Tag: censorship

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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Report: State Department Officially Dismantled ‘Disinformation’ Agency

The State Department has officially canceled the Global Engagement Center (GEC) as part of President Donald Trump’s mission to shut down the “censorship industrial complex,” according to a report.

Paul Sperry, a senior investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations, wrote that the State Department officially closed the Global Engagement Center.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in April that the State Department would close the GEC.

“Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” Rubio wrote in an op-ed for the Federalist, stating that to protect free speech the “censorship industrial complex must be dismantled.”

Rubio contended in the op-ed that then-President Barack Obama transformed the GEC, which was meant to target international terrorism, to cover any and all “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”

He wrote at the time:

This pivot was no accident. Obama’s man in charge at GEC, Rick Stengel, touted his efforts to protect “democracy” while redefining it so that “democracy” came to mean silencing the part of the electorate he doesn’t like.

In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump’s campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, “Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.” That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about, “why America needs a hate speech law.”

The secretary of state said the GEC was an “enthusiastic partner” in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which monitored alleged disinformation during the 2020 election.

“The EIP pretty much exclusively singled out accounts and narratives associated with President Trump and his supporters and, in fact, directly flagged President Trump’s tweets, along with his family members and friends of the administration,” Rubio noted.

“With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting ‘disinformation,’” Rubio continued.

Rubio stated that one recipient of American taxpayer dollars was the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which ranked outlets based on the likeliness that they would spread disinformation.

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U.K. seeking to censor Americans again

Incredibly, the U.K. wants to enforce its draconian censorship laws in the United States.

According to Data Fidelity, an Australian tech site:

Internal communications now made public by the US House Judiciary Committee shed light on a pattern of escalating pressure by the UK’s “communications regulator,” Ofcom, aimed at pushing US-based tech platforms like Rumble and Reddit into adopting strict speech standards, even in apparent disregard for national boundaries and free speech protections.

The emails expose how Ofcom has been leaning on Rumble to align itself with the UK’s Online Safety Act, a censorship law that vastly expands the state’s oversight of online content under the guise of child protection and harm prevention.

Take to the internet or social media to criticize the LGBTQ community or Islam?

You may be paid a visit by the constabulary.

Criticize the U.K.’s leaders?

You might get to visit Scotland Yard.

Criticize gay, trans, or Muslim U.K. leaders?

God help you. (Not that many people in formerly Jolly Olde England believe in the God of the Bible anymore. Which may explain the current state of affairs in Britain.)

It is utterly preposterous that any nation, let alone one as diminished yet allegedly tolerant as the U.K., would seek to enforce and impose its own anti-speech, anti-freedom agenda on a foreign land.

Talk about digital colonization and cultural imperialism!

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UK Expands Online Safety Act to Enforce Preemptive Censorship For “Priority” Offenses

The UK government is preparing to expand the reach of its already controversial censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), with a new set of rules that push platforms toward preemptive censorship.

The changes would compel tech companies to block material before users can even see it, under the claim of stopping “cyberflashing” and content “encouraging or assisting serious self-harm.”

On October 21, the government laid before Parliament a Statutory Instrument titled The Online Safety Act 2023 (Priority Offences) (Amendment) Regulations 2025.

This legal mechanism, used to amend existing legislation without requiring a full new Act, adds two additional “priority offences” to Schedule 7 of the OSA:

By classifying these as “priority illegal content” under Section 59 of the OSA, the government triggers the law’s strictest obligations for online platforms.

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Countries Call on the EU to Enforce “Values” Through Speech Rules

European governments are intensifying pressure on Brussels to tighten control over which organizations receive EU funding, using the language of “combating hate” to justify measures that could sharply restrict free expression.

France, Austria, and the Netherlands have jointly circulated a paper calling on the European Commission to withdraw financial support from any group that does not conform to “European values.”

The document, seen by Politico, urges member states to “redouble their efforts to combat racism, antisemitism, xenophobia and anti-Muslim hatred” and to ensure “no support is given to entities hostile to European values, in particular through funding.”

Behind the rhetoric of tolerance, the plan lays out a system that ties access to EU money directly to ideological loyalty.

Under the proposal, beneficiaries of programs such as Erasmus+ and CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) would be required to sign pledges confirming that they “respect and promote EU rights and values.”

The Commission would also be instructed to apply existing budget rules that allow for excluding groups accused of “inciting hatred.”

The initiative arrives just ahead of a European Council meeting in Brussels, where leaders are set to discuss a range of topics, including Ukraine, migration, defense, and Europe’s digital and environmental goals.

A draft of the Council’s conclusions adds another layer by insisting that “EU values apply equally in the digital sphere,” with the “protection of minors” highlighted as a key aim.

What looks like a defense of European ideals increasingly resembles an effort to police opinions.

By expanding the concept of hate speech both online and offline, the document could allow EU institutions to label controversial or dissenting views as violations of European values. This would effectively hand Brussels the power to determine which voices are acceptable in public debate.

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Judge Orders Tech CEOs to Testify in Case Using Algorithmic Design Rules as a New Avenue for Indirect Online Censorship Pressure

Three of the tech industry’s most recognizable leaders, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Evan Spiegel of Snap, and Adam Mosseri of Instagram, will be required to testify in court early next year.

The order came from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who ruled that their participation is essential in a lawsuit alleging that social media platforms were deliberately designed to harm young users’ mental health.

Attorneys for the companies had tried to prevent the CEOs from appearing, arguing that earlier depositions and other executive testimonies already provided sufficient information.

Judge Kuhl disagreed, stating, “The testimony of a CEO is uniquely relevant, as that officer’s knowledge of harms, and failure to take available steps to avoid such harms could establish negligence or ratification of negligent conduct.”

She also noted that their testimony would be “unique,” since the claims center on design features built to “be addictive” and “drive compulsive” use among minors.

Meta argued that compelling both Zuckerberg and Mosseri to testify would disrupt their ability to manage the business and “set a precedent” for future cases. Snap’s lawyers said the decision to call Spiegel to the stand was an “abuse of discretion.”

Judge Kuhl rejected both arguments, saying that those in charge must directly answer questions about their companies’ conduct instead of delegating that responsibility.

After the ruling, Meta declined to comment.

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