Censorship

He hopes, he's trying to build to, and there's this group of people on the internet who are trying to do this, to build to a stage where we create this level between the big social networks and like individual users of like feed curators, right? People with taste and discernment are picking information individual accounts or types of content to include so people can just absorb information that is interesting to them that is you know if you're anti-ai it's all 100 made by people you know that kind of thing um or if you want you know the if the the ai slop is you know great or whatever if whatever you want it can be created and when i talked to him about this and i was like you know what if this creates more silos and and you know creates bigger issues.

He sort of says, I think that you get into really tricky territory when you try to, um, Censor in any way, right? Like you can, as a private company, create boundaries around hate speech, whatever.

But, you know, there are people who are going to want that type of content.

And this, the more sort of patronizing you are of like, you shouldn't consume the AI content, the more people are going to want to do it.

When listening to you-know-whose book excerpts on PDP yesterday, how many fucking times did that wet-brained simpleton say, laughing our arses off? And the super tips.

Censorship is a real thing, Shuley.

I had to spend 15 minutes rewriting this so it would be accepted.

I can't even say the N-word.

During National Library Week in 2025, the ALA stated pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members, and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries.

The ALA also stated that there was a decrease in documented censorship from 2023 that could be contributed to under-reporting censorship by exclusion and legislation restrictions.

According to a survey by PEN America, about 10,000 books were banned from U.S. schools under Republican-led censorship laws in the 2023 and 2024 academic year, nearly tripling the number for the previous academic year.

Many of the book titles targeted dealt with Black people, you know,

Black

In April 2022, nonprofit organization PEN America found that 1,586 book bans targeting 1,145 unique books had occurred in the past nine months.

Wow.

Also in April, the ALA published its annual report on book censorship, finding that there were 729 attempts to remove school, university, and library materials in 2021, resulting in 1,597 book challenges or removals.

All that had been whispered for the last decade, in the secrecy of friendly meetings, by the generation represented in Russian literature by Turgenev, Tolstoy, Herzen, Bakunin, Ogaryov, Kavilin, Dostoevsky, Grigorevich, Ostrovsky, and Nekrasov, began now to leak out in the press.

Censorship was still very rigorous, but what could not be said openly in political articles was smuggled in under the form of novels, humorous sketches, or veiled comments on West European events, and everyone read between the lines and understood.

Having no acquaintances at St. Petersburg apart from the school and a narrow circle of relatives, I stood outside the radical movement of those years, miles, in fact, away from it.

And yet this was perhaps the main feature of the movement, that it had the power to penetrate into so well-meaning a school as our corps was, and to find an echo in such a circle as that of my Moscow relatives.

Please, yeah, yeah.

So, um, Emmanuel asked me a question about the rise of censorship of digital resources, and I really wanted to make sure that I highlight it.

Uh, we did a report back in twenty twenty-five called Neo-Censorship in US Libraries, which is about how, um, database bans are really underreported.

And the way that we sometimes describe it is like handing a library a list of books to ban or types of books to ban.

It's totally insidious.

I don't know their gender.

They said, Pro-censorship Wattpad refugees drama is so funny to me because when I started using AO3 as a kid, I was a devout Mormon.

And I thought that reading anything even remotely pornographic was a sin and would ruin my life.

So when I was 13, I found AO3 and I went, oh, awesome.

I thought also in the right to censor, like that was a fun fit where you're taking

all the, I think right.

Censor was the time that I liked him.

Cause

I remember thoroughly enjoying