Tag: censorship

“Content Agnostic”: EU Official Denies Anti-Free Speech Policies In Bizarre Letter To Congress

After returning recently from speaking at the World Forum in Berlin, I testified in the Senate Judiciary Committee and warned about the building threat to free speech from the use of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan has taken up the issue and received a letter from the EU’s Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen. The letter is both evasive and deceptive.

In my book, The Indispensable Right, I detail how the DSA has been used to allow for sweeping speech investigations and prosecutions. In direct contradiction to past statements by the EU, Virkkunen denied any effort to regulate speech or enforce the DSA outside of Europe.

What is particularly maddening is the false claim that the EU remains “deeply committed to protecting and promoting free speech.” Many in the free speech community view the EU and the DSA as the greatest threats to free speech in the West.

In his letter, Jordan correctly raised the concern that the DSA could “limit or restrict Americans” constitutionally protected speech in the United States by compelling platforms to crack down on what the EU considers “misleading or deceptive” speech.

In her response, Virkkunen bizarrely describes the DSA as “content-agnostic” while insisting that the DSA “applies exclusively within the European Union.”

That is not what EU officials previously said or what the law itself allows. Articles 34 and 35 of the DSA require all sites to identify, assess, and mitigate “systemic risks” posed by content, including any threats to “civic discourse”, “electoral processes,” and “public health.” It is up to the EU to define and judge such categories in terms of compliance.

The act bars speech that is viewed as “disinformation” or “incitement.” European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager celebrated its passage by declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.”

Some in this country have turned to the EU to force the censorship of their fellow citizens. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and dismantled most of the company’s censorship program, many on the left went bonkers. That fury only increased when Musk released the “Twitter files,” confirming the long-denied coordination and support by the government in targeting and suppressing speech.

In response, Hillary Clinton and other Democratic figures turned to Europe and called upon them to use their Digital Services Act to force censorship against Americans. (Clinton spoke at the World Forum and lashed out at the failure to control disinformation).

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German Dystopia: Friedrich Merz’s and Olaf Scholz’s Incoming Coalition To Turn Censorship Into Overdrive, Crack Down on Social Media and ‘Ban Lies’

If one thinks that de-industrialized and immigrant-flooded Germany was in a poor state, we just have to wait until the new incoming coalition is in place to see how bad things are about to become.

German tabloid BILD has had access to documents from the negotiators of the ‘black-red coalition’ (Friedrich Merz’s CDU and Olaf Scholz’s SPD). And what it found is quite disturbing: they want to take hard action ‘against lies’ – i.e. they are about to double down on censorship and propaganda.

These plans emerge from the negotiation paper ‘Culture and Media’ working group, predicting that the pressure on social media is to be considerably expanded and whatever they deem to call ‘fake news’ is to be severely restricted.

BILD reported:

“The exploratory paper already stated that ‘disinformation and fake news’ threatened democracy. The negotiating paper now even states: ‘The deliberate dissemination of false factual allegations is not covered by freedom of expression’.

The consequence: ‘Therefore, the media supervisory authority, which is independent of the state, must be able to take action against information manipulation as well as hatred and incitement on the basis of clear legal requirements, while preserving freedom of expression’.”

Pressure on platforms like X is expected to increase, and certain ‘false statements’ are to be ‘prevented’, i.e., CENSORED.

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Key Nodes of Federal Government Censorship

Over the past three weeks, anyone interested in free speech (or not) has been on the receiving end of a non-consensual firehouse of flood-the-zone information warfare. Every man and his DOGE has chimed in, capturing via screenshot a score of Osama bin Laden of censorship hideouts – “It’s USAID!” “It’s NED!” “It’s NIH”!

USAID in particular has been made responsible for everything, from funding chemtrails in Naples to biting your own cheek. It’s a shame the word misinformation is of so little use anymore.

USAID is important, but the censorship happens via a system comprising hundreds, possibly thousands, of organisations, small and large. Is there a secret bunker? I don’t know, it isn’t impossible, but the approach is cartoonish. There are key nodes, organisations, and networks that are more important than others, particularly those that hand out money. In fact “complex” was the term that quickly gained favour during the Twitter files, precisely because it captured the system’s complexity – it’s what made it work and minimised public scrutiny.

Over the past couple of months, liber-net has built a database of almost 1,000 federal government awards from 2016-2024 that went towards countering “misinformation” and other similar censorship pretexts. That work aims to complement the mapping of the Censorship Industrial Complex we did for Matt Taibbi. That work looked partly at government funding but focused more on the leading censorship organisations and their often public and private support.

Not all of the 1,000 grants logged are dubious, but many are. We’ve been going through each by hand – reading their project pages, papers, and reports to find out how big a problem they are. Can AI help? Yes to a degree but from what we’ve tried, AI can’t yet really understand why one grant is horrible and the next one is just a bit meh.

The map above is a sketch of where we think the funds have come from to date based on the analysis we’ve been able to do. I emphasise sketch because out of the almost 1,000 awards, I still have another 300-400 to review. Of the 500+ I have looked at so far, around 200 are highly problematic, and another 100 are extremely dubious.

Keep in mind we are looking only at grants that could be considered “censorship” so anything that looked at “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “information integrity,” “information operations,” “content moderation,” “fact-checking” et al. We aren’t looking at grants for dubious woke culture war projects that have set the internet aflame the past couple of weeks.

To give you an idea, the grants include NSF money to Meedan (one of Twitter’s four go-to organisations for Covid “misinformation”) to develop AI to spy on encrypted private messaging groups to weed out so-called “misinformation,” including to create and scale “tip lines” “to millions of users” – aka snitching on a mass scale.

Or more NSF money to the University of Illinois to “track locations, people, and organizational affiliations of dubious COVID-19 information” based on whether they questioned CDC guidance.

Once we’ve finalised reviewing the remaining grants we’ll produce a much more accurate map and systemic analysis of how much each agency was funding censorship, and who they were paying to do it. This teaser is because I have a bee in my bonnet about the dynamite fishing I am seeing where a net, if not a rod, would be more useful.

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Documents Reveal Government-Backed Censorship Network Involving GEC, USAID, and Private Media Firms

America First Legal (AFL) has unveiled a trove of revealing documents obtained through litigation against the US Department of State’s now-defunct Global Engagement Center (GEC).

These documents expose a sweeping censorship network orchestrated by government agencies under the guise of combating “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The findings implicate not only the GEC but also the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the British Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), and various media monitoring organizations in a coordinated effort to control public discourse and suppress speech.

We make the documents searchable for you here.

The GEC was initially established to counteract foreign disinformation, yet recently released documents demonstrate that it became a vehicle for state-sponsored propaganda. AFL’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have uncovered evidence of the GEC’s collaboration with private media firms, leveraging their influence to censor narratives deemed unfavorable. The lawsuit against the GEC further revealed that USAID developed an internal “Disinformation Primer,” endorsing censorship strategies employed by private companies and advocating for their expansion.

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USAID Censorship Scheme Exposed; Global Engagement Center Worked With UK Government And Media Firms To Deploy AI Tools

On Thursday, America First Legal (AFL) released explosive new documents obtained through ongoing litigation against the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), exposing a vast, government-backed censorship operation to silence Americans under the guise of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.” The documents reveal a disturbing alliance between the GEC, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the British Foreign, Commonwealth, Development Office (FCDO), and media censorship organizations, all working in lock-step to manipulate public discourse, control media narratives, and suppress free speech.

The GEC, which was forced to shut down in December 2024, was designed to “combat foreign disinformation abroad.” However, through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, AFL uncovered that the GEC engaged in state-sponsored propaganda, repeatedly using willing participants from private media organizations. Further, AFL’s lawsuit against the GEC revealed that USAID had created an internal “Disinformation Primer” that explicitly praised private sector censorship strategies and recommended further censorship tactics.

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House Judiciary Committee Investigates Biden-Harris AI Censorship Allegations with New Subpoenas

Political trends and circumstances change, as do US administrations – but the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Jim Jordan continues to “soldier on” in its multi-year, comprehensive bid to get to the bottom of the activities by the Biden-Harris White House aimed at pressuring tech companies to its political advantage.

In the past, these investigations produced some spectacular results – such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly admitting to his company relenting to that pressure, stating he regretted that – and that the tech giant would reverse the policies that facilitated compliance with the former government.

The latest set of the Committee’s subpoenas concern companies developing AI tech. The subpoenas have been sent to Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic PBC, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp., Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI.

We obtained a copy of one of the letters for you here.

The Committee wants all documents and communications that the previous administration had with these companies concerning content “moderation and suppression” – i.e., collusion with the aim of censoring lawful speech – to be preserved and presented. The timeframe is January 2020 to January 2025.

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The Speech Police

OK, this one is for all the professional “sensitivity editors” out there, and for the US Department of Homeland Security, and President Donald Trump, and the European Union censors, and all the other self-appointed Speech Police that have been goose-stepping around dictating what everyone can and can’t say and publish and think all the time like a bunch of sanctimonious little fascists.

If you’re easily offended, you’ll probably want to skip this one.

This isn’t the column I was planning to write. I was going to write an insufferably pompous and crushingly boring column about “the state of the publishing industry” and “contemporary literature,” and all that crap, but then a number of recent events intervened and forced me to change my plan.

I was planning to publish that insufferably pompous and crushingly boring column about the publishing industry and literature, and so on, because I’ve got a couple of new books coming out soon. The first one, Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich, will be published by Skyhorse Publishing in April. The other one is a new edition of my dystopian novel, Zone 23, which will be published by Arcade Publishing in July.

Skyhorse Publishing, launched in 2006 by Tony Lyons, is one of the fastest-growing independent book publishers in the United States. The company has published 112 New York Times bestsellers. Arcade Publishing is an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. Their official motto is “Something to Offend Everyone.”

As you can probably guess from the fact that they are publishing two of my books, Skyhorse Publishing and Arcade Publishing do not employ “sensitivity editors” or otherwise attempt to sanitize the writing of the authors they publish. “Sensitivity editing” is just another example of the censorship, “visibility filtering,” and other forms of speech policing that has become normalized in recent years. If you’re not familiar with “sensitivity editing,” I published a column about it in 2023 after Puffin Books—an imprint of Penguin Random House—unleashed their “sensitivity editors” on Roald Dahl’s books.

Anyway, I decided not to write that crushingly boring column about the publishing industry, the “big five” publishers that mostly decide what everyone reads, and the state of contemporary literature, and so on, because I have really had it with all the censorship, and sensitivity editing, and speech policing, and the crackdown on political dissent, and the abrogation of what remains of our democratic rights.

The Department of Homeland Security’s recent arrest and planned deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University grad-student, who the Trump administration has accused, not of any actual crime, but, rather, of “terrorist-aligned” speech, and Trump’s fascistic tweets that followed, and people’s rationalizations of this latest example of the new, nascent form of totalitarianism I have been writing and warning about, was just … well, I felt that something a little more relevant than an insufferably pompous and mind-numbingly boring column about the publishing industry and literature was in order.

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No Other Land Won an Oscar. Miami Beach’s Mayor Is Trying To Evict a Movie Theater for Screening It

The mayor of Miami Beach, Florida, is trying to terminate the lease of a movie theater for screening No Other Land, an Oscar-winning documentary about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Miami Herald reported that Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner introduced a resolution to terminate the lease of O Cinema, an independent film theater that rents space from the city, and discontinue more than $60,000 in promised grant funding. The legislation comes after Meiner tried to pressure the theater to cancel the screening.

Florida civil rights groups and First Amendment experts say such government retaliation against the theater for the content of the films it chooses to screen would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

“Simply put, the First Amendment does not allow the government to discriminate based on viewpoint or to retaliate against anyone for their speech,” says Daniel Tilley, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida. “Pulling funding from an independent, community-based cinema under these circumstances is patently unconstitutional. The government does not get to pick and choose which viewpoints the public is allowed to hear, however controversial some might find them.”

The Miami Beach mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

However, in a newsletter to Miami Beach residents earlier this week, Meiner wrote: “I am a staunch believer in free speech. But normalizing hate and then disseminating antisemitism in a facility owned by the taxpayers of Miami Beach, after O Cinema conceded the ‘concerns of antisemitic rhetoric,’ is unjust to the values of our city and residents and should not be tolerated.”

On March 5, Meiner sent O Cinema a letter on official city letterhead expressing outrage at the cinema’s decision to screen the film, which documents the destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank.

“Here in Miami Beach, our City has adopted a strong policy of support for the State of Israel in its struggle to defend itself and its residents against attacks by the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah,” the letter read. “Airing performances of the one-sided, inaccurate film ‘No Other Land’ at a movie theater facility owned by the City and operated by O Cinema is disappointing.”

This is flagrant government jawboning—an attempt to use the mayor’s bully pulpit and the implicit threat of government action to cow the theater into self-censorship.

O Cinema initially complied.

“Due to the concerns of antisemitic rhetoric, we have decided to withdraw the film from our programming,” Vivian Marthell, CEO of O Cinema, wrote to Meiner the following day. “This film has exposed a rift which makes us unable to do the thing we’ve always sought out to do which is to foster thoughtful conversations about cinematic works.”

However, the theater then reversed course and told the Miami Herald it would continue the screenings after all.

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The Take It Down Act: A Censorship Weapon Disguised As Protection

President Trump has thrown his support behind the Take It Down Act, a bill designed to combat the spread of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated deepfakes. The legislation has gained momentum, particularly with First Lady Melania Trump backing the effort, and Trump himself endorsing it during his March 4 address to Congress.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

“The Senate just passed the Take It Down Act…. Once it passes the House, I look forward to signing that bill into law. And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”

While this comment was likely tongue-in-cheek, it highlights an important question: how will this law be enforced, and who will benefit the most from it?

A Necessary Law with Potential Pitfalls

The rise of AI-generated explicit content and the increasing problem of revenge porn are serious concerns. Victims of NCII have long struggled to get harmful content removed, often facing bureaucratic roadblocks while the damage continues to spread. The Take It Down Act aims to give individuals more power to protect themselves online.

However, as with many internet regulations, the challenge is in the details. Laws designed to curb harmful content often run the risk of being too broad, potentially leading to overreach. Critics warn that, without clear safeguards, the legislation could be used beyond its intended purpose.

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