Introduction: The Role of Censorship in Late Modern Societies

摘要

Libraries have always played a central role in the debate around censorship in our society. From the burning of books (Deichmann 2020), through to suppression of fiction in the courts (Lewis 2020), to the unchecked tracking of citizens and their reading habits (Shuford et al. 2018) in the context of counterterrorism (Sadek 2017), our repositories of information have often been subject to arbitrary control (Chen 2020). In late modern societies, we face a new challenge-while censorship has historically fallen into the domain of governments (Hassid 2020), the private sector now plays a central role in managing, massaging, and controlling the dissemination of information. While the behavior of governments is to some extent controlled by policy, regulation, and our basic laws, it seems that the private sector feels emboldened to act with impunity, and often, not much accuracy (Podrygula 2020). This is a further consequence of the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to make assessments about whether or not to block the transmission of information. When citizens begin to learn their helplessness against automated decisions of large multinational corporations, there is a serious chilling effect on the rights of expression (Nagpal, Li, and Drubrawski 2020). What impact this will have on democracy moving forward is yet to be played out-we need policy advocacy and action from those who care about our basic freedom of expression to be more active in the policy debate (Rui, Cui, and Liu 2020).