#censorship-and-book-bans

#censorship-and-book-bans

Ask any American what our citizenship rule is and they'll tell you, everyone born here is a citizen alike. That rule was enshrined in the 14th Amendment to put it out of reach of any government official to destroy.

The court said Colorado's ban on 'talk therapy' may prevent Christian counselors from helping teens work through their feelings about sexual attractions or their gender identity.

Selling a book on a man who is in jail for his activities as a journalist, for promoting free expression, would be subject to sedition.

Around 2013 in Taiwan's context, when Facebook started to take over the digital ecosystem in Taiwan, many local independent bulletin boards that had been formed for sexual minorities were shut down because they had no income from advertisements, and people were pushed into mainstream platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Meta, whatever, Twitter now X where sexual expression was usually reported or flagged.

A study found that reading banned books predicted civic engagement more strongly than personality traits. Reading banned books showed zero correlation with grades, violent crime, or nonviolent crime in adolescents. Reactance theory explains why censorship backfires: Restricted freedoms activate curiosity and thinking.

These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of 'partisan ideology,' descriptions that 'disparage' Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation's 'beauty, abundance, or grandeur.'

Recent revelations from news agency Reuters that the US is "developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including hate speech and terrorist propaganda," as a method to counter what it sees as excessive censorship in other parts of the world is troubling to the EU. Even if the plans appear to have been delayed and detail is thin, the US position is clear.

Imagine every post online came with a bounty of up to $150,000 paid to anyone who finds it violates opaque government rules-all out of the pocket of the platform. Smaller sites could be snuffed out, and big platforms would avoid crippling liability by aggressively blocking, taking down, and penalizing speech that even violates these rules. In turn, users would self-censor, and opportunists would turn accusations into a profitable business.

Last year was a record-setting one for education censorship; more than half of U.S college and university students now study in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how college campuses can operate, according to a new report from PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for campus free speech and press freedom.

When I saw the Association of American Universities' rejection of the White House's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," I knew that the institutions invited to join the agreement were likely to reject it, too. At a time when organizational communication seems to be the province of PR firms, it is still true that a missive from a group representing some of our country's most prestigious research institutions carries substantial weight in U.S. higher education.