Students Against Censorship to hold referendum on banned newspapers

On 14^th November 2013, the Student Union of Aberystwyth University passed a motion titled “Boobs are not News”, banning The Sun, The Express, and The Daily Star from the Student Union shop.

A couple of students formed the activist group Students Against Censorship to fight the Students Union over matters of free speech and censorship, culminating in a student vote on whether to ban said tabloids for good.

Most recently, the online magazine Spiked.com  published a report documenting the state of free expression at UK universities. The report ranks universities via a traffic-light system: green being excellent, yellow being average, and red being poor. Aberystwyth, previously holding a yellow ranking, is now ranked red.

In response to this shocking development, Ieuan Joy and Jessica Lockwood started up Students Against Censorship, whose first campaign is to remove the ban and allow the SU shop to freely sell the tabloid newspapers mentioned above.

Ieuan Joy, one of the co-founders of Students Against Censorship

Joy has worked to implement an all-student vote on the matter. Originally the vote was for the 25^th February, but now due to issues of bureacracy, the Student Union has moved the date to Friday 11th March.

The SAC team is in contact with several other individuals from other universities carrying out their own anti-censorship campaigns, which is where they got their ideas from. There is a growing network of students fighting for the right to hear all ideas, and for the ability to have every idea praised, dissected, and critiqued.

Hereby, the aim is not to support The Sun’s Page Three, but to push for democratic freedom of speech no matter when. Ieuan claims if The Guardian were banned, he would be carrying out the exact same campaign in the hope that all ideas could be expressed, contemplated and ruthlessly dissected.

The Union argues that this is not an issue of free expression because it does not involve the state censoring individuals, and that it is less about preventing ideas from being discussed but more about protecting minority and/or oppressed groups from harm.

The Students Against Censorship students however claim that this notion of protecting students from certain modes of speech is infantilising and patronising to students.

The Sun recently sparked outrage with this feature

The Union’s motion ‘Boobs are Not News’ pushed forward in November 2015 was concerned with how tabloid newspapers affect women and wider society, and pushed for the ban merely to protect certain individuals on campus.

The motion contained no academic evidence to back these claims, claim Ieuan and Joy. ‘Students Against Censorship’ thus challenged the SU on this issue and the SU then decided to hold an all-student referendum to discuss the matter.

500 people must take part in the all-student vote in order for it to be valid. That said, this means that if 498 voted for the reappeal of the ban and 1 person voted for the keeping of the ban, the tabloid papers would still be banned. Students can now decide what they prefer to be the case at their university: Censorship yes or no will be decided this Friday, 11 March.