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Whenever I encounter some news article regarding “banned” books I dig a little deeper and typically discover that some library or elementary school simply put an age restriction on those titles.

I’ll grant that some of the restrictions seem overprotective. That being said, a parent could easily check out one of those books for their child.

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You would be correct there are no "banned books" in America.

When people say "banned book" they mean that a certain level of government such as a school board or municipality has "banned" them from being in a public (often school) library.

But the headline "In [state I disagree with] they are banning books that have [ideas I agree with]" makes a lot more headlines and clicks.

Then people run with the phrase "banned books" to make things sound worse than they are.

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Each state is part of the USA, and each state DOES ban some books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...

USA is ultra conservative on the average in comparison to just any European state for example.

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> USA is ultra conservative on the average in comparison to just any European state for example.

Are you serious? The UK and Germany are arresting people for social media posts. That is actual impingement of free speech.

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Relying on the ultra mainstream wikipedia for a banned book would be hilarious if it weren't so deeply disappointing. They'll list nothing interesting.
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None of those books are banned.
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The point is that those books aren't actually banned for general access. They may not be present in a school library, but you can certainly get them on Amazon.
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There's a certain amount of censorship of classified information published by (ex-)military, and that kind of thing, but it can be and is challenged in court.

Purely obscene material is also not protected by the 1st, but since the 1970s, the bar for that has been placed very, very high.

The closest I can think of offhand is that for about a year during the pandemic, Twitter suppressed gratuitous COVID misinformation posts, at the request of the government.

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Jordan Derrick (Ashley Dugan) recently had a youtube video on making RDX pulled and criminally charged with "distribution of explosives information to terrorists" for publicly sharing the public domain patented/documented synthesis (going back to a German patent all the way in the 19th century IIRC) of RDX explosives and denied bail for "hate speech" of using the Israeli flag as a doormat (which was actually in the indictment).
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It's not different than McDonald's and Burger King being banned in Germany.

The evidence is that they don't serve it for school lunches.

Is that a weird argument? That's the same way people argue that books are "banned" in America.

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