Alison Macrina

In February, after being alerted to the issue by a group of Massachusetts librarians, Library Freedom Project and Library Futures released a joint statement demanding accountability from Midwest Tape President and Hoopla founder Jeff Jankowski about hateful content and disinformation regarding COVID-19, the Holocaust, LGBTQIA+ people, and other topics on his company’s massively popular electronic content platform for public libraries. Six months later, there is still a great deal of disinformation to be found in Hoopla’s collection on topics ranging from LGBTQIA+ experiences to reproductive health to vaccines.

Recently, I was teaching a privacy class for librarians, and the topic turned to the privacy versus convenience trade-off—the occasional annoyances of using privacy-enhancing technologies online. An audience member laid out what she felt I was asking of the group. “You’re telling us to start selling granola when everyone else is running a candy store.”