- 35 A.D. - The Roman emperor Caligula opposes any reading of Homer’s “The Odyssey” for expressing ideas of “Greek freedom”
- 1788 – Shakespeare's “King Lear” is banned from the stage for 22 years by the tyrannical King George III
- 1971 – The FBI tries to get access to library patrons’ check out histories, claiming investigations for terrorist activity. A Pennsylvanian librarian, Zoia Horn, is jailed for 20 days for refusing to testify for the FBI.
Today in 2026, our right to read is still being contested and threatened, and the proliferation of book challenges might shed some light on how we’ve casually accepted less privacy and more surveillance.
The Current State of Book Bans
Banned Books Week this year runs from October 4th – 10th, and like every year, libraries and information professionals everywhere bring awareness to this restriction of information as book challenges and bans continue to grow nationally.
However, this wasn’t always the case. It’s a fairly recent phenomenon that started in 2021 and can be traced to political and advocacy groups pushing for bans/restrictions on books that contain material they don’t support. The largest groups are Moms for Liberty, US Parents Involved in Education, and No Left Turn in Education. The books these groups object is largely those that merely include or mention LGBTQ+ characters or people of color.
Learn more: BannedBooksWeek.org
Rather than coming from a natural, genuine concern from parents who happen upon a book their child picked up from school, these interest groups share lists of books they deem inappropriate and use social media to rile people up, challenging them to limit what students can access in school libraries. More often than not, these groups use powerful language like “parents' rights” to validate their positions, but they advocate for the beliefs of certain parents rather than taking a neutral stance that would empower all families.
Blindly calling for bans on books with serious, worthwhile topics harms education and the practice of growing skills like critical thinking and empathy. The issue with these groups is that they encourage outrage among supporters who never even try to read or understand the books they are challenging. They simply follow their orders without stopping to think, “Why are we doing this?”.
What Do Book Bans Have to Do with Surveillance?
Book bans/challenges and the lobbyists that call for them are just one symptom of a society we have created against intellectualism and the freedom of information.
Book bans come from a state of concern over what other people are doing. In Spanish, we call these people “metiche”, literally entering yourself into another person’s business, and nobody is nosier than tech companies!
It’s no secret that in this digital world, our data has become a valuable commodity. It is harvested and sold by data brokers so companies can more easily sell us things we don’t need or trick us into thinking we do. The rise of social media and the attention economy, opens a new window encourages us to sacrifice even more of our privacy, recording anything and everything we do.
From the social media apps we download to the personal cameras on everyone’s front doors, we all contribute to this casual surveillance that has become so commonplace it feels normal. Our increased access to each other has emboldened some groups to monitor and scrutinize what their fellow citizens are doing, and this punitive thinking leads to book bans, social media call-outs, and viral videos of people’s most embarrassing moments.
Moreover, tech companies and social media sites love this! Divisiveness, outrage, and arguments get more engagement than more thoughtful content and keep people on their websites longer. Even more concerning is how tech companies are collaborating with government agencies to access all this data. Our current administration is empowering tech companies like Palantir to aggregate our digital information into government databases that profile us based on our opinions, locations, and internet activity. Thankfully, some states like Massachusetts are using local power to push data privacy legislation, opens a new window.
In the United States, we have established rights to privacy, opens a new window just as we have established freedom of expression, and while our lawmakers should uphold and protect those rights, we can take steps to help ourselves and each other.
Tips to Help Secure Your Privacy
- Use an encrypted password manager to store your passwords and use two-factor authentication when possible
- Keep only the apps you really need and use. Periodically wipe your phone of unused apps, especially ones that ask to track your location or files
- Shift your trust away from companies that surveil your data. For example, instead of Gmail and Chrome, explore alternative free email and browser options like Proton or Firefox
- Support nonprofits and public policy that advocate for consumer privacy protections
Learn More: How Harris County Public Library protects your library data
Put Down the Phones and Pick up a (Banned) Book
All this talk of censorship and surveillance can be daunting, but remember that conflict has been part of human history. While it might make you weary, there are ways to engage in the fight for intellectual freedom:
- Reporting book bans to PEN, opens a new window or Unite Against Book Bans, opens a new window
- Attending school board meetings to defend books from bans
- Supporting government officials and policies that advocate for our freedom to read
Above all, read some books! Banned or otherwise, take time to step away from worrying news, check out the stories, opens a new window that inspire such fervent debate, and learn more about surveillance, technology, and the digital world we’ve created for ourselves.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
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