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Liberals and conservatives both oppose censorship of children's literature—unless the writing offends their own ideology, new Cornell research finds.

Studying a representative U.S. population, the scholars in literature, sociology and information science found competing cancel cultures in which widespread opposition to literary censorship masked offsetting disagreements between left- and right-wing values.

Those attitudes highlight the polarization of an issue once governed by bipartisan consensus over the need to protect children from inappropriate violent or sexual content. Now, the researchers said, offensive political ideas are viewed as dangerous—threatening free speech as a core value.

"When each side attacks cancel culture on the other side, the attacks do not cancel out—they additively contribute to the restriction of freedom of expression," said Michael Macy, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, with a joint appointment in the Department of Information Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. "When people see 'freedom of expression' as just another weapon to use in the culture wars, it contributes to the problem of censorship by demeaning free expression as a core societal value."

Macy, who directs the Social Dynamics Laboratory, is the senior author of "," published in PLOS One. Adam Szetela, Ph.D. '25, and Shiyu Ji, a doctoral student in sociology, are co-first authors.

Fueled by social media, public efforts to censor are on the rise: The American Library Association in 2022 documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources—the highest number of attempted book bans since it began compiling the data more than 20 years earlier. Preliminary 2023 data indicated a "record surge of challenges in public libraries."

During the mid-20th century, the left and right jointly targeted sexual and violent content, including a bipartisan U.S. Senate hearing in 1954 on the public health threat posed by comic books. Later, campaigns coalesced to label music and video games. But in recent years, concerns have shifted to political ideology. On the left, progressives have targeted books seen as reinforcing racism, sexism and homophobia, while the right has attacked literature promoting diversity, or that violates norms of cisgendered heterosexuality.

"With the moral panic over comic books in the 50s, you had people on the far left saying this content was corrupting kids and making them violent, and those same concerns were echoed on the far right," said Szetela, the author of "That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing."

"Today, there's still that urge to restrict what can be written and read by people, especially young people, but it has a clearer polarized valence."

In a first study measuring attitudes about censorship, a representative sample of more than 800 participants responded to 15 statements: five that liberals would be more likely to agree with (e.g., "Public elementary schools should not assign a history book about the important contributions of famous white men who owned slaves"); five that conservatives would be more likely to agree with ("Public elementary schools should not assign a book about a transgender character who inspires children to celebrate all gender identities"); and five that were ideologically neutral ("Censorship of children's books is a serious problem in the U.S.").

Conservatives were more likely than liberals to support censorship on the neutral questions. But the results overall showed the two sides held surprisingly similar views about censorship.

"Both sides are willing to let children read books that reflect their own values but not those that might expose children to ideological contamination," the researchers wrote. "Both liberals and conservatives support the censorship of some children's books—just not the same ones."

A second study tested people's willingness to censor based on ideological criticism. More than 800 participants read four poems with content deemed non-ideological in pre-tests, with an experimental group also reading accusations that the poems were either racist, sexist, homophobic or antisemitic (offending the left) or anti-family, anti-male, unpatriotic or anti-Christian (offending the right).

Results showed liberals were more likely to agree with criticism that aligned with their ideology, while conservatives were more likely to censor material in the absence of exposure to criticism.

"These were political attacks under the guise of literary criticism, and the poems were innocent of the accusations against them, but nevertheless, participants in the experiment would sign on to the criticism," Macy said. "The study suggests how easy it is to get people to join the witch hunt."

Amid the right's backlash against "woke" cancel culture, Szetela said, people now refer to "right-wing wokeness," as some activists work to stifle liberal content they oppose. Both sides are engaged in partisan pushes for censorship, the right more through legislative action and the left more through social media.

"It's become kind of fashionable for people to say cancel culture or wokeness is over, and they mean that the left-wing style of censorship is over," Szetela said. "But it's this weird moment where both these urges to restrict and control literary material are co-existing but operating in different ways."