Tag: censorship

Here’s PROOF That UK’s X Ban Has NOTHING To Do With Protecting Children

As UK authorities ramp up their assault on free speech, a viral post shared by Elon Musk exposes the glaring hypocrisy in the government’s “protect the children” narrative. Data from the The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and police forces reveals Snapchat as the epicenter of online child sexual grooming, dwarfing X’s minimal involvement.

This comes amid Keir Starmer’s escalating war on X, where community notes routinely dismantle government spin, and unfiltered truth is delivered to the masses. If safeguarding kids was the real goal, it would be the likes of Snapchat in the crosshairs, given that thousands of real world child sexual offences have originated from its use.

Instead they’re going after X because, they claim, it provides the ability to make fake images of anyone in a bikini using the inbuilt Grok Ai image generator.

Based on 2025 NSPCC and UK police data, Snapchat is linked to 40-48% of identified child grooming cases, Instagram around 9-11%, Facebook 7-9%, WhatsApp 9%, and X under 2%.

These numbers align with NSPCC’s alarming report on the surge in online grooming. The charity recorded over 7,000 Sexual Communication with a Child offences in 2023/24—an 89% spike since 2017/18.

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Cloudflare Vs Italy: The Battle For Digital Freedom And Global Internet Sovereignty

Italian authorities are attempting to force the internet service provider Cloudflare to delete and block certain online services. Cloudflare is resisting and has turned to the U.S. government for support.

The fight for a free internet is intensifying.

The struggle over control of information, censorship, and economic dominance in the digital space is increasingly becoming a fundamental civilizational question. That the European Union now sees not only the EU Commission but also national governments and security apparatuses siding with information diktats, against the fundamental principle of free speech, sends a dangerous signal to the world. The EU has effectively withdrawn from the circle of freedom-oriented state actors.

Into this picture fits a recent report from Italy. A tweet by the founder and CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, has caused a stir.

Prince reports that Cloudflare has been hit with a $17 million fine by a — as he calls it — clandestine cabal in Italy. The accusation: Cloudflare refused to participate in an Italian censorship mechanism at the behest of this group.

A Cabal of Regulators and Media Corporations

Specifically, this concerns a system controlled by the Italian media authority AGCOM (Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni) called the “Piracy Shield.” This blocking system is officially aimed at combating illegal sports and media streaming services. The main targets are the economic interests of major players such as Italy’s Serie A football league, Sky Italia, DAZN, Mediaset, and other large European media and rights corporations.

Private actors, comparable to the so-called “Trusted Flaggers” now familiar in Germany, operate on behalf of the Italian media sector within this system. They report websites, IP addresses, or suspicious domains to the Piracy Shield. The authority then compels internet service providers and infrastructure operators like Cloudflare to implement the corresponding blocks within just 30 minutes. Every advertising minute counts; piracy is indeed a dangerously significant economic factor. The question is: How do states and affected companies enforce copyright? Do they operate under the rule of law and avoid collateral damage, such as backdoor state censorship?

According to Prince, all of this happens without a judicial order or prior review, bypassing due legal process entirely. The measures affect not only allegedly illegal content but also deeply intrude into the technical infrastructure of the internet.

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Starmer’s Looking for an Excuse to Ban X

Keir Starmer has signaled he is prepared to back regulatory action that could ultimately result in X being blocked in the UK.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has suggested, more or less, that because Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has been generating images of women and minors in bikinis, he’ll support going as far as hitting the kill switch and blocking access to the entire platform.

“The situation is disgraceful and disgusting,” Starmer said on Greatest Hits Radio; the station best known for playing ABBA and now, apparently, for frontline authoritarian tech policy announcements.

“X has got to get a grip of this, and Ofcom has our full support to take action…I’ve asked for all options to be on the table.”

“All options,” for those who don’t speak fluent Whitehall euphemism, now apparently includes turning Britain’s digital infrastructure into a sort of beige North Korea, where a bunch of government bureaucrats, armed with nothing but Online Safety Act censorship law and the panic of a 90s tabloid, get to decide which speech the public is allowed to see.

Now, you might be wondering: Surely he’s bluffing? Oh no. According to Downing Street sources, they’re quite serious.

And they’ve even named the mechanism: the Online Safety Act; that cheery little piece of legislation that sounds like it’s going to help grandmothers avoid email scams, but actually gives Ofcom the power to block platforms, fine them into oblivion, or ban them entirely if they don’t comply with government censorship orders.

Killing X isn’t a new idea. You may remember Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff, founded the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. In 2024, leaks revealed that the group was trying to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.”

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Shocking study linking covid jabs and cancer ‘censored’ by mysterious cyberattack

A global review examining reported cases of cancer following Covid vaccination was published earlier this month, just as the medical journal hosting it was hit by a cyberattack that has since taken the site offline.

The study appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Oncotarget on January 3 and was authored by cancer researchers from Tufts University in Boston and Brown University in Rhode Island.

In the review, researchers analyzed 69 previously published studies and case reports from around the world, identifying 333 instances in which cancer was newly diagnosed or rapidly worsened within a few weeks following Covid vaccination.

The review covered studies from 2020 to 2025 and included reports from 27 countries, including the US, Japan, China, Italy, Spain, and South Korea. No single country dominated, suggesting the observed patterns were reported globally. 

The authors emphasized that the review highlights patterns observed in existing reports, but does not establish a direct causal link between vaccination and cancer. 

Days after publication, Oncotarget’s website became inaccessible, displaying a ‘bad gateway’ error that the journal attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.

The journal reported the incident to the FBI, noting disruptions to its online operations. 

In social media posts, one of the paper’s authors, Dr Wafik El-Deiry of Brown University, expressed concern that the attack disrupted access to newly published research. 

‘Censorship is alive and well in the US, and it has come into medicine in a big, awful way,’ El-Deiry wrote in a post on X.

The FBI told Daily Mail that it ‘neither confirms nor denies the existence of any specific investigation’ into a cyberattack on Oncotarget. 

The Daily Mail has reached out to Oncotarget for comment on the cyberattack investigation. 

In a post that can no longer be accessed because of the website hacking, Oncotarget noted disruptions to the availability of new studies online. Although they did not accuse a specific group of wrongdoing, the journal alleged without evidence that the hackers may be connected to the anonymous research review group PubPeer.

The researchers alleged that the cyberattack targeted Oncotarget’s servers to disrupt the journal’s operations and prevent new papers from being properly added to the site’s index. 

The message was shared on social media by El-Deiry before the website crashed, with the doctor adding, ‘Censorship of the scientific press is keeping important published information about Covid infection, Covid vaccines and cancer signals from reaching the scientific community and beyond.’

In a statement to the Daily Mail, PubPeer declared: ‘No officer, employee or volunteer at PubPeer has any involvement whatsoever with whatever is going on at that journal.’

PubPeer is an online platform where researchers can anonymously comment on peer-reviewed scientific papers after they’ve already appeared in journals.

Its stated goal has been post-publication peer review, meaning people discuss, critique, or point out potential issues in studies that have already passed the usual pre-publication checks.

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Pakistan Blocks Major VPNs Under New Licensing Rules, Expanding State Control Over Internet Access

Over the past two weeks, internet users in Pakistan have watched their encrypted connections vanish one after another. Beginning December 22, 2025, major VPNs, including Proton VPN, NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, Mullvad, Cloudflare WARP, and Psiphon have been systematically blocked across the country, according to Daily Pakistan.

The blackout follows a government licensing framework that, on paper, regulates VPN providers but in practice gives the state the power to decide which privacy tools are permitted.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) began enforcing its Class Value Added Services (CVAS-Data) licensing rules in November 2025, nearly a year after quietly introducing the policy.

Under these regulations, companies that want to operate legally must install “Legal Interception” compliant hardware and hand it over “to nationally authorized security organizations” at their own expense whenever instructed.

Any VPN not listed as licensed is automatically subject to blocking by domestic internet providers.

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EU Veterans Rally to Recast the Digital Services Act as Accountability Not Control

It’s not every day that a collection of retired European grandees emerges from Brussels’ revolving doors to tell everyone how misunderstood the European Union is.

Yet here we are, with Bertrand Badré, Margrethe Vestager, Mariya Gabriel, Nicolas Schmit, and Guillaume Klossa linking arms to pen a sentimental defense of the bloc’s new digital commandments.

Their essay, “The Truth About Europe’s Regulation of Digital Platforms,” aims to assure us that Europe’s online rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), does not constitute censorship. It is “accountability,” they say.

In their telling, the DSA is less a blunt legal instrument than a moral document, a kind of digital Magna Carta designed to civilize Silicon Valley’s chaotic playground.

“There is no content regulation at the EU level,” they wrote, invoking the phrase like a magic spell meant to ward off skeptics.

The laws, they explained, simply make big tech companies “evaluate and mitigate systemic risks” and “act against illegal content.” Nothing to see here, just a little transparency, a dash of democracy protection, and the occasional removal of whatever a member state happens to call “illegal.”

It is the sort of language that can only come from officials who have spent decades describing regulation as liberation.

The letter was a response to a growing chorus of critics, including former US officials, who say Europe’s digital regime gives bureaucrats indirect control over what billions of people can see or say online.

Under the DSA, platforms must scan for “harmful or misleading” content, report their mitigation efforts, and warn users when something gets zapped.

Free speech groups have pointed out that when the law tells companies to “evaluate risks to democracy,” those companies tend to err on the side of deleting anything remotely controversial.

To them, “mitigation” often means mass deletion.

Badré and company brushed this off. “When we require platforms to be transparent about their algorithms, to assess risks to democracy and mental health, to remove clearly illegal content while notifying those affected, we are not censoring,” they wrote.

“We are insisting that companies with unprecedented power over public discourse operate with some measure of public accountability.”

When Europe does it, it is not censorship, it is civic hygiene.

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4chan and Kiwi Farms Tell Ofcom It Can’t Censor and Run From Lawsuits

Attorneys representing 4chan and Kiwi Farms have filed an opposition to the UK Office of Communications’ (Ofcom) motion to dismiss their US lawsuit, arguing that the British regulator’s attempt to enforce its Online Safety Act (OSA) on American platforms amounts to unlawful foreign censorship and overreach into the United States’ constitutional domain.

The filing, made in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on December 29, 2025, contends that Ofcom’s actions, sending legally binding “Section 100 Orders” via email to compel compliance with the OSA, violate US sovereignty and the First Amendment.

We obtained a copy of the filing for you here.

The plaintiffs assert that Ofcom’s conduct has no legal force in the United States because it bypassed all recognized international service procedures, including the Hague Service Convention and the US–UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty.

Lawyers Ron Coleman and Preston Byrne argue that Ofcom’s regulatory model functions like a commercial enterprise rather than a sovereign body, funded through fees extracted from companies it regulates.

Under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the plaintiffs maintain that this structure places Ofcom’s operations within the “commercial activity” exception, thereby stripping it of immunity from suit in US courts.

The opposition brief situates the dispute within a broader geopolitical context, describing a “diplomatic standoff” between Washington and London over the reach of online speech laws.

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‘We are the free world now’ — Europe declares war on free speech in the US

“We are the free world now.” Those words from Raphael Glucksmann, a French socialist member of the European Parliament, captured the pearl-clutching outrage of Europeans after the Trump administration did what no prior administration has ever done — stand up to Europe to defend the freedom of speech.

This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio barred five figures closely associated with European censorship efforts from traveling to the U.S. This includes Thierry Breton, the former European Union commissioner responsible for digital policy.

In a post on X, Rubio declared that the U.S. “will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship” and will target “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States.”

Breton achieved infamy as one of the architects of the massive EU censorship system, which is now being globalized. Armed with the notorious Digital Service Act, Breton and others threatened American companies and officials that they would have to yield to European standards of free speech. After Breton learned that Musk was planning to interview Trump before the last presidential election, he even warned the X owner that he would be “monitored” and potentially subject to EU fines.

Socialist Glucksmann is now irate at “this scandalous sanction against Thierry Breton.”

“We are Europeans,” he declared. “We must defend our laws, our principles, our interests.” In other words, this is a war over whether Europe or the U.S. Constitution will dictate the scope of free speech for American companies and citizens.

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DOJ scrambles to find VOLUNTEERS to help redact new Epstein files after sleuths used simple method to crack censored documents

The Justice Department is seeking volunteers to help redact more Epstein files over the ‘next several days,’ it has emerged.

A supervising prosecutor announced an ’emergency request’ from the DOJ to help with ‘remote document review and redactions related to the Epstein files,’ according to an internal email sent to the Southern District of Florida‘s US Attorney’s Office.

The email, which was reviewed by CNN, suggests the DOJ will release more files related to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. 

‘I am aware that the timing could not be worse,’ the official reportedly wrote in Tuesday’s email asking career prosecutors for assistance. ‘For some the holidays are about to begin, but I know that for others the holidays are coming to an end.’ 

The supervising prosecutor cited how officials have an ‘obligation to the public to release’ the files but in order to do so must make ‘certain redactions’ to ‘protect the identity of the victims, among other things.’

The DOJ has released a massive trove of Epstein files already, but there are many more to come with officials noting that overall there are hundreds of thousands of documents set to be released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Some of the files released by the DOJ were improperly redacted, allowing sleuths to easily reveal the censored information by copying and pasting blacked-out text into a word processing document, the New York Times reported.

The hack allowed viewers to reveal previously withheld names and entities. It also revealed additional details of Epstein’s alleged abuse – which the Daily Mail has opted not to publish – and money concealment tactics.

The Daily Mail understands the redactions that sleuths were able to hack through were applied by various courts, whose documents were then handed over to the DOJ and published in the Epstein files. Files redacted by the DOJ and FBI were unaffected.

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Macron accuses US of ‘intimidation’ against EU

US visa restrictions against several senior EU officials amount to “intimidation and coercion” aimed at undermining the bloc’s digital policies and sovereignty, French President Emmanuel Macron has said.

On Tuesday, the administration of US President Donald Trump announced new sanctions targeting Thierry Breton, the former European Commissioner for Internal Market appointed by Macron himself, and four other officials over what it described as “efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.”

At the core of the dispute are the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, which impose strict competition and transparency obligations on large online platforms. Given that most such firms – including Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon – are headquartered in the US, American officials have argued the framework is discriminatory. Breton in particular was among the officials who played a pivotal role in establishing the EU digital rulebook.

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