Mastodawn

They are banning books in addition to banning the web because they want to prevent children from coming into contact with ideas.

I am older than the www, I lived in an underdeveloped country, didn't get a computer until I was 14. Libraries were my window into the world. I became a member of the adult library aged 11 because there was not much to read in the children's library. My mother tried to keep me away from the library after I showed her Cosmos by Carl Sagan and said: "See, this book also says that god does not exist, it is not just me".

That's why to this day I have a thing for libraries. We have to make sure they are preserved, because the web surely won't be.

https://hsnl.social/@Dany/116271552680700342

Dany :verified_gay: (@[email protected])

A British school library banned around 200 books deemed inappropriate. Including books about totalitarianism, toxic masculinity and books aimed at queer teenagers. This is a worrying move, and extra worrying is the use of AI to classify the books. It demonstrates the Bias as a Service that is inherently part of what AI is. https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/school-book-banning-escalates-in-the-uk-as-greater-manchester-secondary-school-censors-scores-of-books/

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Nicola Elle 🏳️‍⚧️1d ago

@rhelune I wonder how many of us have a story of having a book taken from us, or a book stolen, or a book banned from their library, because someone disagreed with the content.

Mine was having my copy of Darwin's "On The Origin of Species" vanish while I was in school; given the number of fundamentalist Christians in the school, it didn't take a genius to figure out what had happened.

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Enola Knezevic 1d ago

@NicolaElle I'm so sorry 😞 Taking a book away is often like banning one from seeing a friend 😥

The only good thing is that a book being banned makes people want to read it even more.

I do not remember such a situation from my childhood, but there was a situation at a previous workplace. A colleague and I were about to leave it. We had never met in person before because I had been refusing to return to the office. I came by (with an FFP3 mask) and left a gift wrapped used book I had read on her desk, because it was relevant to her situation (I had to ask the bosses which desk was hers). It was "Snakes in Suits, When Psychopaths Go to Work" by Robert Hare. When she came to the office, she unwrapped it and thanked me. Some days later she informed me that the book had disappeared.

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Christian Rickert 1d ago

@rhelune I’d walk down the aisle as a kid and explore different topics. Books on astrophysics literally “opened the cosmos” to me:
Our place in the universe, our understanding of the basic elements, and the power of gravimetric simulations. - That view changed my perspective on life forever. 📖

I think that’s a different experience from the modern (ad-driven, social media) web, where content is always tailored and prioritized by algorithms. 💻