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Book Challenges Nearly Doubled From 2021

CHICAGO The American Library Association (ALA) today released new data documenting*1,269 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago. The unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022 nearly doubles the 729 challenges reported in 2021.

A record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021. Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color.

Of the reported book challenges, 58% targeted books and materials in school libraries, classroom libraries or school curricula; 41% of book challenges targeted materials in public libraries.

The prevalent use of lists of books compiled by organized censorship groups contributed significantly to the skyrocketing number of challenges and the frequency with which each title was challenged. Of the overall number of books challenged, 90% were part of attempts to censor multiple titles. Of the books challenged, 40% were in cases involving 100 or more books

Prior to 2021, the vast majority of challenges to library resources only sought to remove or restrict access to a single book.

A book challenge is a demand to remove a book from a librarys collection so that no one else can read it. Overwhelmingly, were seeing these challenges come from organized censorship groups that target local library board meetings to demand removal of a long list of books they share on social media, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALAs Office for Intellectual Freedom. Their aim is to suppress the voices of those traditionally excluded from our nations conversations, such as people in the LGBTQIA+ community or people of color.

Each attempt to ban a book by one of these groups represents a direct attack on every persons constitutionally protected right to freely choose what books to read and what ideas to explore, said Caldwell-Stone. "The choice of what to read must be left to the reader or, in the case of children, to parents. That choice does not belong to self-appointed book police.

ALA will unveil its highly anticipated list of the top 10 most challenged books in the U.S. on Monday, April 24 during National Library Week, along with its full State of America's Libraries Report. The theme ofNational Library Week 2023, There's More to the Story, focuses on the essential services and programming that libraries offer through and beyond books.

ALA President Lessa Kanani'opua Pelayo-Lozada said, Every day professional librarians sit down with parents to thoughtfully determine what reading material is best suited for their childs needs. Now, many library workers face threats to their employment, their personal safety, and in some cases, threats of prosecution for providing books to youth they and their parents want to read.

ALA began documenting the book challenges reported to us over two decades ago because we want to shine a light on the threat of censorship facing readers and entire communities. Book challenges distract from the core mission of libraries: to provide access to information. That includes access to information and services for learners of all ages, homeschooling parents, job seekers, new computer users, budding readers, entrepreneurs, veterans, tax filers and amateur genealogists just to name a few.

While a vocal minority stokes the flames of controversy around books, the vast majority of people across the nation are using life-changing services that public and school libraries offer. Our nation cannot afford to lose the library workers who lift up their communities and safeguard our First Amendment freedom to read.

Polling conducted by bipartisan research firms in 2022 showed that voters across the political spectrum oppose efforts to remove books from libraries and have confidence in libraries to make good decisions about their collections. To galvanize support for libraries and respond to the surge in book challenges and other efforts to suppress access to information, in 2022 ALA launched Unite Against Book Bans, a national initiative to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship.The coalition will mark its first anniversary during National Library Week.

* ALA compiles data on book challenges from reports filed with its Office for Intellectual Freedom by library professionals in the field and from news stories published throughout the United States. Because many book challenges are not reported to the ALA or covered by the press, the 2022 data compiled by ALA represents only a snapshot of book censorship throughout the year. A challenge to a book may be resolved in favor of retaining the book in the collection, or it can result in a book being restricted or withdrawn from the library.

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American Library Association reports record number of demands to ... - ala.org

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Ethereums censorship problem seems to have changed course over the past six months. After the government's Office of Foreign Asset Control sanctioned Tornado Cash transactions to U.S. citizens in August, the vast majority of blocks added to the blockchain were OFAC compliant.

Now, the share of censored blocks has shrunk to less than a third in what might be seen as a comeback for Ethereums anti-censorship ethos.

According to the site MEV Watch, during the past weekend and into the beginning of this week, roughly one in three blocks that made it onto the Ethereum blockchain was OFAC compliant. This means that about 30% of blocks excluded transactions sanctioned by the OFAC, including Tornado Cash.

This article originally appeared in Valid Points, CoinDesks weekly newsletter breaking down Ethereums evolution and its impact on crypto markets. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Flipping that around, more than two-thirds of blocks that made it onto the Ethereum blockchain over the last 24 hours are not OFAC compliant.

(mevwatch.info)

Just a month ago, Ethereum validators were still censoring about 50% of blocks that made it onto the blockchain. The last time that Ethereum had such low levels of censorship was Sept. 24, 2022.

Since Ethereum went through the Merge in September, about 85% of the blocks that made it onto the blockchain participated in a middleware known as MEV-Boost, where validators can request pre-made blocks from builders.

MEV-Boost is a software that helps validators earn MEV, or maximal extractible value, which are profits that come from rearranging or including certain transactions within a block. The MEV-Boost software was innovated by Ethereum research and development team Flashbots in order to distribute MEV among validators more equally.

While MEV-Boost hasnt been integrated into Ethereum at the protocol level, its widely used by the Ethereum ecosystem, as 85% of validators have relayed blocks via the middleware component. Flashbots also has its own relayer for validators to connect with, used by roughly 25% of validators.

Story continues

After OFAC sanctioned Tornado Cash, there was debate over whether validators should include those transactions or not. Ever since then, the Ethereum community has continued to push for a censorship reversal, and the results of those efforts now appear to be paying off thanks, in large part, to the introduction of new, non-censoring relays.

At the time the sanctions went into effect, most validators were connected to Flashbots MEV-Boost relay, which Flashbots immediately programmed to censor transactions by default.

In response to community backlash, however, Flashbots raced to complete the process of open sourcing its code for MEV-Boost, so others could develop their own non-censoring relays.

Read more: As Censorship on Ethereum Begins, Could This Open-Sourced Code Help Counter It?

In November, Agnostic and ultra sound relays with a non-censoring version of MEV-Boost were introduced. Since then, they have risen up in the ranks of relays delivering blocks on Ethereum. Flashbots accounts for delivering about 26% of the blocks over the past 14 days, while Agnostic and ultra sound each have delivered roughly 20% of the blocks over the past 14 days.

(mevboost.pics)

Over the weekend, Agnostic and ultra sound each delivered more blocks on Ethereum than Flashbots did.

Martin Kppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis Chain, which runs the Agnostic relay, told CoinDesk that it took some time to get the word out and demonstrate that we offer a reliable relay.

Now that validators have had the opportunity to experiment with MEV-Boost, many have started to turn to alternative relays like Agnostic and ultra sound.

The number of validators that are connected to us is constantly growing, Kppelmann said. We were already able to deliver the most blocks of all relays for some period of time.

Read more: Fewer Than Half of New Ethereum Blocks Over the Past 24 Hours Are OFAC Compliant

Read more:
Latest Ethereum Blocks Suggest Validators Are Reversing Censorship - Yahoo Finance

A history of the transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century could well be told with just a focus on free speech and censorship. But this story of changed attitudes toward censorship yields lessons far beyond just the liberal attitude toward free speech.

Aside from the inevitability of death and taxes, there is another immutable rule: history repeats itself. Its repetitions may come in different ways, but history seems inevitably prone to recycle itself.

The censorship impulse reflects one such way in which history repeats itself.

In the 1950s and 1960s, censorship campaigns arose in response to the Cold War and the danger of communist infiltration and influence. These high-profile campaigns were followed in the 1970s and 1980s by efforts to control the burgeoning flood of violent and sexually explicit media speech available to children. Generally speaking, these censorship efforts were acquiesced in or supported by conservatives. Behind the banner of the Free Speech Movement that began in California in the 1960s, liberals stood as staunch allies of free speech, regardless of how repulsive or destructive that speech.

Liberals continued that solid free speech defense through the 1990s and 2000s, although with cracks beginning to appear as they began succumbing to political correctness. It was liberals who strongly resisted a congressional attempt to regulate Internet pornography accessed by children, as well as state attempts to protect children from graphically violent video games. This probably marked the apex of the liberal defense of speech. For at least the past decade or two, the liberal position on free speech has eroded considerably, to the point where the political left has become the primary advocate for censorship across an array of speech issues.

Censorship, in fact, is really no longer a speech issue. It has become a tool within the political weaponry arsenal.

The instances of political speech censorship appear across the spectrum of contemporary life. A belief in election fraud can disqualify you from a job. A position on pro-life can subject you to FBI harassment. A skepticism on lockdowns or mandated vaccines can brand you as a social outcast. An adherence to certain religious views can subject you to innumerable sanctions.

The recent release of the Twitter files reveals an astonishing attempt by the federal government to control the speech content of Twitter users. And most recently, because of a fear that a public panic might threaten the banking industry, there have been liberal calls to censor social media reports of bank failures. Censorship has become a forefront tool for the achievement of political objectives, much like tax cuts or spending promises.

A history of the transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century could well be told with just a focus on free speech and censorship. But this story of changed attitudes toward censorship yields lessons far beyond just the liberal attitude toward free speech.

To the left, the purpose of government is no longer the protection of liberty. The lefts indifference toward freedom of speech is but one example. Another appears in how quickly the left has turned away from religious liberty. Indeed, freedom has disappeared from the list of principles and values believed in by the left. In the place of freedom now comes the amorphous term equity. But equity is not a natural right or individual liberty; it is instead a label for a political agenda.

The prevalence of censorship advocacy also demonstrates how the left continually sponsors the growth of government in all areas of life. Twenty-five years ago, liberals vehemently opposed any content regulation of the Internet, warning that government interference could stunt the growth of the Internet. Since then, and true to prediction, the Internet has grown, to the point of becoming a mainstay of the American economy. The way in which American business has converted the Internet into a growth engine that has reshaped culture and society should be cause for celebration. Instead, the left sees this triumph in private entrepreneurship as a prompt for greater government control and activism. Indeed, now that the Internet has prospered, the left seeks to use it to further promote the reach of government into our lives.

An age-old justification for free speech, even speech that is unwanted, holds that if a democratic people want to address unwanted conduct in society it must certainly protect the speech concerning that unwanted conduct. Because only through that speech will a democracy be able to know the existence and extent of the underlying unwanted conduct. In this context, speech is always the tip of the iceberg. And if the iceberg is to be avoided, the tip needs to be seen.

Likewise, censorship has become the tip of the lefts political iceberg.

The Imaginative Conservativeapplies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics as we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please considerdonating now.

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Censorship: The Tip of the Iceberg - The Imaginative Conservative

Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was missing context and could mislead people.

According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations and federal officials that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls the censorship-industrial complex, I had committed the offense of malinformation. Unlike disinformation, which is intentionally misleading, or misinformation, which is erroneous, malinformation is true but inconvenient.

As illustrated by internal Twitter communications that journalist Matt Taibbi highlighted last week, malinformation can include emails from government officials that undermine their credibility and true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.

The latter category encompasses accurate reports of breakthrough infections among people vaccinated against COVID-19, accounts of true vaccine side effects, objections to vaccine mandates, criticism of politicians, and citations of peer-reviewed research on naturally acquired immunity.

Disinformation and misinformation have always been contested categories, defined by the fallible and frequently subjective judgments of public officials and other government-endorsed experts. But malinformation is even more clearly in the eye of the beholder, since it is defined not by its alleged inaccuracy but by its perceived threat to public health, democracy or national security, which often amounts to nothing more than questioning the wisdom, honesty or authority of those experts.

Taibbis recent revelations focused on the work of the Virality Project, which the taxpayer-subsidized Stanford Internet Observatory launched in 2020. Although Renee DiResta, the Observatorys research manager, concedes that misinformation is ultimately speech, meaning the government cannot directly suppress it, she says the threat it poses require[s] that social media platforms, independent researchers and the government work together as partners in the fight.

That sort of collaboration raises obvious free speech concerns. If platforms like Twitter and Facebook were independently making these assessments, their editorial discretion would be protected by the First Amendment. But the picture looks different when government officials including the president, the surgeon general, members of Congress, and representatives of public health and law enforcement agencies publicly and privately chastise social media companies for not doing enough to suppress speech they view as dangerous.

Such meddling is especially alarming when it includes specific requests to remove content, make it less accessible or banish particular users. Even without explicit extortion, those requests are tantamount to commands because they are made against a backdrop of threats to punish recalcitrant platforms.

The threats include antitrust action, increased liability for user-posted content and other legal and regulatory measures. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said such measures might be necessary when he demanded a whole-of-society effort to combat the urgent threat posed by health misinformation.

In a federal lawsuit filed last year, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, joined by scientists who ran afoul of the ever-expanding crusade against disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, argue that such pressure violates the First Amendment. This week, Terry A. Doughty, a federal judge in Louisiana, allowed that lawsuit to proceed, saying the plaintiffs had adequately alleged significant encouragement and coercion that converts the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social media platforms into state action.

Doughty added that the plaintiffs have plausibly alleged state action under the theories of joint participation, entwinement, and the combining of factors such as subsidization, authorization, and encouragement. Based on that analysis, he ruled that the plaintiffs plausibly state a claim for violation of the First Amendment via government-induced censorship.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of that case, Congress can take steps to discourage censorship by proxy. Shellenberger argues that it should stop funding groups like the Observatory and mandate instant reporting of all communications between government officials and contractors with social media executives relating to content moderation.

The interference that Shellenberger describes should not be a partisan issue. It should trouble anyone who prefers open inquiry and debate to covert government manipulation of online speech.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds.See our guidelines.

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Fight against 'malinformation' is censorship by government proxy - Chicago Sun-Times

Censorship in the United States is nothing new, though its targets have shifted over time. The earliest book bans in the United States were started by religious leaders. In 1650, a Massachusetts Bay colonist named William Pynchon published his pamphlet The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption in which he argued that people who followed Christian teachings would go to heaven. Puritan leaders did not favor the pamphlet and proceeded to denounce him as a heretic, burned his pamphlet and banned it.

This continued throughout history; during slavery and the Civil War, many states outlawed literature that expressed anti-slavery sentiments, one very famous novel being Uncle Toms Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Similar bans continued throughout history, with the Comstock Act of 1873 deeming it illegal to send obscene, lewd or lascivious, immoral or indecent publications through the mail, while also targeting those who possessed some form of literature or art deemed obscene. It aimed to prohibit discussing birth control and sexuality. Some books were banned and subsequently burned, including Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass and James Joyces Ulysses.

Books continue to be banned and challenged, with the most recent occurrences happening in states aiming to eliminate literature surrounding queer studies, people of color and ultimately young people. Some states include Indiana, Florida, Texas and Tennessee, among others.

As such, in honor of the marginalized groups represented in the books that are facing challenges, here is a list of books from Floridas most recent book ban that you need to read.

1. The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood:

This novel argues that legally controlling womens reproductive freedom is morally and politically wrong. This is depicted through the suffering of Offred and the other Handmaids. Handmaids are servants whose only purpose is to have children. From the dystopian perspective they lose all value once they no longer are able to carry children. It is banned in many states due to its profanity, sexual tones and being anti-Christian, among other reasons. The story is a powerful yet disturbing dystopian satirical piece of literature that shows a future U.S. a where women have been stripped of all their civil rights. Not ironically, this comes less than a year from when Roe v. Wade was overturned, an event which signifies a complete disregard for womens health and rights by the Supreme Court.

2. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas:

An award-winning bestselling young adult novel, The Hate U Give is about the shooting of a young unarmed Black man by a white police officer. The Hate U Give, despite being important to the African American plight, was banned. When looking at Gov. Ron DeSantiss efforts to eliminate African American studies in the Advanced Placement curriculum, it is unsurprising that a book that gives a vivid image of what its like to be a Black man in the U.S. would be banned.

3. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Snchez:

This chilling New York Times bestseller follows a young woman named Julia, who navigates her grief following an accident that involved her sister and details the trauma she faces when her mother compares her two daughters.

It was important for me, for young people of color, to feel seen by the book, said author Erika Snchez in an interview with NBC News.

The book, due to its strong language and negative portrayal of religious faith, was unpopular among parents. The book is banned for its strong language and negative portrayal of religious faith. Unfortunately, while it is a rather grim topic, the stigma of depression wreaks havoc in many communities. By writing about suicidal ideation, Snchez raises awareness in young Latine individuals. The fact remains that Hispanic teens, especially females, have higher rates of suicide compared to white or black teens, according to the CDC.

4. Dreaming in Cubanby Cristina Garca:

This novel, which was originally banned in 2020, outlines the heroines journey of Celia del Pino and her family, who is forced to cope with their ever-changing Cuba in light of the Cuban Revolution and the emotional trauma that ensued. There is a tremendous overemphasized theme of family relationships and the divisiveness of politics. It sheds a unique light on Cuban history and culture by including critical historical events and elements of Santera, a popular religion in Cuba. Dreaming in Cuban was condemned for containing obscene and pornographic material and is no longer circulated.

5. The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis:

This is a genuinely heartbreaking novel that takes readers on a harrowing but compelling journey regarding our societys rape culture and violence against women. It focuses on Alex Craft, who had an older sister that was raped, killed and mutilated. The book ultimately is a feminist book that highlights the struggle of consistently trying to be the best while talking about the genuine and scary reality of what it is like to be a woman in the U.S.

6. Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult:

Picoults novel features two timelines: flashbacks and the present moment. It follows Peter Houghtons life, with flashbacks showing the years of brutal bullying he endured to the present moment: when he decides to commit a mass shooting at his high school. This novel is controversial for its violence, sexual references and profanity. Something interesting to note is that 20 of Picoults titles were banned in Florida.

Jodi Picoult, in an interview with The Hill, warned, Weve seen, historically, what the next chapter looks like when we dont speak out against book challenges and that story does not end well.

Challenging and banning books has a tremendously negative impact on a society, often leading to a spread of xenophobia and overall ignorance. Young people should have access to unsensitized versions of history and books that expose them to new cultures and experiences because it allows them to think critically about the world.

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Read banned books, defy literary censorship - Daily Trojan Online