> but I never hear about lawmakers attempting to shut down the internet or part of the internet
They definitely like to meddle there too.
The worst part was that this guy was beyond reproach - he went out of his way to notify people and said he wouldn't mention it to news outlets etc until the issue was resolved. It was a clear case of the governor misusing his power to prosecute a free press that he didn't like using a pretext he knew was incorrect. While it's funny to poke at the governor for this, I personally believe it should have caused his removal from office.
https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/23/claim-that-report...
excerpt:
State education officials initially wanted to thank Renaud for discovering the problem that, as investigators would learn, has existed undetected since 2011. And an FBI agent who looked at the incident informed the state that it was “not an actual network intrusion,” noting that the website in question “allowed open source tools to be used to query data that should not be public.”
State officials made it clear the information was on a public site, it was not encrypted or password protected and the reporter was not anywhere he wasn’t allowed.
The governor decided to blame a government failing on the reporter who discovered it.
Despite all this, Parson convened a press conference to label the reporter a “hacker” and demand a highway patrol investigation. He accused the Post-Dispatch of trying to use the security flaw to embarrass him, and his political action committee launched ads to raise money off Parson’s attacks.Schools are publicly funded by taxes; those taxes are apportioned by elected representatives. The legislature has the right to dictate what the money can and can't be used for. That's not censorship.
It's a huge violation of the spirit of libraries. It is effectively censorship. I guaranteed that the bible, despite portraying just about every subject they are trying to hide, is present in every single school library in the state.
Saying that kids only get free access to the books the state legislators agree with is absolutely censorship.
so what was going on in all those other cases?
>they'll try to remove it from the [everywhere else] too"
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/05/gop-lawmaker-petitions-c...
hey look they've already started escalating. Now, that one got dismissed but yeah, your "steelman" is not in fact "silly"
Also, a nakedly unconstitutional attempt to control the inventory of a private company is not exactly the greatest example of an escalating.
Removing certain books from all the libraries is what we call "banning" those books. That's literally what the term means.
> you can just go actually read the text of these laws
Here, kid, no Judy Bloom for you, but you can read the law that prohibits her book? That's just sick.
That's worse than censorship.
This is big government stepping in to override decisions of local governments that they disagree with.
It's censorship and an infringement on the basic constitutional rights of public employees to independently make purchasing decisions for the government.
Because any parents could pay for private school on their own dime.
It's the same as choosing to include one bible and pointedly not another.
I object to my taxes you mentioned being used in that manner. I pay for education not indoctrination and ignorance. A large, perhaps the largest function of education is to expose the mind to the variety of the world. Selectively masking off parts of it is literally creating ignorance not education.
and most of the people there to use the internet don't have access to the web on their own -- they're not going to be the most internet savvy users.
it's not impossible for Jim-Bob the toothless iterant to get to the Pronz on library computer -- i'm sure it happens, in much the same way i'm sure it happens on school computer lab systems -- but it is certainly the minority.
tbh i'd be more worried about doomscrollers and kids playing online games burning bandwidth and bogarting the systems