Intellectual Freedom News 5/31/2019
May 31, 2019 – Collated by OIF Staff and News Editors
Highlights
- Intellectual Freedom & Privacy Events in our Nation’s Capitol | OIF Blog; “ALA’s Annual Conference is in Washington D.C. this year, and the Office for Intellectual Freedom will be there staffing committee meetings, programs, and social events.”
Censorship
- Delaware County library cancels teen drag event | The Columbus Dispatch (OH)
- Christian group trying to stop drag queen storytime at Fall River library | The Herald News (MA)
- A Drag Queen Story Hour is coming to Fall River’s library — and now a group is planning to protest it | Boston Globe
- Leander church to host ‘Drag Queen Story Time’ after City cancels library event | KVUE.com (TX)
- New Hampshire prisons ban books critical of prison system, award winners | Book Riot
- Illinois prison removes more than 200 books from prison library | Illinois Public Media News
- Kansas Prisoners Banned From Reading ‘A Game of Thrones’ Along With Thousands of Other Books | Newsweek
- ACLU calling for Arizona prisons to lift ban on Black author’s book | Rollingout.com
- Compromise reached over disputed Los Angeles school mural | NCAC
Privacy
- All the ways Google tracks you – and how to stop it | Wired
- Spokane Public Library investigating after video of fight surfaces in mayoral campaign | The Spokesman-Review
- Schools are deploying massive digital surveillance systems. The results are alarming | Education Week
- The First Public Schools In The US Will Start Using Facial Recognition Next Week | BuzzFeed
- As Surveillance Culture Grows, Can we Even Hope to Escape its Reach? | The Guardian
- A new bill would force companies to check their algorithms for bias | The Verge
- The Government Is Expanding Its Social Media Surveillance Capabilities | Brennan Center for Justice
Catch up with all the privacy news with the Privacy News Update on the ChoosePrivacyEveryday site.
Access
- The Digital Public Library of America has re-released the Mueller Report as a well-formatted ebook instead of a crappy PDF | Boing Boing
- Eliminating librarian positions limits intellectual freedom | OIF Blog
- To meet the ‘Plan S’ open-access mandate, journals mull setting papers free at publication | Science Magazine
Net Neutrality and Broadband Access
- FCC cuts bogus data from yearly broadband report, acts like nothing happened | Gizmodo
- What does the FCC’s Broadband Deployment Report tell us about the digital divide? | Benton Foundation Digital Beat
- 47 Democrats cave on net neutrality after GOP calls bill “dead on arrival” | Ars Technica
- Digital gap between rural and nonrural America persists | Pew Research Center FactTank
Fake News, Free Press, Social Media
- What Game of Thrones teaches us about fake news | OIF Blog
- How Finland is fighting fake news – in the classroom | World Economic Forum
- Facebook isn’t deleting the fake Pelosi video. Should it? | The New York Times
- Deepfakes are getting better—but they’re still easy to spot | Ars Technica
Academic Freedom & Campus Speech
- Public colleges seek ways to pull up the welcome mat for white-nationalist and other extreme speakers | The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Self-censorship on campus is bad for science | The Atlantic
First Amendment and Free Speech
- Why fascists storm bookstores | The Nation
- Supreme Court rules against Alaska man in free speech case | The New York Times
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor once again is the most speech-protective justice | Freedom Forum Institute
Around the Web
- Changes to HHS civil rights website appeared to foreshadow Trump administration’s rollback of transgender protections | Sunlight Foundation
- Happy birthday, Raina Telgemeier! | OIF Blog
- How a California library built an outstanding free lunch and learning initiative | School Library Journal
- This dating app exposes the monstrous bias of algorithms | Wired
- 10 reasons school librarians are more important than ever | eSchool News
International Issues
- The splinternet is growing | Fortune; ” This phenomenon, colloquially called “splinternet,” whereby governments seek to fence off the World Wide Web into a series of national Internets, isn’t new. The term, also known as cyberbalkanization, has been around since the 1990s.”
- Academic freedom at risk in Italy | Inside Higher Ed
- Scientists accuse Hungary of seeking “total political control” over research | Reuters
- Poland files a challenge to new EU copyright law | Techspot.com
- China’s internet censors are on high alert ahead of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests | Business Insider
- This ‘fake news’ law threatens free speech. But it doesn’t stop there. | The New York Times (Singapore)
ALA News
- Bestselling Author Jason Reynolds is the Opening General Session Speaker at the 2019 ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition in Washington, DC
- Controversial topics and difficult dialogues – Strategies for addressing misinformation in the Library (ACRL)
- New session: Offering Service and Support to the LGBTQIA Community and Allies Workshop
- Libraries = Strong Communities tour to end with rally celebration at ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition in Washington, D.C.
- 2020 Symposium on the Future of Libraries Opens Call for Session Proposals
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