over 2022 numbers.”
Given these ever-more-frequent, ever-more-strident attacks, what can a concerned reader do to stem the tide of book-banning?
PEN America, an organization whose mission “is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible,” offers a number of ways to make one’s voice heard. Whether you’re a student, a parent, an author, or a librarian, PEN America provides advice, assistance, and resources to keep you informed and ready to push back.
The need to support the nation’s libraries is more urgent than ever. In Bendery’s HuffPost piece, American Library Association President Emily Drabinski draws a chilling conclusion: “What gets lost in conversations about book banning is that it’s really about eliminating the institution of the library, period. It’s not about the books. Well, it is about the books, but the books are the way in to gut one of the last public institutions that serves everyone.”
“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture,” Ray Bradbury once said. “Just get people to stop reading them.”
Bradbury was one of the 20th century’s finest fabulists, the author of The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the worldwide blockbuster Fahrenheit 451. Published in 1952, the novel Fahrenheit 451 is set in a future where books are illegal and firemen don’t put out fires – they start them. Printed matter is what they burn.
Bradbury was writing in the tense, paranoid early years of the McCarthy era. But he might as well have penned those words last Thursday.
Support your local library. Speak up for the voices the hate-mongers would shut down. Before – as history’s proven again and again – they try to shut down yours.
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Students fight a book ban by giving away free banned bookswww.youtube.com
The New York Public Library has also weighed in on the matter, you can find its suggestions here.
Why Mark Zuckerberg Is Sucking Up to Donald Trump (and Attacking Twitter)
With Donald Trump preparing to crack down on social media, Mark Zuckerberg is echoing Trump's sentiments
Last week two of Donald Trump's tweets attacking mail-in voting were flagged by Twitter as inaccurate, with a link to clarifying information.
Predictably, President Trump did not take the note well and is now preparing to sign an executive order with the purpose of cracking down on social media companies. In a move that strikes at the very foundation of the Internet, the new order will seek to give the federal government authority over how these platforms moderate user content.
Donald Trump on X
The idea is that Internet platforms receive broad immunity from government regulation with the assumption they are acting in good faith and not attempting to enforce a particular ideology. So if the Trump administration claims—as they have in a draft of the new order—that social media companies are "invoking inconsistent, irrational, and groundless justifications to censor or otherwise punish Americans' speech," then they can justify stepping in to interfere.
Trump has even suggested that he may use his authority to shut down social media platforms like Twitter. It remains to be seen how far-reaching this petty retaliation will be, or how much Twitter really needs to fear President Trump's latest tantrum, but that hasn't stopped Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from trying to set his company apart as the "free expression" platform that doesn't need government controls because it won't interfere with Trump and his ilk saying whatever they want. As he put it in an interview with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin, "Compared to some of the other companies, we try to be more on the side of giving people a voice and free expression."
It's a nice sentiment if you ignore the fact that it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It's only relevant in that it echoes some of the language and ideas that the Trump administration and other reactionary figures in American politics have been using to attack anyone who tries to curtail their dishonesty.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Social networks should not fact-check politicianswww.youtube.com
Did Twitter's decision to add a link with clarifying information at the bottom of Trump's misleading tweets do anything to limit anyone's free expression? Did it interfere with Zuckerberg's stated principle that "people should be able to see what politicians say?" Of course not, and Zuckerberg's implied suggestion that Twitter is attempting to be an "arbiter of truth" prompted a response from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who defended the company's decision to to "point out incorrect or disputed information about elections." While it's worth critiquing what Twitter gets things wrong in its efforts to regulate the platform, what their action did in this case—and what it was plainly intended to do—was to mitigate the harm of misinformation being spread for the purposes of undermining the electoral process.
But the fact that the whole situation enraged Donald Trump and kick-started his move against social media companies means that it's time for Zuckerberg to prostrate himself and emphasize Facebook's minimal, hands-off approach to fact-checking, noting that his company has "a program where we work with independent fact-checkers."
He didn't mention that those "independent" fact-checkers include Check Your Fact, a subsidiary of the reactionary "news" outlet The Daily Caller, which is infamous for platforming biased, misleading, and white-nationalist material. This is emblematic of Facebook's approach to the political scandals it has dealt with since the 2016 election. Zuckerberg has consistently tried to play both sides of the political aisle in a way that is self-serving and incompatible with a genuine fight against disinformation—particularly in an era when Donald Trump is the head of one of those parties.
Jack Dorsey via X
This is in keeping with Zuckerberg's established disinterest in monitoring the deceitful content on his company's website. He prefers to allow lies to exist on Facebook and Instagram—and particularly in political ads on Facebook—and to let "the media" sort it out because, as he put it, "political speech is the most scrutinized speech already, by a lot of the media." This obviously ignores the reality that Facebook and other social media platforms control which aspects of "the media" people are exposed to, favoring what keeps people engaged—which is to say, the most sensational content coming from the perspective they already agree with.
Zuckerberg is resistant to the idea that this algorithmic curation of content makes his company accountable for the dangerous, manipulative, and hateful misinformation that it helps to spread. Instead, he says he wants to focus on only catching "the worst of the worst stuff." While we can blithely hope that this approach can at least prevent another Facebook-incited massacres like the recent genocide in Myanmar, it certainly makes it easy for figures like Donald Trump to skirt the truth.
From Facebook's perspective, however, this is part of the advantage. Along with being far easier and cheaper for them to enforce, it allows them to draw a contrast between themselves and other social media companies so that Donald Trump will direct the brunt of his wrath elsewhere. As long as Republicans remain in power in the federal government, it will be in Mark Zuckerberg's interest to play nice with their lies about Joe Biden and Ukraine and their fear-mongering about the terrifying threat of accessible voting.
So if Trump's new executive order calls out "freedom of expression" and claims that social media companies "hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey," then Zuckerberg will respond by selling Facebook as "one of the tech companies that is the most protective of giving people a voice and free expression" with "a special deference to political speech."
As long as it remains within a certain gray area of distortion, it's clearly good for Facebook's business to allow powerful figures like Trump to spread as much dishonesty as they like.
Then again, maybe this is all too harsh. Maybe Zuckerberg has a purer motive for wanting to charm the president with this talk. Maybe he senses that—within Trump's inner circle—he has a kindred spirit: someone with dead eyes and waxen skin who could offer him the kind of connection he's been seeking ever since he reinvented digital friendship, someone with whom he could fuse into a single, soulless entity known simply as Jark Kushkerberg. Keep the dream alive, Mark.
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