Censoring Love and Books

Recently, I have been reading more world literature; it started when I read French, Italian, and Russian translations in my fiction class, and now has spread to a more expansive range including traditionally non-Western texts.

In his book, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, Shahriar Mandanipour explores the detrimental effects of the extreme censoring of speech, books, and relationships. His book uses bold text to show what can actually be published in Iran, and he comments throughout in regular typeface to explain how difficult writing a love story becomes with the extreme censorship. Often, he results to metaphors and abstract language to describe a simple embrace, something that is not allowed.

After I put down the book, I sighed with relief. Thank goodness this kind of censorship does not happen in America where we have freedoms other countries may lack.

Overtly, my relief was correct; under the First Amendment, Americans celebrate the precious right to freedom of speech, press, petition, assembly, and religion. Still, my relief at a lack of American censorship was naive. Even though these rights are protected, censorship does occur in America, and it is far more underhanded and deceptive than that of Iran.

The burgeoning presence of fake and extraordinarily biased news sources, especially on the Internet, represents a different kind of censorship that occurs every day, often unnoticed. Facebook feeds tailored to our likes, news sources that report statistics in favor of their constituents' political preferences, and  false clickbait headlines merely skim the surface of a new era of sifting for truth.

Censorship online also occurs with the rise of explicit content and the consequent response to filter this content. Tumblr, a social media platform used for sharing and collaborating on content, recently rolled out a new Safe Mode, in which users under 18 are protected from sensitive content and users over 18 can opt into the protection.

On the surface, this sounds perfectly acceptable. Tumblr has very few restrictions on its content in the first place, so this new feature aims to protect its under 18 population from posts marked as NSFW (not safe for work). I thought it was a perfect solution.

Then, one of my own posts was censored.

I got an email notification regarding my post being marked as sensitive content, labeled NSFW for all of Tumblr. Here is the post:

https://polyliteramore.tumblr.com/post/162672957634/thankful-for-freedom

I had posted this photo in honor of the 4th of July, a little message of gratitude for a country that is receiving a considerable amount of backlash at the moment. The book itself is not the least bit NSFW or inappropriate for teenagers, and neither is the photo.

I submitted my photo for Tumblr to review, and thankfully, I received a response about a week later.

My childhood took place just before the age of the Internet, and so I never encountered censorship beyond books sorted out of the children's section in the bookstore. I read nearly anything that was remotely digestible, and I grew up with a newspaper in my hand every morning. Even as a child, I read about the happenings around the world, albeit through an American news source. The Internet indeed provides a plethora of access to content that is simply not suitable for children.

But I fear the censorship that comes alongside this, preventing people from accessing veritable information about other cultures and societies so different from our own. I myself have no solution to this problem, but I merely want to remind myself to be aware of the censorship that occurs daily both on and off the Internet, both on my computer and around the world.