Tag: censorship

Shopify Reimposes Content Restrictions Through Shop App, Reviving Ban on “Hateful” Content

Shopify has reintroduced restrictions on certain types of merchandise, targeting what it calls “hateful content.”

This marks a significant shift back toward censorship, though the company has avoided framing it that way.

The change comes more than a year after Shopify eliminated similar content bans in what was then seen as a move toward supporting free expression in commerce.

Recently, the company updated a help page related to its Shop app and payment system to include a ban on products promoting “hateful content, violence, gore, profanity, or offensive content.”

This revision, made sometime after May, and noticed by Bloomberg, applies specifically to the Shop sales channel.

While Shopify’s main platform-wide acceptable use policy still does not include a hateful content clause, this new rule effectively reintroduces content control through a different path.

The company had previously removed its ban on hateful content in July 2024.

That decision appeared consistent with CEO Tobi Lütke’s long-standing defense of open commerce.

In a 2017 blog post, Lütke wrote, “commerce is a powerful, underestimated form of expression.” He went on to say, “We don’t like Breitbart, but products are speech and we are pro free speech,” and added, “To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas…When we kick off a merchant, we’re asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code?”

Rather than restoring the original company-wide policy, Shopify has now imposed restrictions within a specific tool. This segmentation allows the company to present itself as a neutral platform while still controlling what merchants can sell. In practice, it results in censorship through back-end enforcement.

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‘World-first’ eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant exposed: How taxpayer’s money is being wasted on an endless game of online whack-a-mole – as it’s revealed banned X posts can simply be re-uploaded

The Australian government’s attempts to police online speech have descended into farce after its ‘world’s first’ eSafety Commissioner admitted it was effectively powerless to stop people re-sharing ‘banned’ posts.

On Tuesday, Daily Mail Australia revealed the Australian government tried to force a Canadian man called Chris Elston to delete an ‘offensive’ post about a UN trans expert, threatening X owner Elon Musk with an $800,000 fine if it was not removed from the platform.

Mr Elston, who goes by the name of ‘Billboard Chris’ on X and lives in Canada, refused to delete the post.

When X subsequently complied with the ‘removal order’ by geo-blocking the post in Australia, Mr Elston simply re-shared the offending post. 

In a colossal back-fire for the e-Safety Commissioner, that post alone has been seen over 130,000 times and a concerted campaign to re-share it by others has racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

In response to this publication’s story, Billionaire X owner Musk said: ‘What is the world coming to?’ 

Now, the taxpayer-funded eSafety Commissioner has admitted it can only block or remove the subsequent posts if other complaints are made by the offended party.

‘eSafety’s Adult Cyber Abuse Scheme is a complaints-based scheme,’ a spokesperson for the eSafety Commissioner told Daily Mail Australia. 

‘In cases where a new version of the material has been posted after a removal notice has been issued and complied with, we require a new complaint from the targeted Australian resident – or someone authorised to report on their behalf – to take regulatory action.’

This effectively means the ‘world’s first’ online safety regulator could be engaged in an endless game of whack-a-mole as it attempts to police speech online. 

Political figures were lining up to condemn the alleged waste of Aussie taxpayer’s money. 

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4chan and Kiwi Farms Sue UK Regulator Ofcom Over Online Censorship Law, Citing First Amendment Violations

Two of the internet’s most free-speech supporting platforms, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, are taking their fight for online free speech to court, targeting the UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, for what they describe as an unconstitutional attempt to enforce British censorship laws on American websites.

In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the plaintiffs argue that the UK’s controversial Online Safety Act is not only an unlawful extraterritorial power grab but a direct attack on foundational American liberties.

Read the complaint here.

The suit calls Ofcom’s enforcement tactics a clear violation of the First Amendment and a dangerous attempt to establish global jurisdiction over online speech.

The complaint lays out how the UK’s censorship regime is being pushed onto American soil, despite the fact that both platforms operate entirely within the United States and are in full compliance with US law.

“Parliament does not have that authority. That issue was settled, decisively, 243 years ago in a war that the UK’s armies lost and are not in any position to relitigate,” Kiwi Farms stated bluntly in a letter responding to Ofcom’s demands.

Ofcom, under the new Online Safety Act, is demanding that platforms like 4chan and Kiwi Farms conduct written “risk assessments,” install content moderation systems, remove speech deemed “illegal” by UK standards, and verify the identities of their users.

The platforms face criminal penalties and steep fines of up to £18 million ($24M) or 10% of their global revenue if they refuse.

The plaintiffs argue these demands are not only legally unenforceable but blatantly unconstitutional. “Where Americans are concerned, the Online Safety Act purports to legislate the Constitution out of existence,” the lawsuit states.

Central to the challenge is the claim that Ofcom, a British corporate regulator funded by the very companies it polices, is attempting to impose UK-style speech control on a global scale.

According to the complaint, Ofcom has no lawful authority to regulate US platforms, let alone to compel speech or force the removal of content that is protected under the US Constitution.

The filing asserts that Ofcom’s threats of imprisonment and massive fines, coupled with demands for speech censorship and compelled disclosure of sensitive company information, constitute “egregious violations of Americans’ civil rights.”

The UK regulator has already targeted both platforms with a series of legal notices and threats, despite lacking jurisdiction or proper legal process.

These include multiple emails and letters declaring 4chan and Kiwi Farms in breach of UK law, none of which were served under the required UK-US Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty.

The plaintiffs argue that these attempts at enforcement are not just improper, but “repugnant to United States public policy.”

“Ofcom purports to regulate content and interactions on platforms and services with which Plaintiffs’ users are voluntarily interacting,” the complaint says. “Ofcom seeks to control those interactions in order to satisfy the whims of Ofcom employees or the UK law enforcement or political apparatuses.”

Notably, both platforms have limited or no access for UK users in response to the threats. Kiwi Farms, for instance, blocked UK IPs entirely after receiving what it interpreted as an impending Section 100 order demanding compliance.

The lawsuit requests the court to block Ofcom from issuing further demands without going through proper international legal channels and to declare the Online Safety Act’s enforcement efforts unenforceable in the United States.

It also seeks a permanent injunction against any future attempts by Ofcom to impose UK regulations on the plaintiffs.

The case stands as a direct confrontation between two visions of the internet: one based on the US constitutional tradition of free speech and open access, and another that embraces government-mandated safety regimes that can be weaponized to silence speech on a global scale.

For the plaintiffs, the message is clear: they will not yield to foreign censors. As the suit puts it, “Delaware and West Virginia are not part of the UK. Their citizens, both natural and corporate, do not answer to the UK.”

Preston Byrne of Byrne & Storm, P.C., who represents the plaintiffs, told Reclaim The Net the platforms are refusing to comply with Ofcom’s demands because “American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an e-mail.”

He praised the decision by 4chan and Kiwi Farms to stand firm against the foreign regulator, stating, “In the face of these foreign demands, our clients have bravely chosen to assert their constitutional rights.”

Byrne characterized the UK’s censorship law as a calculated attack on the American tech sector, warning that “the UK Online Safety Act is a brazen attempt by a foreign country to hobble American competitiveness and suffocate American freedom by exporting the UK’s censorship laws to our shores.”

He made it clear that the legal team would not allow such interference to go unanswered: “The First Amendment bar is prepared to hale any foreign censor into federal court at any time to defend any American.”

In a statement to Reclaim The Net, Ronald Coleman of the Coleman Law Firm, P.C., co-counsel in the suit, framed the case as a broader defense of national sovereignty and individual liberty.

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Saudi AI Firm Launches Halal Chatbot

Companies with AI chatbots love to highlight their capability as translators, but they still default to English, both in function and in the information they are trained on. With that in mind, Humain, an AI company in Saudi Arabia, has now launched an Arabic-native chatbot.

The bot, called Humain Chat, runs on the Allam large language model, according to Bloomberg, which the company claims was trained on “one of the largest Arabic datasets ever assembled” and is the “world’s most advanced Arabic-first AI model.” The company says that it is not only fluent in the Arabic language, but also in “Islamic culture, values and heritage.” (If you have religious concerns about using Humain Chat, consult your local Imam.) The chatbot, which will be made available as an app, will first be available only in Saudi Arabia and currently supports bilingual conversations in Arabic and English, supporting dialects including Egyptian and Lebanese. The plan is for the app to roll out across the Middle East and eventually go global, with the goal of serving the nearly 500 million Arabic-speaking people across the world.

Humain took on Allam and the chatbot project after it was started by the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, a government agency and tech regulator. For that reason, Bloomberg raises the possibility that Humain Chat may comply with censorship requests of the Saudi government and restrict the kind of information made available to users.

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Senator Amy Klobuchar Can’t Take A Joke, Demands Censorship Law

Senator Amy Klobuchar has acknowledged what opponents of her legislation have been warning all along.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, she confirmed that her proposed NO FAKES Act would be used to censor AI-generated parody.

Her target is a meme video that pokes fun at her reaction to an American Eagle jeans advertisement featuring actress Sydney Sweeney.

Rather than brush off the obvious satire, Klobuchar doubled down on the need to suppress it. “As anyone would, I wanted the video taken down or at least labeled ‘digitally altered content,’” she wrote.

She applauded TikTok for removing the clip, praised Meta for tagging it, and expressed frustration that X would not help her attach a Community Note.

This public complaint confirms that the NO FAKES Act, Senate Bill 1367, is not just about preventing identity theft or stopping fraud. Klobuchar is one of the bill’s lead authors, and she is openly calling for legal tools to remove content that ridicules her.

The bill gives individuals the right to sue over the creation or distribution of “unauthorized digital replicas.”

It also places heavy compliance burdens on platforms, which would face steep fines for failing to remove flagged content quickly or for not implementing policies to suspend repeat offenders.

While the bill claims to allow space for parody, satire, and documentaries, Klobuchar’s statements make it clear that those exemptions offer little practical protection.

The parody video in question shows an AI-generated version of Klobuchar speaking at a fake Senate hearing, ranting about Democrats needing more visibility in advertising. The fictional version of the senator says, “If Republicans are going to have beautiful girls with perfect titties…we want ugly, fat bitches wearing pink wigs and long-ass fake nails being loud and twerking on top of a cop car at a Waffle House ‘cause they didn’t get extra ketchup.”

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Yale’s Censored Vaccine Injury Research and the Urgent Need for Scientific Reform

One premier research group has bravely studied the vaccine-injured and provided many critical details about their multi-year illnesses.

•Unfortunately, despite their excellent research, medical journals have refused to publish their results, including the most recent study which showed clear differences exist between long COVID and COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

•Science is ultimately predicated upon the methods we use discern what is actually true (epistemology). As this subject has been neglected, our epistemological standards frequently result in existing dogmas and vested interests being reaffirmed while critically important data never reaches the public awareness (e.g., due to widespread medical journal censorship).

•During COVID-19, the severe abuses of the scientific community (which ultimately resulted from it having no accountability for failing to uphold its social responsibilities) broke the public trust in science, and allowed something previously inconceivable—MAHA to gain control of our corrupt scientific apparatus and have a mandate to reform it.

•NIH director Jay Bhattacharya has announced his commitment to fixing the scientific apparatus and has engaged in a variety of NIH initiatives and public discussions which are vital to allowing science to serve the people rather than vested-interests.

Yale’s medical school is widely considered to have one of the top autoimmunity research and treatment programs in America. As long COVID is considered to be immunological in nature, their researchers extensively studied it, and remarkably some of them then pivoted to also studying vaccine injuries (in part because the COVID vaccines rather than curing long COVID patients, sometimes made them much worse). A few days ago, they finished a new research paper on the subject, but like their previous ones, it was immediately summarily rejected by the “reputable” journals it was submitted to (including the one I feel was the most obligated to publish these findings). In this article, I aim to cover the importance of their most recent results and, more important, examine what their habitual censorship reveals about science in general.

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California Content Law Design Code Faces Free Speech Clash

Efforts to implement California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code continue to face resistance from both the tech industry and digital civil liberties groups, who argue that the law’s restrictions violate constitutional protections and would compel sweeping surveillance and censorship online.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which represents companies including Google, Amazon, Meta, and eBay, recently filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case NetChoice v. Bonta.

Stephanie Joyce, the group’s senior vice president and director of its litigation center, condemned the legislation in blunt terms: “The Constitution prohibits the government from dictating what lawful content readers can see, and it extends that protection regardless of the reader’s age.

Though well-intentioned, California’s internet age restriction law is unconstitutional, and the court of appeals should affirm the decision to block it.”

The case marks the second time this legal clash has reached the Ninth Circuit. Previously, the court blocked only a portion of the law and returned the rest for further review.

Now, with renewed scrutiny, the court could determine whether the entire statute fails to withstand constitutional challenge.

NetChoice, an industry coalition that includes many of the same members as the CCIA, has led the charge against a wave of so-called “age assurance” laws.

These policies would require digital platforms to verify the ages of users and potentially restrict minors’ access to content deemed unsuitable. But free speech advocates warn the consequences would be broader and more dangerous than legislators admit.

Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) have also weighed in with their own amicus brief, arguing that the law’s age estimation mandates undermine essential First Amendment rights. “CDT and EFF’s brief argues that the appeals court should uphold the injunctions solely on the basis of its overbroad, unconstitutional age verification requirement because that requirement is not severable from other provisions and should doom the entire statute.” The brief warns that such mandates not only chill access to lawful speech but also erode online anonymity and place users’ personal data at risk.

They also emphasize that minors’ ability to engage freely online is a critical part of their development and civic participation. “Social media helps minors develop their own ideas, learn to express themselves, and engage productively with others in our democratic public sphere,” the brief states.

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X Slams Brazil for Censorship, Secret Orders, and Free Speech Crackdown in USTR Trade Investigation

As part of an ongoing investigation by the US Trade Representative (USTR) into Brazil’s treatment of American digital platforms, X has filed a stark warning about what it describes as intensifying threats to freedom of expression and the rule of law in Brazil.

The USTR probe, focused on policies that may harm US companies, closed its comment period on August 18, with a hearing scheduled for September 3.

We obtained a copy of the comments for you here.

X’s submission outlines a series of aggressive measures by Brazilian authorities that the company says are undermining internet freedom and imposing extraterritorial censorship demands.

Among the most concerning developments, according to the platform, is a ruling from Brazil’s Supreme Court in June 2025 that gutted a core protection in the country’s 2014 internet law, the Marco Civil da Internet (MCI).

By declaring Article 19 partially unconstitutional, the ruling opened the door for tech platforms to be held legally responsible for user-generated content, without requiring judicial oversight.

This, X argues, has increased operational burdens and incentivized preemptive content removals.

The platform also warned that Brazil’s judiciary, particularly under Justice Alexandre de Moraes, has been issuing covert content removal orders targeting journalists, politicians, and even US users.

These directives are often enforced without any notice or opportunity to appeal, a practice X says raises serious concerns about due process and transparency.

Further, the company expressed alarm over Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice asserting jurisdiction beyond its borders. According to X, the court has ordered content to be removed globally, even when such content is legal in countries like the United States. The court has described this overreach as a “natural consequence” of the internet, a justification X contends disregards international legal norms.

X also highlighted what it sees as the Brazilian judiciary’s disregard for the US-Brazil Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT).

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UK Government Moves to Investigate 4chan Under Draconian ‘Online Safety Act’ — Platform’s SAVAGE Response Leaves Them Humiliated

The British government is at it again, weaponizing its so-called “Online Safety Act” to crack down on speech it doesn’t like.

This time, the target is none other than the online forum 4chan, the notorious online discussion board where anonymous users post unfiltered commentary that sends elites into fits.

On June 10, 2025, Ofcom, the UK’s Orwellian Office of Communications, opened an official investigation into 4chan.

According to Ofcom, the platform failed to hand over information on demand, did not file the “appropriate illegal content risk assessments,” and didn’t bow to London’s censorship mandates. In other words, 4chan refused to bend the knee.

By August 13, Ofcom escalated matters, issuing a provisional notice of contravention under the Act and threatening fines of £20,000 ($27,100) plus daily penalties until the platform complied.

According to the notice:

Provisional Decision: Information Notice duties

In accordance with section 130 of the Online Safety Act 2023, we have today issued 4chan Community Support LLC with a provisional notice of contravention.

Ofcom is satisfied that there are reasonable grounds for believing the provider has contravened its duties under section 102(8) of the Act to comply with two requests for information. We will consider any representations provided in response to this provisional notice before we make a final decision on this matter.

The additional duties under investigation

On 10 June 2025, we opened an investigation into whether the provider of 4chan has failed/is failing to comply with its duties under the Online Safety Act 2023 to:

  • adequately respond to a statutory information request;
  • complete and keep a record of a suitable and sufficient illegal content risk assessment; and
  • comply with the safety duties about illegal content.

Ofcom’s investigation continues to examine concurrently whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that the provider has failed, or is failing, to comply with the other duties under investigation, including duties to protect its users from illegal content. We will provide updates on these matters in due course.

But instead of cowering, 4chan and its legal team fired back with a blistering response that left Ofcom and Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s censors utterly humiliated.

In a blistering legal statement posted by Byrne & Storm, P.C. and Coleman Law, P.C., 4chan’s lawyers dismantled Ofcom’s fantasy that they had authority over an American company.

The statement went further, warning that U.S. federal authorities had already been briefed and that the Trump Administration should be prepared to step in to defend American companies against foreign censorship mandates.

The statement reads:

According to press reports, the U.K. Office of Communications (“Ofcom”) has issued a provisional notice under the Online Safety Act alleging a contravention by 4chan and indicating an intention to impose a penalty of £20,000, plus daily penalties thereafter.

4chan is a United States company, incorporated in Delaware, with no establishment, assets, or operations in the United Kingdom. Any attempt to impose or enforce a penalty against 4chan will be resisted in U.S. federal court.

American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an e-mail. Under settled principles of U.S. law, American courts will not enforce foreign penal fines or censorship codes.

If necessary, we will seek appropriate relief in U.S. federal court to confirm these principles.

United States federal authorities have been briefed on this matter.

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, was reportedly warned by the White House to cease targeting Americans with U.K. censorship codes (according to reporting in the Telegraph on July 30th).

Despite these warnings, Ofcom continues its illegal campaign of harassment against American technology firms. A political solution to this matter is urgently required and that solution must come from the highest levels of American government.

We call on the Trump Administration to invoke all diplomatic and legal levers available to the United States to protect American companies from extraterritorial censorship mandates.

Our client reserves all rights.

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Immigration, Censorship, and the Deep State in the Yookay

Mass immigration and the refugee crisis have transformed European politics over the last decade. The United Kingdom has experienced some of the biggest changes, as repeated popular revolts against immigration have led to both Brexit and the collapse of the Conservative Party in favor of Reform UK. The American Conservative sat down with Connor Tomlinson, a British journalist and political commentator, to talk about the impact of immigration on the UK and the country’s future.

Let’s start with something that I think a lot of Americans have found quite puzzling looking at the situation in the UK. Immigration is the question in British politics, especially right now. Every British government for years has been elected on the promise of lowering immigration. None have done so. Why?

When you say for years, that means going back to 1974. Every single election referendum since has promised lower migration and never delivered. There’s a few reasons. 

The first, I think, is the economic system. Anytime someone promises to cut immigration, a pie chart is wheeled into the room by the so-called experts, and they say, “If you do this, we won’t be able to fudge the numbers on the population, which then builds our annual GDP up, which then allows us to borrow even more debt to pay down for subsidized socialized medicine and pension system.” One thing that Keir Starmer ran into when he was elected to government was that because the Treasury predictions are done on an annual cycle, you can’t cut the size of the civil service, because if you make anyone lose their jobs—and it’s very hard to do the extra legislation anyway—but if you make anyone lose their jobs, they get a year severance pay, and it doesn’t register as cuts. If you cut immigration in the short term, there might be a dip in GDP, because you cut X amount of totally useless jobs. So instead, all they ever do is cut the very few things that they can do—the extra payments and pensions and things like that, which ends up estranging entire swathes of their voter base. 

So economics is one reason. The other one is that there is a human-rights industrial complex that has taken root. Keir Starmer, when he was a human-rights lawyer busy going around the world acting on behalf of murderers to get rid of the death penalty, actually helped write the text for Tony Blair’s 1998 Human Rights Act, which wrote the European Court of Human Rights and Convention on Human Rights into British law. So even after Brexit, we still have European laws on our books, because they’re a separate entity.

That means that you get Pakistani pedophiles or Albanian gangsters who say, “My son doesn’t like the taste of foreign chicken nuggets,” appealing to the statue and saying, “My right to a family and private life should mean that I get to stay in this country even though I’m a criminal.” No politician wants to touch that because of the deep taboos that have existed since 1945, since the atrocities of the Holocaust, since Hitler killed a lot of people in a very racist way. So all these antiquated human rights doctrines, like the UN Refugee Convention, like the European Convention of Human Rights, which were written with Dutch Jews fleeing persecution in mind, are now pertaining to North African rapists, and we’re just battery-farming them at the taxpayers expense. 

The final reason, I would say, is that the government has a hell of a lot of contracts with private security and housing firms like Serco. So local councils which mismanage their budgets and these private security firms and these hotel chains will take direct government subsidies to house not just legal migrants that come over (95 percent of whom aren’t paying any taxes at all, and are just a net drain), but also loads of illegal migrants who have come over the physical barrier of the English Channel. These illegal migrants have been picked up by the RNLI, our border force, ferried back, and are now housed in four-star accommodations at the cost of over £14 billion a year to the taxpayer.

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