i work in a library & i spend too much time online, and one of the results of this combination is that i spend a lot of time thinking about 'censorship'. there are a lot of annoying things that people say about it, talking about libraries & various internet communities, but it's complicated & contentious so this is more or less inevitable. the common thread that bothers me in both of these places is the retreat into legal frameworks

in libraries, this is kind of unavoidable; libraries are for the most part public institutions, their employees are government workers in high-contact roles with the public. and to be fair, in almost all of the publicized cases regarding censorship in libraries, library staff are pretty clearly grasping whatever justification seems likely to work in an effort to prevent books from being unjustly removed from library shelves. i still think it's a weak move to point to a pile of tedious case law to defend library workers' stance that books which reflect the needs, interests, and viewpoints of marginalized people belong in libraries, and i'd much rather libraries & professional organizations worked to create a specific, positive outline of libraries' role & intellectual freedom more generally. this move might require libraries to drop the 'neutrality' stance that they've cultivated more or less from the origins of the profession in the progressive era, and while i think that might be constructive, the best counterargument i've seen is that a lot of library workers are actually deeply shitty people who are only barely held in check by rigorous professional ethics. the problem with this argument, of course, is that shitty people are rarely actually held in check by professional ethics, but it does at least have a practical ring to it.

moving on. in fandom spaces, the legalizing argument is a lot stupider. 'censorship is only when the government takes down your stuff, there's no reason to bring online spaces into it.' i don't think anybody actually feels this way in practice, though? obviously we all know that one can feel suppressed or have one's ability to express one's ideas meaningfully stifled by private institutions, particularly & perhaps most obviously online, and pretending otherwise seems silly. [sidebar: i am thinking about lawrence lessig's "law of the horse" here.] the law says you don't have the right to have your works included in a library collection (see, for example, egli v. chester county library, in 2019), and i agree, but i'm not convinced that that addresses every other public 'place.' in practice, one can easily have one's works removed from privately owned & operated spaces (twitter, ao3, whatever, i'm not making an argument about section 230 here), meaningfully reducing their circulation, & we don't have another clear, concise term for this practice than censorship ('suppression'?). furthermore, why do we care what the law says? the law is only dubiously involved in fan spaces—one must awkwardly skirt whatever articulation of intellectual property has the most force behind it & consider whatever rules one's internet hosting service is beholden to, i guess, but it doesn't seem to me like those rules are convincing or morally authoritative so much as they are scary.

similarly, deciding which content is and is not moral or is and is not 'dangerous' based on what specific governments have decided to permit seems profoundly unconvincing to me. i have heard of comstock laws, and while i too do not like lolicon & would like it to be blasted from existence, i am just not seeing how going 'well, the united states government says it's illegal' is meant to be a compelling argument. surely there's something else we could say instead? i do things that the united states government has said are illegal all the time: i have defaced dollar bills, driven without a seatbelt, shared various digital copies of things that i did not have the right to share. these are criminal activities in a technical sense but is anyone like, morally offended by them? like, no, i would hope?

all this to say that i wish when 'censorship' & 'intellectual freedom' came up, we had more of a positive articulation of how force operates in these interactions, and at least some engagement with what harm we imagine the content we seek to ban or suppress might in practice do. i think there's some pretty good discussion of the harm censorship does already. i am in fact pro-censorship in several situations: for example, i do not think public libraries should purchase books that contain misinformation, including many books that are routinely included in library collections, like rapid weight-loss books, terf shit, anti-vaxxer screeds, and books that endorse ABA as a 'treatment' for autism, among plenty of other things. i have heard the balanced collection argument & i don't care, because based on my personal experience i think the patrons who read these books use them to do harm to themselves & others, and there's no need for the library to present these works as authoritative when they are, in fact, dangerous bunk. i am not particularly interested in outlining my personal squeamishness or the limits i see in other arenas right this minute—my point is that it would be helpful to come up with some boundaries for argument other than the u.s. legal code, which is at the best of times fucking useless