The Asian reporter. (Portland, Or.) 1991-current, April 03, 2023, Page 8, Image 8

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    U.S.A.
Page 8 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
Book ban attempts hit record
high in 2022, library org says
April 3, 2023
Utah social media law is
ambitious, but is it enforceable?
By Hillel Italie
By Barbara Ortutay
The Associated Press
The Associated Press
EW YORK — Attempted book
bans and restrictions at school
and public libraries continue to
surge, setting a record in 2022, according
to a new report from the American Library
Association (ALA).
More than 1,200 challenges were
compiled by the association in 2022, nearly
double the then-record total from 2021 and
by far the most since the ALA began
keeping data 20 years ago.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” says
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the
ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
“The last two years have been exhausting,
frightening, outrage inducing.”
The report not only documents the
growing number of challenges, but also
their changing nature. A few years ago,
complaints usually arose with parents and
other community members and referred to
an individual book. Now, the requests are
often for multiple removals, and organized
by national groups such as the conserva-
tive Moms for Liberty, which has a mission
of “unifying, educating, and empowering
parents to defend their parental rights at
all levels of government.”
Last year, more than 2,500 different
books were objected to, compared to 1,858
in 2021 and just 566 in 2019. In numerous
cases, hundreds of books were challenged
in a single complaint. The ALA bases its
findings on media accounts and voluntary
reporting from libraries and acknowledges
that the numbers might be far higher.
Librarians around the country have told
of being harassed and threatened with
violence or legal action.
“Every day professional librarians sit
down with parents to thoughtfully deter-
mine what reading material is best suited
for their child’s needs,” ALA president
Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada said in
a statement. “Now, many library workers
face threats to their employment, their
personal safety, and in some cases, threats
of prosecution for providing books to youth
they and their parents want to read.”
Caldwell-Stone says that some books
have been targeted by liberals because of
tah’s sweeping social media
legislation passed in late March is
an ambitious attempt to shield
children and teens from the ill effects of
social media and empower parents to
decide whether their kids should be using
apps like TikTok or Instagram.
What’s not clear is if — and how — the
new rules can be enforced and whether
they will create unintended consequences
for kids and teens already coping with a
mental health crisis. And while parental
rights are a central theme of Utah’s new
laws, experts point out that the rights of
parents and the best interests of children
are not always aligned.
For instance, allowing parents to read
their kids’ private messages may be harm-
ful to some children, and age verification
requirements could give tech companies
access to kids’ personal information,
including biometric data, if they use tools
such as facial recognition to check ages.
“Children may be put at increased risk if
these laws are enforced in such a way that
they’re not allowed to some privacy, if they
are not allowed some ability for freedom of
speech or autonomy,” said Kris Perry,
executive director of the nonprofit
Children and Screens: Institute of Digital
Media and Child Development.
The laws, which will go into effect in a
year, impose a digital curfew on people
under age 18, require minors to get
parental consent to sign up for social
media apps, and force companies to verify
the ages of all their Utah users. They also
require tech companies to give parents
access to their kids’ accounts and private
messages, which has raised alarms for
child advocates who say this could further
harm children’s mental health by
depriving them of their right to privacy.
This is especially true for LGBTQ+ kids
whose parents are not accepting of their
identity.
The rules could drastically transform
how people in the conservative state access
social media and the internet, and if
successful, serve as a model for other
states to enact similar legislation. But
even if the laws clear the inevitable
lawsuits from tech giants, it’s not clear
how Utah will be able to enforce them.
Take age verification, for instance.
Various measures exist that can verify a
person’s age online. Someone could upload
a government ID or consent to the use of
facial recognition software to prove they
are the age they say they are.
“Some of these verification measures are
wonderful, but then also require the
collection of sensitive data. And those can
pose new risks, especially for marginalized
youth,” Perry said. “And it also puts a new
kind of burden on parents to monitor their
children. These things seem simple and
straightforward on their face, but in
reality, there are new risks that may
emerge in terms of ... collection of
additional data on children.”
Just as teens have managed to obtain
fake IDs to drink, they are also savvy at
skirting online age regulations.
“In Southeast Asia, they’ve been trying
this for years, for decades, and kids always
get around it,” said Gaia Bernstein, author
of Unwired, a book on how to fight
technology addiction.
The problem, she said, is that the Utah
rules don’t require social networks to
prevent kids from going online. Instead,
they are making the parents responsible.
“I think that’s going to be the weak link
in the whole thing, because kids drive their
parents insane,” Bernstein said.
There is no precedent in the United
States for such drastic regulation of social
media, although several states have
similar rules in the works.
On the federal level, companies are
already prohibited from collecting data on
children under age 13 without parental
consent under the Children’s Online
Privacy Protection Act. For this reason,
social media platforms already ban kids
under 13 from signing up to their sites —
but children can easily skirt the rules, both
with and without their parents’ consent.
Perry suggests that instead of age veri-
fication, there are steps tech companies
could take to make their platforms less
harmful, less addictive, across the board.
For instance, Instagram and TikTok could
Continued on page 9
U
N
FRIVOLOUS BANS. Bills facilitating the restric-
tion of books have been proposed or passed in Ari-
zona, Iowa, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, among
other states. In Florida, where governor Ron DeSantis
has approved laws to review reading materials and
limit classroom discussion of gender identity and race,
books pulled indefinitely or temporarily include John
Green’s Looking for Alaska and Grace Lin’s picture
story Dim Sum for Everyone!”
racist language — notably Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — but
the vast majority of complaints come from
conservatives, directed at works with
LGBTQIA+ or racial themes. They include
Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, Jonathan
Evison’s Lawn Boy, Angie Thomas’ The
Hate U Give, and a book-length edition of
the
“1619
Project,”
the
Pulitzer
Prize-winning report from The New York
Times on the legacy of slavery in the U.S.
Bills facilitating the restriction of books
have been proposed or passed in Arizona,
Iowa, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma,
among other states. In Florida, where
governor Ron DeSantis has approved laws
to review reading materials and limit
classroom discussion of gender identity
and race, books pulled indefinitely or
temporarily include John Green’s Looking
for Alaska, Colleen Hoover’s Hopeless,
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The
Handmaid’s Tale, and Grace Lin’s picture
story Dim Sum for Everyone!
More recently, Florida’s Martin County
school district removed dozens of books
from its middle schools and high schools,
including numerous works by novelist Jodi
Picoult, Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-
winning Beloved, and James Patterson’s
“Maximum Ride” thrillers, a decision
which the bestselling author has criticized
Continued on page 9
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8
SCAN ME
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holding an event
in celebration of
Asian Heritage Month?
To be included in The Asian Reporter’s
Asian Heritage Month special issue,
please send your event listing to
<news@asianreporter.com>
by Monday, April 17, 2023.
Please include the event title, date, time,
and location with address; a brief summary
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number (required) that can be published.
E-mail and website addresses may also be included.
9
7 5
MEDIUM
Difficulty
3
level: Medium
# 59
#96553
Instructions: Fill in the grid so that the digits 1
through 9 appear one time each in every row, col-
umn, and 3x3 box.
Solution to
last issue’s
puzzle
Puzzle #51239 (Easy)
All solutions available at
<www.sudoku.com>.
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