Tag: censorship

‘All they did was wear wristbands!’ Judges question school district’s ban on ‘XX’ at girls’ games

Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island risk becoming hotbeds of censorship by school districts if the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals construes perceived offense as harassment. School districts risk massive liability for harassment if it does not.

Lawyers for censored parents and New Hampshire’s Bow School District laid out alternate visions of legal calamity to a three-judge panel of the Boston-based court at a hearing Wednesday on the constitutionality of Bow banning “XX” wristbands, a silent form of advocacy for female-only sports, from school athletic events.

Parents and a grandparent sued the district more than a year ago, after it threatened to arrest them at a Sept. 17, 2024, girls’ soccer game featuring a male player for not removing their wristbands, which refer to the female chromosome pair, and issued no-trespass orders. Bow set up a “protest zone” for critics of male inclusion soon after the suit was filed. 

Their passive protest shortly followed a federal judge blocking The Free State’s law that “prohibits biological males from participating in female athletics,” an injunction that applied only to the male athletes who sued, not every male who identifies as a girl.

A district judge nominated by President George H.W. Bush rejected a preliminary injunction against Bow this spring, claiming the wristbands send a “demeaning and harassing” message to males who identify as girls and participate in girls’ sports.

Wednesday’s oral argument suggested the panel might buck the 1st Circuit’s reputation as a rubber stamp for schools on gender identity, frequently leaving Bow School District lawyer Jonathan Shirley seeming to stumble for answers that would satisfy their questions.

Another panel upheld a school district’s ban on a student wearing an “Only Two Genders” shirt because it “assertedly demeans characteristics of personal identity” even if done “passively, silently, and without mentioning any specific students.” Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas blasted their colleagues for not accepting that case.

One of Wednesday’s panel members, Judge Julie Rikelman, served on another that upheld a school district’s practice of hiding students’ identification as the opposite sex from their parents. President Biden nominated Rikelman, who argued to preserve federal abortion rights in Dobbs, a month after SCOTUS ruled against her abortion-clinic client.

The 1st Circuit was the only federal appeals court until recently without any active GOP-nominated judges, which Reuters reported has made its lower courts “magnets for lawsuits challenging Trump’s agenda by Democratic state attorneys general and advocacy groups.” The Senate confirmed President Trump nominee Joshua Dunlap on Tuesday.

Wednesday’s panel included two judges with senior status, meaning they are allowed to handle a reduced caseload compared to active judges: Jeffrey Howard, nominated by President George W. Bush, and Sandra Lynch, by President Clinton.

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Telegram Pushes Back as Australia’s Online Censorship Battle Heats Up

Australia’s continuing clash over online speech has deepened after the Federal Court ordered Telegram to define the limits of its lawsuit against eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant by November 7.

The directive followed complaints from the regulator that Telegram had widened its challenge beyond what it originally filed, introducing new arguments at a late stage.

The dispute centers on the controversial Online Safety Act 2021, which gives the eSafety Commissioner broad authority to demand information from online platforms about their handling of “harmful” content and to impose penalties for non-compliance.

Telegram is challenging both the Commissioner’s authority under that law and the A$957,780 ($622k) fine issued earlier this year after it allegedly missed a reporting deadline.

In March 2024, eSafety issued notices to six major technology companies, including Google, Meta, X, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Telegram.

The notices required detailed reports about how each company was combating material connected to “terror and violent extremism” and demanded responses within 49 days.

According to eSafety, Telegram failed to comply within that timeframe, leading to the fine on February 24, 2025.

Telegram has rejected both the fine and the regulator’s jurisdiction.

The company argues that it is not a “provider of social-media services” under the law and therefore cannot be bound by Section 56(2), which authorizes eSafety to compel cooperation from social media or electronic service providers.

Telegram also claims that it never received the March 2024 notice because it was sent to an incorrect address in Dubai and to unrelated email inboxes. The company maintains that it only learned of the request in late August 2024 and still provided responses in October “in circumstances where it was not compelled to do so.”

During a recent hearing, eSafety’s lawyer Philip Solomon said Telegram had suddenly expanded its case to challenge not only the legality of the reporting notice but also the fine itself.

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UK Lords Debate Impact of VPNs on Censorship Laws

It began as a plan to “keep children safe online.” It has become a national realization about how far the government can reach into the digital lives of its citizens.

The UK’s Online Safety Act has turned into a case study in how a law written for protection can give no protection and end up with mass surveillance.

When peers in the House of Lords met this week to examine its effects, they sounded little like guardians of youth safety, and it was easy to tell they don’t have enough self-awareness to realize they’ve helped unleash a monster.

Lord Clement-Jones, the Liberal Democrat technology spokesperson, noted that young people are already avoiding the law’s controls.

VPNs, he said, are now used on a “widespread” scale, which “risks rendering age-assurance measures ineffective.”

The statement revealed a central problem: the people being protected are already finding their way around the digital ID rules. They always will.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales expressed the issue plainly. Calling the Act “very poorly thought-out legislation,” he told The House magazine: “We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances, so, if it comes to that, it’s going to be an interesting showdown, because we’re going to just refuse to do it. Politically, what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that.”

Wales’s refusal is part of a natural broader discomfort with the idea of regulating access to information through identification.

Under the new law, platforms must verify users’ ages through ID checks or similar systems. Millions of users will have to prove their identity before they can post or browse. Privacy groups describe this as a national identity program introduced without open debate.

With data breaches still frequent across both government and corporate systems, the setup creates an environment where every login carries potential exposure.

VPN use has increased in response. These tools, once associated with cybersecurity professionals, now serve anyone who prefers to maintain privacy online. They allow people to move through the internet without revealing personal data.

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Killing the Canada Goose

Canada’s conservative outlet Juno News depicts Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as an incompetent, narcissistic leader who has done nothing to improve our country’s image on the world stage or to legislate for solvency and freedom of expression in the domestic realm. He is now at the helm of a faltering country that has little hope of struggling back on its feet.

Indeed, it is hard not to suspect that Carney and his Liberals, like the sinister Democrats in the U.S., are driven by a double agenda against the welfare of their own citizens: to deprive them of their political rights and freedoms via legislative and policy initiatives on the one hand, and to render them destitute by eviscerating the economy on the other. These actions are almost certainly deliberate.

As United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Carney crafted global carbon-pricing initiatives, describing carbon taxes as the “linchpin of responsible climate governance.” His book Value(s) leaves no doubt respecting his globalist and green-industrial objectives at the cost of national sovereignty. 

Now he is bruiting several market-driven changes to his preferred agenda to ensure popular support, but still claims “I’m the same me. I’m focused on the same issues…What we need to do is to be as effective as possible in terms of addressing climate change while growing our economy.” It has been proven worldwide that you can’t do both. The dogma of climate change kills not only the climate, the environment, the water table, and the avian cohort. It destroys the economy as well.

As a Western Standard commenter writes, “Despite Canada slipping into third world economic status, Carney’s first proposed bills deal with censorship and control of people’s speech/internet posts. That really says where his priority lies. Carney will go down in history as the last Canadian prime minister presiding over 10 provinces and 3 territories.” Or the first Canadian prime minister ruling over a garrison regime.

Carney, the technocratic, oxymoronic, inept globalist banker, who capered into the Liberal leadership, is thus serving up reheated Trudeau goop — more debt, more bureaucracy, more excuses, more anti-pipeline propaganda, more affordability crunch, more Keynesian spending-and-borrowing, and more anti-Trump invective, all of which has led to what plainly appears to be intentional national failure. Canada is merely his laboratory to test his theories for national implosion. Regarding Carney’s first six months in office, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has summed up the outcomes thus far, posting that “after six months, everything is worse. Crime, tariffs, inflation, deficits, immigration, housing — all spiralling out of control.” The plan is working. 

The key element in his program is to strip away individual rights so that Canadians will be censored and restrained in “a digital gulag” where a series of bills he is proposing—Bill C-8 on cybersecurity, Bill C-9 on combating hate, and Bill C-2 on presumably secure borders—are currently making their way through parliament.

The intention is made to sound noble but is really as black as an old kettle’s arse. Bill C-8 can cut off phone and internet service to political dissidents and opponents of the realm without a court order, depriving them of personal and political access to information and leaving them effaced from “the conversation.” Bill C-9 allows the government to prosecute for “hate crimes,” which have no strict definition and are completely arbitrary, erasing freedom of expression in the public square; people can be arrested for something that hasn’t yet been said or for hurting someone’s feelings. Bill C-2 enables government to open mail parcels and computer files without a warrant. John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has argued that  “Canada will be a police state by Christmas if Parliament passes Bills C-2, C-8, and C-9 in their current form.”

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Senate Grills Meta and Google Over Biden Administration’s Role in COVID-Era Content Censorship

A Senate hearing this week discussed government influence on online speech, as senior executives from Meta and Google faced questions about the Biden administration’s communications with their companies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The session, titled “Part II of Shut Your App: How Uncle Sam Jawboned Big Tech Into Silencing Americans,” highlighted the growing concern in Washington over what lawmakers describe as government-driven pressure to suppress lawful expression.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who led the hearing, began by declaring that “the right to speak out is the foundation of a free society” and warning that “censorship around the world is growing.”

He accused the Biden administration of pushing technology companies to restrict Americans’ speech during the pandemic, and he faulted both the companies and Democrats for failing to resist that pressure.

“Today, we pick off where the story left off,” Cruz said, pointing to Meta and Google as examples of firms that “were pressured by the Biden administration to censor the American people.”

He pledged to introduce the Jawbone Act, which he said would “provide a robust right to redress when Americans are targeted by their own government.”

Markham Erickson, Google’s Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy, defended the company’s approach, emphasizing that its moderation decisions are guided by long-standing internal policies, not by government direction.

“While we are a company dedicated to the goal of making the world’s information universally accessible, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have certain rules,” Erickson said, citing restrictions on “terrorist content, child sexual abuse material, hate speech, and other harmful content.”

He acknowledged that officials in the Biden administration had contacted Google during the pandemic to urge the removal of certain COVID-19 content from YouTube.

But Erickson maintained that the company “develop[ed] and enforce[d] our policies independently” and “rejected suggestions that did not align with those policies.”

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Obama’s Latest Ploys at Shadow Government, Internet Censorship Exposed. He Needs to Be Held Accountable.

Former President Barack Obama’s presidential legacy is crumbling before our eyes. While he works to perform the roles of former president and titular head of the Democrat Party, running interference for the flailing campaigns of Democrat gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger (VA) and Mikie Sherrill (NJ), and propping up CA Gov. Gavin Newsom and his unconstitutional gerrymandering scheme, he has the looming threat of the government for whom he used to be the head, precipitating his legacy’s increasing demise. 

In July, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard dropped evidence that exposed how then-President Obama and his intelligence apparatus created fraudulent documents that spearheaded the entire Russia Collusion hoax lodged against President Donald Trump 45. 

As DNI Gabbard stated,

The stunning revelations these intelligence documents expose should concern every American. There is irrefutable evidence detailing how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, as though it were true. The documents we released shows how they did it: manufacturing findings from shoddy sources, suppressing evidence that disproved their false claims, disobeying IC tradecraft standards, and withholding the truth from the American people,” said DNI Gabbard. “In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people and worked with their partners in the media to promote this lie to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump.

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Leftists Are Pushing for Global Speech Censorship

The Democratic Party, and the global Left in general, spent the last five years crying about “mis/disinformation” and the need for more oversight of social media platforms and the Internet in general. It is anathema to the people who think they are our moral and intellectual superiors that we might say, write, or think things with which they disagree.

In moves that would make George Orwell turn over in his grave, the Biden administration tried to force the “Disinformation Governance Board” on America. Turns out that board was born after a 2022 speech given by former President Barack Obama at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center — a speech that pushed for broad censorship of the Internet.

Michael Shellenberger is now sounding the alarm that global censorship is coming unless we stop it.

The entire post is long, but we’ll highlight the most salient (and alarming) points:

But now, foreign governments, including Europe, the UK, Brazil, Australia, and others are demanding censorship, including of the American people. The risk is that US tech companies will find it significantly less expensive to have a single global censorship regime and just go along with foreign censorship requests. Facebook complied with Biden administration demands to censor because it needed Biden’s help in dealing with European censorship officials. And the Brazilian government forced Elon Musk to continue censoring the Brazilian people after it froze Starlink’s assets.

And Public has discovered that the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, which is led by Obama’s former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is at the heart of a new, secretive, and possibly illegal censorship initiative that appears even more ambitious than the one Obama proposed in 2022.

On September 24, the Cyber Policy Center hosted a secret dinner between its leaders and top censorship officials from Europe, UK, Brazil, California and Australia. The meeting was titled “Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.” Frank McCourt, the same person behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, financed the gathering through his “Project Liberty Institute,” (PLI), toward which he gave $500 million to “strengthen democracy” and “foster responsible technology.”

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When the Government Censored Dracula, Frankenstein, and King Kong

In 1931, Universal Studios released a pair of films that still haunt American culture. The first to emerge from the shadows was Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire who creeps by night to feed on the blood of his victims. Then, shambling in the bloodsucker’s wake, came Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff as the tragic creature who was pieced together from dead body parts and brought to unnatural life by the titular mad scientist.

Some modern horror fans might find these films to be too slow or tame for their liking. But we must remember that they were genuinely frightening or disturbing to many audiences back in the day. They were so upsetting to some people, in fact, that the official censorship boards that then existed in multiple states took a page from Dr. Frankenstein and sliced off the best parts.

Today, the idea of an official state censor requiring specific cuts to a mainstream Hollywood movie in order for that movie to be shown to paying adult customers would be laughed out of court on First Amendment grounds.

But no such robust First Amendment jurisprudence existed in the 1930s. In fact, it was not until 1925 that the U.S. Supreme Court first recognized that the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech applied to the actions of state and local governments. And, as we will see, it was not until 1952 that the First Amendment’s protections against state censorship were extended to the movies.

So Dracula and Frankenstein both faced the censors’ knives when they were first released. For example, in his invaluable book, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, David J. Skal noted that Massachusetts mandated several cuts to all Sunday screenings of Dracula, including the removal of a shot “showing part of a skeleton in a casket as well as one of a beetle-like insect emerging from a miniature coffin.”

As for Frankenstein, Skal reported that one of the most commonly maimed scenes involved the creature encountering a young girl who was tossing flowers onto a lake and watching them float. Seemingly charmed by the girl’s joyful actions, the creature, behaving with a sort of child-like innocence of its own, tosses the girl onto the water to watch her float like a flower. But the girl (predictably) drowns, compounding the creature’s pathos and isolation.

Many censors objected to that upsetting scene and it was typically cut in a way that removed the sight of the creature actually tossing the girl onto the water. Yet, as Skal observed, such an edit “ironically [left] some viewers with the impression that they had been spared the spectacle of some shocking molestation.” In other words, the censors arguably made the scene even more disturbing by forcing audiences to draw their own conclusions about the full nature of the girl’s fatal meeting with the creature. The censors thus defeated the point of their own clumsy censorship.

Several years later, Frankenstein‘s even better (in my view) sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, faced its own angry mob of censors. The “list of eliminations ordered by the Ohio Censor Board,” complained one Universal staffer, in a report quoted by Skal, were “very drastic and very harmful to the success of this picture.”

Perhaps the fullest record we have of that era’s heavy-handed government crackdown on horror movies comes from a 1933 pamphlet published by the National Council on Freedom From Censorship titled What Shocked the Censors: A Complete Record of Cuts in Motion Picture Films Ordered by the New York State Censors from January, 1932 to March, 1933.

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ECRI Pressures Ireland and Finland to Adopt New “Hate Speech” Laws and Speech Monitoring Systems

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) has issued another set of polite bureaucratic thunderbolts, this time aimed at Ireland and Finland, for not cracking down hard enough on their citizens’ conversations.

The group, operating under the Council of Europe, says both nations have been dragging their feet on what it calls “hate speech.”

In other words, they’re not censoring fast enough.

In Ireland’s case, ECRI was appalled to discover that the country’s “extremely limited” legal framework still leaves some room for public disagreement online.

The commission noted with concern that certain hate speech provisions were removed from the Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Act 2024, and urged Dublin to correct the oversight by writing new laws to target such expression.

The report didn’t stop there. It called for a national data system to document “racist and LGBTI-phobic bullying and violence in schools” and a “comprehensive data collection” program for hate crimes and hate speech.

It even floated the idea of regulating “election-related misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy,” which it deemed “critical to limit the spread of hateful ideas.”

So the plan is clear: build a bureaucracy that tracks words, ideas, and schoolyard insults, then hand election discourse over to regulatory authorities. What could go wrong?

ECRI did find time to congratulate Ireland for its National Action Plan Against Racism and inclusion programs for Roma and Traveller communities.

But after that brief applause, the hammer came back down. Hate speech, it concluded, remains “widespread.” More laws, more oversight, more policing of conversation.

Finland’s report read like a blueprint for speech management. ECRI announced that hate speech there “has increased and reached a critical level,” though it didn’t specify what exactly counts as hate speech, or how “critical” was measured.

The group praised Finnish police for maintaining “a regular presence in a web-based gaming platform” where officers act as “game police” and talk to young users about hate speech and online crime. It’s not satire, that’s in the official report.

ECRI proposed creating a national working group to design new policies against hate speech and advised police to unify their methods for “recognition, unmasking and official recording” of hate.

Schools, it said, should install systems to track “racist and LGBTI-phobic incidents,” while even non-criminal “hate incidents” should be formally recognized and logged.

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Australia’s eSafety Chief Pressures Big Tech and AI Firms on Verification, Age Checks

Australia’s top online regulator, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, is intensifying her push to reshape speech in the digital world.

Her office has formally warned major social platforms and several AI chatbot companies that they could soon be forced to comply with far-reaching new age verification and “online safety” requirements that many see as expanding government control over online communication.

The warnings are part of the government’s effort to enforce the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, which would bar Australians under 16 from creating social media accounts.

Letters sent to Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, X, and YouTube make it clear that each company is expected to fall under the scope of the new law.

The Commissioner’s preliminary assessment is that these services exist mainly for “online social interaction,” which brings them within the definition of social media platforms and subjects them to strict age verification and child protection obligations.

Not all of the companies accept that classification. Snapchat claims to be primarily a messaging platform similar to WhatsApp, while YouTube has opposed losing its original exemption.

At this stage, only services with a clear focus on messaging or education, such as WhatsApp, Messenger, YouTube Kids, and Google Classroom, remain excluded from the Commissioner’s oversight.

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