A new House appropriations bill does something unusual for Washington legislation. It tells federal agencies they cannot spend money pressuring platforms, advertisers, or foreign governments to silence speech that Americans are legally allowed to make.
H.R. 8595, the national security and State Department appropriations bill, runs hundreds of pages and buried throughout are provisions that would shut off federal funding to a wide range of speech-suppression activities.
The restrictions cover direct platform pressure, ad boycott campaigns aimed at US media companies, blacklists, and cooperation with foreign censorship regimes that target American tech firms.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The headline provision is on page 252. It bars the use of any appropriated funds to “deplatform, deboost, demonetize, suppress, or otherwise penalize” online speech, social media activity, or news outlets producing content that would be lawful under US law. The language is deliberately wide and it catches the obvious things, like government agencies asking a platform to take a post down, and the less obvious ones, like funding research projects that pressure advertisers to abandon publishers.
That second category has been doing real damage for years. Brand “safety” programs, hate speech classifiers built with federal grant money, “disinformation” tracking outfits that exist primarily to attach scary labels to inconvenient reporting.
Federal money cannot flow to programs designed to impose “legal, regulatory, financial, reputational, commercial, or political costs” on American tech companies, social media platforms, online intermediaries, or digital publishers for hosting First Amendment protected speech.
There is also a prohibition on funding work that pushes foreign governments to do the censoring instead. American agencies cannot use these appropriations to support foreign laws, regulations, codes, or enforcement mechanisms that punish US platforms for carrying speech that would be lawful here.
The whole architecture of routing American speech restrictions through Brussels or London or Canberra, then importing the results back home through global compliance regimes, runs into a federal funding wall.
Blacklists are out. Censorship cooperation with supranational bodies is out. Inducing advertisers to “cut off, reduce, redirect, or otherwise interfere with advertising, sponsorship, payment, or other revenue on the basis of lawful online speech” is out.
Hellbound and Down 