Tag: censorship

Rubio Is Sued Over Visa Bans on Foreign Censorship Supporters

A nonprofit that supports online speech restrictions is suing the Trump administration for sanctioning people who pushed platforms to delete speech. The case landed in a D.C. courtroom on Wednesday and the irony runs deep.

The Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) wants a federal judge to block a State Department visa policy announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May 2025.

The policy allows the US to deny entry, revoke visas, or deport foreign nationals the government considers “complicit in censoring Americans.”

CITR filed for a preliminary injunction, and Chief Judge James Boasberg heard oral arguments on May 13 in Coalition for Independent Technology Research v. Rubio.

The five people sanctioned under this policy in December 2025 are not random academics. Thierry Breton helped build the EU’s Digital Services Act, which compels American tech companies to delete speech Europeans find objectionable.

Imran Ahmed runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has campaigned to get accounts banned from platforms.

Clare Melford runs the Global Disinformation Index, which compiled advertiser blacklists to financially punish news outlets it decided were spreading “disinformation.”

Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg co-founded HateAid, a German group pushing legal action against speech it calls “digital violence.”

Rubio accused them of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”

CITR’s attorney Carrie DeCell argued that “the government is subjecting CITR members and other non-citizens to exclusion, detention and deportation simply for reporting on speech on social media and the harms that might arise from it, and advocating for different content moderation policies and other policies that might govern internet platforms.”

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Ofcom and the Fantasy of Global Speech Control

Ofcom appears to believe that a website is a kind of television channel. This would explain a lot about what happened on Wednesday, when Britain’s speech regulator fined an American mental health and suicide discussion forum £950,000 ($1.3 million) for hosting speech that is legal in America, on servers in America, operated by Americans.

The site had already blocked British visitors from accessing it, voluntarily, as a gesture of goodwill, despite having no legal obligation to do so and despite Ofcom having no jurisdiction to demand it. Ofcom fined it anyway. The fine is unenforceable.

The site owes Ofcom nothing under American law. And even if the site had never blocked a single British visitor, Ofcom’s case would still make no sense, because a British regulator cannot fine an American citizen for legal American speech on an American server any more than the French postal service can fine you for what you write in your own diary.

Ofcom is the Office of Communications, the British government’s speech regulator. Americans don’t really have an equivalent because most Americans would never stand for one. The closest thing is the FCC, except imagine the FCC could also decide what you’re allowed to say on the internet and fine you if it disapproves.

Under the notorious Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, Ofcom gained the power to decide what speech is permissible online and to fine platforms that host speech the UK government doesn’t like.

That includes speech that is perfectly legal everywhere else on earth. It is, when you think about it for more than four seconds, absolutely mad.

Ofcom launched on December 29, 2003, stitched together from five separate regulators: the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the Independent Television Commission, the Office of Telecommunications, the Radio Authority, and the Radiocommunications Agency.

They all dealt with broadcasting, telecoms, or spectrum. They regulated transmitters, phone lines, and radio frequencies, all of which used publicly owned spectrum and publicly funded infrastructure to push content into British living rooms.

The airwaves belonged to the public. The transmitters were built with public money. If you were using national resources to broadcast to a national audience, it made sense that a national regulator got to set some terms. None of these five organizations were designed to have opinions about what a foreigner writes on a computer in Virginia.

The confusion starts with Ofcom not understanding what a website actually is.

A website does not push anything. Content sits on a server. A visitor actively goes to it and requests it. The data crosses borders only because someone on the other end typed in the URL. Website users are called “visitors” and not “viewers” for exactly this reason. They go to the site. The site does not come to them.

This is not a complicated distinction. A reasonably bright nine-year-old could grasp it over breakfast. Ofcom, apparently, cannot.

The regulator is treating a website in Virginia as though it were a transmitter on a hill in Surrey and claiming jurisdiction over the server rather than the person visiting it. It’s like fining an American for not stopping British citizens from mailing letters to them.

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Days Away: The TAKE IT DOWN Act Creates a Censorship Mechanism With No Safeguards

The Federal Trade Commission sent letters to 17 major tech companies this week, warning them to comply with the Take It Down Act by May 19 or face fines of $53,088 per violation.

Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, X, Reddit, Discord, Snapchat, Pinterest, Bumble, Match Group, Automattic, and SmugMug all got the same message from Chairman Andrew Ferguson.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

“We stand ready to monitor compliance, investigate violations, and enforce the Take It Down Act,” Ferguson wrote.

“Protecting the vulnerable, especially children, from this harmful abuse is a top priority for this agency and this administration.”

The law, signed by President Trump in May 2025 with strong backing from First Lady Melania Trump, requires platforms to delete non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated deepfakes, within 48 hours of receiving a removal request.

Platforms must also find and remove identical copies, provide clear notice about the removal process and let people track their requests. The FTC published a business guidance page alongside the letter spelling all of this out. The definition of “covered platform” is broad enough to capture social media, messaging apps, video sharing, gaming platforms, and essentially any site hosting user-generated content.

Nobody wants revenge porn circulating online. But the law Congress passed is far broader than the problem it claims to solve.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act borrows its structure from the DMCA’s already-controversial notice-and-takedown system, then strips out the safeguards.

Under the DMCA, a takedown request must include a statement under penalty of perjury. False claims can result in liability. There’s a counter-notice process so the person whose content was deleted can push back. TIDA has none of this. There’s no penalty for false claims, no counter-notice, no requirement that the filer prove anything before content disappears. A platform gets a complaint, has 48 hours, and deletes. That’s the entire process and exactly why the Take it Down Act introduces a new censorship mechanism.

The law defines a violation as involving an “identifiable individual” engaged in “sexually explicit conduct,” without defining that conduct narrowly.

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AI Safety Institute Debuts with Big-Name Backers and a Censorship Agenda

Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute arrived at the Danish Parliament this week and the guest list is stacked with people who think you can’t be trusted to speak freely online.

Hillary Clinton, Ursula von der Leyen, former Biden Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Ofcom chief Melanie Dawes, and the head of an organization that wants to break end-to-end encryption are all gathering at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen to announce what they’d like to do next about AI and children.

The “next” part is where it gets concerning. The Youth AI Safety Institute, launched by Common Sense Media on May 5, says it will “complement efforts by regulators and policymakers to translate frameworks such as the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act, and the UK Online Safety Act into practical protections for child-safe AI.”

Those three censorship laws represent the most aggressive government-directed speech suppression regimes currently operating in the Western world. The Institute isn’t questioning them. In fact, it wants to help implement them and push them further.

The summit, titled “Keeping Our Children and Families Safe in the AI Era,” is co-hosted by Common Sense Media, Save the Children Denmark, and Margrethe Vestager, who spent years as the European Commission’s executive vice president building the regulatory architecture that now lets EU officials order platforms to delete content.

More than 200 policymakers, tech executives, and civil society figures are expected. King Frederik X of Denmark is giving the opening address. The Duchess of Edinburgh will attend. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is on the bill.

And so is Pinterest CEO Bill Ready, whose company helped pay for the Institute’s creation.

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Paris Prosecutors Move to Criminally Charge Musk and xAI

Paris prosecutors announced Thursday that their investigation into Elon Musk’s social platform X has been upgraded to a full criminal probe.

The Paris prosecutor’s office is now asking investigating magistrates to formally charge Musk, former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, and three companies linked to the platform, including xAI and X.AI Holdings Corp. If they refuse to appear for those charges, prosecutors say judges can issue warrants that carry the same legal weight.

The charges cover a long and growing list of alleged offenses: Complicity in possessing and distributing sexual images. Nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes. Denial of crimes against humanity. Fraudulent extraction of user data. Violation of the secrecy of electronic correspondence. Manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group. Illegal collection of personal data without adequate security.

The announcement came just three weeks after the US Department of Justice refused to cooperate with the French investigation, calling it an attempt to regulate American speech through foreign criminal law. France pushed ahead anyway.

The investigation did not begin with deepfakes or child safety. It began with politics.

French Member of Parliament Éric Bothorel, a member of President Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, filed a complaint in 2025 alleging that X’s algorithm had been manipulated for the purpose of “foreign interference” in French politics.

Bothorel accused the platform of narrowing “diversity of voices and options” after Musk’s takeover and cited Musk’s “personal interventions” in moderation decisions.

A second complaint, from a senior official in French public administration, alleged the same thing, claiming to observe a surge of “hateful, racist, anti-LGBTQ” content aimed at skewing democratic debate.

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Globalism Is Totalitarianism

Consider these recent news stories from Europe and North America:

(1) Germany’s government is considering a new law that would allow its spy agency to investigate and block citizens from buying homes if the would-be owners hold political views that conflict with the government’s official policies.  In effect, political dissent would disqualify a person from owning a home.

(2) London Mayor Sadiq Khan is pushing for a government-run “disinformation unit” to investigate and silence online criticism of the mayor’s policies.

(3) British police are doing more to crack down on citizens’ “politically incorrect” speech than they are to prevent Islamic rape gangs from targeting women and girls.

(4) Under the guise of “protecting the children,” unelected queen (some say European Commission President) Ursula von der Leyen has announced the rollout of Europe’s mandatory digital IDs which will eliminate online privacy, anonymity, and, eventually, all public dissent to official government policies.

(5) North American and European intelligence agencies continue to downplay the threats from Islamic terrorism and overstate any threats from “white supremacy” and “right-wing extremism.” 

(6) For the nineteenth time, Ukrainian hold-over president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has submitted legislation to Ukraine’s hold-over parliament to extend a decree of martial law, which suspends elections, bans opposition parties, prohibits media organizations from criticizing government policy, and empowers the government to conscript men into military service and confiscate civilian resources for the war effort.

(7) In support of secret “gender transitions” at taxpayer-funded schools and taxpayer-funded “gender reassignment” surgeries, Nova Scotia Education Minister Brendan Maguire lambasted Canadian parents who believe that they “deserve rights over” their children.  Maguire made it clear that Canadian citizens have no parental rights.

(8) In France, 60% of voters believe that “a replacement of the French population by non-European populations” is occurring right now.  66% see this as bad for France.

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European Commission Official Touts 17 Investigations as Proof the Digital Services Act “Delivers”

The European Union’s Digital Services Act is a censorship and surveillance law dressed in the language of safety. It gives unelected officials in Brussels the power to decide what hundreds of millions of people are allowed to say online and it is building the infrastructure to verify their identities before they’re permitted to say it.

But at POLITICO’s AI & Tech Week summit in Brussels this month, Renate Nikolay, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General at DG CONNECT, celebrated the law’s growing enforcement record. Seventeen ongoing investigations and one non-compliance decision, she told the audience, prove the DSA “delivers.”

What the DSA delivers is pressure. Pressure on platforms to censor more speech, faster, with fewer questions asked. Pressure to open their algorithms and internal systems to government inspection without a court order. And, increasingly, pressure on individual users to prove who they are before they’re allowed to participate in public discourse online.

Nikolay presented these enforcement numbers as proof of success. They are proof of something but not what she thinks.

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Meta Will Fight Ofcom Over the Math, Just Not the Censorship

Meta filed a judicial review against Ofcom in London’s High Court on Thursday over how the regulator calculates fees and fines under the Online Safety Act, the UK’s online censorship law. The company isn’t challenging the law’s censorship powers, its ability to compel scanning of encrypted messages, or its elastic definition of online “harm.” It is challenging the size of the fine.

The dispute centers on whether Ofcom should base penalties on Meta’s global revenue or just what it earns in the UK and the gap between those two figures is enormous. Meta reported roughly $201 billion in worldwide revenue last year, and the Online Safety Act lets Ofcom fine companies up to 10% of “qualifying worldwide revenue,” which puts Meta’s theoretical penalty ceiling near $20 billion. Calculated on UK-only revenue, that number collapses.

“We and others in the tech industry believe [Ofcom’s] decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history.”

Ofcom pushed back in a statement, saying: “Disappointingly, Meta are objecting to the payment of fees, and any penalties that could be levied on companies in future, that are calculated on this basis.”

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EU Pushes Meta Toward Digital ID and Age Verification Under DSA, Threatens 6% Revenue Fine

Brussels has decided Meta isn’t monitoring its users hard enough.

The European Commission issued a preliminary finding on April 29 that Facebook and Instagram violate the Digital Services Act because the company can’t reliably stop children under 13 from creating accounts, opening Meta to fines that could reach 6 percent of its global annual turnover, a sum potentially north of $12 billion.

The official complaint is clearly a regulator demanding more identity checks, more verification, more friction at the door.

Meta’s existing approach, which mostly involves asking users to type in their birthday, lets minors lie their way onto the platform. The Commission says the tool available for reporting underage users requires up to seven clicks to access, is not pre-filled with user information, and frequently results in no follow-up action.

The Commission also pointed to evidence that around 10 to 12 per cent of children under 13 were accessing Instagram and/or Facebook, contradicting Meta’s own internal numbers.

What the Commission wants Meta to do instead carries a cost most of the coverage skipped over. Self-declared birthdays are inadequate, so something stronger has to fill the gap.

That means age estimation systems that infer how old you are from how you behave or age verification that links your account to a government-issued document. Either path turns the basic act of opening a social media account into either a behavioral surveillance event or an identity verification event. There is no third option being seriously proposed.

The implications reach well beyond the under-13 question. Once a platform knows who you are with legal certainty, the entire premise of online speech changes.

Anonymity has historically protected dissidents, whistleblowers, abuse survivors, journalists communicating with sources, and ordinary people who simply don’t want their employer reading their political opinions.

Strip that away and you lose the conditions under which a great deal of valuable speech actually happens. People self-censor when they know they are being watched and a verified internet is a watched internet by definition.

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Censorship in Disguise? Congress Introduces Antisemitism Resolution

Two congressmen introduced a resolution this week that appears to include pressure on tech companies to censor people.

Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) have co-sponsored a resolution “condemning antisemitic rhetoric from prominent online personalities.” At four pages long, it urges “social media platforms and public leaders to denounce and address” antisemitism.

The resolution blames online platforms for the recent rise in anti-Jewish bigotry. It claims antisemitic incidents have “significantly increased, including a 344 percent increase over the past 5 years, and [an] 893 percent increase over the past 10 years.” And the reason is because online platforms have served as “a major vector for the spread of such hatred.”

Piker and Owens

Two influencers are targeted in the resolution, Hasan Piker and Candace Owens, both of whom have intensely criticized the Israeli government’s military operation in Gaza. “Piker has openly applauded Hamas’ terrorism, downplayed the mass rape of civilians on October 7th, and dehumanized Orthodox Jews as ‘inbred,’” Lawler said in a statement. “Owens has trafficked in vile conspiracy theories, promoted blood libels, and platformed Holocaust deniers.”

“Hatred is hatred, period,” Gottheimer said. “We must stand up and speak out. I get that speaking up is not easy, but our constituents didn’t elect us to always take the easy path. That’s what principled leadership is all about.”

Piker denied being an antisemite. “They are once again conflating legitimate critics of Israel with actual antisemites,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, according to reports. “They would rather complain about fake antisemitism in defense of Israel than call out the real sources of Jew hatred with a full chest. I have spent my entire career combating all forms of bigotry including antisemitism and will continue to do so in spite [of] this cynical ploy to satisfy donors.”

Owens has called the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza a genocide. So has another popular podcaster, Tucker Carlson. The Israeli human-rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel agree. As do millions of people around the world. And, if polls are to be believed, most American Jews believe Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, with about four in 10 saying it’s guilty of genocide.

Israel and Gaza

Reports say 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza, most of them civilians, thousands of them children. Most of the Gaza Strip has been carpet bombed, leaving a majority of people homeless. A few months back, U.S. President Donald Trump admitted people were starving in Gaza. Understandably, people have spoken out against that.

Israel has justified its severe response as a proper way to address the October 7 massacre during which Hamas brutally killed 1,200 Israelis. While it goes widely unreported, it should not be overlooked that Israeli defense officials reportedly ignored several warnings from within its own defense apparatus of what was coming. Nevertheless, this has all inflamed tremendous criticism toward the Israeli government. In some cases, it has ginned up genuine anti-Jewish bigotry.

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