August 3, 2018 – Collated by OIF Staff and News Editors

Intellectual Freedom Highlights

• Project Report: Library Values & Privacy in our National Digital Strategies: Field guides, Convenings, and Conversations | Center for Information Policy Research, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Data & Society

Censorship

• Do trigger warnings help or harm? | Psychology Today; “The researchers found that being exposed to trigger warnings caused participants to rate both themselves and others as more vulnerable to developing PTSD. Trigger warnings led to no self-reported differences in anxiety between the two groups overall, but for participants who already held the belief that “words cause harm,” trigger warnings led to an increase in anxiety.”
• Memoirs about censorship | OIF Blog
• The Hate U Give and All American Boys challenged by Charleston County Police | OIF Blog
• N.J. Court Orders Google to Vanish Plaintiff’s Photo | Volokh Conspiracy

Privacy

• In ‘Quiet Skies’ program, TSA is tracking regular travelers like terrorists | Boston Globe
• The scoop on NJIT’s facial recognition security system | NJIT
  •  Big Brother’s Blind Spot | The Baffler
  • Against Black Inclusion in Facial Recognition | Digital Talking Drum
• Can Canadian border agents search your phone or laptop? A new guide explains | CTV
• 23andMe sold access to your DNA library to big pharma, but you can opt out | Motherboard
• Big data is getting bigger. So are the privacy and ethical questions | Chronicle of Higher Education
• Trump administration working on consumer data privacy policy | Reuters

See this week’s additional privacy news and updates on the Choose Privacy Everyday blog.

Net Neutrality and Broadband Access

• Massachusetts proposes net neutrality law to call out bad ISPs | CNET

Internet Filtering and Online Content

• People viewing porn on Puyallup Public Library computers sparks outrage | KOMO News
• Why Are We Still So Worried About Wat­­ching Porn? | Slate
• Online Speech Regulation: A Comparative Perspective | Data & Society (Podcast)

Access

• Museum in a box | Smithsonian Libraries Unbound Blog; “MiaB allows students to learn about the collections from the Smithsonian Libraries and Museums, from the comfort of their own classrooms.”
• Public gets digital access to Little Bighorn Battlefield collections | Billings Gazette
• Can you print a gun at your local library? It’s not likely | Hartford Courant

Free Press, Social Media, and Fake News

• “Known but not discussed”: Low-income people aren’t getting quality news and information. What can the industry do about it? | Nieman Labs
• Newsroom employment dropped nearly a quarter in less than 10 years, with greatest decline at newspapers | Pew FactTank
• Leaked white paper proposes Congressional regulation of social media | Columbia Journalism Review
  • Scoop: 20 ways Democrats could crack down on Big Tech | Axios
  • Congress just showed us what comprehensive regulation of Facebook would look like | The Verge
• Nunes suggests possible legal action against Twitter for ‘censoring’ conservatives | The Hill
• Facebook Just Removed a Cluster of 32 “Bad Actor” Fake Accounts and Pages | Slate
  • How Fake Influence Campaigns on Facebook Lured Real People | The New York Times
• The future of “fake news” : Pepsi gets Facebook to censor jokes about plastic in its Kurkure corn puffs | Boing Boing
• Fake Facebook accounts are getting harder to trace | Wired
• Online hate is rampant. Here’s how to keep it from spreading | Wired
• How History Classes Helped Create a ‘Post-Truth’ America | The Atlantic

Academic Freedom & Campus Speech

• Not merely free speech, but better speech needs to be protected on campus | The Globe and Mail

First Amendment and Free Speech

• Metro can ban all religious ads on buses and trains, court rules | The Washington Post
  • Appeals court sides with Metro over Catholic Archdiocese in religious ads lawsuit | WTOP
• The Right to Speak | NPR; Podcast with segments on: Why should we listen to views we find offensive?,  Should A Culture Dedicated To Free Speech Limit Hate Speech?, What Happens When Different Viewpoints Are Silenced?, Who Benefits From Unrestricted Free Speech?
• The Sex-Trafficking Case Testing the Limits of the First Amendment | Politico
• The fight over 3-D printed guns | The New York Times
• Liberals, don’t lose faith in the first amendment | The New York Times
• The First Amendment was meant for times like now | Freedom Forum Institute

Around the Web

• Jeff Sessions announces creation of “religious liberty” task force | CBS News
• Jeff Sessions Announces Religious Liberty Task Force at DOJ in Response to “Dangerous Movement” | Slate
• Meet the YouTube starts turning viewers into readers | The New York Times
• Responsible freedoms | Inside Higher Ed
• Unpublished chapter of Malcolm X’s autobiography acquired by New York library | CNN
• Congress has a $95 million proposal to study tech’s effects on kids | Wired
• Historians just don’t get archivists. Here’s why | The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Where artists are desecrators: A review of Patrica Forde’s “The List” | OIF Blog

International Issues

• Cologne archaeologists unearth oldest library in Germany | The Art Newspaper
• Google is reportedly planning a censorship-friendly search service for China | TechCrunch
• CPJ condemns pre-election news censorship in Cambodia | Committee to Protect Journalists
• Malaysian cartoonist Zunar finally free from sedition charges | CBLDF

ALA News

• #BannedBooksWeek is September 23-29, 2018. Stock up on free downloads and social media art!
• Suggested Language & Resources for “Meeting Rooms: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights” – The Intellectual Freedom Committee formed a working group to revise the meeting rooms interpretation. Library community members — ALA members & non-members alike — are invited to suggest language & resources for the interpretation by 8/24, using this form
• ACRL releases 2017 Academic Library Trends and Statistics
• ALA report shares findings, illustrates successes from 10 years of the American Dream Literacy Initiative

 

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