Doctors spoke out after the Centre for Disease Control removed a number of webpages that included terms, such as “gender” and “transgender”, a move they said could potentially endanger people’s health.
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“We’re not talking here about ideology – we’re talking about public health,” Dr Richard Besser, a former acting director of the CDC told the New York Times in February. “We’re talking about people whose lives are being put at risk.”
There have been reports that scientists may be self-censoring to try to protect their research funding.
And the defence department has marked tens of thousands of photos and posts to be deleted, with the majority targeting women and minority groups, such as references to the first women to pass marine infantry training, Associated Press reported.
The war on words is not restricted to the inner workings of government.
Just ask Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student who spent more than six weeks in detention after she was apprehended on a Boston street in March.
Hundreds of people gathered in Somerville, Massachusetts, in March to demand the release of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student at Tufts University who was arrested and held for six weeks for an opinion piece in a student newspaper.Credit: nnayashee.sharma
A video captured the moment immigration enforcement agents, some wearing masks and plain clothes, surrounded her, tied her hands behind her back and led her away.
Ozturk’s immigration status wasn’t the issue – she was in the US legally on a student visa. The problem, it later transpired, was words, in the form of an opinion piece she co-wrote for a student newspaper criticising her university’s response to the war in Gaza.
A judge ordered her release in May, finding that there was “absolutely no evidence” she had engaged in or advocated violence, and did not pose a danger to the community.
The same month Ozturk was arrested, a French scientist was refused entry to the US after authorities found messages on his phone in which he expressed his political opinion on the Trump administration’s research policies, France’s higher education minister told Agence France-Presse.
Ironically, the day Trump was inaugurated he signed an executive order pledging to restore freedom of speech, which states, “government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society”.
Several months later, censorship in the “land of the free” dominated discussion on the opening night of the World Voices Festival organised by PEN America, with those who make their living from words speaking out.
Writers gathered in New York as books continue to be pulled from American school libraries, concerns about media freedom rise, and the number of writers jailed around the world grows.
But the mood at the festival felt like one of defiance, as authors spoke about the need to fight back, to not allow self-censorship to creep in, and the futility of trying to restrict words.
“I don’t think that authoritarianism can destroy the human imagination,” said Nigerian-American author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who grew up under a military dictatorship in Nigeria. “I don’t think it can destroy storytelling. I don’t think it can destroy words”.
Government gatekeepers may have uncapped their red pens in a bid to wipe out terms that don’t fit their narrative. But efforts to control language seem doomed to fail. After all, banning something often only makes it more powerful in the long run.
Liz Gooch is an Australian journalist and editor based in New York.
