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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

For everyone arguing about how the library system is being censored with this, I would like to remind people that since 2000, all libraries (including non-school libraries) have the internet censored with (almost always) Google SafeSearch locked on and many websites (particularly porn but there are others) blocked. And it's federal law.

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-prot...

Is this censorship? And if so, what is the difference between internet censorship and library censorship, other than that someone printed their work instead of typing it? And why is outrage permitted for this and blocking printed books, but not for digital work?

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The difference is that librarians already provide a "SafeSearch" by curating material at libraries. This is more similar to if Texas tried to mandate that Google SafeSearch at libraries should now include a ban on any LGBTQ images.

Contrary to what you might imagine, checking out and shelving books is not the only things librarians do – they also curate and trim material, a bit like cultivating a garden. Libraries are a fine-tuned system that maximizes freedom of expression and ideas in a reasonably curated manner. It existed long before the Internet, and legislators tampering with that is always alarming.

Would the legislators intervening be permissible in your view if the legislators believe that the librarians are doing a poor job at curation?

An example of this is the right's claim that many of these banned books are almost pornographic in nature and inappropriate for almost any age. From the right's perspective, the legislators are intervening because the librarians are failing at their curation and safety job.

Yes, that would be a perfectly reasonable legislation. The burden would be on the legislators to clearly articulate their viewpoint, and provide reasonable justification for why those materials are inappropriate for any age.

Currently, some of the 850 "suspicious titles" they are "looking into" include books like We Are All Born Free: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures [1]. This does not lead me to conclude that their chief concern is safety and curation.

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[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-mat...

Safety? Absolutely! But safety of what? Their own ideas and ideals at the cost of everyone else's.

>> An example of this is the right's claim that many of these banned books are almost pornographic in nature.

I'm pretty sure illustrations of people having sex and an illustration of a younger child giving an older child oral sex falls into that category:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBdP1kYXoAA_c0T?format=jpg&name=...

People lost their minds when a woman read several pages from the book "Gender Queer" by Maia Kobabe.

What’s the context of those images? It seems perfectly appropriate for highschool.

I've seen people downplaying the contents book using arguments like "these kids are already looking at porn, so who cares?" Whatever, I don't have an issue with that. Been there, done that.

But how about this one? What if you're one of the many kids who want to but can't get laid in high school? Seeing teenage sex normalized by the school itself could lead to all kinds of additional insecurities.

If you’re a teenager who is having an emotional, strongly negative response to seeing fictional acts of sexual behavior in a comic because you can’t have actual sex, that is a perfect opportunity for you to reach out to adults in your life so you can have a clearly sorted talk about how to have a healthy relationship with sex and intimacy.

It takes two to tango.

Precisely, and being comfortable with yourself not having sex is very important. It affirms others have their own agency not to have sex with you and also can teach you ways to love yourself without depending on the dopamine of sex. If you have a strong, overwhelming, negative emotional response to other people having sex, just because you’re not having it then that’s a real issue that can be addressed through whatever support network you have to work on whatever you have in yourself that the actions of strangers having a good time doing something unrelated to you somehow harms you.

Does it normalize it? Lots of art contains sex, even explicit sex and representations of rape. Having some event be part of somebody’s story does not automatically promote that activity.

> Libraries are a fine-tuned system that maximizes freedom of expression and ideas in a reasonably curated manner.

Is there a difference between the freedom of expression of children and of adults? If so, wouldn't parents have a right to limit the freedoms of their own children according to their families moral and religious beliefs?

I wonder if maybe the issue is that in a school setting, the librarians are operating as if the children are their only charges?

I'm entirely ignorant on these points and don't have children, so this is just a question from that perspective: Are librarians doing enough to announce their editorial decisions and to explain them to parents? Should they be required to?

Should libraries share with parents the list of books their children have checked out? Should libraries allow parents to curate a list of books they do not want their children to checkout? Is there a better middle ground here?

Parents should teach their children to use “good judgement” according to their family values with regard to what books they choose to check out from the library. Creating some kind of list system (with all the additional overhead involved) seems silly to me.

It's a common philosophical question applied to this topic: The logically easy philosophical definition is always the extreme - in this case, absolutely no restriction - and there are always objections using false equivalencies and slippery slopes ('if you violate the extreme in this way, you can violate it in any way').

Real life is not about logical extremes. Nothing in the US Bill of Rights is unlimited, for example. You have freedom of speech, to bear arms, and of religion, but you can't slander someone, own an anti-aircraft weapon, or sacrifice humans to the gods.

At the school library, we may not want people watching pornography. That's different than political censorship.

I don't want them watching porn at the public library either. It ruins the experience to have to witness a homeless person jacking off at a computer station, and not something I want my taxes paying for.

What does it have to do with homeless people? I thought we were talking about school libraries, which generally don't have adult visitors?

Also, do you have anything to back up yet another ugly stereotype about groups of people who are 'other'?

It wasn’t a good comment, but will confirm sketchy things happening at libraries in our area. Pretending they don’t happen, or being upset at their mention is not helpful either.

> Pretending they don’t happen, or being upset at their mention is not helpful either.

Is that happening?

I have seen a number of things in the last decade or so in that department that I’d prefer not to. Laws became suggestions at some point, not sure why.

The difference is that you can't accidentally click a popup that takes you to a porn website in a book. If you want to talk about specific things that are blocked by that safe filter that you think shouldn't be, that could be a discussion worth having. But anyone who has ever used the internet should know that you absolutely need some kind of filter on a school's internet connection.

When I was in school, the only things online that I wanted to access that were blocked were flash games.

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