Educational School Database Secretly Embeds Porn, Lawsuit Claims

For the second time in a year, the widely used educational research database EBSCO, which serves schools and libraries throughout the country, has become the target of a right-wing activist group accusing the company of secretly sneaking porn into their massive collection of millions of online articles and books, used for scholarly research into a vast range of topics. Last year, it was the National Center on Sexual Exploitation—a recent rebranding of the 56-year-old group Morality in Media—which named EBSCO to its “Dirty Dozen,”  claiming rather cryptically that “EBSCO brings the dark world of XXX to America’s elementary, middle, and high school children.” Then on October 10 of this year, a conservative “public interest law firm” known as the Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit against EBSCO as well as against the Colorado Library Consortium, which the Thomas More firm decsribes as “a tax-supported nonprofit corporation that knowingly brokers EBSCO’s pornographic databases to schools and libraries throughout Colorado.” What, exactly, is this secret cache of porn hidden among the vast collection of commercial and academic publications covering every conceivable topic? The Thomas More Society is not entirely specific about that. But it does claim that EBSC searches turned up, “a full-text e-book titled ‘Pornography in America: A Reference Handbook,’ which contained live url links to a company hosting video pornography and promoting the pornography industry.” The law firm also listed “ a ‘summer reading list’ for children contained many erotic and BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadomasochism) stories, which could be located through as innocent a search as ‘romance,’” and “an allegedly teen website that advises children to use saran wrap to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.” “Here’s the thing: EBSCO aggregates stuff other people publish,” wrote Barbara Fister on the Inside Higher Education site. “They put it into different bundles for libraries to choose from. There’s a process for deciding what goes into these bundles and a process for complaining about what’s in them. There is no plot on the part of EBSCO to corrupt youth any more than librarians, defending people’s freedom to read, are forcing porn on anyone.” James LaRue of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom also responded to the NCOSE attack on EBSCO in 2017. “NCOSE accuses libraries and periodical indexers of crimes.Yet it ignores the well-documented sexual abuse in religious organiza-tions, such as the Catholic Church’s abuse of young boys, or the estimated quarter-of-a-million child marriages that take place in the United States every year,” LaRuse wrote. The Massachusetts-based EBSCO itself also responded to the repeated attacks on its database. “EBSCO does not include pornographic titles in its databases, embed pornographic content in its databases, or receive revenue for advertising from any organization,” said the company’s spokesperson Kathleen McEvoy, in a email to Inside Higher Education. “We are appalled by the tenor of allegations related to our intent and the inaccuracies of statements clearly made in absence of factual information.” Photo by HazelGHC / Wikimedia Commons