Censorship wars against banned books, porn, and the internet can be won

A new generation of gamers celebrated June 27th as a historic day. After years of argument, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a California law banning the sale of “mature”-rated games to minors — declaring that one of the youngest art forms of the new millennium deserved the First Amendment’s full protection. Just over a decade old, the decision felt like just one of many steps in an ongoing march to unprecedented opportunities and benefits for artists.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Supreme Court reversed the speech crackdowns against the internet’s nascent growth. Key pieces of Communications Decency Act restricting online sexual content were among the areas that the Court overturned. The desire to dub music, movies, and video games beyond legal limits was decreasing among politicians and courts. Online publishing reduced the influence of theatre chains and soft gatekeepers such as Walmart. They could also reduce the sales of unrated movies and explicit songs. However, crowdfunding was a way to bring niche media into this world.

The path to success looks ever more perilous. It is now more difficult to find art online because the web platforms have their own guidelines and incentive systems. An activist movement is pushing to take books out of libraries and schools. It could be made easier by a series of new laws. And America’s highest courts have proven willing to put even long-settled principles up for grabs.

The American Library Association received 729 complaints in 2021 about efforts to remove books from libraries. This was the most number of such complaints it has ever received over its twenty-year history. They were focused around books about gender identity and sexuality and were supported by a large political campaign. They’re also not slowing down: Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, says that 2022 surpassed the previous year’s count by November.

State-level laws have been passed to restrict access to libraries and curricula in schools due to local disputes. Florida has passed the Stop WOKE Act. This is one of several recent measures to prevent supposedly repellent material from being removed schools. The language was feared by university professors as it would prohibit any readings related to segregation and genocide. Missouri’s Senate Bill 775 criminalizes showing many visual depictions of sex in private or public school materials.

“This campaign to censor books dealing with gender identity, sexual orientation, race, racism — we’ve not seen such a coordinated effort ever,” says Caldwell-Stone. ”I guess we could go harking back to the McCarthy-era attack on materials believed to be communicating a message about socialism or communism. But it’s almost the same.”

There are far more consequences than just a few lost books on school shelves. Public libraries aren’t just visited by children, and in addition to lending books and films, they’re portals to the web for many people. “The whole idea of public libraries is to equip individuals to learn for themselves what they believe,” Caldwell-Stone says. And when librarians have pushed back on restrictions, they’ve faced harassment or specious criminal complaints. In some cases, that’s led to communities at least temporarily losing their libraries altogether. State laws like Missouri’s threaten to dramatically up the ante.

Some courts have upheld legal restrictions on speech. A judge blocked the Stop WOKE Act in a blistering opinion rife with comparisons to George Orwell’s 1984. A Virginia court threw out an attempt to ban Barnes & Noble from selling two books via an obscure state obscenity law, albeit after initially letting the case move forward. Texas courts did not care when Netflix was prosecuted by a local official for streaming to viewers. PetsFrench Coming-of-Age Film, “”

But there’s also cause for concern. Texas’s appeals court upheld an Internet moderation law that had serious consequences for speech. However, the Supreme Court ruled against it by a slim majority of five to four. Public figures will find it much easier to sue for negative media coverage if at least two justices call for the need to revise the standard of libel. In overturning decades of legal precedent, the Supreme Court earlier in this year tossed out decades. Roe V. WadeThis could spell doom for many supposedly settled legal doctrines.

Republican lawmakers and activists are the main beneficiaries of these book banning initiatives. But Democrats have floated misinformation bans and anonymity-threatening child safety bills that could also chill speech for years to come. Both parties have backed the Kids Online Safety Act, which is meant to protect children from seeing harmful material — but could also lock them out of sex education or LGBTQ resources. Governments worldwide are placing bans on “fake news” that threaten the liberty of the press, and some are pushing for rules that would let them pressure websites into taking down even legal content.

“I think it’s inevitable we’ll see more legislative attacks on the legal foundations of online free speech from both Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. and political parties in other countries,” says Evan Greer, director of digital human rights organization Fight for the Future. “It’s been steadily increasing, and I would argue maybe even exponentially increasing, over the last couple of years.”

Social media has facilitated many of these initiatives. It’s given ordinary citizens a platform that allows them to communicate with one another. This puts the speech law in extreme strain. Even as that’s happened, though, the web itself has undergone a transformation. Users have concentrated inside a handful of private social networks that play a huge role in what people can say — and how they say it.

Social networks can (and to avoid being overrun by spam and harassment, effectively have to) ban speech that doesn’t violate the law. But even if this isn’t legal censorship, it shapes culture in meaningful and sometimes bizarre ways. TikTok, which has recently exploded as the social giants of the ’10s have stagnated, is defining how a new generation of creators talks — giving rise to a bowdlerized slang dubbed algospeak to avoid its supposed bans on words ranging from “kill” to “lesbian.”

Some algospeak is tongue-in-cheek, but that doesn’t make it trivial. “The rules that these very large platforms set have an impact on what gets seen and heard, but also an impact on what people perceive as OK,” says Greer. Greer says that there are increasingly rules that prohibit depicting and discussing sexuality or human bodies. This is a taboo artists used to fight for. Many social media platforms have strict bans against pornography. They often loosely define the category, which can include almost any type of nudity, with some exceptions. “People have grown up in an internet where if you see a pair of breasts, you’re like, Whoa, I’ve ended up in the wrong place.”

Even when platforms are not available want They are now being viewed as more open-minded and they risk losing their support by mobile app shops and payment processors, who increasingly take on the role of retailers’ gatekeepers. Tumblr head Matt Mullenweg laid out the situation starkly earlier this year, explaining why Tumblr wasn’t lifting its “porn ban” — a set of rules that purged queer and body-positive blogs, among other material, from the site in 2018. “No modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007,” lamented Mullenweg. “You’d need to be web-only on iOS and sideload on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money.”

But if there’s hope for a more open future, it’s that the state of speech has rarely changed faster. TikTok’s worldwide launch was less than five years ago. Even more recent is the current surge in library book bans. Twitter, which has played a huge role in shaping political discourse over the past decade, is undergoing an overhaul that’s driven many users to smaller independent platforms like Mastodon. These platforms are facing their own moderation challenges, but they offer the next decade an alternative to the past decade’s centralized control. “I don’t know that anyone can predict what happens next,” says Greer.

And Caldwell-Stone believes that when people understand the stakes of speech battles, they get involved — and usually not on the side of censors. “I think that’s where the change has to come. It’s to encourage everyone to realize that what happens in the community is important. Even the election of a library board member is crucial. It is important to know what the agenda and beliefs of county commissioners who will appoint your library board and school boards. And what they should be supporting is the ability of everyone to make their own choices,” she says. “It’s not the role of the government to tell people what to think.”