This was one of last weeks Daily Number at the Pew Research Center for the People & The Press .
The headline: 46% support public school library book banning.
The good news is that this is the “lowest level of support in 20 years.”
What are these “dangerous ideas” that people want to keep from their kids?
Isn’t the act of keeping our kids from these ideas just as dangerous?
Then we have Google going full throttle with their campaign to fight censorship. Their guns are aimed at Washington, D.C. in the hope of getting Government support in their fight for the free flow of information throughout the world.
“It’s fair to say that censorship is the No. 1 barrier to trade that we face,” says Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s director of public policy and government affairs.
Their timing on this issue is impeccable and though Google claims no political motive I can see this issue creeping into the presidential races and finding broad political support rather quickly.
This is after all a non-violent way to “bring to the world the best of American ideals about freedom of expression, creativity, and innovation.”
Google’s back is against the wall. They already censor their searches in a number of countries and realize the trend is moving toward censorship and away from the free flow of information. In a recent OpenNet Initiative poll 25 of 41 countries surveyed are engaged in some form of Internet censorship. In 2002 that number was 2 or 3.
This is what they said when they entered China:
“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission”
To be in China they had to severely compromise their core business model.
How many times can you compromise it before it becomes altered?