Tag: censorship

Federal Judge Orders UO to Pay $191K to PSU Professor Blocked for “All Men Are Created Equal” Comment

The University of Oregon is facing the financial consequences of an unconstitutional attempt to suppress speech after a federal judge ordered it to pay $191,000 in legal fees to Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley.

The order, issued by US District Judge John V. Acosta, follows a settlement reached in March 2025 in which the university acknowledged Gilley’s comments should not have been censored and agreed to implement major policy reforms.

The legal fees, which will be covered by UO’s insurer United Educators, include $147,070 awarded to the Institute for Free Speech (IFS) and $43,930 to the Angus Lee Law Firm.

These payments, combined with more than $533,000 that the university had already spent on its own legal representation by late 2024, push the cost of defending its actions to at least $724,000.

That figure excludes further expenses accrued since November.

These high costs are directly tied to UO’s decision to support its DEI officials after they blocked Gilley for replying “all men are created equal” to a university post on X.

This fee award reflects the substantial resources required to vindicate fundamental constitutional rights in the digital age, as well as the vigor with which the University of Oregon chose to defend unconstitutional policies,” said Del Kolde, IFS Senior Attorney.

“The university made a costly decision to prioritize DEI principles over constitutional principles, aggressively litigating this case for nearly three years rather than acknowledging the obvious, that blocking someone for quoting the Declaration of Independence violates the First Amendment.”

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Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Blasts EU’s Digital Services Act as Gateway to Censorship and Centralized Control

While European regulators polish their halos and crank out legislation faster than Brussels can subsidize cheese, Pavel Durov is out here playing the role of a digital heretic.

In a French interview, the Telegram founder is sounding alarms over what he sees as a not-so-slow crawl toward speech control disguised as safety. The latest darling of the bureaucratic elite? The Digital Services Act is a piece of legislation that reads like it was written by a committee of risk-averse interns with a fetish for vague language and zero accountability.

Durov isn’t whispering his concerns at think tank luncheons or lobbying dinners. He’s calling it what it is: an institutional greenlight for censorship. “Once you legitimize censorship, it’s difficult to go back,” he says, which probably makes him the least popular dinner guest in Brussels since anyone asked about eurozone debt.

What makes this more than another libertarian tech rant is that Durov isn’t hypothesizing. He’s living it. Right now, he’s effectively stuck in France, being slow-roasted by criminal accusations that, according to him, are so flimsy they wouldn’t hold up in a Bluesky comment section.

“Nothing has ever been proven that shows that I am, even for a second, guilty of anything,” he insists.

One story in particular peels back the clean, professional veneer of Europe’s “rules-based” order.

Durov describes a charming little tête-à-tête with the head of France’s foreign intelligence service, the DGSE.

Over croissants and state-sponsored pressure, he was asked to delete Telegram channels tied to Romanian political activists.

He refused. Not with a polite “I’ll look into it” or some carefully lawyered dodge, but with what may be the most defiant line uttered by a CEO since Steve Jobs told IBM to get lost: “I told them I prefer to die than betray my users.”

Nothing screams “democracy in action” quite like a spy agency demanding censorship in a private meeting. At least they skipped the pretense.

Beneath the PR gloss of the Digital Services Act lies the basic truth of modern governance: power is being centralized and speech, sanitized.

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X Sues New York For Demanding Social Media Data To Censor Speech

Social media company X sued New York to challenge a state law that requires social media companies to submit semi-annual reports about how they are suppressing certain kinds of speech to the New York attorney general. According to the lawsuit, provisions in the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” violate social media companies’ First Amendment rights and threaten free speech.

The law, in part, outlines “terms of service reports” in which companies must disclose to the state whether the terms of service for each of their platforms define certain “categories,” including hate speech, racism, extremism, misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference. If their terms of service do include these categories, the companies would also be required to include those definitions in the report. The reports would also require companies to disclose a “detailed description” of their “content moderation practices” regarding these categories. Failing to submit the report could engender $15,000 per day. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the law in December, and it is set to go into effect this year.

X challenged the constitutionality of the “Content Category Report” portions of the law, arguing that they force companies to disclose “highly sensitive and controversial speech” protected under the Constitution. X also noted that content moderation “engenders considerable debate among reasonable people about where to draw the correct proverbial line,” and that “[t]his is not a role the government may play.”

Musk, who has described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” bought Twitter in 2022 to return the platform to “a digital town square” where ideas could be debated freely. He loosened the platform’s content moderation rules and readmitted suspended users, including President Donald Trump.

New York State Sen. Brad Holyman-Sigal and Assemblywoman Grace Lee, both Democrats, sponsored the law. In a letter that X quoted in the lawsuit, the two politicians said that X and Musk have a “disturbing record,” which “threatens the foundations of our democracy.” In a Tuesday statement responding to the lawsuit, the two lawmakers called social media companies, including X, “cesspools of hate speech,” and claimed the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” is necessary for “transparency.”

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IDF Mandates Pre-Approval for Reporting Missile Strikes, Including on Social Media and Online Platforms

A new set of censorship rules issued by the Israel Defense Forces is raising alarms over media freedom and public transparency.

Brigadier-General Kobi Mandelblit, Israel’s chief censor, declared on Wednesday a mandate requiring prior approval for any reporting on where missiles or drones have struck, no matter the platform or location of publication.

According to the statement, “any person who prints or publishes printed matter or a publication regarding the location of a strike or hit by enemy war materiel, including missiles of any kind and UAVs, in the media or online (including social media, blogs and chats, etc.)” must now submit that material to the military censor for approval before it is released.

This directive applies to both domestic and international reporting, online and offline.

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California Judge Blocks Trump Admin from Dismantling State Dept’s Censorship Agencies

A federal judge in California has halted the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) Hub, formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

In a June 13 order, US District Judge Susan Illston declared that the planned elimination of the unit, part of a broader push by the administration to downsize the federal government, violates an earlier injunction.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio may have prematurely celebrated the end of R-FIMI back in April when he said the censorship unit was “dead.”

Despite his announcement, legal barriers remain in place, preserving the agency’s existence. For now.

Through the intervention of the federal judiciary, R-FIMI, a program with a $50 million annual budget that has drawn fire for suppressing online speech under the pretense of combating “foreign disinformation,” has been granted an unexpected lifeline.

The agency, a legacy of the Obama administration, was launched in 2016 to monitor and counter alleged foreign propaganda, particularly from Russia.

But over time, its activities expanded into domestic spheres, drawing allegations that it pressured social media platforms to silence certain political voices ahead of the 2020 election.

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Musk says he is providing Iran with Starlink as regime restricts internet

Elon Musk signaled late Friday night that he is providing Iranians with Starlink satellite internet after conservative analyst Mark Levin asked him to turn the service on in Iran during Israel‘s conflict with the country.

“The beams are on,” Musk said in a response to Levin’s request on X.

Levin’s initial post argued that if Starlink is turned on in the country, “Musk can put the final nail in the coffin of the Iranian regime.” Starlink is Musk’s satellite internet service.

Iran restricted internet access for millions of people following Israel’s strike on the country. Internet usage in the country heavily declined after the restrictions were issued, according to the internet monitoring group Netblocks. There hasn’t been a complete block of traffic, however, as Levin’s post suggested.

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Joe Rogan Reveals Two Former U.S. Presidents Pressured Spotify to Censor His Views on COVID

Joe Rogan has revealed that two former U.S. presidents pressured Spotify to censor his views on COVID.

In his most recent episode with Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a Houston-based otolaryngologist who wrote a book about her battle to push back against the mainstream narratives about the pandemic, Rogan detailed how aggressively people in powerful places had come after him.

“Spotify got calls from two former presidents,”

Spotify responded by flagging podcasts discussing COVID-19, however, although Rogan insists the effects were overwhelmingly positive.

“I grew by two million subscribers in a month,” he said.

“People started listening, and they started listening, like, ‘Oh, he’s really reasonable and pretty humble about all this stuff and just asking questions.’”

Rogan also criticized media outlets that mocked his use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19, accusing them of deliberately misleading the public by calling it a horse dewormer.

“I’m, like, ‘Why aren’t you guys concentrating on the fact that a 55-year-old man is fine three days later during the worst strain?’

“It was during the Delta where everybody’s freaking out. ‘This one’s going to kill us all,’” he continued.

“And I was fine in three days.”

The 57-year-old added that he no longer respects mainstream media after they disgraced themselves countless times.

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Britain Launches Cross-Border Censorship Hunt Against 4chan

The UK government has taken another aggressive step in its campaign to regulate online speech, launching formal investigations into the message board 4chan and seven file-sharing sites under its far-reaching Online Safety Act.

But this is more than a domestic crackdown; it is a clear attempt to assert British speech laws far beyond its borders, targeting platforms that have no meaningful presence in the UK.

The law, which came into full force in April, gives sweeping powers to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, to demand that websites and apps proactively remove undefined categories of “illegal content.”

Failure to comply can trigger massive fines of up to £18 million ($24M) or 10 percent of global revenue, criminal penalties for company executives, and site-wide bans within the UK.

Now, Ofcom has set its sights on 4chan, a US-hosted imageboard owned by a Japanese national. The site operates under US law and has no physical infrastructure, employees, or legal registration in Britain. Nonetheless, UK regulators have declared it fair game.

“Wherever in the world a service is based if it has ‘links to the UK’, it now has duties to protect UK users,” Ofcom insists.

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France considers requiring Musk’s X to verify users’ age

The French government is considering designating X as a porn platform — a move that will likely have the platform implementing strict age verification requirements.

Such a designation could effectively ban children from accessing the social media app unless it curtailed adult content. Paris has recently upped its efforts to protect kids online by requiring age verification by porn platforms.

“X has indicated since 2024 that it accepts the distribution of pornographic content. It must therefore be treated as such,” Digital Minister Clara Chappaz’s office told POLITICO.

Her team has been tasked with “examining the designation of X in the decree concerning pornographic sites that must verify the age of their users.”

The confirmation follows an appearance by Chappaz on French TV show “Quotidien” on Thursday evening, where she said X will soon receive “the same pretty papers as YouPorn” instructing X to ban adult content or implement age screening.

Porn platforms serving content in France are required to implement age verification measures with a final deadline of June 7, although some are protesting.

Failure to comply could see sites fined, delisted from search engines or blocked completely.

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Censorship in Our Materialist World

My dear friends,

A long time ago but I am still here. Two weeks ago I learned on one and the same day that the LinkedIn account of Jakobien Huysman and the Facebook page of Alain Grootaers (both producers of the corona critical Headwind series) were permanently removed, that Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen was visited by six policemen for making a satirical movie about a pro-Palestian rally in Amsterdam, that Martin Kulldorff was fired as a Harvard professor for his criticial stance during the corona crisis, and that Belgian right wing politician Dries Van Langenhove got a one-year prison sentence for allowing racist memes to circulate in a WhatsApp group.

What do all these sanctioned acts have in common? They are linguistic acts—acts of speech. When you consider the rise of censorship within its broader cultural context, you notice something remarkable: Society is in the grip of the materialist view on man and the world, which reduces the entire realm of speech and consciousness to a meaningless side product of biochemical processes in our brain.

Man thinks, feels, and speaks, but that doesn’t really matter. He is a heap of flesh and bones and from the biochemical simmering in his braincase some thoughts and feelings emerge—God knows why. And from time to time, the machine rattles and creaks a bit and the mouth of the human being expels some noise. This noise turns out to be evolutionarily useful. It allows the efficient exchange of information and that confers an advantage in the struggle to survive. That’s why the human being has continued to speak.

This is how the materialist worldview explains the field of speech and consciousness, and this is how it degrades the realm of the Mind and the Soul.  

Nevertheless, this materialist society, which reduces consciousness and speech to a negligible side effect, is in the first place scared of…speech and consciousness. It tries to control thoughts and feelings through indoctrination and propaganda and with censorship it tries to keep the field of speech in an iron choke hold. This ‘velvet glove totalitarianism’ is very real. Every time we use the internet or social media it steers our mind through state-controlled search engines and AI-generated algorithms; through machine learning each and every dissident narrative is mapped and its most influential representers are identified and inhibited; it recruits tens of thousands of ‘digital first responders’ to ridiculize and criminalize everyone who doesn’t conform to the state ideology, and so on.

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