How did we get here?
After looking through the mission statements, more questions arose about what kind of language was being used across groups involved in book bans. What information do they post to their readers? In what ways do they talk about their issues? We decided to look at the information the groups provide to their readers, whether it be news articles and or blogs, factual and or opinionated. However, this time we were interested in both pro-censorship and anti-censorship groups and instead of them just located in Florida, we looked at the groups nationally. To see how the pro-censorship and anti-censorship groups and news/blogs were chosen, take a look at our methods tab. The goal of comparing the language in the groups news/blog posts was to hopefully find any patterns in the data that could give us more insight on how these groups operate and what they concern themselves with.
Before Looking at the Data...
Below, there are four graphs – one for each word. Using the online tool Voyant, we were able to determine the terms “gender”, “teachers”, “law”, and “libraries” as best for analysis between pro-censorship and anti-censorship groups. To learn more about how the words were selected, take a look at our methods tab. Before you start to take a look at the graphs below, its important to understand what they are really telling you. For each term, there are six context categories that the word could have been sorted into. “What does this mean?” you are probably wondering. In Voyant, there is a tool that allows you to look at at the context in which the word was used in texts. After looking through the contexts of each word, six main topic categories were created to help sort how the term was being used in the news/blog posts. These categories are labeled on the graph as Misinform., Opp. Agenda/Ideologies, Agenda/Ideologies, Threatening Opp. Actions, Freedom, and Betterment of Community. To interpret the graphs correctly, you must understand what these categories mean and how terms were categorized into them:
Misinform.: This category represents what they as a group deem as causing misinformation or confusing among others. This is often when they are talking about ideas or people in opposition to them. A term is put in this category when they explicitly state something is misinforming or causing confusion among others. Examples of other phrases that put a term into this category was stating “skewed vision” and “made up.”
Opp. Agenda/Ideologies: This category represents what the group deems as ideologies, agendas, or actions of opposers. Terms are sorted into this category when we are very clear that they are talking about opposers. This is decided by looking at the negative or positive language used surrounding the term in contexts, then applied on down the list from there.
Agenda/Ideologies: This category represents what the groups describes as their own ideologies, agendas, or actions. Like the Opp. Agenda/Ideologies category, terms are sorted into this category when we are very clear that they are talking about their opposers. This is decided by looking at the negative or positive language used surrounding the term in contexts, then applied on down the list from there. Some examples of phrases that placed a term in this category is saying “we recommend,” as said in a pro-censorship posted source: “embracing the Christian nationalist label,” and simply mocking an opposing idea.
Threatening Opp. Actions: This category represents any time a group talks about being threatened by or having great concern of their opposers. There could easily be overlap with the Opp. Agenda/Ideologies category. But to be put into this category, they have to explicitly state ways in which they feel or have been threatened. Example phrases that put a term into this category include “Help!”, “harassment,” “conquered,” “criminally charged,” “jailed,” and even “bomb threat.”
Freedom: This category represents any time a group talks about their freedoms. There could easily be overlap with the Agenda/Ideologies category. But to be put in this category, they have to explicitly mention the words “freedom,” “rights,” etc. in context with the term.
Betterment of Community: This category represents any time a group talks about bettering the community around them. Like the previous category, Freedom, there can easily be overlap between Agenda/Ideologies. But to be put in this category, the group has to explicitly state what they did as a group to support the betterment of the community and or explain how their readers can.
The categories are shown in the graphs as the percent of the total amount of times the word was found in the compiled articles for a specific group. For each word, you will see the data for both pro-censorship and anti-censorship, with the total number of times the word was found next to it in parenthesis. When looking at the total percentage, you may think that they are very low. That is partly due to the fact that Voyant also includes words in website links and titles into its analysis, which cannot be excluded.
There is a shocking difference is the amount of times the word “gender” is used in news/blog posts, with pro-censorship groups having 339 counts and anti-censorship having 152 counts. Looking at the graph we can see what these two groups share having the highest percentage of Opp. Agenda/Ideologies out of the four terms. When looking through Voyant, pro-censorship posts often talked about gender in the context of how adults are teaching gender to children, especially instances with teachers in school. One specific line from Christopher Rufo reports on a book and how it “elevated the discourse around queer sexuality.” They often discussed how gender was just an idea and that parents and teachers are forcing the idea onto children causing unnecessary confusion within them. However, anti-censorship group posts commonly talked about how gender is a common topic in book bans. They discussed how gender was becoming an increasingly restricted topic in classrooms as the idea of censorship grows and talked of how their opposers expressed “their objections to” the ideas of gender
Looking through the context of teachers, pro-censorship groups often talked about how teachers are taught and or encouraged to learn about lgbtq+ topics like gender, sexual identity, transgender transitions and more. We can see this being represented in the graph once more with Opp. Agenda/Ideologies having their top percentage for their data. The anti-censorship groups is a little more interesting, in which it actually shows the categories of Threating Opp. Actions and Betterment of Community on the graph. When looking at the context, we often saw many mentions of the restrictions on how teachers will be able to talk about controversial topics in the classroom and the many challenges teachers face. They mentioned how their opposers want to jail or fine teachers/school board members who fail to remove books or even talk about LGBTQ+ topics in a classroom. For the Betterment of Community category, context showed how anti-censorship groups tried to encourage their readers to support the teachers and the salary of teachers in their communities.
This graph is showing an interesting relationship between pro-censorship and anti-censorship. Pro-censorship is shown with Agenda/Ideologies having a higher percentage over Opp. Agenda/Ideologies. Meanwhile, it is the opposite for anti-censorship groups. Pro-censorship groups mentioned classroom materials, mandates and required courses they didn’t agree with, and laws that correlate to their ideologies. These laws were about banning child transgender surgeries, gender classes, laws for “both unborn children and their mothers,” and more. The pro-censorship groups context for the term law had their ideas of protecting children. As expected by looking at the graphs, anti-censorship groups often talked about the laws being discussed or created by their opposers. They say these laws are causing fear and are “harmful to minors.” Another part of this data that we found interesting, is how Freedom was discussed. Pro-censorship often mentioned religious freedom, while anti-censorship often brought up freedom of speech.
The first piece of data we found interesting this term was the difference in counts between pro-censorship and anti-censorship. Anti-censorship had significantly more uses of the word “library” than pro-censorship. By looking at the graph, we can also see how both groups have about the same percentages of their categories of Opp. Agenda/Ideologies and Agenda/Ideologies. This is something we haven’t seen yet. When looking in the context for the anti-censorship group posts, they discuss attacks on libraries from their opposers. One line read, “Town voted twice, twice, this year to defund its entire library.” They also discussed often what they thought of their opposers actions, with one line reading, “Backwards to assist parents in preventing their kid access to library books so that they don’t learn the dangerous ideas like queer.” Pro-censorship groups often discussed how people are unqualified to decide what goes into libraries. The words “pervert” and “transgender” were often seen in the context of this term. Both sides expressed their discontent with the review process of library books.
What can we learn?
After looking through the data, a common pattern between pro-censorship and anti-censorship news/blog posts is that they are often talking about their opposers, which in most cases are each other. If they aren’t talking about what the other one is up to, they are often giving about their opinions on what the other one is thinking or doing. While the focus when gathering sources was to find news articles and blogs regardless of whether or not they were labeled as opinionated or not, almost every single source had a strong bias. From this data, we can be reminded of how easily influenced a reader can be from reading the news/blogs posted from these groups’ sites. When reading information posted on these types of groups’ sites, it is important to recognize their biases so you can formulate your own opinions on this still growing controversial topic.