Tag: censorship

Court backs city censorship: Ontario appeal ruling blocks ‘Woman = Adult Female’ ad

The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled against the Christian Heritage Party of Canada (CHP) in a high-profile free speech case, siding with the City of Hamilton’s decision to reject a controversial bus shelter ad.

The case stems from a 2023 attempt by CHP to purchase advertising space on Hamilton transit shelters. The proposed ad featured a smiling woman alongside the message: “Woman: An Adult Female.”

City officials blocked the ad, arguing it could offend transit users, a decision CHP challenged through judicial review before ultimately appealing to Ontario’s top court.

That challenge has now failed.

In its decision, the Court of Appeal upheld the city’s authority to control messaging in public advertising spaces even where that control intersects with constitutionally protected expression.

The ruling effectively shuts down CHP’s argument that a political party has the right to publicly promote what it describes as the biological, biblical, and dictionary definition of a woman in a public forum.

CHP leader Rod Taylor blasted the decision, calling it a blow to fundamental freedoms.

He argued that the ruling undermines core Charter protections, including freedom of speech, press, conscience, and association, and warned that ideological pressure is now influencing both legislatures and the courts.

The party says it will continue advocating for what it calls “truth and freedom,” despite the setback.

In today’s Canada, even defining a word can land you in court — and still lose.

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Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. 

That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s. The Archive’s mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible to the public. To that end, the organization operates the Wayback Machine, which now contains more than one trillion archived web pages and is used daily by journalists, researchers, and courts.

But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web’s traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit. 

For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive’s crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.

The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use. 

Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn’t start, and didn’t ask for. 

If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren’t just limiting bots. They’re erasing the historical record. 

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UK Regulator Ofcom Has Fined 4chan £520,000 Under a Law That Doesn’t Apply in the US

Ofcom has now fined 4chan £520,000 ($691,572) under the Online Safety Act. The platform hasn’t paid a penny and isn’t intending to. Its lawyer replied to the latest demand with a picture of a hamster.

That’s the state of UK online speech regulation in 2026: a regulator issuing fines to American websites, receiving rodent-themed correspondence in return, and collecting almost nothing.

The breakdown: £450,000 for failing to put age verification in place, £50,000 for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published, and £20,000 for failing to set out in its terms of service how it protects users from criminal content. Ofcom says 4chan must comply by April 2 or face daily penalties on top.

But this confrontation and push for 4chan to start checking IDs didn’t start with a £520,000 fine. It started with an email sent across the Atlantic to a company that owes the UK government nothing.

4chan is an American platform. Its registered in Delaware. Its servers are in the United States. It has no employees in Britain, no offices in Britain, no legal registration in Britain, and no business presence of any kind in Britain. It is, in every meaningful sense, none of Ofcom’s business.

And what good would the First Amendment be if it could be overridden by foreign demands?

When the Online Safety Act came into full force, Ofcom declared that any site with “links to the UK” had duties to protect UK users, regardless of where in the world it was based.

That phrase, “links to the UK,” is intentionally vague, allowing British authorities to demand compliance from virtually any website. Under that logic, any American platform that a British person can visit is subject to UK speech law. No presence required. No UK operations required. Ofcom thinks it has jurisdiction over planet Earth.

Beginning in April 2025, Ofcom sent a “legally binding information notice” to 4chan’s corporate services company, by email, demanding compliance with the Online Safety Act and threatening that failure could “constitute a criminal offence” resulting in a fine of £18 million or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, arrest, and imprisonment for up to two years.

The notice was sent to a company not authorized to accept service on 4chan’s behalf. No UK court had issued it. No treaty process had been followed. It was, legally speaking, a strongly worded email.

Preston Byrne, the attorney representing 4chan, described the regulator’s actions as “an illegal campaign of harassment” directed at American tech firms, and made clear his client would not comply: “4chan has broken no laws in the United States, my client will not pay any penalty.”

By June 2025, Ofcom had opened a formal investigation.

Byrne’s reply was characteristically direct: “Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States.” He continued: “After an entire year of your agency’s spectacular failure to get the memo, my only suggestion is that you take a first-year course on U.S. constitutional law.”

In August 2025, 4chan and Kiwi Farms took the fight to the US federal courts. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that the Online Safety Act is not only an unlawful extraterritorial power grab but a direct attack on foundational American liberties. The complaint states: “Where Americans are concerned, the Online Safety Act purports to legislate the Constitution out of existence.”

The platforms argue that Ofcom’s demands, including written “risk assessments,” content moderation systems, removal of speech deemed “illegal” by UK standards, and user identity verification, would require violating the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Byrne told reporters: “American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an email.”

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Court Backs First-Grader in Suit Over School Reaction to ‘Any Life’ Matters Drawing

Can a “schoolyard dispute” warrant federal court intervention? Do first-graders have First Amendment rights? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit just gave a resounding yes to both questions.

The case centers on a first-grader identified in court documents as B.B. After her teacher read a story about Martin Luther King Jr., B.B. drew a picture of her and her multiracial friend group. “Black Lives Mater [sic] any life,” it said. Sweet, right?

Apparently not to the administrators at Viejo Elementary School in California’s Capistrano Unified School District. The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, spoke with B.B. about her drawing, allegedly telling her that it was inappropriate. According to B.B., she was also barred from recess for two weeks.

B.B.’s mother, Chelsea Boyle, sued, alleging that her daughter’s First Amendment rights had been violated.

A federal district court sided with the school and Becerra, holding that B.B.’s drawing was not protected by the First Amendment. “This schoolyard dispute—like most—does not warrant federal court intervention,” wrote U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in the court’s 2024 opinion.

Now, the 9th Circuit has weighed in and reversed course. “We hold that elementary students’ speech is protected by the First Amendment,” the appeals court ruled, vacating the lower court’s decision and sending the case back for reconsideration.

“Schools may restrict students’ speech only when the restriction is reasonably necessary to protect the safety and well-being of its students,” the 9th Circuit judges wrote.

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Social Media Panic Lands Joseph Gordon-Levitt a U.N. Gig

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a new gig, but it’s not in Hollywood. On Tuesday, the actor was appointed as the United Nations’ (U.N.) first global advocate for human-centric digital governance. 

In this role, Gordon-Levitt will “strengthen public understanding of how digital technologies shape everyday life, rights and opportunities,” according to a U.N. press release. In other words, he will be one of the U.N.’s chief advocates for regulating social media platforms.

In a video explaining his jargon-filled title, Gordon-Levitt warned that social media is causing an “epidemic of mental health issues and loneliness,” and a “rise in polarization and extremism and authoritarianism.” He said “governments need to get in the game” and curb these “damaging side effects” from social media. 

This is not the first time Gordon-Levitt has advocated for crackdowns on online platforms. In February, Gordon-Levitt traveled to Capitol Hill, where he urged senators to pass the Sunset Section 230 Act. The bill, introduced by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and Dick Durbin (D–Ill.), would repeal Section 230—the federal law that limits platforms’ liability for third party speech—two years after the date of enactment. 

The “first step” in combatting the negative influence of Big Tech is to “sunset Section 230,” he said. “I want to see this thing pass 100 to zero. There should be nobody voting to give any more impunity to these tech companies, nobody.”

After receiving backlash for these comments, including from journalist Taylor Lorenz, Gordon-Levitt clarified that he didn’t want to completely scrap Section 230; he only wanted to reform it. 

During his speech on Capitol Hill, Gordon-Levitt invoked his authority as a concerned father of three to push for more online safety regulations. But emotional pleas do not always make for good policy. In fact, protecting children online has motivated more than a dozen bills in the House alone, many of which would infringe on free speech and privacy. 

One of these bills, the Reducing Exploitative Social Media Exposure for Teens (RESET) Act, would ban anyone under the age of 16 from creating or maintaining social media accounts. Another, the App Store Accountability Act, would require age verification for access to app stores and parental consent for users under 18. Most notably, the controversial Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would require online platforms to enforce policies and procedures to “address” various “harms to minors.” Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes that KOSA would compel platforms to “censor a huge array of content out of fear that the government might decide it contributed to some vague category of harm and then sue.”

What proponents of these bills often fail to recognize is the many benefits that social media can offer kids. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center poll among teenagers, just 9 percent said that social media had a mostly negative effect on their lives. Citing the upsides of friendships and connections, 32 percent said social media had a mostly positive effect on them. Another study found that disconnection was a greater threat to adolescents’ self-esteem than heavy social media use, challenging the narrative that social media causes isolation. 

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Russia’s Rumored Telegram Block Appears Underway As Outage Reports Surge

Reports are flooding in from across Russia that Telegram is suddenly going dark, fueling speculation that the Kremlin may already be testing a nationwide block ahead of a rumored planned crackdown next month.

“Over the last 24 hours, Telegram has effectively stopped working through some providers if you are using Russian IP addresses,” tech sector observer Vladislav Voytenko told Kommersant FM on Monday. “As for using Telegram via mobile internet, you can basically forget about it,” he added.

Russia’s Main Radio Frequency Center, an arm of media watchdog Roskomnadzor, said a surge of complaints began appearing over the weekend, with at least one-third coming from Moscow, followed by St. Petersburg and other cities spread across the country’s vast 11 time zones.

Regional media has tracked user reports on outage monitors such as Downdetector and Sboi.rf, which show complaints spiking sharply over the weekend as the app began failing across multiple regions.

Some Russian users have described the platform is barely functioning “in any form”. They complain the app won’t open, messages won’t send, and neither will photos and videos load.

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Tucker Carlson: “Throughout the West Criticizing the Netanyahu Government is Now a Crime Punishable by Imprisonment”

Tucker Carlson released his latest interview on Monday.

He invited longtime friend and fellow Israel critic Glenn Greenwald as his guest.

Tucker made this bold statement to his audience, “Throughout the West, criticizing the Netanyahu government is now a crime punishable by imprisonment.”

(You can listen to this at 1:02:10 in the video below.)

It’s not clear what he is referring to today.

Glenn Greenwald says that censorship of conservative voices in the West is not as big of threat on free speech as criticizing Israel and Jews.

This video interview comes out just days after Tucker said the CIA has been reading his text messages and is referring a criminal complaint against him.

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‘Hateful’: Lawmakers push dark scheme to make certain Bible verses illegal

Lawmakers are pushing an agenda right now that would threaten free speech and make some of the verses of the Bible illegal to recite, under the guise of “Combatting Hate.”

The work on Bill C-9 in the Canadian parliament has been outlined in a report from the RAIR Foundation, which recorded speeches from a recent rally against the misnamed plan.

While the bill does contain some things that could be helpful in a free society, such as actions targeting displays of terror symbols, limits on “intimidating people” trying to access religious sites, and restrictions on intentionally obstructing someone from entering a place of worship, there remains a problem.

That’s the agenda to strip out a decades-old religious rights protection provision in Canada’s Criminal Code. Under that precedent, there is a “good faith” religious defense, meaning that those expressing sincere religious expression are protected from prosecution for “hate” even if those views offend “prevailing cultural norms,” the report said.

The removal “collapses a critical constitutional firewall and opens the door to politically motivated prosecutions of pastors, rabbis, religious leaders, teachers, parents, and ordinary citizens who refuse to affirm state-mandated gender ideology or other government approved narratives,” the report said.

Transgenderism has become a hot button topic for Democrats and other leftists in the United States since Joe Biden spent his four years in the Oval Office pushing the agenda that fails on basic science. Being male or female is embedded in the human body down to the DNA level and the administration of chemicals or access to body mutilating surgeries does not make that change.

Hundreds rallied, in an event organized by ARPA Canada, against the agenda.

“Speakers at the rally made the stakes unmistakably clear: this debate is not about ‘balancing rights.’ It is about whether Canada will remain a country where citizens can speak biological and theological truths without fear of state punishment—or descend into a regime where government authorities determine which scriptures, facts, and moral convictions are deemed ‘hateful,'” the report said.

The damage already has started, the report said, with a recent case involving former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld who was ordered to pay $750,000 for publicly affirming that there are only two biological sexes.

The bill has been debated by the House of Commons and sent to committee. From there it will return for a final vote before going to the Senate.

The foundation report warned there would develop a “state-narrative enforcement—a system where dissent from ideological orthodoxy is punished while genuine threats or acts of hatred are ignored.”

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They censored debate on the censorship bill

On today’s episode of the Candice Malcolm Show, Candice is joined by our old friend Andrew Lawton, former independent journalist and current Member of Parliament for Elgin—St. Thomas—London South. Andrew sits on the Justice Committee, where they just shut down debate on Bill C-9, the Liberal government’s latest censorship bill.

They are literally censoring debate on a censorship bill! You can’t make this stuff up.

Andrew walks us through his attempts to amend the bill that removes religious exemptions for sincerely held views, which were shut down and rejected by the Liberal government. Andrew discusses the committee process and how the Liberals were able to push this through.

Candice and Andrew discuss the various attempts by the Liberal government to censor Canadians and crack down on free speech, which historically aims to silence their critics rather than address real concerns of hate and violence in Canada. On that topic, they discuss the terrifying string of terrorist intimidation currently aimed at Iranian dissidents and Jewish Canadians in Toronto, where Liberal laws have done nothing to protect these communities.

Andrew notes that C-9 would not have stopped these attacks, and notes the danger of having an estimated 700 members of Iran’s secret police force, the IRGC, active in Canada.

Finally, Candice and Andrew discuss the CBC, in light of the recent testimony from former host Travis Dhanraj. Andrew reconfirms the Conservative Party commitment to defund the state broadcaster.

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TDF sounds alarm over imminent passage of Bill C-9

Proposed “Combatting Hate Act” expands the legal definition of hatred and removes key free expression safeguards in the Criminal Code.

The House of Commons has closed debate on Bill C-9, the “Combatting Hate Act.” The Bill expands and codifies the definition of “hatred,” departing from the Supreme Court’s strict requirement of “vilification and detestation.” It removes the longstanding good faith religious speech protections for sincerely held religious opinions and expressions based on religious texts in the Criminal Code and eliminates the requirement for Attorney General consent before charging individuals with certain hate crime offences. The Bill also creates a new offence that applies when an underlying offence—even a non-criminal one—is motivated by hatred, potentially doubling the penalties for the underlying act.

The Bill has faced opposition from civil liberties groups and religious organizations. TDF was invited to testify before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and filed a brief outlining its serious misgivings. 

“Ironically, the government has moved to end debate on issues of public concern for a bill that would end debate on issues of public concern. The Bill empowers prosecutors to bring charges based on the merest suggestion that the impugned conduct is motivated by an ill-defined concept of “hatred,” massively increasing potential jail time and legal jeopardy for defendants. In our experience, these types of offences tend to be laid against marginalized and working-class people rather than powerful elites and political insiders. However, all Canadians can expect greater digital censorship and increased online police surveillance if the Bill becomes law. We only have to look at the UK example, where police make approximately 12,000 annual arrests for online “hate incidents” under similar legislation.” 

The Bill now moves to a vote at the justice committee. After that, it will proceed to the report stage and third reading before advancing to the Senate.

TDF will continue to oppose the Bill and all attempts by the government to censor Canadians.

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