Censoring Anti-Censorship Part 2

But it is mathophobic! This poster is
obviously anti-subtraction!

I may have overestimated the impact this intra-librarian skirmish had in the right wing media. In my last post I really worried that Elizabeth McKinstry really opened a wound where the social conservative culture warriors could rush in like a virus and destroy the American Library Association over a poster for banned books week. Just for contrast, this is what that poster looks like without a person in it and I don't think there is enough LSD on the planet to make someone think that it is islamophobic. I wanted to get my initial thoughts down in that post before diving into what others had to say on the subject.

To summarize, it is counterproductive to downright destructive when the far-left attacks a mainstream (i.e. non-conservative) organization. Outside the right wing echo chamber of media and foundations, money and resources are finite. So wasting them on a frivolous squabble subtracts from efforts to hold the line against fundamentalists and fascists, to say nothing of making progress. Sometimes the culture warriors are able to simply destroy a progressive organization, see ACORN. People supposedly on the same side should not be helping the enemy, but it happens all the time; see Glen Greenwald et. al. That is another story for another time though.

The point is, do you know how many times in any given year some rural school principal or "concerned parents" try to get books and other materials banned? State legislators, town council members, conservative churches, and right wing pressure groups are also constantly attacking the very concept of tolerance, diversity, and equality in what we can see and read. The ALA and especially the Office for Intellectual Freedom have their hands full defending your right to read, and having to take time to address some overly sensitive concerns to a poster means that some fundamentalists out there will succeed in getting books off the shelves. So back to my mistake.

Google's algorithms are very complex but con artists and "legitimate" businesspeople are constantly trying to game the system through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). One way to mess with the rankings is through news aggregators, also called content farms. I had a problem with this a while back, I still don't know the depth of what they were up to but as I wrote on that post I did not want to be associated with porn sites, and above all they did not have my permission to use my content. I suppose there is something in the blogger terms and conditions that makes my wishes irrelevant but I digress.

So you can hopefully cut me some slack that what I thought was a slew of stories from right wing media actually turned out to be a single story from The Daily Caller repeated over and over. To it's credit, the story is basically a straight news report with the only questionable segment was in profiling McKinstry's LinkedIn page. I guess it is public knowledge and we all need to be careful what we post online, but is it responsible journalism to post her place of employment and her self-description as a “wildly progressive, feminist killjoy”? I don't know if this detail rises to the level of lone wolf bait but it did not seem necessary to report.

Even more interesting were the comments. There was plenty of islamophobia and rationalizations for hatred toward Muslims, plus the usual character attacks of "liberal this" and "liberal that." But not a word about ALA or the Office for Intellectual Freedom. Perhaps the librarian organization as a whole dodged a bullet.