Tag: censorship

The Social Reckoning Wants the Speech Referees Back

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, written and directed by the prominent screenwriter and produced by Sony, isn’t a movie about Facebook, even though it is based on the social media giant’s story and its controversial global impact.

This is actually political activism with a running time of 112 minutes.

In April 2024, on The Town podcast, Sorkin said, “I blame Facebook for January 6” – and when asked why, he said, “You’re going to need to buy a movie ticket.”

He didn’t stop there. Sorkin, who is known for his TV series The West Wing and The Newsroom, as well as films like The Social Network, said, “There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. There’s just growth.”

On the same podcast, Sorkin referred to the 2024 election as “an election about Trump vs. not-Trump, and there is an existential choice there.”

He directed it himself to get it out before the midterms: “I didn’t want The Social Reckoning to come out a year after the midterm elections,” and “I wanted it to come out now.”

The timing of the movie’s release, and the fact it was directed by Sorkin himself to make that happen, is not the only clue that this is a piece of political persuasion.

Aaron Sorkin and Sony Pictures are trying very hard to sell The Social Reckoning as something it’s not – but in the process, they are also inadvertently revealing what it actually is.

“I’m not going to deny, of course, that the movie is political,” Sorkin told Politico, as reported by TheWrap. “I just think it shouldn’t be.”

On NBC’s Today show, he went for the “anti-truth” angle: “The film shouldn’t be political unless you are somebody who is anti-the truth, okay?”

So those who don’t accept Sorkin’s truth are anti-the-truth.

On CBS, he said that if he ever got the chance to talk to Mark Zuckerberg, he would tell him, “You want to make the world a better place? Don’t make the truth up for grabs.”

Sorkin is not interested in argument. He is interested in selling his movie. And he has a willing partner in Sony, whose CEO, Tom Rothman, said, “I’m a free speech absolutist too, but I know you can’t yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater. I know that there is a difference between free speech and falsehood.”

(Yes, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater.)

As for falsehood – who gets to decide what that is? Sorkin and Rothman? Meta’s “fact-checkers”? The government?

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Cambridge University Declares Free Speech Should Be ‘Restricted’

Gonville and Caius College, one of Cambridge’s oldest foundations, is compelling its undergraduates to attend mandatory “inclusivity training” from the start of term.

The 90-minute sessions are being delivered by Stop Hate UK, a ‘charity’ activist organisation whose own materials tell students their free speech rights may be restricted, that “Islamophobia is a crime”, and that a facial expression can count as harm.

The order lands in the same university that spent the better part of two years investigating a philosopher for lawful speech, and in the same education system that has spent 2026 drilling children in white privilege, “racism requires power”, and compulsory hijabs.

According to an email from the college’s education and tutorial office, seen by The Spectator, “attendance by undergraduate students is mandatory. It is important for the community as a whole to ensure a collective and unified response.” The course, due to run from the week commencing 5 October, will cover “demonstrating inclusive behaviours” and “recognition of a hate incident and its impact.”

A Caius spokesman told The Spectator the college had, “in consultation with student representatives,” committed to “hosting facilitated discussions around inclusivity to support the whole community at Caius.”

That is a softer description than the email students actually received. Mandatory attendance and a demand for a “collective and unified response” is not a discussion. It is an instruction.

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The Supreme Court Won’t Save ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ From the School Censors

Two Michigan middle-school boys wore sweatshirts bearing three words that contained no profanity: “Let’s Go Brandon.” School administrators made them take the shirts off anyway because everybody knew what the phrase meant.

Now the Supreme Court has decided not to get involved.

The justices declined Monday to hear the students’ First Amendment appeal, leaving intact a divided Sixth Circuit ruling that allowed Tri County Area Schools to treat the slogan as vulgar speech. A denial of review doesn’t mean the Supreme Court endorsed that reasoning. It does mean the two students lost their last chance to overturn it in their case.

From the Associated Press:

The school told her sons to take off the sweatshirts she bought them for Christmas in 2022.

Lower courts upheld the ban, finding the veiled vulgarity of the phrase allows schools to ban it. It functions as a stand-in for “F-— Joe Biden.”

The woman’s attorneys argued that the decision wrongly gives school officials wide latitude to squelch political speech based on their personal ideas of what is vulgar. The phrase itself doesn’t contain any swear words or sexual implications, they said.

The school district urged the justices to reject the case, arguing that messages with lewd implications have no place in school, even if they touch on political topics. There has been evidence that some students wore clothing that read “Make America Great Again” or had messages supporting President Donald Trump, a Republican who lost the 2020 election to Biden, a Democrat.

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Brazil Court Goes on Censorship Spree Days Before Presidential Election

Brazil’s top electoral authority, the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), issued new censorship rulings on Wednesday as the nation prepares to hold presidential elections this weekend.

The South American nation is hours away from holding its 2026 general elections, scheduled for Sunday, October 4, with all polls suggesting that a runoff election will be held on October 25 between current incumbent socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Senator Flávio Bolsonaro.

In the past week, the 2026 Brazilian presidential campaign has seen two new controversies emerge surrounding Bolsonaro and Lula. The conservative senator denounced being the target of a fake news campaign accusing him of allegedly planning to remove the title of Brazil’s patron saint from Nossa Senhora do Aparecida (Our Lady of Aparecida), a title of the Blessed Virgin Mary that holds 300 years’ worth of faith and veneration for Brazilian Catholics.

Sen. Bolsonaro — who is running for office after his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, was banned and imprisoned for “crimes against democracy” charges — is an Evangelical Christian. Globonews, which Bolsonaro accused of acting as a “central hub” to spread the fake news campaign against him, issued a public retraction and apology after the claim was confirmed to be false.

On Wednesday, a three-out-of-five majority of the TSE’s justices ordered the complete removal of any and all social media content involving the fake news campaign against Bolsonaro, upholding an initial ruling issued by Supreme Court Justice and TSE member André Mendoça in response to a request issued by the Bolsonaro presidential campaign team.

Wednesday’s ruling was preceded by a back-and-forth series of court orders on the matter. The state-owned news agency Agência Brasil detailed on Wednesday that Mendoça had originally ruled to censor the fake news campaign posts against Bolsonaro — but Supreme Court Flávio Dino overturned the censorship orders on the grounds that they infringed the free speech rights of a local comedian who lodged a complaint on the matter. Supreme Court Justice Luiz Fux later overturned Dino’s ruling. The impasse led to the head of the Supreme Court, Edson Fachin, bringing the matter to a vote.

Metrópoles detailed that Justice Mendoça had initially argued that removing social media posts pertaining to the fake news campaign did not constitute censorship, as the content had already been proven to be misinformation and therefore “does not constitute prior censorship, as it does not establish prior state control over future expressions, does not require judicial authorization for new publications, and does not suspend users’ profiles, accounts, or channels.”

Separate from the controversy surrounding the fake news campaign against Flávio Bolsonaro, President Lula has found himself at the center of a firestorm after he bizarrely claimed this week that Brazilian girls learn to “get touched” from a young age. According to Lula’s ruling Workers’ Party (PT), the Brazilian president was allegedly referring to cervical cancer screenings.

The TSE also issued censorship rulings on Wednesday against conservative lawmaker Nikolas Ferreira over his response to Lula’s controversial statements. Ferreira, a 30-year-old Congressman from Minas Gerais, published a video expressing his outrage about Lula’s remarks while questioning the “explanation” provided by his party. In the video, which remains publicly available at press time, Ferreira affirmed that there is the possibility that a pedophile “might be listening” to Lula’s remarks and stressed, “girls aren’t to be touched from an early age.”

TSE Justice Estela Aranha reportedly gave Ferreira a 24-hour deadline to remove a video, arguing that the lawmaker allegedly “took the president’s statement about medical exams out of context and attributed a sexual connotation to his words.” Arahna ordered Ferreira to abstain himself from both republishing the video and from producing any kind of content that is “substantially identical” to the original piece under penalty of a yet-to-be determined fine.

“The contested publication is not limited to political criticism or disagreement regarding the appropriateness of the language used,” Justice Aranha reportedly argued.

“In developing the line of reasoning set forth in the contested media report, the respondent introduces a connotation entirely different from that present in the original statement, shifting the discussion from the realm of public health to that of various criminal acts,” she continued.

Ferreira referred to the situation in a social media post, which reads, “Lula knows so much about what he lost that he only requested the removal of the video from my network, but not a right of reply, because he knows he would have to explain the inexplicable.” In a separate post, the lawmaker pointed out that it was Lula who appointed Justice Aranha to the TSE in 2025.

The contents of the conservative lawmaker’s video appear to have greatly infuriated Lula, who called Ferreira a “bastard” during a Tuesday night campaign rally. In the same event, Lula’s wife, First Lady Rosângela “Janja” Lula da Silva, referred to the lawmaker as a “little shit.”

Hours later, the Brazilian president once again insulted Ferreira in a Wednesday interview with Terra Brasil, referring to him as a “complete idiot” for allegedly spreading “misinformation” against him.

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Censorship Advocates Seek To Use Bots And Anonymous “Sock Puppet” Accounts For Themselves While Denying Them To Others

Political leaders across the West have said for a decade that governments must end online anonymity to shut down fake accounts known as bots, particularly those from Russia. “I want to see real names on the internet,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in February. “In a democracy, citizens have the right to privacy,” said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at Davos in January 2025, and “not to anonymity or impunity,” proposing to tie every social media account to a European digital identity wallet. Greece’s digital governance minister proposed in April 2026 to link every profile to a verified identity because “The major problem behind anonymity is toxicity.” French President Emmanuel Macron declared that his priority was “to demand the disappearance of fake accounts” and “these famous bots, these troll farms.”

But now the advocates of government censorship of legal speech are demanding the legal power to wage information warfare through anonymous accounts and an explicit “sock puppet” strategy. Buried in the Australian government’s new censorship bill is a definition: “A sock puppet identity is a false or fictitious identity assumed by a person in the course of using, or carrying out any activity in relation to, an online service.” The legislation goes on not to warn of bad actors using sock puppets but rather to authorize the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to create and use sock puppets to “disseminate” information.

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Report: Social Media Platforms Block Paid Advertising for Elon Musk Documentary

Major social media companies including Meta, YouTube, X, and TikTok are reportedly refusing to accept paid advertisements for Alex Gibney’s upcoming documentary about Elon Musk, raising concerns that the Masters of the Universe are closing ranks to protect one of their own.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Bleecker Street, the distributor of Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary Musk, is facing an unprecedented challenge in promoting the film’s October 9 theatrical release. YouTube, TikTok, Meta’s platforms Instagram and Facebook, and Elon Musk’s own X platform have all declined to run paid advertisements featuring the documentary’s trailer, according to sources familiar with the situation.

The rejections have caught Bleecker Street by surprise, prompting the distributor to scramble internally to understand the reasoning behind the decisions. A person familiar with the company’s processes, who is not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that the studio is working to address the situation through appeals.

Perhaps most notably, X, the social media platform owned by Musk himself since 2022, has refused to engage with Bleecker Street representatives about the film or even accept advertising for any other films on the distributor’s upcoming slate. Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” since buying Twitter and renaming the platform.

All three companies that provided explanations cited concerns related to “political content” as their reason for rejection. TikTok and Meta maintain policies prohibiting campaign or other political advertisements. Meta’s policy stems largely from fallout following the Cambridge Analytica scandal during the 2016 election cycle. However, the Musk trailer, which was released on Thursday, does not appear to constitute the type of campaign advertising these policies were designed to prevent. The trailer contains only a shot of a political rally from 2024 and a reference to the 2024 election at its conclusion, elements commonly found in documentaries without constituting political advocacy.

YouTube’s rejection presents an even more puzzling case, as the platform does permit campaign advertisements, requiring only “paid for” disclosures from verified candidates.

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Dem Senator Wants To Regulate The Internet To Prevent Another Trump From Happening

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called for government regulation of the internet as part of a broader effort to reduce loneliness and powerlessness among Americans, two conditions he argues push voters toward leaders like President Donald Trump. Murphy made the remarks on September 21 during an appearance on the I’ve Had It podcast, where he discussed his book, Crisis of the Common Good.

Murphy told the podcast hosts that isolation and helplessness define the country right now. “Those are the two things I think Americans are going through right now… They don’t feel powerful at all, and they feel lonely,” he said.

His remedy for loneliness coincidentally becomes an excuse to grow the government even further.

“And so, government should build a set of rules in which people feel more powerful – that’s why the minimum wage is so important – and people feel so more connected,” Murphy said.

He added, “That’s why, you know, rebuilding healthy institutions in your town should be a project that government is involved in.”

Then he got to the internet and revealed his true objective. “Regulating the internet so that you’re spending less time alone on Instagram should be an important government project,” Murphy said. And if Americans feel more powerful and less alone, Murphy argued, “they are going to be less likely to fall for a bullshit demagogue like Donald Trump.”

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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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