Censorship - Blog Posts
Being a pro censorship ao3 user is so insanely cringe. Either use the (incredibly effective and well designed) filtering system to avoid seeing the shit you don't like or stop complaining. Leave the pro censorship rhetoric to Wattpad or smth
A Love Letter to History
(if you could call it that)
On a cold January morning in 1914, James Joyce published the first part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that very part, on a similarly cold morning just after Christmas Break, Stephen Dedalus stood huddled with other Clongowes students and watched the snow moulding itself around their boots, wondering what made Simon Moonan and Tusker Boyle, in all their ordinariness, kiss in the square.
Napoleon Bonaparte was not born Napoleon Bonaparte. He was born Napoleon Buonaparte. Napoleon Buonaparte was not born in France, but he was born French enough. Of course, they’ve forgotten that by now. They often aren’t allowed to remind themselves, either.
There is very little to say about Fahrenheit 451 that it has not already said about itself. Any review of it is only ever a paraphrasing of some chapter or other, intentionally or otherwise. In the past twenty years, it has been banned at least ten times in the US alone. I imagine censoring a book about censorship gave many people the opportunity to pat themselves on the back. Unfortunately, their intentions, however malevolent, are misplaced. In the book, the people are on the side of banning books. There is no oppression, and no need for revolution. The bars caging a mind are not so easy to topple. The guillotine falls over an empty basket, and symbolism overflows from an empty cup. There is nothing to overthrow when the fault lies with time.
History. What a heavy word.
Christopher Marlow was excommunicated by the Church, and so was one of Shakespeare’s daughters. It is claimed that he based Ophelia off of his wife. I wonder why.
Five years after that day in the square, Stephen Dedalus refused to back down from his claim of Byron’s brilliance. Words like 'blasphemous' and 'irreligious' pooled around his feet. He cupped his hands in the water and lapped it up. Everything I write now contains some shred of Stephen’s name. I wonder why.
Why is a muse called a muse? To muse is to think, to think deeply. Is a muse’s job to be a conductor of thought? Must all thought be equivalent to love? Why does the word smell like the thickest honey? Why does it sit so heavily on my tongue?
Icarus never meant to fall. If he raced toward the sun, it was only to prove that he could. And he was never on fire. Oh, he burned, alright — the melting wax made sure of it. Did he grasp at the feathers as they came free from the harness? Did he watch them drifting towards the sea? Did he notice anything happening at all? For a moment, a brief, shining moment, the sun was neither hope nor doom, but triumph.
I never could write anything on either the 31st or the 1st. There is something about endings, and something about beginnings. The sun dawned the same on New Year’s Day, but at the stroke of midnight, my phone sang like I lived my whole life before the first light.
Fifteen years after that day in the square, Stephen Dedalus parted with Cranly, unafraid of being alone,
“— and not have any one person who would more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.”
“Of whom are you speaking?” Stephen asked at length.
Cranly did not answer.
They met again, and sixteen years after Oscar’s death, James Joyce retraced his name in “Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name” in a book I have yet to read.
It’s funny how they ban books written centuries ago. Congratulations, Ronald, a pre-industrialization schoolmaster had a broader mind than yours. A clod of dirt shifts as Shakespeare turns in his grave.
History. What a heavy word. I used to think we owed it something.
I want to write a narrative piece about censorship. When I was younger I thought it was something only in books, I never would have imagined that it would be something I would encounter in my real life. Why do people want to ban books? Books provide knowledge, they help us step into worldly perspectives other than our own. We hear stories, we learn, and we grow.
I read Fahrenheit 451 in eighth grade for the first time, and I was throughly shocked by the content. Why would a society be so afraid of books, and literature that they wanted to burn them. In my fourteen year old brain it felt like an act of immaturity, and completely unnecessary. Let the people read! Let them grow their horizons and read!
It wasn’t until I had read 1984 that I truly began to understand the point of government censorship. When I read Bradbury the year before, I was reading a required book for class, and my brain didn’t think much past the fact that I thought it was wrong. However while reading Orwell I really started to grasp at what was the reason and why it was so wrong that people were banning books.
I’ll probably come back to this later, but I am starting to write a narrative essay on this, and I needed a place to just blurt my thoughts.
Online-Veranstaltung zu Banned Books am Welttag des Buches
Gemeinsam mit der Kommission für Queere Hochschulpolitik der bukof (Bundeskonferenz der Frauen- und Gleichstellungsbeauftragten an Hochschulen) organisieren die Queerbrarians (eine Netzwerk queerer Librarians) ein queeres Online-Event zum World Book Day.
Nach einem einführenden Vortrag auf Deutsch von mir sprechen Eve & Lucie auf Englisch. Sie kämpfen gegen die Book Bans in ihrem County in Tennessee.
Das Event ist kostenfrei und braucht keine Anmeldung. Alle Interessierten sind herzlich willkommen.
Titel: Celebrating the Freedom to Read
Datum: 23. April 2025
Uhrzeit: 16:30 bis 18:00 Uhr
Flyer & Infos
URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 tumblr's nsfw ban hitting the entire internet this spring 2022
February 1, 2022
I’m so so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this
WHAT IS THE EARN IT ACT?
The EARN IT Act has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country. This is a bill that will make children less safe, undermine online safety and security, and trample free expression, because it carves out another exception to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230), which the ACLU describes as “foundational to modern online communications.” This has been the law that has let the internet grow into what it is today, we’ve had this law since the 90s. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of this law because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)
The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship. Platforms will be incentivized to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSEM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.
If this bill passes, we're going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms, for fear of the liability that could come with ever accidentally hosting CSAM, as well as the erasure of end-to-end encryption on messaging platforms.
This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal's EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230.
EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please, (Right now, right wing organizers are catgorizing books about racism as ‘porn’ to ban them from schools) which is a cherished goal of organizations that seek to reintroduce obscenity prosecutions for content now protected by Free Speech jurisprudence. This will 1000000% be used to eradicate anything LGBT online.
What this bill says it does on the surface is make platforms liable for their users’ activity if that activity involves sex and minors. However, because of 230, platforms are not liable at all about their users' activity. This has allowed platforms to grow and thrive and many niches online to as well. The bill also creates an unelected commission to create “best practices” to combat online child sexual exploitation. While these recommendations are nominally voluntary (so Americans have no decision on who gets to be on it), platforms that refuse to comply will be liable for criminal prosecutions and lawsuits should the government decide any of their users is engaging in online child sexual exploitation.
This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.
This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.
Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of "protecting kids" to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids.
The entire EARN IT act is based on *multiple* misunderstandings of the law and reality. It's a really really really bad policy that will do serious harm. But because Senator Blumenthal wants headlines, he'll pretend that it "helps protect the children." It won't. It'll do real damage. It will make CSEM much much worse.
One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works -- without fear of liability for any "failure." Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.
(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on "obscenity" as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)
NCOSE, the far right anti-LGBT hate group behind the global anti-sex legislations, is pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.
The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill?
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) along with a coalition of 26 civil society organizations urged the United States Senate to reject the EARN IT Act. Groups on the left and right, including the ACLU, Fight for the Future, EFF, and Hacking // Hustling oppose it. Because it threatens free expression online and will threaten marginalized people’s safety while being totally unnecessary and failing to fix the problem it claims to address. The EARN IT Act empowers states to give law enforcement access to users’ private conversations and force companies to create encryption backdoors for law enforcement. This is totally unnecessary. Platforms are already handing over CSAM to the federal government. It’s actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.
I don't know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the "make child pornography worse" bill, but here we are.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
EARN IT Act was introduced yesterday! And it’s already scheduled to get marked up, which is the first step post-introduction. Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. IF YOU LIVE IN THESE STATES (IL, VT, CA, RI, MN, DE, CT, HI, NJ, and GA), CONTACT YOUR SENATOR AND HOUSE MEMBERS NOW. THIS IS URGENT. This is who gets first crack, and folks in all have Senators who are on the Judiciary committee.
I'm guessing this month or March is when the bill would be passed if there is no opposition 😭 The bill was re-introduced yesterday, already set for markup this Thursday. This feels like an attempt to fast track it this month. Additionally the current makeup of Congress favors those who want it passed. Back in 2020 it was mostly Senate republicans and democrats who are basically republicans (just like now, check the sponsors) pushing it with Ron Wyden using the filibuster to stop their efforts. The house dems didn't want to give Trump a win and needed to appear as pro-privacy/free speech for the 2020 election. Now the dems have the presidency, both chambers of Congress and if you've noticed have spent a few years repeatedly demanding social media censorship and desperately want to give Biden victories. biden isn't like obama who opposed sopa/pipa to appeal to younger voters. This is similar to how FOSTA passed with the group who made it happen last time back again. Far as I'm aware Wyden hasn't spoken about new earn it yet but even if he does oppose it, it's very possible there will be enough Senate democrats to join the republicans in passing it beating a filibuster. Then pelosi's band of house idiots pass it and we have to choose between breaking the law because they can't stop us from using encryption or being obedient sheep to a group who consider themselves above laws.
It already has a fifth of the Senate cosponsoring it. There is a very very very real chance this bill becomes law. This is an uphill battle that's going to happen fast and quick. PLEASE, FIGHT NOW.
202-224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline.
This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.
More sources to read about this bill:
https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-earn-it-act-is-anti-evidence
Fight for the Future’s Statement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=678EW8v09z8&t=1s
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220131/22423648395/senates-new-earn-it-bill-will-make-child-exploitation-problem-worse-not-better-still-attacks-encryption.shtml
EARN IT Act treats Myths as Facts.
https://surviveearnit.com/what-is-the-earn-it-act/ From 2020, but little has changed about the bill.
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/earn-it-act-back
Center for Democracy and Technology’s Statement
DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT
TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven't seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.
me when i see someone censor the word kill in real life / a website where it’s allowed
HEY YOU
https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-internet?recruiter=886155669&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_abi.lightning_2primary_share_options_more.control
Article 13 is extremely bad for everyone, not just those in the EU, so GO SIGN THIS PETITION TO HELP SAVE THE INTERNET!! I don’t care wether you’re into politics or not, but REBLOG AND SPREAD THE WORD TO FRIENDS AND FAMILY!