Poll Shows Growing Support for Book Banning, Ratings in U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Poll Shows Growing Support for Book Banning, Ratings in U.S.

lj.libraryjournal.com

12 pointsLyrric7 comments

This is kind of misleading, the survey was about banning books in school libraries, where minor are going to be the group accessing the books. Given this it's pretty remarkable that 72% of people think that children and young adults should have access to any book they want.

Edit - from the article:

> Caldwell-Stone pointed out that the survey’s questions about school libraries reflect a different set of attitudes from those surrounding public or academic libraries. Coupled with the broad nature of the questions, this could encourage a less nuanced range of answers.

Astonishingly so. I don't understand how anyone could not think certain books are inappropriate for school libraries.

That’s a very different question, and I think you’re radically misinterpreting the opinion of the “don’t ban books” camp.

There’s a big difference between trusting school librarians to make appropriate choices of books to put in school libraries vs. letting a politically appointed central committee maintain lists of banned books or subjects.

Only a small minority think that young children should have easy and unsupervised access to every book in the world.

* * *

Edit: I just looked at the original source, and IMO AlexandrB is a bit confused about the poll results. There were two sections of the poll, one about books in school libraries (Tables 1A and 1B), and another about banning books in general (Table 2). The two shouldn’t be mixed up.

http://www.theharrispoll.com/health-and-life/Censorship_2015... (scroll down to the tables at the bottom)

In other words, as far as I can tell that 28% is in favor of banning certain books in general, not just for school libraries.

    Books with refs to violence: 45 SHOULD, 48 SHOULD NOT
         Books with refs to sex: 51 SHOULD, 43 SHOULD NOT
                      The Bible: 80 SHOULD, 13 SHOULD NOT

For a country of christians, shockingly few seem to have read the bible!

It takes some extra clicks but: "These are some of the results of The Harris Poll® of 2,244 U.S. adults surveyed online and in English between March 11 and 16, 2015"

See that "online"? That most likely folks who were enthused enough by this issue tended to be the ones that answered. This is not a protocol to obtain a random sample. And it's a fairly small non-ramdom sample at that.

Might be an interesting indicator of increasing paranoia in our increasingly connected media saturated society.

Found this article, but maybe there is some more recent research out there. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-22/edition-7/paran...

I wonder if those 72% of no-banners really want pirated photocopies of copyright books in their school library, along with color picture books of violent child pornography. Surely the questions were misleading or open to different interpretations by different respondents.

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