Game

The censorship battle against banned books, porn, and the internet can be won

June 27, 2011 was a big day for a generation of video game fans. After years of debate, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned California’s law banning the sale of “adult” rated games to minors — claiming that one of the youngest art forms of The new millennium deserves full First Amendment protection. The decision was made just over a decade ago, as a solid step towards unprecedented opportunities for artists.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Supreme Court reversed speech suppression measures on the nascent website, including significant sections of the Communications Decency Act to restrict content. online pornography. Politicians and courts no longer want to dub music, movies, and games out of bounds. Online publishing has eroded the power of soft gatekeepers like Walmart and movie theater chains, which can reduce sales of obscene songs and unrated movies, and at the same time Crowdfunding has opened a way to bring niche media into the world.

But the road ahead these days looks increasingly perilous. The web platforms that have transformed the art have created their own rules and incentives that shape what people see online. An extensive effort by activists is trying to get books from schools, libraries and sometimes commercial shelves. A series of new laws could make that easier. And America’s highest courts have proven willing to put even long-resolved principles up for grabs.

In 2021, the American Library Association reported 729 complaints about efforts to evict books from libraries, the highest number in 20 years of record keeping by the association. Efforts are centered around books that address gender identity, sexuality, and race or racism, and while many of the books take place in the local political context, they are motivated by a national political campaign. They’re not slowing down either: Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, says that 2022 has already surpassed the previous year’s figure in November.

Local battles have been incorporated into state laws designed to lock down libraries and classroom curriculum. Florida passed the Stop WOKE Act, one of many recent efforts to keep allegedly objectionable materials from schools, with language spoken by some college professors. afraid to ban reading about segregation and genocide. Missouri Senate Bill 775 criminalize the display of many sexually descriptive images in private or public school documents.

“This campaign to censor books related to gender identity, sexual orientation, race, racism — we have never seen such a concerted effort,” says Caldwell-Stone. “I guess we can go back to the McCarthy-era attack on documents that supposedly convey a message of socialism or communism. But it’s almost the same.”

The ramifications are much bigger than the few books missing from the school bookshelf. Public libraries aren’t just for kids, and in addition to lending books and movies, they’re also a web portal for many people. “The whole idea of ​​public libraries is to equip individuals to educate themselves on what they believe in,” says Caldwell-Stone. And when librarians pushed back the restrictions, they faced harassment or special criminal complaint. In some cases, that has resulted in communities at least temporarily completely lost their library. State laws like Missouri run the risk of significantly increasing the stakes.

Some courts have ruled out legal attacks on speech. A judge blocked the Stop WOKE Act in a scathing stance rife with comparisons to George Orwell 1984. A Virginia court has rejected an attempt to ban Barnes & Noble from selling two books through a confusing state law on obscenity, albeit after initially letting the case go. Texas courts were unimpressed when a local official prosecuted Netflix for allowing viewers to stream cutea French coming-of-age movie.

But there is also reason to worry. A Texas appeals court upheld internet censorship laws with staggering effects on speech and Supreme Court blocked it with a thin majority of five to four. At least two judges have called for a review of the defamation standard, making it easier for public figures to sue for negative press coverage. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court rejected decades of legal precedent in overturning Roe sues Wadesomething that could bode ill for all sorts of supposedly settled legal doctrines.

Efforts to ban these books have focused on Republican activists and lawmakers. But Democrats have floated misinformation bans and anonymous child safety bills, which could also cool speech for years to come. Both sides have supported the Children’s Online Safety Act, which protects children from seeing harmful material — but can also lock them about sex education or LGBTQ resources. Governments around the world are banning “fake news” that threatens press freedom, and some are pushing for rules that would allow them to pressure websites to take them down even legal content.

“I think it is inevitable that we will see more legislative attacks on the legal underpinnings of freedom of speech,” said Evan Greer, director of digital human rights organization Fight for the Future. online commentary from both Democrats and Republicans in the United States as well as political parties in other countries.” . “It’s been steadily increasing, and I think maybe even exponential, over the past few years.”

Many of these efforts have been fueled by the rise of social media, which has given ordinary people a loudspeaker. put the law of speech under intense tension. Even so, however, the site itself has undergone a transformation. Users clustered within a handful of private social networks plays a huge role in what people can say — and how they say it.

Social networks can (and to avoid being swamped by spam and harassment, really must) ban speech that doesn’t break the law. But even if this is not legitimate censorship, it shapes culture in meaningful and sometimes strange ways. TikTok, which recently exploded as the social giants of the 10s stagnated, is defining how a new generation of creators talk – creating a bowdlerized slang dubbed algospeak to avoid its alleged bans on the words “kill” to “lesbian.”

Some algorithmic languages ​​are just talk, but that doesn’t make it trivial. “The rules set by these very large platforms have an impact on what is seen and heard, but also have an impact on what people consider okay,” says Greer. And increasingly, that means rules against depicting or discussing sex and the human body, a taboo that artists once fought to end. Most major social networks ban pornography, and they often define that category loosely, sometimes including nearly any nudity with a few narrow exceptions. “People have grown up in the internet age where if you see a pair of boobs, you’ll like, Whoa, I ended up in the wrong place.”

Even if the platforms would like With a more liberal policy, they face a boycott of payment processors and mobile app stores, which increasingly serve as gatekeepers that retailers once occupied. Tumblr head Matt Mullenweg make the situation clear earlier this year, explaining why Tumblr didn’t lift the “porn ban” – a set of rules body positivity and gay blogs have been purged, among other documents, from the site in 2018. “No modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules Tumblr did in 2007,” Mullenweg lamented. “You need to only use the web on iOS and sideload on Android, pay in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business activities without blocking, do a lot of work. during age, identity and compliance verification so you don’t go to jail, protect all that identifying information so you don’t screw up your users and make a ton of money.”

But if there is hope for a more open future, it is that the state of speech rarely changes any faster. TikTok launched globally less than 5 years ago. The recent rise of the library book ban is even newer. Twitter, which has played a huge role in shaping political discourse over the past decade, is undergoing an overhaul aimed at directing more users to smaller independent platforms like Mastodon. These platforms are facing censorship challenges of their own, but they offer the next decade an alternative to the centralized control of the previous decade. “I don’t know if anyone can predict what happens next,” Greer said.

And Caldwell-Stone believes that when people understand the benefits of squabbles, they get involved — and often don’t side with censorship. “I think that’s where the change has to come. It’s to encourage people to realize that what happens in the community matters. That even library council elections matter. Voting for a county commissioner, your school board and library board appointee, is in part knowing what their agenda is and what they stand for. And what they should support is people’s ability to make their own choices,” she said. “It’s not the government’s role to tell people what to think.”



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