Colorado: “Jefferson County Library Scrubs Tweets after Getting Complaints that Posts are Politically Biased”

From The Denver Post:

The head of the Jefferson County Public Library this month deleted a series of tweets from the library’s Twitter account after a county commissioner complained they were politically biased.
That has people in the county talking about the role of libraries as repositories of free expression and the unfettered exchange of ideas — and whether that mission could be jeopardized by the specter of online censorship.
The offending tweets, which were mostly posted in January, included a message promoting the library’s databases titled “Facts are facts”; a picture of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton behind the phrase “I Believe in Science!” posted on Inauguration Day; links to information about refugees featuring women in Muslim dress; and images of birth control methods linking to information on “women’s health care reform.”
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[Library Director Pam] Nissler said at first she was “concerned and puzzled” about the commissioner’s complaint but later concluded that the tweets could be perceived as having a bias, especially if a viewer were to primarily focus on the photos in the postings.

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