While visiting a bookstore last week, I was struck by a sign sitting on a bookshelf by the entrance that read: “We sell banned books.” It felt like a punch—a reminder that the reason I’d visited the store was because it was in the US, and not my home country, China.

Back in where I live, censorship is the norm. Access to politically unfavorable content is heavily restricted. Growing up in this environment of redacted knowledge, the debate on free speech and book banning became an intrinsic—and relatively muted—part of my life.

The crux of this issue is the power of the state—and exactly how much we are giving up if the state gets to decide what to erase and what to keep. While it’s expected of many popular online platforms to restrict content that’s deemed harmful, attention must be drawn to the “well-intentioned” suppression of thought once the state gets involved. In this information-controlled age, having the power to delete and censor is to own the means to edit the truth. This, as we’ve learned far too many times in history, leads to no good. 

Ultimately, the solution to this quarrel of book censorship rests in the people it will impact the most—readers like you and me. Only when we, and the wider public, acquaint ourselves to the dangers of letting others decide what we can read can we avoid the slippery slope of restricting “inappropriate content.” That future may seem distant, but I’m hopeful that we’ll get there some day.