Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
The Charlie Kirk purge: How 600 Americans were punished in a pro-Trump crackdown
Two months after Charlie Kirk's assassination, a government-backed campaign has led to firings, suspensions, investigations and other action against more than 600 people. Republican officials have endorsed the punishments, saying that those who glorify violence should be removed from positions of trust.
House Republicans Want To Doxx Wikipedia Editors Over Bogus 'Bias' Complaints
The letter’s requests read like a fishing expedition designed by people who fundamentally misunderstand both Wikipedia and the Constitution.
"Rather than end the genocide," Johnson said, "the response instead is to continue firing, doxing, smearing, and attempting to censor inconvenient narratives."
#censorship · #free-speech · #israel–palestine-conflict · #wikipedia
School board member admits to banning books without reading them, faces lawsuit
"I don't like them. I wouldn't read them. I'll be honest I've read the reviews on some of them…" With these words at a public meeting, Tennessee's Rutherford County School Board member Stan Vaught admitted to banning books he hadn't read — a revelation that kicked off a federal lawsuit.
According to the complaint, board members relied primarily on BookLooks.org, a website connected to the Hitler-quoting group Moms for Liberty, instead of reading the books themselves or considering their literary merit. The board repeatedly overruled their own librarians' recommendations to keep books like Toni Morrison's Beloved and Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, and Ernest Cline' Ready Player One because it has "characters discussing beliefs that heaven and god are not
real."
#books · #censorship · #extremism · #free-speech · #libraries · #us-politics
Cover to Cover: An Analysis of Titles Banned in the 23–24 School Year
In the 2023-2024 school year, there were more than 10,000 instances of banned books in public schools, affecting more than 4,000 unique titles. These mass book bans were often the result of targeted campaigns to remove books with characters of color, LGBTQ+ identities, and sexual content from public school classrooms and libraries. As book bans reached an unprecedented high in the last school year, PEN America sought to further understand the impacts of this censorship – the identities, content areas, genres, and types of books that are being erased from America’s public schools.
In November 2024, PEN America previously reported on the content of titles that had experienced two or more bans (1,091 titles); here, we include a more comprehensive analysis of all 4,218 titles banned during the 2023-2024 school year.
What have we found?
Book bans are not a hoax.
How the United States Learned to Love Internet Censorship
America was once seen as the home of the free internet. That era is now over.
So, the scenario has an awful lot of similarities to the Hunter Biden laptop story, right? Almost eerily so. But this time, Elon Musk is in charge, right? And so, obviously, he left this up, right? And he let people share it, right? Free speech absolutism, right? Right? Elon?
Hahaha, of course not.
#censorship · #elon-musk · #free-speech · #social-media · #us-politics
But there is a problem across certain quarters of the IndieWeb stemming from what I think is internalised behaviour learned from continuous exposure to the mores of Corporate America.
If you can’t find certain types of content in the curated collections of links on IndieWeb sites because the curators have adopted wholesale the corporate rules of “what is allowed" then the IndieWeb is just going to be a pallid reflection of the CorporateWeb, but with far less clout.
For years, internet advocates have warned against restrictive policies by governments like those in China and Russia aimed at limiting access to specific content online. They said initiatives like the Great Firewall risked ushering in an internet that was increasingly balkanized into different spheres where users will have very different experiences of the web based on where they are. The “splinternet,” as some call it, was to be avoided at all costs, but maybe it’s time to reconsider that stance; maybe it’s time to embrace it.
#censorship · #politics · #web