The unprecedented surge in book banning has made headlines in recent years, but a new report is looking to shed light on another facet of the current censorship battle—efforts to ban materials from digital databases and collections.
“Book challenges have garnered a significant amount of attention in the press and on social media since at least 2020, when Christian and right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty began distributing lists and challenging books en masse under the broad banner of ‘parental rights.’ Less widely covered is the earlier, and still ongoing, wave of challenges that similar groups have made to databases in court, in state legislatures, and in local communities,” notes the report, Neo-Censorship in U.S. Libraries: An Investigation Into Digital Content Suppression, released last month by library advocacy group Library Futures. But so-called “database challenges” are “more widespread and more impactful than initially reported,” the report concludes.
“While book challenges can have a significant impact on a library’s or school district’s resources, the impact of book challenges on minors’ access to information pales in comparison to the database allegations discussed in this report,” the report states. “With the click of a button, censors can wipe out access to crucial resources for hundreds of thousands of people at once, as happened in Utah, when K-12 EBSCO databases were shuttered overnight for 650,000 students because of one person’s complaint.”
Indeed, while individual authors are effective spokespeople for the freedom to read and book challenges can be more easily counted and publicized, “it is more difficult to quantify chilling effects on research databases” and the “soft censorship” that results from “blocking access to digital materials rather than removing them from the shelf,” the report goes on to point out, noting that would-be censors have targeted offerings from a wide range of digital service providers in recent years, including EBSCO, Sage, ProQuest, the Cengage Group, and Follett Content Solutions.
The report details the efforts of several right-wing groups going back more than a decade that have challenged database content under “the false premise” that is pornographic, and urges freedom to read advocates to expand their efforts to include the digital realm.
“Database content allegations presaged the current spike in book bans, and the impact of this current era of neo-censorship threatens to be wider and deeper,” the report warns. “Databases do not contain harmful materials, but a lack of access to materials harms minors who are looking to do legitimate school research.”
The full report is available here.
