British Library Network Blocks 'Hamlet' For 'Violent Content'

Free Speech

from the infinite-jest dept

The use of Web blocks — usually “for the children” — is becoming depressingly common these days. So much so, that many people have probably come to accept them as a fact of online life. After all, the logic presumably goes, we can’t do much about it, and anyway surely it’s a good thing to try to filter out the bad stuff? Techdirt readers, of course, know otherwise, but for anyone who still thinks that well-intentioned blocking of “unsuitable” material is unproblematic, the following cautionary tale from the British blogger W.H. Forsyth may prove instructive:

The rest of the highly-entertaining blog post details attempts to get the library staff to see that there was a worrying symbolism about blocking Hamlet of all things in the British Library of all places:

As this shows, the British Library’s IT department tried to shrug this off with a “not our fault” comment to the effect that it was the wifi service doing the blocking, not the British Library, but that is just casuistry: the wifi service was being offered by the British Library to allow its users to access the Internet — an indispensable research tool these days. As one of the world’s leading repositories of knowledge, the British Library has a clear responsibility to facilitate that access. The fact that its staff seemed unperturbed by the censorship of Shakespeare in this supposed temple of British culture is also deeply troubling.

A tweet bemoaning the block had more luck: within 12 minutes, the British Library Reference Services tweeted back:

Since the block was quickly removed, you might ask: what’s the problem? Well, maybe stuff like this, reported by @matt_sperling on Twitter, the same day as the Hamlet censorship:

These included a painting of Lot and his Daughters by Hendrick Goltzius:

and Luca Giordano’s Battle between the Lapiths and Centaurs:

The next day, @alexvtunzelmann tweeted about continuing issues:

And that’s the problem: taste is highly subjective, and clearly leading here to massive overblocking on the British Library’s wifi network. The fact that the blocks were later removed misses the point: that they are inappropriate obstacles for scholars carrying out legitimate searches, and that they should never have been applied in the first place. It’s sad to see a great institution like the British Library complicit in this spread of routine and mindless censorship.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: british library, censorship, filters, hamlet, violence