Last week we looked at the way censorship in the age of the internet is typically invisible. It’s not the police raiding bookstores; it’s — for example — sudden downranking of posts so that information that might have reached millions of people reaches only dozens. Constantly suppressed, it can’t go viral. We can see the change more clearly if we look at the difference between how books (and other information) used to get banned and how they get banned today.

Book banning before the internet

When the word “book bans” is used today, it usually means something different from what it meant even a few decades ago. Ulysses, a groundbreaking work by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941) was indeed banned in England, on decency grounds in 1920. (It was published in France in 1922.) Similarly, a salacious novel, Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1748), was banned in the years following World War II. When a bookstore in London, Ontario (Canada), decided to carry it in 1964, I well remember the uproar that ensued. But the whole affair was very public, including the huge pile of copies for sale, in defiance of the police.

Many literary groups fret about book bans today. But their targets are usually quite different. They fight decisions by librarians and teachers not to shelve books in school libraries on the grounds that the material is unsuited to the students’ age range, usually due to extreme sexual or political content. Such anti-ban groups often give the impression of not knowing or understanding much about how censorship aimed at adults really works in the age of the internet. Or perhaps their concerns are more narrowly focused now.

Book banning today

It came out recently that in 2021, senior U.S. government advisor Andy Slavitt was pressuring Amazon to find ways to keep from the public material by opponents of government vaccine policies. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) reported on documents subpoena’d by the House Judiciary Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, that Slavitt ran keyword searches for words like “vaccine.” Slavitt then wrote to Amazon to say he wasn’t pleased with what he saw.

According to Jordan, “Initially, Amazon decided to hold off on ‘doing a manual intervention’ to censor books. Why? Not out of any commitment to free speech, but because doing so would be ‘too visible’ to the American public and likely to spur criticism from conservative media.” (February 5, 2024)

Then, “After the White House spent a week berating Amazon, what did the online bookstore do? Starting March 9—the same day as its meeting with the White House—Amazon enabled ‘Do Not Promote’ for books that expressed the view that vaccines were not effective.” (February 5, 2024)

Jordan points to an internal e-mail that offers,

One book (out of 9) was found to violate our COVID policy and was removed. As a reminder, we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective on 3/9, and will review additional handling options for these books with you….However, many of the books highlighted by [a pending Buzzfeed story] are about COVID conspiracies not vaccination, and are therefore out of scope for this policy effort. CRM plans to resume work on a broad misinformation policy again once we align on an approach for anti-vax books.

via Jacob Sullum, “Was Amazon ‘Free to Ignore’ White House Demands That It Suppress Anti-Vaccine Books?, Reason, February 7, 2024

The book that attracted the ban was Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe and Effective is Lying (2019) by controversial British doctor Vernon Coleman. A book so titled was certain to attract attention at a time when governments were frantically promoting COVID vaccines.

The book is for sale at Amazon today though. Possibly the continuing controversy over the safety and efficacy of the vaccines made a continued ban questionable. There is good reason to think, overall, that the government response to COVID has fueled declining trust in science. Conflicts arising from censorship would hardly help.

So here we have book banning at the highest level of government. Yes, this is only one incident. But, as we will start to see in the next post on this topic, a number of high-level organizations are preparing to get into serious censorship of much more of what you are allowed to see and know.

Sadly, it will likely all pass under the radar of traditional anti-book banning groups. Such groups, in my view, suck all the oxygen out of the room about comparative trivia just when we need a serious discussion about some really big issues. Stay tuned.

You may also wish to read: How censorship has changed and why that matters so much. The way censorship works now, you don’t even know about it. So it is much more difficult to protest. Today’s censorship depends in part on the fact that failing mainstream media don’t want to know. Stories are increasingly broken by independent writers.