Tag: censorship

The EU Insists Its X Fine Isn’t About Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.

When the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, officials could not have been clearer. This, they said, was not about censorship. It was just about “transparency.”

They repeat it so often you start to wonder why.

The fine marks the first major enforcement of the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new censorship-driven internet rulebook.

It was sold as a consumer protection measure, designed to make online platforms safer and more accountable, and included a whole list of censorship requirements, fining platforms that don’t comply.

The first target is Elon Musk’s X, and the list of alleged violations look less like user safety concerns and more like a blueprint for controlling who gets heard, who gets trusted, and who gets to talk back.

The Commission charged X with three violations: the paid blue checkmark system, the lack of advertising data, and restricted data access for researchers.

None of these touches direct content censorship. But all of them shape visibility, credibility, and surveillance, just in more polite language.

Musk’s decision to turn blue checks into a subscription feature ended the old system where establishment figures, journalists, politicians, and legacy celebrities got verification.

The EU called Musk’s decision “deceptive design.” The old version, apparently, was honesty itself. Before, a blue badge meant you were important. After, it meant you paid. Brussels prefers the former, where approved institutions get algorithmic priority, and the rest of the population stays in the queue.

The new system threatened that hierarchy. Now, anyone could buy verification, diluting the aura of authority once reserved for anointed voices.

However, that’s not the full story. Under the old Twitter system, verification was sold as a public service, but in reality it worked more like a back-room favor and a status purchase.

The main application process was shut down in 2010, so unless you were already famous, the only way to get a blue check was to spend enough money on advertising or to be important enough to trigger impersonation problems.

Ad Age reported that advertisers who spent at least fifteen thousand dollars over three months could get verified, and Twitter sales reps told clients the same thing. That meant verification was effectively a perk reserved for major media brands, public figures, and anyone willing to pay. It was a symbol of influence rationed through informal criteria and private deals, creating a hierarchy shaped by cronyism rather than transparency.

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“The Days Of Censoring Americans Online Are Over”: Senior US Diplomats Slam EU’s “Attack” On American Tech Platform X

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and several other senior U.S. officials have criticized the internet policies of the European Union (EU), likening them to censorship, after the governing bloc last week levied Elon Musk’s social media platform X with a $140 million fine for breaching its online content rules.

On Dec. 5, EU tech regulators fined X 120 million euros (about $140 million) following a two-year investigation under the Digital Services Act, concluding that the social platform had breached multiple transparency obligations, including the “deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark,’ the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.”

The EU accused X of converting its verified badges into a paid feature without sufficient identity checks, arguing that this deceived users into believing the accounts were authentic and exposed them to fraud, manipulation, and impersonation.

This meant the platform had failed to meet the Digital Services Act’s accessibility and detail standards, leaving out key information that prevented efforts to track coordinated disinformation, illicit activities, and election interference, according to the EU.

Even before the EU’s fine was announced, U.S. Vice President JD Vance suggested it amounted to punishing X for “not engaging in censorship.”

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EU targets platforms that refuse to censor free speech – Telegram founder

The EU is unfairly targeting social media platforms that allow dissenting or critical speech, Telegram founder Pavel Durov has said.

He was responding to a 2024 post by Elon Musk, the owner of X, who claimed that the European Commission had offered the platform a secret deal to avoid fines in return for censoring certain statements. The EU fined X €120 million ($140 million) the day before.

According to Durov, the EU imposes strict and unrealistic rules on tech companies as a way to punish those that do not comply with quiet censorship demands.

“The EU imposes impossible rules so it can punish tech firms that refuse to silently censor free speech,” Durov wrote on X on Saturday.

He also referred to his detention in France last year, which he called politically motivated. He claimed that during that time, the head of France’s DGSE asked him to “ban conservative voices in Romania” ahead of an election, an allegation French officials denied. He also said intelligence agents offered help with his case if Telegram quietly removed channels tied to Moldova’s election.

Durov repeated both claims in his recent post, describing the case as “a baseless criminal investigation” followed by pressure to censor speech in Romania and Moldova.

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US accuses EU of ‘attack on American people’ after fine on X

The US has accused Brussels of an “attack” on Americans after the EU fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X €120 million ($140 million) for violating the bloc’s content-moderation rules.

The European Commission announced the decision on Friday, noting that it is the first time a formal non-compliance ruling has been issued under the Digital Services Act.

The move comes amid a broader wave of enforcement against major American tech companies. Brussels previously imposed multibillion-euro penalties on Google for abuses in search and advertising, fined Apple under both the Digital Markets Act and national antitrust rules, and penalized Meta for its “pay-or-consent” ad model. Such actions have sharpened disagreements between the US and the EU over digital regulation.

According to the Commission, X’s violations include the deceptive design of its blue checkmark system, which “exposes users to scams,” insufficient transparency in its advertising library, and its failure to provide required access to public data for researchers.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio slammed the decision, writing on X that it is not just an attack on the platform, but “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.” 

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US Under Secretary Warns Britain That the First Amendment Isn’t Negotiable

This week, Sarah Rogers, the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, touched down in the UK not to sip tea or admire the Crown Jewels, but to deliver a message as subtle as a boot in the face: stop trying to censor Americans in America.

Yes, really.

According to Rogers, the UK’s speech regulator, Ofcom, the bureaucratic enforcer behind Britain’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), has been getting ideas. Dangerous ones. Like attempting to extend its censorship regime outside the United Kingdom and onto American soil. You know, that country across the ocean where the First Amendment exists and people can still say controversial things without a court summons landing on their doormat.

To GB News, Rogers called this attempt at international thought-policing “a deal-breaker,” “a non-starter,” and “a red line.”

In State Department speak, that is basically the equivalent of someone slamming the brakes, looking Britain in the eye, and saying, “You try that again, and there will be consequences.”

To understand how Britain got itself into this mess, you have to understand the Online Safety Act. It is a law that reads like it was drafted by a committee of alarmed Victorian schoolteachers who just discovered the internet.

The OSA is supposedly designed to “protect children online,” which sounds noble until you realize it means criminalizing large swaths of adult speech, forcing platforms to delete legal content, and requiring identity and age checks that would make a KGB officer blush.

It even threatens prosecution over “psychological harm.” And now, apparently, it wants to enforce all of that in other countries too.

Rogers was not impressed, saying Ofcom has tried to impose the OSA extraterritorially and attempted to censor Americans in America. That, she made clear, is outrageous.

It’s more than a diplomatic spat. Rogers made it painfully clear the US isn’t going to just write a sternly worded letter and move on. There is legislative retaliation on the table.

The GRANITE Act, Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny & Extortion, is more than a clever acronym. It is the legislative middle finger Washington can consider if the UK keeps pretending it can veto American free speech from 3,500 miles away.

The bill, already circulating in the Wyoming state legislature, would strip foreign governments of their usual protections from lawsuits in the US if they try to censor American citizens or companies.

In other words, if Ofcom wants to slap US platforms with foreign censorship rules, they had better be ready to defend themselves in an American courtroom where “freedom of expression” isn’t a slogan, it is a constitutional right.

Rogers confirmed that the US legislature will likely consider that and will certainly consider other options if the British government doesn’t back down.

Of course, the GRANITE Act didn’t come out of nowhere. Rogers’s warning didn’t either. It is a response to the increasingly unhinged state of free speech in the UK, where adults can be arrested for memes, priests investigated for praying silently, and grandmothers interrogated for criticizing gender ideology.

“When you don’t rigorously defend that right, even when it’s inconvenient, even when the speech is offensive,” Rogers said, “you end up in these absurd scenarios where you have comedians arrested for tweets.”

This is the modern UK, where “hate speech” has been stretched to include everything from telling jokes to sharing news stories about immigration. And now, under the OSA, that censorious spirit has gone global.

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Goodbye Jury Trials, Hello Digital ID: 10 “recommendations” from the Crime and Justice Commission

The Times Crime and Justice Commission was established last year, with its mission statement being to…

consider the future of policing and the criminal justice system, in the light of the knife crime crisis, a shoplifting epidemic, the growing threat of cybercrime, concerns about the culture of the police, court backlogs, problems with legal aid and overflowing prisons.

And today is that long-promised glorious golden day where they reveal their findings. The white smoke has gone up and we get to witness the result of their long hours of toil.

How are we going to fix everything?

Let’s take a look at the complete list, with some helpful annotations:

1. Introduce a universal digital ID system to drive down fraud, tackle illegal immigration and reduce identity theft;

Digital ID for everybody! It’s going to solve every problem! We’ve talked this to death, it was always going to be in here.

2. Target persistent offenders and crime hotspots using data to clamp down on shoplifting, robbery and antisocial behaviour;

That’s about surveillance. “Data” means your private data which they will get from social media companies.

3. Roll out live facial recognition and other artificial intelligence tools to drive the efficiency and effectiveness of the police;

Again, FRT was always going to feature. I’m not sure what “other artificial intelligence tools” means, but the vagueness is likely the point. “Efficiency” is the word doing the heavy-lifting in that sentence, intended to capture the pro-MAGA, pro-Musk UK crowd.

4. Create a licence to practise for the police, with revalidation every five years to improve culture and enhance professionalism;

That’s just throwing something out for the “other side”. So far it’s all just more powers for the police and courts, this adds some faux accountability framework into the mix to make it look fair.

5. Set up victim care hubs backed by a unified digital case file to create a seamless source of information and advice;

Same as above, with some extra seasoning for the digital identity sales pitch thrown in.

6. Introduce a new intermediate court with a judge and two magistrates to speed up justice and reduce court delays;

This is about replacing trial by jury, and that’s all it’s about. It’s something they’ve been wanting to do for years and keep making excuses to try.

7. Move to a “common sense” approach to sentencing with greater transparency about jail time, incentives for rehabilitation and expanded use of house arrest;

Not sure what this means in real terms, but any use “common sense” in this kind of document should always raise an eyebrow. As should the idea of “expanded use of house arrest”.

8. Give more autonomy and accountability to prison governors with a greater focus on rehabilitation and create a College of Prison and Probation Officers;

No idea what this means yet. Could be about more prison-based work programs (a la private prisons in the US), could just be fluff between important parts.

9. Restrict social media for under-16s to protect children from criminals and extreme violent or sexual content;

Again, very predictable. And, again, very dishonest. As we’ve said a thousand times, “restricting social media to under-16s” – in practical terms – means everyone on social media has to verify their age. So bye-bye online anonymity.

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Democrats Would Like To Suppress Free Speech The Way Britain Does

It’s easy to look at a collapsing civil society in a foreign country and comfort ourselves that, despite all our problems, we’re not as bad off as those people. Americans are especially apt to do this with our cousins in Great Britain, whose country is now in a state of precipitous and probably irreversible decline, and whose political leadership is openly hostile to the native population.

But it’s a mistake to comfort ourselves this way, partly because the corruption of a place like Britain — the online censorship, the criminalization of disfavored opinions, the two-tiered system of justice — doesn’t stay confined to their shores but eventually makes its way to ours. Indeed, many Democrats here in America don’t see the tyranny of modern Britain as a cautionary tale but as a template to follow.

A startling case in point is a recent story from Drop Site News by Paul Holden, who chronicles how a secret campaign to elevate Kier Starmer to prime minister included a scheme to demonetize news outlets deemed unfriendly to the Starmer wing of the Labour Party. One of those news outlets was The Federalist.

In the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign, a shadowy UK-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) worked with NBC News and Google insiders to attempt to blacklist and demonetize The Federalist under false pretexts — an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful. The Orwellian-named NBC News Verification Unit reported in June 2020 that Google had banned the website ZeroHedge from its advertising platform and had warned The Federalist that it too might be banned.

But this wasn’t just “reporting,” it was part of a larger political op. According to the NBC News report itself, Google’s actions came only after the company had been “notified of research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that combats online hate and misinformation. They found that 10 U.S-based websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protests, and projected that the websites would make millions of dollars through Google Ads.”

And who notified Google about this CCDH report? NBC News did. This was a transparent effort by left-wing activists at NBC News, together with left-wing activists at the CCDH, to demonetize and silence The Federalist for the crime of noticing the hypocrisy surrounding BLM protests and strict Covid lockdowns.

But who or what was the CCDH, and why did it target The Federalist? At the time, the CCDH’s connection to the Starmer political machine and the Labour Party was unclear. But as Holden’s reporting reveals, the CCDH was part of a larger partisan political project that targeted The Federalist, Breitbart, ZeroHedge, and others. “As Keir Starmer rose to power in Britain, the political machine responsible for his rise ran a behind-the-scenes campaign to demonetize the U.S. news outlet Breitbart,” writes Holden. “The attacks on Breitbart were part of a targeted campaign against media outlets on both the left and right considered hostile to the centrist faction of the Labour Party, according to a trove of documents that expose the operation.”

At the center of this campaign was a man named Morgan McSweeney, who is now Prime Minster Starmer’s chief of staff. Between 2018 and 2020, McSweeney served as the company secretary and managing director for an organization called Labour Together that funded a think tank called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). At the time, SFFN claimed to be a grassroots effort organized and run by a group of anonymous concerned citizens inspired by the demonetizing campaigns run by Sleeping Giants, which had targeted Breitbart in the U.S. during the 2016 election.

In fact, SFFN was an astroturfing operation created and run by people in positions of real power inside the Labour Party, including not just McSweeney but Steve Reed, now a senior member of Starmer’s cabinet. The original purpose of SFFN, as Holden reports, was “to defeat the left-wing of the Labour Party and the media ecosystem that supported it.” The operations of SFFN, however, expanded to include right-wing outlets like Breitbart and The Federalist, which it saw as impediments to Starmer’s rise.

Eventually, SFFN was absorbed into a new entity, CCDH, whose CEO is a man named Imran Ahmed. Ahmed worked with McSweeney in the London office of Labour Together, which first launched the SFFN project. Ahmed has said that McSweeney gave him a “shell company” called Brixton Endeavors that later became CCDH and in early 2020 absorbed the entire SFFN project. McSweeney has tried to distance himself from all this but as Holden notes, McSweeney was the sole director of Brixton Endeavors between 2018 and September 2019, and remained a director of CCDH until April 2020.

During this time, a plan was developed to target disfavored news outlets by going after their advertisers. As Ahmed himself said in an October 2020 U.S. State Department conference on antisemitism, the CCDH “put together a program called stop funding fake news” designed to undermine ad revenue of certain news sites. He boasted that the weak points of news websites is that they’re expensive to run, so eliminating their ad revenue meant that “within a couple of months, you can completely eviscerate the economic base of a website.”

What Ahmed and his underlings at CCDH needed was a willing news outlet to “report” on its targeting of certain websites for being “hateful” or “racist.” This they found in the NBC News Verification Unit, which tried to goad Google into demonetizing The Federalist and others, and then “reported” it as news.

Take a step back and realize that this is the equivalent of people like Ron Klain or Jeff Zients, who served as chiefs of staff during the Biden administration, running secretive demonetization ops against conservative news outlets in America.

But even that isn’t very far-fetched. After all, the Biden administration’s State Department used its now-defunct Global Engagement Center to fund censorship operations by groups like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, among others. We here at The Federalist joined with The Daily Wire in a lawsuit against the State Department in 2023, claiming these groups, supported by the federal government, sought to defund and suppress our reporting and commentary in violation of our First Amendment rights.

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Macron Wants To Go Full “Ministry Of Truth” With Draconian Censorship Grab

French President Emmanuel Macron is facing fierce pushback from conservative voices within France over his renewed drive to grant the state sweeping new censorship powers, Barron’s reports.

On Friday, Macron once again raised the alarm about so-called “disinformation” spreading on social media, insisting that parliament grant authorities the ability to immediately block content deemed “false information.” As if the existing arsenal of censorship tools weren’t enough, the left-wing president now wants to establish a “professional certification” system that would effectively create an official, state-approved class of media outlets—separating those that toe the government’s ethical line from those that refuse to do so.

France’s right-wing press has reacted with outrage, with Vincent Bolloré’s Journal du Dimanche denouncing Macron’s “totalitarian drift” on free speech and warning of “the temptation of a ministry of truth.”

Bolloré-owned CNews and Europe 1 were equally scathing, with popular presenter Pascal Praud accusing the president of acting out of personal resentment, declaring the initiative comes from a “president unhappy with his treatment by the media and who wants to impose a single narrative.”

National Rally leader Jordan Bardella also delivered a blistering rebuke, saying in a statement, “Tampering with freedom of expression is an authoritarian temptation, which corresponds to the solitude of a man… who has lost power and seeks to maintain it by controlling information.”

Bruno Retailleau, head of the Republicans in the Senate, echoed the warning on X: “[N]o government has the right to filter the media or dictate the truth.”

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Britain Is Lost

A recent interview Tucker Carlson had with George Galloway, a long-time member of the British Parliament and with a show himself in Britain, who was recently detained at the border under terrorism charges for, apparently, the opinions broadcast on his show.

No nation has fallen quicker or more completely than Britain into the totalitarian mindset.

It’s why we highlighted this aspect of modern Europe into the film Deconstruction.

Britain, as long as it pursues the same oppression of free speech as the Soviet Union, can not be called or considered an ally of the United States.

This is what we have to decide as a people, the American people, who will and who will not be our allies. Governments, especially now, are poor judges of character. They will hold onto traditional alliances, when those alliances have long been strained, simply because they would be unsure of what that would do to international relationships. If we lose Britain, France and Germany as allies, what effect does that have on NATO?

My question, however, is what damage does continued alliances with nations who punish their people for what they have said, posted or broadcast do to international perception? Are we not tarnished by their brush? Yes. It also signals that the United States is not determined to uphold the right to free speech. That in order to maintain these alliances will betray their own people.

As Britain, France and Germany turn toward implementing a police state to support immigrants who rape and kill their sons and daughters, put protesters in jail and silence not only their own citizens, but any who arrive through the internet, can they still be considered allies of a free nation? No. So, how free is that “free” nation? It is not free as it supports and continues alliances with nations diametrically opposed, not only to free speech, but a series of democratic principles.

The battle taking place within the European nations draw a stark contrast to the Central and Eastern European nations, formerly Soviet client states, who distance themselves from European Union dictates that promote illegal migration and the silencing of objectors.

The whole idea of democracy comes from the idea that the people have a say in who governs them and the policies they impose. When freedom of speech is so blatantly outlawed and only approved narratives permitted, there is no democracy. I don’t know what sort of government Britain has, but it is not a democracy as it claims. Yes, I know it’s technically a Monarchy, but the King or Queen has nowhere near the political power they once held.

All of this centers around illegal migration, it’s where people like Keir Starmer intend to derive their power, in the end. If he supports the replacement population when it is unpopular to do so, they might look kindly on him when the Islamists take full control of the politics, but he is a useful idiot.

They continue to put forth the idea that a declining birthrate is the reason for the importation of these migrants, but if European and American birthrates are dropping, as it is in all Western societies, it would seem that the logical conclusion would be to outlaw abortion, not import rapists and murderers.

But that’s not the reason. It isn’t the birthrate, it’s an attempt to forever change politics that eliminates the right, the Christians. This point was made clear by Viktor Orban in the film Deconstruction that’s coming out soon.

Communists and Islamists work well together. They have the same goal, supremacy through murder and imprisonment of an uncompliant populace. Democracies must tolerate the naysayers, the critics, that’s the difference. It won’t be long and the UK will be an Islamic nation, just as Iran became an Islamic nation. Are they still allies of the US? If so, why are not all Islamic nations allies? Because Islamic nations are at war with the US. “Death to America” does not seem like the pronouncement of an ally. Will it be heard across Britain, while we still consider it a close ally? Of course.

The United States had better figure this out, too. The only true allies the US has in Europe are the Central and Eastern European nations.

They are also the ones that need more protection from Russia and China, because, as smaller economies, they can’t afford to be too choosy about who they do business with and the more that the United States can be a better economic partner, the stronger we will all be.

The world is changing rapidly and our government is incapable of keeping up with the pace. It has to be led by the people.

The film Deconstruction makes this point. 

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Congress Goes Parental on Social Media and Your Privacy

Washington has finally found a monster big enough for bipartisan unity: the attention economy. In a moment of rare cross-aisle cooperation, lawmakers have introduced two censorship-heavy bills and a tax scheme under the banner of the UnAnxious Generation package.

The name, borrowed from Jonathan Haidt’s pop-psychology hit The Anxious Generation, reveals the obvious pitch: Congress will save America’s children from Silicon Valley through online regulation and speech controls.

Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, who has built a career out of publicly scolding tech companies, says he’s going “directly at their jugular.”

The plan: tie legal immunity to content “moderation,” tax the ad money, and make sure kids can’t get near an app without producing an “Age Signal.” If that sounds like a euphemism for surveillance, that’s because it is.

The first bill, the Deepfake Liability Act, revises Section 230, the sacred shield that lets platforms host your political rants, memes, and conspiracy reels without getting sued for them.

Under the new proposal, that immunity becomes conditional on a vague “duty of care” to prevent deepfake porn, cyberstalking, and “digital forgeries.”

TIME’s report doesn’t define that last term, which could be a problem since it sounds like anything from fake celebrity videos to an unflattering AI meme of your senator. If “digital forgery” turns out to include parody or satire, every political cartoonist might suddenly need a lawyer on speed dial.

Auchincloss insists the goal is accountability, not censorship. “If a company knows it’ll be liable for deepfake porn, cyberstalking, or AI-created content, that becomes a board-level problem,” he says. In other words, a law designed to make executives sweat.

But with AI-generated content specifically excluded from Section 230 protections, the bill effectively redefines the internet’s liability protections.

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