This week, CBLDF joined the other sponsoring members of the Kids’ Right to Read Project to support students’ and teachers’ free expression rights in two separate but similar cases that would restrict the right to read. CBLDF joins coalition efforts…
Author: Maren Williams
Explore Comics Censored in China
We’ve told you before about a few examples of memes, cartoons, and other images being censored on China’s Twitter-like microblogging site Sina Weibo. An army of 150 censors police Weibo’s 500 million users, deleting anything they find that might displease…
Teachers: Don’t Miss These 2013 Graphic Novels
One of our missions here at CBLDF is promoting the use of comics and graphic novels in schools — hence our publications Raising a Reader! How Comic & Graphic Novels Can Help Your Kids Love to Read! and CBLDF Presents…
Utah Librarian To Receive Downs Intellectual Freedom Award
In January 2013, a months-long dispute over Patricia Polacco’s In Our Mothers’ House was finally resolved when the Davis School District in Farmington, Utah, returned the picture book to open library shelves. Since April 2012, the book about a lesbian…
Censorship 2013: Student Protest Saves Persepolis in Chicago Public Schools
When a blogger leaked a March 14 email from the principal of Lane Tech College Prep in Chicago, Illinois, students in the district took immediate action. Within hours of discovering the email, students used social media to organize a protest…
Indian Political Cartoons Deleted from Twitter — No Explanation Yet
Indian blogs are reporting that two pieces by political cartoonist Manjul were repeatedly deleted from Twitter with no explanation over the weekend, but the cartoons have just as mysteriously been allowed to remain after he posted each of them a…
“Boobies” Case May Clarify Student Speech Rights
Sometime in the next few weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to hear a case that has the potential to greatly clarify the free speech rights of students in public schools. While that is of course a very…
Absolutely True Diary Pulled From Classrooms at West Virginia Middle School
Two weeks after the last challenge to Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was positively resolved, the book has been removed from eighth grade classrooms at a middle school in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, after a…
Cartoonist Keeps Drawing Despite Fundamentalist Threats
The last time we featured Egyptian political cartoonist Doaa Eladl here, she was facing a Muslim Brotherhood-backed lawsuit that alleged one of her cartoons was blasphemous. In the tumultuous months since then, the lawsuit evaporated along with Mohamed Morsi’s presidency…
Report Illustrates International Crackdown on Online Expression
A new infographic from PEN, an international NGO that aids writers threatened with arrest, prosecution, or violence, shows that government repression of speech is increasingly focused online. PEN found 92 writers around the world currently imprisoned or in detention for…