Analysis of mission statements
When reading about pro censorship organizations a common question that kept popping into our heads was, “what are these organizations saying to get people on their side and banning books?”. So we decided to collect mission statements and About Us pages from groups that are active at a county level. We focused on Florida because of it’s many book challenges as well as other reasons covered in our methods tab. Immediately we noticed that these groups will generally either take a defensive stance, claiming they must defend their way of life, or an aggressive approach which calls for action to fight against an unjust government. From here we formed a hypothesis: If an organization correlates it’s mission with defensive language, then it will be more effective at getting books banned.
“We are the action arm of local citizens as they defend their faith, freedom, and liberty.”
-Brevard Citizens Defending Freedom
“There is power in numbers and the purpose of our organization is to fight for the survival of America by unifying, educating, and empowering parents.”
– Moms for Liberty, Collier County
The first thing that stuck out was one organization called “Moms for Liberty”(M4L), as their county chapters made up a majority of the county level groups that we are looking at. This may be due to a multitude of reasons, it may be because they are a nationally present organization so many people looking to join or start their own group look to M4L for assistance, or it may be like the case of Brevard county’s chapter where they were already an established group for another cause, in this case anti mask, and were approached by M4L to merge with their organization. However these chapters came to be, it is important to recognize that they are from the same organization because they use the same phrases along side their own unique mission statements and about us pages such as “Please invite parents, grandparents, and community members that value parental rights.”, and “We are stronger together!”.
Aggressive vs Defensive Language
“Liberty” is the most common unique word when looking at all of the mission statements and “About Us” pages, appearing 138 times across 34 pages, and it is not only because the most active organization has liberty in it’s name. In fact out of the 34 mission statements and about us pages, 31 of them used the word liberty at least once, including the oldest group we found, “Winterhaven9-12 Project” which was founded in 2010. For the purpose of this project we will take liberty to mean freedom from a government imposed harmful education, as that is the goal of all of these organizations. Using Voyant-Tools we can look at frequently occurring key terms, each of those terms has a correlation value and a significance value with each other word in the text. The correlation value will be between 1 and -1 with 1 being the strongest correlation and -1 meaning there is a negative correlation(link to correlation value guide). Along side those correlation values are the significance values, which is calculated by Voyant to determine if the correlation has any significance. As recommended by Voyant to avoid false correlations we excluded anything with a significance value of more than .05. Across all of our sources there are commonly occurring key terms that can generally be broken down into 6 categories(figure 1.), 3 approaches(Aggressive, Supportive, Defensive) and 3 subjects(Community, Family, Government). For this section we focused primarily on the use of aggressive vs defensive language as that is where we see the biggest difference between all groups and groups with books that have been banned between 2021-2022(link to list). Correlations with the word liberty best show what kind of language is being used when describing their groups’ goal so that is where we started our analysis. We found the strongest correlations with the word liberty to be supportive and aggressive language, and a weak correlation with defensive language.
Key terms and their correlation value with Liberty: Aggressive(fighting(.69), fires[of liberty](.67)) Supportive(dedicated(.88), educating(.71), empowering(.65)) Defensive(defend(.4)).
Now if we look at what words have the strongest correlations with liberty, only in the counties where books are being banned between the years of 2021-2022(figure 3.), we start to see what kind of language the most effective pro-censorship groups use. It is worth noting that M4L has a local group in every county that has banned books in Florida, however they are not the only groups present in those counties either. The biggest difference we find is there is a much higher correlation with liberty and defensive language and a lower correlation with aggressive language. Key terms and their correlation value with liberty in counties with banned books: Aggressive(fight(.65)) Supportive(dedicated(.92), educate(.89), empower(.77)) Defensive(defend(.83)) This trend is present in other key terms as well. We see a correlation of .81 between “Survival” and “Fighting” across all groups but no significant correlation between those two words in counties with book bans. To further prove the point, there is a correlation of .95 between “Survival” and “Defend” across the groups with bans in their county while all groups together have a value of only .69. All of these correlations support our claim that groups that correlate defensive language with their goals are more effective at getting books banned than groups that correlate aggressive language with their goals.
What does this mean?
If you find yourself being swayed by arguments for parental rights and pro censorship organizations we encourage you to think about the kind of language they are using, organizations claiming to act in defense of their liberty and freedom may be utilizing that language to appeal to more people and garner sympathy for their cause. Check out our section on news shared by pro and anti censorship organizations to get a deeper dive on what the true goals and intentions are of these groups, or look at the political data of Florida and how its changed over time to see what may be the cause of these organizations gaining more popularity in recent years.
Supportive Language & the future of this project
While supportive language is not something we had initially considered in our hypothesis, it has certainly shown a trend in the language chosen by groups with books banned in their county between 2021-2022. As demonstrated in figure 3, counties with banned books have very strong correlations between supportive language and terms used in one of the 3 subjects categories(figure 1). If we look at the term community we can see what terms it is being correlated with. Across all groups community is correlated with the terms empower and stronger. In counties that have banned books between 2021-22, community is correlated with survival, unifying, empower, families, and stronger. This is just one example of organizations finding more success when directly correlating their use of supportive language with terms associated with community and family. We believe this is because it is likely the best recruitment strategy to grow their group and get a stronger voice in their community. We hope to be able to expand upon this project in the future and provide more insight into the use of supportive language, recruitment, and community interaction.