Library Futures, a nonprofit organization that addresses library policy and digital access, has released a report on the censorship of e-resources used by students for classroom research. Neo-Censorship in U.S. Libraries: An Investigation Into Digital Content Suppression details the targeting of educational databases and the rise of legal challenges against libraries, reminding readers to look beyond the print books that are the tangible symbols of the freedom to read.
According to Library Futures, false or unsubstantiated accusations of obscenity leveled at libraries foment fears of legal risk, sometimes resulting in the so-called soft censorship of e-resources, in which digital content providers or libraries apply system-wide filters and “stopwords” that block results from a user’s search. The report also claims that content banners have become emboldened and better organized with each lawsuit they file, and that their legislative agenda ultimately harms educational institutions and communities.
“Despite the fact that access decisions impact digital collections, the discussion [of banning a physical book] often excludes the complex factors at play in the digital realm,” said Michelle Reed, director of programs at Library Futures and the lead author of Neo-Censorship in U.S. Libraries. “The digital component is underreported, and it’s concerning because it’s easy to create a large-scale impact by introducing a stopword” or otherwise suppressing legitimate research material.
According to the report’s executive summary, Library Futures investigators found “zero evidence that students use library e-resources such as databases to retrieve pornography or sexually explicit material.” Students are using digital tools to complete course assignments, they said, yet “small but organized groups” continue to make unfounded claims that students are accessing pornography through school and library databases.
That’s why the report's “first key finding is ‘bogus claims,’ ” Reed said. Purposeful accusations of distributing pornography may be intended to undermine institutions, and “we can say these claims are bogus, whereas other organizations may be more guarded” about telling an opponent that an accusation appears false. Among many U.S. cases in the report, Library Futures studied a 2018 complaint that led to the temporary suspension of EBSCO K–12 databases in Utah, affecting 650,000 students, as well as the unsuccessful Pornography Is Not Education (PINE) lawsuit against the Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) and EBSCO Information Services, alleging a civil conspiracy to distribute pornographic material.
To study students’ “normal school use” of databases, Reed and her team looked at public records in Utah. The state tracked student searches “over five or so years, and it was clear students were using databases in exactly the way you would expect,” Reed said—that is, to do homework and write research papers. “We invested our time and energy to pull all those reports together and look at what rose to the top,” she recalled, “and it’s not the things that people are saying students are searching for.”
Reed noticed abundant searches for information on current events. “In the early days of Covid 19, ‘coronavirus’ was one of the top searches, and there were a lot more for ‘online education,’ ” she said. “Some of the searches will break your heart too: seeing ‘gun control’ as a top search, ‘depression,’ ‘anxiety.’ But it’s important children have that access. And the way organizations are implementing stopwords, so much access is restricted.”
Jennie Rose Halperin, executive director of Library Futures, agreed that digital censorship obscures data without leaving a literal gap on the bookshelf. Until recently, she said, “no one knew what a database was, so they came for the books.” But, Halperin noted, once so-called parents’ rights groups and conservative organizations focused on data providers such as EBSCO, ProQuest, Sage, Cengage Group, and Follett Content Solutions, they took steps to scare entire organizations into compliance.
According to the Neo-Censorship report, this resulted in content providers implementing “local controls” on databases, particularly related to health and race. “Under even the smallest of threats, the companies have provided the tools or have secretly put on the tools—we don’t know—that apply the content blocking on these systems,” Halperin said. “It’s more wide-reaching than banning a list of books” because a stopword may be assigned to an entire database and restrict every student from that term.
“We very much want to hold vendors accountable and have done that,” said Reed. She and Library Futures also want to support librarians, who may be tempted to avoid certain content—or “self-censor”—because of anticipated controversy, and they want to keep valuable educational information freely available to young people.
“Every day there’s a new incident, a new piece of legislation,” Reed said. As she studies the changes to the library landscape, she added, she is astonished by “how chilling some of these things really are and how deep into disinformation this goes.”
