Political views, not sex and violence, now drive literary censorship

ITHACA, N.Y. — Liberals and conservatives both oppose censorship of children’s literature — unless the writing offends their own ideology, new Cornell research finds.

Studying a representative U.S. population, a team of scholars in literature, sociology and information science found competing cancel cultures in which widespread opposition to literary censorship masked offsetting disagreements between left- and right-wing values.

Those attitudes highlight the polarization of an issue once governed by bipartisan consensus over the need to protect children from inappropriate violent or sexual content.

“Both sides are willing to let children read books that reflect their own values but not those that might expose children to ideological contamination,” the researchers wrote in “The Polarization of Literary Censorship in the U.S.,” published in PLOS One. “Both liberals and conservatives support the censorship of some children’s books – just not the same ones.”

In one study measuring attitudes about censorship, a representative sample of more than 800 participants responded to 15 statements: five that liberals would be more likely to agree with (e.g., “Public elementary schools should not assign a history book about the important contributions of famous white men who owned slaves”); five that conservatives would be more likely to agree with (“Public elementary schools should not assign a book about a transgender character who inspires children to celebrate all gender identities”); and five that were ideologically neutral (“Censorship of children’s books is a serious problem in the U.S.”).

Conservatives were more likely than liberals to support censorship on the neutral questions. But the results overall showed the two sides held surprisingly similar views about censorship.

A second study tested people’s willingness to censor based on ideological criticism. More than 800 participants read four poems with content deemed non-ideological in pre-tests, with an experimental group also reading accusations that the poems were either racist, sexist, homophobic or antisemitic (offending the left) or anti-family, anti-male, unpatriotic or anti-Christian (offending the right).

Results showed liberals were more likely than conservatives to agree with criticism that aligned with their ideology, while conservatives were more likely than liberals to censor material in the absence of exposure to criticism.

The growing role of partisan ideology in shaping literary censorship, warned the researchers, threatens free speech as a core value.

“When each side attacks cancel culture on the other side, the attacks do not cancel out — they additively contribute to the restriction of freedom of expression,” said Michael Macy, professor of sociology, director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory, and senior author of the paper.

For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.