Tag: censorship

Boston Globe Praised Harvard for Suppressing Free Speech to Save It

The Boston Globe (9/13/26) ran an article contrasting two Boston-area universities’ approaches to campus free speech. Penned by higher education reporter Mike Damiano, the piece reads like an installment of Highlights for Children‘s didactic “Goofus and Gallant” feature, with one school clearly doing it right while the other is letting down the cause of free speech.

Northeastern University plays the role of the loathsome Goofus, with critics remarking that the “school’s leaders have taken a hands-off approach to speech issues since cracking down on a pro-Palestinian protest encampment more than two years ago.”

Meanwhile Harvard, in Gallant fashion,

undertook a multi-year experiment in remaking campus speech norms with top-down reforms, resulting in what students and professors describe as a kind of thaw on a campus where tensions over politics, ideology and speech had thrust it into an acrimonious national debate.

That certainly makes it sound better than Northeastern’s “hands-off approach.” But you have to ask: What did Harvard’s leadership actually do for speech when they put their hands on it?

Well, for one thing, “they have nudged teaching fellows and professors to keep their personal politics out of the classroom.” Huh—telling faculty not to talk about their politics does not actually sound like promoting free speech.

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Australia Wants to Remake the Internet in the Name of “Safety”

The Australian government has published its proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation, a plan that it says will give people more control over their social media feeds, but which opponents fear is a way to introduce more online censorship.

The exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 was published on September 8 for consultation, and it is not yet law. The deadline for submissions is noon on September 22, and Communications Minister Anika Wells said the plan is to formally introduce the bill to Parliament in October.

We obtained a copy of the draft for you here.

In the words of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “This is not about giving government control, it is about giving people control.”

And while the proposal is often referred to as My Feed, My Way, it is not about banning algorithms, but giving new and existing users a choice between feeds based on recommendations, and one that shows posts from accounts they follow.

But beneath this choice, there is a broader change to the Online Safety Act 2021 that would be introduced by the Digital Duty of Care bill, and that is to impose a duty on those behind online services to ensure a safe online environment as far as reasonably practicable.

This duty would apply to a wide range of services, including social media, messaging, games, hosting, search, app stores, internet providers, AI services enabling generated material to be shared through covered services, as well as certain equipment providers.

The minister in charge would be able to exempt services that are low-risk or minimally used. The proposal is designed to protect adults from what is described as seriously harmful material and conduct, while under-18s would have additional protection against harmful content and design features.

The list of harmful content and conduct that the draft seeks to protect adults from includes child sexual abuse, threats of violence, encouragement of self-harm, and support for listed terrorist organizations.

For children, the list includes pornography, encouragement of disordered eating, hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality, glorification of crime, dangerous stunts, abuse and bullying.

However, the minister would have the power to add more categories of harmful material or conduct by issuing a legislative instrument.

Wells must first seek and consider advice from eSafety, and the instrument can be disallowed by Parliament.

The draft bill also targets features that the government considers to have negative behavioral impacts, such as recommendation systems, endless feeds, and engagement-feedback tools, as well as time-limited content. Social media services would be required to stop these features for children under 16.

The proposal also includes a system of risk assessment that online services would have to conduct at least once a year, and keep for six years. These assessments would have to be provided to the eSafety commissioner on request.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who has a history of censorship demands, would be in charge of enforcing the scheme, which would bring maximum company penalties of A$109.2 million.

The draft bill does contain some safeguards, such as the definition of reasonably practicable, which takes into account the risk, available measures, cost, and the potential for a measure to have a disproportionate effect on privacy.

The duty of care does not extend to lawful communications occurring in private solely between consenting adults, the draft bill states.

Opposition leader Angus Taylor on September 6 said he feared the proposal was “an attempt by the government to censor social media,” while One Nation leader Pauline Hanson said that Australia should be moving away from government censorship, not “building the Orwellian machinery for it.”

The Greens, on the other hand, have supported the idea of making sure users have a choice when it comes to feeds, but they want to make sure that users have to opt in to have their feeds curated by algorithms.

White House spokesman Kush Desai reacted by saying that President Trump “has unequivocally warned trading partners against imposing digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion on America’s leading technology sector.”

Desai added that “the administration remains committed to raising these issues with our trading partners.”

Communications Minister Anika Wells sought to downplay the significance of the White House statement, telling News24 that the US was responding to broader questions that also included Australia’s tax arrangements, and not only the Digital Duty of Care proposal.

“We’re a sovereign nation, we have the right to defend Australian parents and kids and we’ll do that,” Wells said.

The government’s proposal has been portrayed as giving users a choice between personalized recommendation feeds and those that show posts from accounts they follow.

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The far-left will import Europe’s methods of suppressing free speech to the USA

Hillary Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Joe Biden said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” – while his own Justice Department was trying to incarcerate Trump. Anderson Cooper asked Kamala Harris whether Trump was a fascist, and she answered, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”

The label was never just a label. Twitter banned Trump in January 2021 even though, as I discovered reporting on the Twitter Files, the company had concluded he did not violate its rules. Prosecutors then indicted him. A New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts.

Meanwhile, AP [Associated Press] calls the socialist mayor of New York not “far left” but rather “the democratic socialist leader of America’s largest city.”

In the five months after Trump’s inauguration last year, the networks used “far right” and similar labels 1,222 times. They used “far left” 86 times. Another analysis of more than 30 million articles found that American and British media use right-wing extremism labels more than three times as often as left-wing ones.

If you think this ended with the 2024 election, look at what the same people are doing in Europe, because that is the playbook they intend to bring back here [to the USA].

A German court sentenced a journalist to seven months in prison for a satirical image of the interior minister. Prosecutors raided the home of a pensioner who called the vice chancellor an idiot in a meme. Police carried out 46 home searches in a single day for online speech.

Election officials strike opposition candidates from ballots. A Romanian court annulled a presidential election. French judges banned Marine Le Pen from office and a court ordered her to wear an ankle monitor. German bureaucrats kept a local political candidate off the ballot for his interpretation of “Lord of the Rings.”

What they do over there matters over here. The European Commission fined X [Twiter] €120 million after, in the words of the House Judiciary Committee, it “successfully pressured major social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules.” Global means you.

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Australia: Officials Ask Parliament to Restrict Social Media Clips of Public Hearing Evidence

Just when you thought Australia’s steamrolling toward censorship couldn’t get any worse, the heads of Australian government departments want new limits on how members of parliament share recordings of officials testifying at public parliamentary hearings.

A new attempt to this end was made last week by the Secretaries Board, made up of the heads of Australia’s government departments. The board is currently chaired by Steven Kennedy, secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which advises the prime minister and coordinates policy across the government.

The proposal was contained in a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Parliamentary Standards.

The board is unhappy that politicians are using excerpts of the footage from these hearings, often to criticize the officials, and sometimes to ridicule them, by editing the clips and adding captions to highlight certain parts of the testimony.

Comments left on social media under these posts are also a major concern for the board, as they can be “highly offensive” – and sometimes even defamatory.

As examples, the board cites personal attacks on officials’ physical appearance (especially if they are women), their integrity, as well as comparisons to “Nazis, pedophiles, and other criminal offenders.”

Some of the “highlights” of the comments mentioned in the submission include “despicable,” “filth,” “political puppet,” “bigot,” “pig,” “KKK member,” “parasite,” “shill,” “criminal,” “fraud,” “clown,” and “lying corrupt grub.”

The board wants parliament to come up with “guidance” on how to use these recordings on social media, and lists several ways to do it, such as preventing “potentially harmful” use of committee evidence, and requiring that a link to the full hearing or transcript is provided whenever an extract of an official’s testimony is posted.

Another idea is to have MPs disable comments on social media when they post these clips, and make sure that the full, unedited version of the hearing, or the transcript, is made available instead of extracts.

Reporting on the submission described full hearings and transcripts as the preferred approach, with fallback restrictions on editing, captions and posts targeting individual officials.

The submission said that officials appearing at these public hearings “have not consented to a subsequent use of their image, or its use by parliamentarians and their political parties for party-political purposes.”

And the board also complained of “the increasing use of excerpts from committee proceedings on social media, particularly where material is presented without context and exposes officials to ridicule, hostility or abuse.”

The proposal was rejected by Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May, who said that bureaucrats should not be allowed to decide how parliamentarians do their job, and that the proposed restrictions would be an attempt to “take the teeth out of parliamentary scrutiny.”

“Bureaucrats shouldn’t get to decide where to draw the line on parliamentary scrutiny, particularly when they’re the ones being scrutinised,” Hodgins-May said. “Restricting what parliamentarians can post from public proceedings is not the answer. This looks like an attempt to take the teeth out of parliamentary scrutiny. Frankly, if this scrutiny wasn’t having an impact, they wouldn’t be so worried about it.”

But the board’s proposal is not the first of its kind. In fact, the previous week, Celia Perkins, deputy secretary of Australia’s Department of Defence, made a similar request to a parliamentary hearing, asking that the committee prevent MPs from sharing video and audio of officials appearing at public hearings on social media.

Perkins said that public servants giving evidence “do not consent to the reposting of our evidence to social media sites or the reproduction of our likenesses for the purposes outside the framework of the parliament and the transparent public proceedings of this committee.”

However, the Senate committee rejected the request on the advice of the Senate clerk.

Professor Luke Beck from the Monash University Law School, who specializes in constitutional law, believes that the latest proposal may be unconstitutional because it would likely violate the implied freedom of political communication in the Australian Constitution by “directly and expressly” burdening political communication.

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Brazil’s Dictator-Judge Removed from ‘Fake News’ Inquiry He Used to Persecute Conservatives

The head of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), Justice Edson Fachin, on Wednesday removed Justice Alexandre de Moraes from the widely controversial inquiry against “fake news” amid an ongoing crisis at the nation’s Supreme Court.

The decision strips Justice de Moraes from an inquiry he used over the past years to enact a fierce persecution and censorship campaign against Brazilian conservative voices — with former President Jair Bolsonaro being the most prominent target of de Moraes, the inquiry’s now-former rapporteur.

Over the past weeks the Brazilian top court has found itself amidst a “Civil War” between Justices de Moraes and André Mendonça that has plunged the judiciary and its members into an ongoing crisis.

The situation began in early September when Justice Mendonça unsealed a police report containing an analysis of alleged WhatsApp messages involving Justice de Moraes and Daniel Vorcaro, who is a Brazilian banker currently under police custody on corruption accusations stemming from the “Banco Master” financial fraud case involving the eponymous São Paulo-based bank. Justice Mendonça is one of the STF Justices overseeing the fraud case.

Days after the report was unsealed, Justice de Moraes accused fellow Justice Mendonça of having committed “abuse of authority” throughout his supervision of the Banco Master case.

Justice de Moraes formally requested before STF chief Justice Fachin that the inquiry against “fake news” was used to investigate the allegations he presented against Justice Mendonça. Fachin declined de Moraes’ request and instead directly forwarded the complaint against Mendonça to his desk.

On Wednesday, Fachin announced that de Moraes has been removed from the “fake news” inquiry but upheld all rulings and decisions made by de Moraes under its framework. Fachin also called upon an upcoming plenary session of the Brazilian Supreme Court to discuss the ongoing judiciary crisis.

The Brazilian state-owned news agency Agência Brasil recounted that the controversial inquiry was originally launched by the Brazilian Supreme Court in 2019 with the alleged goal of fighting what was described as the “dissemination of news that undermined the integrity and security” of the STF, its Justices, and relatives.

At the time, Justice de Moraes was appointed as the inquiry’s rapporteur by then-STF chief Justice José Antonio Dias Toffoli, a still-active member of the Brazilian top court who found himself at the center of an unrelated controversy earlier this month after he banned and rapidly unbanned the presidential campaign of outsider right-wing candidate Renan Santos.

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Trump Censorship Machine Loses Again in Court

The Trump administration’s crusade to crush campus criticism took another wallop on Friday in a California courtroom. Federal judge Noël Wise ruled that the Trump administration’s “ideological-deportation policy” brazenly violated the US Constitution.

The Stanford Daily—one of the best-known college student newspapers in the nation—sued the Trump administration for changing its “immigration policy and pattern of enforcement, namely by arresting, detaining, and deporting students with F-1 visas when those students use their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government does not like.” It asserted that the Trump administration’s “actions have specifically impacted Stanford Daily by decreasing the quantity and diversity of opinion pieces The Stanford Daily is able to publish on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.” Foreign students who had written on the issue requested that their previous articles be deleted, and other foreign students were no longer willing to comment on hot issues.

The Trump administration claims unlimited discretion to silence foreign students by deporting those whose opinions it disapproves of. Judge Wise wrote, “The language of the [First] Amendment makes clear that it is not the government that gives freedom of speech to the people. Instead, that freedom is imbued in the people. . . . It is not the government’s to take.” This is a notion that conservatives instinctively understand when it comes to the Second Amendment and the right of self-defense. But many people fail to recognize the same right for freedom of speech. Conor Fitzpatrick—the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—which represented the student newspaper, declared, “Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child.” FIRE president Greg Lukianoff clarified the scope of the ruling:

This ruling does NOT say the government must admit anyone, issue anyone a visa, or grant anyone citizenship. It says that once a person is lawfully here, the government cannot deport them because they engaged in protected speech. The government cannot tell a legal immigrant: An American is free to say this, but if you say it, you’re out.

George Porteous—Editor in Chief of Stanford Daily—hailed the decision: “The reporters in our newsroom shouldn’t have to fear that writing a story will result in their deportation. Today’s victory means they won’t have to.” But it remains to be seen whether this latest judicial rebuff slows the Trump censorship juggernaut.

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OUTRAGE: Texas Student’s School Laptop BLOCKS Search for President Trump — But Allows Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Jeffrey Epstein

A Richardson Independent School District parent says her son’s school-issued laptop blocked him from searching for the sitting President of the United States, while searches for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein went through without a hitch.

The district has so far refused to explain why.

According to an exclusive report from The Dallas Express, an anonymous Richardson ISD parent provided video of her son attempting to research President Donald Trump for a school assignment. When he searched “Trump,” the device displayed a blunt message: “WEBSITE BLOCKED BY RICHARDSON ISD.”

The same block did not appear for Biden, Harris, or Epstein.

“My child was researching our current president for a school assignment and discovered that the district’s web content filter had blocked ‘Trump’ from search results,” the parent told The Dallas Express.

“This means students can’t access legitimate educational and news content, including current-events research, government and civics coursework, and basic search results about the sitting U.S. President. This is very concerning, as it amounts to censorship of information about a current public official.”

She then had her son test other names.

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Colorado college drops charges against student journalists, but speech restrictions remain uncertain

The Community College of Aurora closed its conduct case against student journalists this month, finding them “not responsible” due to unclear rules, after restricting the reporters from interviewing and publishing without prior approval and charging them for continuing those activities.

The student newspaper, FoxTalk, is led by CCA student Andrew Green, who told The College Fix via email that the decision, “is a big step forward.” 

He added that he still doesn’t “know whether the restrictions on interviews, reporting and publishing have actually been lifted.”

“I want the earlier warning reconsidered, and a clear answer about whether we are free to interview students, report and publish. I would much rather spend my time building the newsroom than fighting the college,” he said.

He added that he believes the school and newspaper can have a “good relationship” moving forward, “while FoxTalk still does independent journalism.” 

Green also said he is “working with the Student Press Law Center’s New Voices team to explore legislation around protections for college student journalists in Colorado,” he said. 

“Even if FoxTalk and CCA resolve everything, I would like the next student journalist to have clearer rules than I did,” Green told The Fix. 

A free speech group called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression continues to press the college. 

Program Manager for FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative Marie McMullan said the group is “assessing next steps” and that “until the ban on publication and student disciplinary measures are rescinded, our concerns remain.”

She also said that this “kind of blanket ban on student journalism can’t remain in place, and we continue pushing CCA to change its course.” 

FIRE had sent a demand letter this month to CCA Vice President Reyna Anaya, calling on the school to “drop the charges against any student who chooses not to comply with such unconstitutional demands, and forego further censorial practices.” 

The group alleges that CCA’s directives violated the First Amendment through prior restraint, prior review, compelled speech, and restrictions on associational freedom.

Reached for comment, CCA Executive Director of Communications and Special Initiatives Courtney Butler told The College Fix that the school is still reviewing the matter and is unable to provide additional comment.

FoxTalk was registered under the college on March 13th. In April, Green asked CCA administrators “to confirm whether FoxTalk could seek comment from CCA faculty and staff in their personal capacities without going through Butler’s office,” according to FIRE’s demand letter. 

Dean of Student Success Julie LaRock then informed Green that the newspaper would need to “receive staff approval before identifying themselves as FoxTalk staff, accessing non-public spaces, beginning work on each month’s stories, and publishing any content whatsoever.”

LaRock further advised Green to hold off on additional work until structural coordination with the administration and faculty was established.

On June 3, Green questioned the order to stop FoxTalk from publishing, saying the group still planned to cover the June 30 primary election, including a debate at the University of Denver. 

After an administrator said FoxTalk only had to follow regular student-organization rules, Green assumed they could publish again and wrote to confirm. The administrator replied that the ban was still in place until FoxTalk’s structure was fixed, and also criticized the activities of three members.

On July 14, Green was charged with interviewing students, posting on the FoxTalk website, contacting employees, and ignoring earlier orders. On July 23 he was charged again for not following a college official’s directives. 

McMullan told The Fix that CCA’s rationale for restricting the students is not very common compared to what the group has seen in the past. However, several other schools have similarly tried to restrict student journalists. 

“Repeatedly … universities and colleges subjecting student journalists to investigations, hearings, and punishments for basic newsgathering and publishing, or attempting to wholesale stop students from publishing,” she said.

Morgan State University, for example, implemented a policy that restricts student journalists’ ability to gather news directly, requiring media inquiries to go through the Office of Public Relations and Strategic Communications, The College Fix previously reported. 

McMullan previously told The Fix this policy is a “blatantly” illegal “gag order.”

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Appeals court blocks Minnesota’s censorship of election integrity group over felon voting

Minnesota is a leader among states testing First Amendment limits on regulating speech and expression in the name of protecting the public, with its mandatory social media warning labels and criminal bans on AI-generated “nudification” – including barechested men – and election-related “deepfakes” that mock politicians.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which refused to block the deepfake law by reading an unwritten parody exception into it, wasn’t so tolerant when it came to Minnesota’s potential censorship of an election integrity group.

A three-judge panel ordered a lower court to block a voter-interference law as applied to the Minnesota Voters Alliance and its members as their case moves forward, leaving them free to publicly assert — without risking prosecution — that the Land of 10,000 Lakes violates its constitution by letting felons vote before their “civil rights” have been “restored.”

“A group of Minnesotans want to express their belief that certain felons cannot vote. Can the state criminalize their speech? In denying a preliminary injunction, the district court thought so. We disagree,” Judge David Stras wrote for the unanimous panel, nominated by presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, faulting the law as a prior restraint without “procedural safeguards.”

House File 3 works in tandem with HF 28, which restores voting rights to felons whenever they are “not incarcerated for the offense” – even if they are still serving the sentence – by criminalizing the spread of certain information within 60 days of an election. Democratic Gov. Tim Walz signed both laws in 2023.

HF 3’s “deceptive practices” section prohibits transmitting information that “intends to impede or prevent another person from exercising the right to vote” and is known to be “materially false,” including “the qualifications for or restrictions on voter eligibility at an election.” 

“The Alliance is worried that it already has a target on its back” from both state and county prosecutors, who can “pursue gross-misdemeanor charges” against alleged violators and civil actions “to prevent or restrain a violation,” Stras’s opinion says. The law also lets anyone “injured by” a supposed violation bring civil actions.

Anoka County buttressed MVA’s case by bringing a counterclaim after it sued Attorney General Keith Ellison and Anoka County Attorney Brad Johnson, by seeking money damages and an injunction against MVA for violating the law, according to the voter integrity group.

ACLU supports election censorship law

The Upper Midwest Law Center and Liberty Justice Center, which represent MVA and its members, cheered the ruling. 

“The First Amendment does not allow the government to end an argument by threatening prosecution,” UMLC President Doug Seaton said. 

Minnesota cannot “silence political debate simply because an election is near,” LJC senior counsel Reilly Stephens said.

Ellison’s office told Just the News “we’re evaluating all of our options to best protect Minnesotans’ freedom to vote.” 

Protect Democracy United counsel Cameron Kister accused the 8th Circuit panel of violating its own precedent. 

“The Minnesota Deceptive Practices Provision is not a statute that targets falsity and nothing more; it is a statute that targets falsity deployed to accomplish a harm the common law has recognized for centuries,” the progressive activist wrote.

In line with its turn against free speech for select groups since the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, the ACLU supported Ellison and Johnson in a friend-of-the-court brief, arguing the election censorship law is narrowly tailored and responded to “incidents of purposeful, targeted election disinformation aimed at preventing voters from exercising their constitutional right.”

The elected Democrats already triumphed over MVA’s constitutional challenge to the felon-voting law itself, which the Minnesota Supreme Court tossed on the grounds that the “taxpayer standing” asserted by MVA and its members “does not exist when a taxpayer simply seeks to generally restrain ‘illegal action[s] on the part of public officials.'”

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