404 Media

2026-06-22 14:00:24

Are Public Libraries Becoming Children’s Libraries?

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.

Earlier this year, an Alaskan assembly member found himself in hot water for introducing a resolution that would have prohibited the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Public Library System from making books and other media available to anyone if deemed “harmful to minors” by the borough manager.

The proposal wasn’t well received. Public records obtained from the Borough Clerk’s Office and shared with 404 Media show that the proposal was wildly unpopular. In emails to assembly members, constituents implored the resolution's sponsor Michael Bowles to withdraw it, calling it an “audacious and idiotic” attempt at destruction by way of “bureaucratic nightmare.” One constituent likened it to a proposal to “make all libraries children's libraries.” Another said its adoption could result in countless other books being removed that “are not sexual in nature” but which may contain “passing references to sex or adult themes.”

A week went by before Bowles withdrew the request, seemingly to recalibrate. The Mat-Su Sentinel reported in May that the assembly member introduced and again withdrew a resolution that would have forced the system to pull the book Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human from shelves. This teen book has been in the adult section of Mat-Su’s borough-run libraries since 2023 when it was relocated from the teen section following a challenge.

404 Media has obtained records from dozens of public libraries, which include Requests for Reconsideration of Materials forms (RFRs) and official decision letters to challengers, along with draft versions of updated collection development policies. Much has been written in the last five years about the blatant efforts to suppress access to books that could contain any remotely challenging ideas or that deviate even slightly from cis white heterodoxy, but there’s been little talk about what that means from the rest of us. What my reporting confirms is that there are more books intended for children and young adults in adult sections because challengers didn’t believe it was appropriate for children and young adults to read about people of color and/or people who are queer, trans, or both, while also showing that a large-scale reorganization of public library collections is currently underway, that its application varies by state and locality, and that it’s been very hard to measure because it’s totally chaotic.

Records obtained from one South Carolina public library system show that between June 2024 and August 2025, more than two dozen young adult books were relocated to the library’s adult section. Before that, the system had already resectioned more than two dozen other YA titles. The ACLU sued Greenville County Public Library System in 2025 for its board-adopted policies from 2024.

Most letters from the library’s executive director didn’t include any reason for the relocation. However, more recent letters reference the library’s updated collection development policy.

One frequently challenged title caught up in the mix at this library was The Hate U Give a YA book published in 2017 about a teenager who has to witness her friend—an unarmed Black man—be murdered by a police officer during a traffic stop. In 2024 at the Greenville County Public Library System, the book was challenged and retained before, in 2025, the book was again challenged and relocated to the library’s adult section. What happened in between these two events, the library’s board adopted policies making this and other books easier to remove.

The majority of U.S. anti-library laws introduced from 2022 to now have largely focused on school libraries. Only a few states have laws that affect municipal and county public libraries, and so far, most of these efforts have either failed to pass or were struck down by governors. That’s not to say state governments haven’t found other ways to do censorship. As of now, at least two states have mechanisms tying public library funding to content restrictions. One of them happens to be South Carolina, which has a legislative requirement that threatens to strike the system from its budget unless the system certifies with the State Librarian that they don’t keep books in the children, youth or teen sections that could be of "prurient interest” to a 17 year old. A more aggressive version of state library-agency rulemaking comes from Alabama.

In 2024, the Alabama Public Library Service (APLS) amended its administrative code to withhold funding to public libraries that don’t do enough to restrict minors’ access to “sexually explicit” or otherwise “inappropriate” material, and has only continued to broaden its scope since. APLS has since gone on to broaden the criteria for what is “sexually explicit” before adding a provision to treat content dealing with the “concept of more than two biological genders” as inappropriate for youth sections.

Tuscaloosa Public Library released records to 404 Media in response to a public records request that included tracked edits to the library’s 2025 collection development policy—initially based on a 2022 version—to meet APLS funding requirements. These changes appear to have been accepted. A line about the library welcoming community feedback on collection development, which an editor appeared to question, was also retained.

The motives behind these changes to collection policies and funding incentives raise serious questions about who public libraries are for in America. William Rodick, who researches representation and culturally responsive teaching in Pre-K and primary education for the nonprofit EdTrust, says the mass relocation of diverse books from developmentally appropriate sections of public libraries into adult sections is a form of “intellectual condescension,” or the idea that young people aren’t capable of dealing with hard topics through literature.

“That becomes manifest by removing opportunities for demonstrating honesty for students,” Rodick told 404 Media.

Rodick says that students already have disproportionate access to spaces outside of classrooms where students can access reading materials. Regardless of where they’re getting their books, students of color and students who are LGBTQ+ aren’t presented in the majority of the books they do have access to—much less so now than just a few years ago.

“And when they are presented, quite often those representations are stereotypes through really negative portrayals that are certainly not going to use the kind of motivation students need to engage with reading,” Rodick said. “The fear that I have is that at some point, we are going to see even greater disparity in outcomes than we already do for literary rates because of perpetual inaccess to quality materials.”

Literacy rates have been trending downward for young people for a while. When the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released its Nation’s Report Card assessment in early 2025, it caused a stir, because one of the major takeaways was that more than 60 percent of fourth graders don’t read proficiently. Another was that the gap between the country’s strongest and weakest readers is widening because the lows are getting lower. Meanwhile, in 2020, about half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 were found to have low literacy skills.

Nadja Young is chief brand officer with MetaMetrics, the company that developed the widely-adopted Lexile Reading Framework because it measures both reader ability and text complexity to match readers with books that are appropriately challenging. She says the focus for upper grades in high school is really about vocabulary in contexts that are authentic.

"Reading whole books absolutely helps to build that stamina," Young told 404 Media.

Yet shrinking attention spans and fast-moving curricula are pushing schools toward teaching excerpts over whole books, to the point that college instructors observe that students are finding an expectation to finish a whole book for a college course novel. For The New Yorker this month, Becca Rothfeld literally wrote an essay about the immaturity of modern American books, likening them to “the literary equivalents of the social-media profiles that teen-agers (and adults who have never quite outgrown teen-age tics) compulsively check and update.”

There are, of course, other factors to weigh when making widesweeping generalizations about literacy rates in adults. Young notes that adults with dyslexia, neurodivergence, and English language learners have historically and continue to have difficulty finding books they can parse that also honor their maturity and intellect. Lexile only measures a text’s complexity, not the content or themes a book contains. And yet, books are being relocated based on content or theme. Whether text complexity is an afterthought or conflated with content or theme is only something the most prolific censors can know.

"I don't think we could take the stance that it's going to bring the population up or down because as long as these books are still in the library somewhere, people can find them and the librarians can help direct them," Young added.

Tasslyn Magnusson, an independent researcher and consultant with organizations like PEN America and EveryLibrary was an early chronicler of the current rise of modern-day book banning. She says book relocation in public libraries is really just a roundabout way of eliminating diverse representation from children’s literature entirely.

“We may end up with collections that have weird pockets of literature in them, but I think the more likely scenario is the books won’t circulate,” Magnusson told 404 Media.

When library books don’t circulate, they’re more likely to get weeded so the library can circulate new titles based on their collection policies. Collection policies, however, are being rewritten across the country to eliminate intellectual freedom and privacy for minors by targeting titles that can fit into a broad category called “sexually explicit,” which is synonymous with “harmful to minors.” This, Magnusson says, prompts publishers to argue that books with same-sex couples, transgender protagonists and people of color encountering racism, brutality—even genocide—don’t sell, because libraries are getting rid of them.

Where the hypothesis holds up, Magnusson said, is that a young person’s constitutional right to access information is dependent on where they live and whether the adults in their lives recognize them as having free will or not. For adult sections of libraries, a disproportionate number of young adults will need some form of parental permission to check out books that deal with sensitive subjects that, like it or not, teens deal with.

Unfortunately, the modern-day parental rights movement is predicated on a belief that children are the property of their parents, and therefore parents, “should be able to do anything they want to them,” including restricting their right to read and explore their interests to their fullest potential. Instead, Magnusson says, adults are blocking children from accessing developmentally appropriate material in instances that deal with sensitive subject matter. She takes YA books that grapple with hard topics, like suicide and child sexual abuse as examples, as these are issues censors frequently cite in RFRs for why a book should be relocated.

The illusion of control is obviously not working and will have devastating consequences for the rest of us, which people do not want and vehemently reject. This means the answer likely lies somewhere between meeting your kids where they’re at, even when where they’re at bears no resemblance to the Devil You Know. Which is scary and sucks, but that’s also what parenting is, and which a lot of parents don’t seem to get.

“We talk about parents’ rights, but what we really need is parent remedial education,” Magnusson added.

Part One: Elan School: The Worst 'Troubled Teen' Facility - Behind the Bastards | iHeart

Robert is joined by Miles Gray to discuss The Elan School.FOOTNOTES: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/style/skeletons-in-the-classroom.html https://www.darkdowneast.com/episodes/elanschool https://www.courant.

^{Behind the Bastards (iHeart)}

404 Media

2026-04-01 13:00:00

‘BLOCKADE’: The Right Is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.

Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries. Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway.

One such experiment indicates a desire to accelerate content production of book reviews for conservative book-rating sites. BLOCKADE, which stands for “Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism,” relies on xAI or OpenAI API keys to generate book reports from PDF/ePUB files, basing the analysis on a set of parameters that are publicly available through the creator’s Github page.

The program’s script includes a list of roughly 300 words, each assigned a severity score that contributes to an overall appropriateness score based on their own metrics. The script explicitly defines “educational inappropriateness” as “content offensive to conservative values,” while also asking the AI “not to include any additional text or explanation” for its decisions.

“If you want to classify content in this kind of context, maybe toxicity with offensive content, troublesome content—whoever it is it finds troublesome—asking for an explanation is super useful,” Jeremy Blackburn, associate professor of computer science and director of the Institute for AI and Society at Binghamton University, told 404 Media.

Blackburn notes that there’s a lot of control relinquished to a chatbot as to what the definition of pornography or conservative values is. The definition is whatever the AI model has defined it as.

“There’s just a lot of responsibility being abdicated,” he added. “If you’re abdicating the responsibility with this kind of not sophisticated prompting strategy with no real thought into how to evaluate what comes out of these models.”

Intellectual freedom advocates are alarmed by the frequency in which censors rely on AI to help them determine what books to remove from public spaces. When BLOCKADE is finished interpreting conservative values to mean whatever xAI or OpenAI’s LLMs say they mean, it builds a risk profile for the book that the user can then export as a PDF that looks a lot like the book reviews organizations like Moms for Liberty popularized before AI chatbots were on the market. The format has inspired numerous copycats from organizations that take the idea a step further, using heat maps to monitor books they don’t like that remain available in school libraries by aggregating data by state, district, school building and the number of books in circulation. In other instances, activists use social media channels to highlight their experiments with using AI chatbots to challenge passages for possible violations of state laws.

In every case, these reviews are designed to be submitted as attachments to formal book challenges to districts, fueling the removal of totally normal books from schools nationwide, and shouldn’t be confused with those from publishing industry professionals. They also disproportionately target titles that feature historically underrepresented—and often misrepresented—characters and voices that grapple with big ideas like consent, prejudice and free will, which are important issues for young people to reckon with. Often, these reviews are used to justify formal challenges to their availability in school classrooms and libraries and as a tool to falsely accuse school staff of egregious misconduct. Increasingly, these reviews are—to some extent—informed by AI outputs.

Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program notes that the practice of stripping books of their context didn’t start with AI. Early efforts to legitimize review platforms relied on keyword tallies to justify arbitrary numeric scores, stripping passages and illustrations of their context and ignoring the wholeness of books.

“When [censors] start using these tools to take the shortcut to get books off shelves, you’re going to end up pulling so many books that tend to be the most targeted anyway,” Meehan told 404 Media.

Rated Books, which hosts all of the book reports Moms for Liberty members produced before winding down last year, is behind one of the more aggressive campaigns to get "sacrilegious" content out of schools. The site is run by Brooke Stephens, a Utah-based activist who has spent months chronicling her experiments with commercial AI tools for the LaVerna in the Library - Utah’s Mary in the Library Facebook group. This Facebook group, which operates like a support group for the most proficient book banners in America, has been a testing ground for how well AI can effectively interpret state laws that restrict young people’s access to books. Using Utah’s “bright-line” rule—a legal standard applied to schools through House Bill 29—certain depictions of sexual conduct are considered “harmful to minors” and thus contain no “serious value” regardless of their literary merit—Rated Books reviewers ask different AI models if the passages they don’t like violate the legal standard.
Image: Brooke Stephens
“I’ve found that AI generally errs on the side of over-application rather than under, meaning it may find something it thinks is against the law that I wouldn’t think is against the law,” Stephens posted on January 13 to the LaVerna group in an effort to explain her methodology.

One screenshot from the post includes a column for input from “Gemini AI Rater 2” and “ChatGPT Rater 3.” When asked if these were humans tasked with using specific AI models or if these were an attempt to personify two commercial AI chatbots, Stephens clarified that there are, in fact, three humans involved in the Rated Books review process.

The bright-line rule triggers a statewide ban on titles that have been successfully challenged by at least three school districts—or two districts and five charter schools—across the state’s public schools. Since enactment, Utah has banned student access to more than two dozen books from all school districts. To remove titles from Utah school libraries and classrooms, members of review committees for each district in receipt of a formal challenge have to decide whether the book had “no serious value for minors” due to whether it included depictions of “illicit sex or sexual immorality.”

Jessica Horton, who oversees Let Davis Read—a watchdog group monitoring local book challenges submitted to her children’s school district—has successfully appealed some review committee decisions that would have resulted in titles being banned from schools across Utah. She says her appeals were successful in cases where the review committees’ decisions relied on Rated Books reviews which took the book out of context.

“Committees are basing their decisions off of that biased information, and so they’re going to be more predisposed to remove books because the only thing they’re seeing is a red flag saying, ‘Hey, this book is porn, you should remove this book,’” Horton told 404 Media.

This month, the National Book Rating Index—a Rated Books affiliate project—began selling users access to NarraTrue, an AI content scanner that promises to scan books for potentially sensitive materials. According to the product’s description, a $5 payment will net purchasers a CSV file with specific page numbers and verbatim excerpts. While only a few AI content scans have been made public, access to the product is now included among lists of other likeminded book reviews.

In other parts of the country, the ability to mass-produce content to challenge books in schools is fueling an emerging market where organizations sell “solutions” to the very school districts the “parental rights” movement overwhelmed has enabled these tools to take off more vapidly. The Texas company BookmarkED is selling its AI content scanner to districts as a solution to legal liability problems.

Public records obtained by 404 Media from the New Braunfels Independent School District northeast of San Antonio show the district has heavily invested in AI to screen books for content that would violate one of the state’s numerous book ban laws, particularly SB 12 and SB 13.

Emails from the company to the district include phrases like, “the real power of your OnShelf dashboard isn’t just the list of books; it’s the book intelligence behind that list,” before promising to give customers a “truly defensible process” that “allows you to build a review process you can stand behind” and promises more context for what the AI flags and why. This includes AI content analysis, live landscape monitoring of what the public and activist groups are saying about the book and whether other districts have retained or removed certain books.

In a Nov. 18, 2025 email exchange, NBISD employees were candid about the product’s efficacy.

“I feel like BookmarkED is flagging more each time you run it,” a NBISD elementary school librarian wrote. “We have said that all books we are reviewing will need to have the things that were flagged pervasively throughout the book taken as a whole. Based on the comments from the AI, it seems that if it has any content at all, it flags rather than taking it as a whole. But I couldn’t tell you for sure.”

Meehan says districts should be wary of the rent-seeking motives baked into these AI platforms, if not for the “grifty” energy these companies give off, then for the local decision-making power that’s being abdicated to Silicon Valley.

“Your state passes harmful legislation that removes and censors books, and then you have companies appear that then want to charge districts to review their collections,” Meehan said.

Despite fast-tracking a nearly $9,000 contract with BookmarkED, the district maintains that it’s still in the “exploring process.”

According to the Texas Freedom to Read Project, NBISD has removed more than 1,400 books from its elementary, middle and high schools to comply with new laws while the ability to purchase new books is suspended indefinitely.

“All of this is not real—it’s manufactured,” Laney Hawes, a volunteer with the Texas Freedom to Read Project told 404 Media. “It’s not a real problem because if it was a real problem, our children wouldn’t all have phones in their pockets and Chromebooks in their backpacks… Your child can Google it and find a live reading and enactment of the same book on YouTube or their school-issued Chromebook.”

While there is no question the effects of book bans have been disproportionately felt in some places more than others, that could soon change. In February, Republicans introduced H.R. 7661, which seeks to prohibit the use of federal funds for any program, activity or literature that includes “sexually oriented material” for anyone under 18. The legislation targets trans folks specifically, and would likely compel schools to remove library books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes in order to retain federal funding.

Critics warn that, if passed, H.R. 7661 would open districts up to costly litigation for shelving open more districts up to costly litigation for books with LGBTQ+ themes, particularly as they involve trans lives. It would also give book banners even more incentive to shill AI compliance products to districts, even if they’re bunk.

“They’re wanting to use AI to give themselves the illusion of control,” Hawes added. “But they won’t have it.”

Amidst Lawsuit, Utah Bans Its 23rd Book from All Public Schools

On Friday the 13, Utah banned a Stephen King book from every school district in the state. That was Utah's 23rd state-sanctioned ban.

^{Kelly Jensen (BOOK RIOT)}