Intellectual Freedom News 2/8/2019
February 8, 2019 – Collated by OIF Staff and News Editors
Highlight
- New Library Bill of Rights Provision Recognizes and Defends Library Users’ Privacy | ALA News
- Council adopts revision to ‘Copyright: An Interpretation of the Code of Ethics‘ | ALA News
- 6 answers to Twitter questions about reporting censorship | OIF Blog
Censorship
- Counter-event planned at Greenville’s Five Forks library during Drag Queen Story Hour | Greenville News (SC)
- Astoria leaders defend Drag Queen Story Hour at library | Daily Astorian
- Maine lawmaker makes changes to bill that sought to ban obscene materials in schools | WMTW
- Proposed bill would let parents have more of a say in what is taught in public schools:
Hearing to be held on bill that would censor books used in public schools | News Center Maine - Text, HP80/LD 94, An Act To Prohibit the Dissemination of Obscene Material by Public Schools | Maine Legislature
- Proposed bill would let parents have more of a say in what is taught in public schools:
- Federal Drag Queen Story Time lawsuit dismissed | KATC (LA)
- Drag Queens read books to children, protesters gather outside | KATC (LA)
- An author canceled her own YA novel over accusations of racism. But is it really anti-black? | Slate; ‘Blood Heir’
- When social media goes after your book, what the right response? | The New York Times
- Mayor’s attempt to censor local article about Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism draws national attention | CNBC
- Drag queen story time at public Pennsylvania library spurs protests | WJAC
- State rep. backs off bill to censor internet content | Albuquerque Journal (NM)
- A censor sits in the library | OIF Blog, ‘A Suicide Bomber Sits in the Library’
- Silence in full volume: The censorship of an important public artwork | OIF Blog
Privacy
- “A Fundamentally Illegitimate Choice”: Soshanna Zuboff on the age of surveillance capitalism | The Intercept
- How Silicon Valley Puts the ‘Con’ in Consent | New York Times
- New Washington State Privacy Bill Incorporates Some GDPR Concepts | National Law Review
- A new Google Chrome extension will detect your unsafe passwords | Wired
- How to shine a light on U.S. government surveillance of Americans | ACLU
- Many popular iPhone apps secretly record your screen without asking | TechCrunch
- Facebook is laughing all the way to the bank as Americans shrug off privacy concerns | Los Angeles Times
- Dr Jules Polonetsky on the changing face of privacy in the digital age | Silicon Republic
Net Neutrality and Broadband Access
- Broadband Providers Are Quietly Taking Advantage of an Internet Without Net Neutrality Protections | Public Knowledge
- Net Neutrality Updates: What the future holds in Mozilla case | American Libraries
- Tech companies, states spar with govt over net neutrality | The Ledger
Fake News, Free Press, Social Media
- Support freedom for student journalists | OIF Blog
- Tom Bianchi’s Instagram ban is the latest in queer social media censorship | Out
- Teens don’t use Facebook, but they can’t escape it | Wired
- 10 facts about Americans and Facebook | Pew Research Fact-tank
- Peering under the hood of fake-news detectors | MIT News; “New work from MIT researchers peers under the hood of an automated fake-news detection system, revealing how machine-learning models catch subtle but consistent differences in the language of factual and false stories”
Hate Speech in Libraries
- Swastika found at Somers High School Library | Daily Voice (NY)
Access
- Thousands of scientists run up against Elsevier’s paywall | Nature
- Google offers a pair of apps to help the deaf community | Wired
- Attacking a pay wall that hides public court filings | The New York Times; “The federal judiciary has built an imposing pay wall around its court filings, charging a preposterous 10 cents a page for electronic access to what are meant to be public records. A pending lawsuit could help tear that wall down.”
Academic Freedom & Campus Speech
- Letter to Augsburg University regarding Phillip Adamo | AAUP
- No, campus censorship is not a myth | Spiked
- Kelso teacher-student conflict poses question: Is online criticism bullying? | TDN
First Amendment and Free Speech
- Lawmakers to consider new rules on prayer in public schools | New Hampshire Union Leader
- The US Supreme Court will review the government’s right to be a prude | Quartz
- Texas Supreme Court subtly provides stronger protections for anonymous speakers | EFF
Around the Web
- Racism and the American Library Association | Inside Higher Ed
- The American Dream Is Alive and Well | The New York Times “Most people in this country say that they are living it — but what they mean by the phrase might surprise you.”
- The challenge of America’s first online census | Wired
- The history of women in sci-fi isn’t what you think | Wired
- Research team investigating Internet censorship with tracking system | Michigan Radio/NPR; “A group of University of Michigan researchers is investigating Internet censorship. The team created a system called Censored Planet that monitors and reports when access to websites is blocked. The team is seeking to understand which websites governments are blocking and why.”
- Textbooks with LGBT history-makers coming to Elk Grove classrooms after tense debate | The Sacramento Bee
- Library of Congress receives major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation | Infodocket; “The Library of Congress announced today that it has received a $540,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to evaluate the physical health of the national collection of books in American research libraries and to guide their archive retention and preservation decisions.”
International Issues
- The tiny library bringing books to remote villages | BBC (Italy)
- Only censorship cases in Russia skyrocketed in 2018, NGO says | The Moscow Times
- China’s online censorship stifles trade, too | The New York Times
- Uganda’s Makerere University at center of row over academic freedom | DW.com
- Banned books to be on display at Richmond Public Library | Richmond News (Canada)
ALA News
- Actor and Community Activist George Takei is Auditorium Speaker at 2019 ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition
- Newbery Award Winning Author Matt de la Peña to Headline AASL President’s Program
- ALA Executive Board releases statement regarding incident at Council Forum
- New eCourse: The First Amendment and Library Services | ALA news (begins March 4)
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