Tag: censorship

House passes “Take it Down Act,” sending revenge porn bill backed by Melania Trump to president’s desk

The House passed a bipartisan bill Monday that makes it a federal crime to post real and fake sexually explicit imagery online of a person without their consent, sending the legislation that was backed by first lady Melania Trump to the president’s desk. 

The bill, known as the “Take It Down Act,” cleared the lower chamber in a 409-2 vote. The two “no” votes came from Republicans. The Senate unanimously passed the measure in February. 

The legislation requires social media companies and other websites to remove images and videos, including deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence, within 48 hours after a victim’s request. 

“If you’re a victim of revenge porn or AI-generated explicit imagery, your life changes forever,” Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, said at a March 3 roundtable promoting the bill. 

Cruz, who introduced the bill, recalled the experience of a teenage victim, Elliston Berry, whose classmate used an app to create explicit images of her and then sent them to her classmates. Berry’s mother had tried unsuccessfully to get Snapchat to remove the images for months before she contacted Cruz’s office for help. 

“It should not take a sitting senator or sitting member of Congress picking up the phone to get a picture down or video down,” Cruz said. 

The first lady, who rarely appears in public, attended the March discussion at the U.S. Capitol to advocate for the bill’s passage in the House. 

“It’s heartbreaking to witness young teens, especially girls, grappling with the overwhelming challenges posed by malicious online content like deep fakes,” she said. “This toxic environment can be severely damaging.” 

The first lady applauded Congress after its passage and said the bipartisan vote made a “powerful statement that we stand united in protecting the dignity, privacy, and safety of our children.” 

“I am thankful to the Members of Congress — both in the House and Senate — who voted to protect the well-being of our youth,” she said in a statement. 

According to the FBI, in recent years there have been an alarming number of cases where victims have been extorted that have ended in suicide. Lawmakers said they hope the bill will save lives by providing recourse for victims. 

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Meta’s Oversight Board Condemns Free Speech Reforms, Pushes for Continued Censorship Over “Human Rights” Concerns

Welcomed by opponents of the multi-year Big Tech-government censorship collusion in the US, Meta’s decision to abandon its controversial “fact-checking” program is receiving criticism from others.

Among them is Meta’s Oversight Board, which is also unhappy that the company is allowing more freedom to users of its platforms when it comes to discussing issues like gender identity and immigration.

Announcing the changes earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the “moderation” system in place until that point had produced “too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

The content was flagged, downranked, or removed, as were users if either censorship algorithms or third-party “fact-checkers” decided it contained “misinformation” or “hate speech” – and the criteria for this was heavily biased in favor of the former administration’s agendas.

But looking back at the policy shift announced on January 7, the Board expressed its concern that Meta went about this “hastily, in a departure from the regular procedure, with no public information shared as to what, if any, prior human rights due diligence the company performed.”

The Board decided to put the emphasis on “human rights” rather than free speech, in particular the handling of topics related to LGB and transgender issues.

Meta’s policy now allows users to make allegations about mental illness or abnormality “when based on gender or sexual orientation.” This is essentially explained as a way to allow the discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality that is already happening in society, in political and religious contexts.

But the Board thinks this may result in human rights violations and wants Meta to investigate whether that is happening, and to “update it” on the findings twice a year.

Just how restrictive the rules around these issues have been is illustrated in the two cases the Board was considering – attempts to ban videos expressing views about the participation of transgender persons in sports and their “access” to bathrooms.

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US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, Calls Out Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia) of Violating 501(c)(3) Status by Allowing Propagandists to Flood Platform – Gives Them Til May 15th to Turn Over Documents

It’s not a secret that The Gateway Pundit, the fifth-largest conservative news website in America today, has one of the most dishonest and vile entries on Wikipedia.

This works out well for the globalist left in the fact that we do not own our name on Wikipedia – the far-left editors do, we cannot comment or explain any entry under our name, we cannot edit our entry to include our award-winning journalism, we cannot rebut any of their lies about us.

It’s a great tool for the left and it has cost conservatives, including this website, millions of dollars in potential traffic and income.

The Gateway Pundit is not the only conservative website that Wikipedia smears and lies about.

In December 2019, T. D. Adler at Breitbart News reported that Wikipedia blacklists now included The Epoch Times and The Gateway Pundit for our truthful reporting on Russiagate.

Wikipedia highlighted The Gateway Pundit’s reporting that was true and factual and used it against us as an excuse to censor our website.

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Von der Leyen’s paws are all over Ireland’s counter disinformation strategy

The government of Ireland’s 55 page counter disinformation strategy, available for free download here, is worth perusing to show how pervasive and thorough Von der Leyen’s emerging censorship web is. The first thing that critical readers might note is that there is no mention of Irish sources of disinformation, but that Russian sources of disinformation are mentioned five times.

In addition to that blatant show of Russophobia, its obsession with Moscow shows that this report is not only lop-sided, biased and partisan but that it comes up short in the empirical stakes as well. Though one might imagine that such a government funded report would give example after example of mis-information to bolster its case, that would be to mis-interpret its function, which is to put in place the censorship pillars on which not only Ireland but all of von der Leyen’s Europe will rest. Far better to close the angle, forget specific examples of mis-information and prattle on with catechisms of pseudo scientific cliches.

Thus, though there is no mention of the recurring patterns of NATO false flag operations that other SCF contributors frequently draw attention to, there are lists after lists of the pillars that must be legislated for to make not only Ireland but all of Europe safe again from the free flow of information.

The table of contents shows how the report is neatly divided into a number of sections to achieve von der Leyen’s aims. We first of all have an overview of the issue, explaining how Ireland is challenged by disinformation and how Ireland and Europe must respond, presumably by banning Russia Today, which I can now only get by using a VPN. Although an empirical or applied approach might devote a line or two to the mortal challenge Russia Today or SCF’s excellent Bruna Frascolla poses to us all, there is none of that. Instead, we must accept that Russia Today and Bruna Frascolla are coming for our jugulars and only von der Leyen and her Irish-based minions can save us from them, which is rather odd as I find the information to noise ratio much higher in them than I do in the Irish or British media.

So much for their silly overview. The next section spells out five principles through which counter-information will be fought. These essentially amount to the European Union agreeing on a narrative and that narrative being bolstered from the local level right up to von der Leyen herself. No matter whether it is Israeli war crimes in Gaza or NATO war crimes in Ukraine and Syria, all parties will spread the agreed narrative and gang up on those, who might suggest subversive counter-narratives regarding Hunter Biden’s lap top, von der Leyen’s Covid 19 vaccine profiteering and so on. Regarding Covid 19, the views of paid political and scientific hucksters will be accepted and those with alternative views will be punished on whatever pretext best suits the particular situation.

Although freedom of expression will be guaranteed, that freedom will not extend to those heretics, who question the prevailing narrative and who thereby put the entire clown show at risk. “Resilience and trust” in the powers that be will be drilled into the masses and the civil society networks they work though and “corporate accountability and regulatory enforcement” will further cement the narrative into our collective psyche. As in all quasi-military campaigns, there will be “cooperation, collaboration and coordination”, otherwise known as C3 or command, control and communications by the U.S. Military. Finally, there will be punishments as a matter of principle for dissenters and other heretics.

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Back With A Vengeance: Nina Jankowicz Calls On Europeans To Oppose The US

Nina Jankowicz, the former head of Biden’s infamous Disinformation Governance Board, was “back with a vengeance.” 

After the outcry over the board led to its elimination, Jankowicz did what many of the displaced disinformation experts have done: she peddled her dubious skills to Europeans and others like a wandering rōnin without a master. 

Now, Jankowicz has appeared before one of the most anti-free speech bodies in the world — the European Union — to call upon those 27 countries to fight against the United States, which she called a world threat.

How the “Mary Poppins of disinformation” came to alight upon Europe is a familiar tale. 

The European Union has become the global hub for censorship efforts and, after she departed from the government, Jankowicz made a beeline for Europe.

I have been a long critic of Jankowicz, who became an instant Internet sensation due to a musical number in which she sang “You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation” in a TikTok parody of the song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” 

After the Biden Administration reluctantly disbanded her board, she later moved to join a European group as a foreign agent to continue her work to block views that she considers disinformation.

The false portrayal of the United States as a lawless, autocratic nation no doubt thrilled the Europeans. 

In announcing her heading a private disinformation group called the American Sunlight Project, Jankowicz used the same hysteria to attract donors, insisting that “Disinformation knows no political party. Its ultimate victim is our democracy.”

Of course, Jankowicz herself has been accused of disinformation that served one particular party. 

She was previously criticized for allegedly spreading disinformation and advocating censorship.

The ultimate irony is that Jankowicz knows that she can count on many of us in the free speech community to support her right to spread such sensational and inflammatory information. 

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‘Fact-Checking’ Was Always Just Censorship. Polls Show Americans Could See Through It

Legacy media and Big Tech colluded with so-called “fact-checkers” to censor Americans’ speech for years — from Covid-19 to the Hunter Biden laptop story to the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden’s mental decline. Now, these self-appointed arbiters of speech are losing power because the public can see through their lies.

Mentions of “misinformation” and “disinformation” — the left’s favorite terms for disapproved speech — on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News have apparently dropped to the lowest levels since 2020, according to Axios. “Professional fact-checking went mainstream during the first Trump administration, but it’s since become politicized,” Sara Fischer wrote for Axios. 

The outlet should know, as it has engaged in repeated propaganda operations under the guise of “fact-checking.” After reporting former Vice President Kamala Harris was “appointed by Biden as border czar,” Axios tried to fact-check Republicans, claiming “she never actually had” the title. As The Federalist previously reported, this is the same outlet whose co-founders demanded now-President Donald Trump apologize for getting shot in the head.

So Axios’ admission that fact-checking has “become politicized” is telling. It speaks to the fact that Americans are no longer willing to fall for media hoaxes. After all, Pew Research found that this year, public support for censorship fell for the first time since 2018. And as Axios reported, the number of so-called “fact-checking” sites had been growing since before 2016 — but in recent years, it began falling. 

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US wants UK to ditch ‘hate speech’ laws to secure trade deal – media

The administration of US President Donald Trump wants the UK government to repeal hate speech laws in order to secure a trade deal between the two nations, the Independent reported on Wednesday, citing claims by sources close to US Vice President J.D. Vance. 

In a recent interview, Vance spoke of his admiration for the UK and expressed optimism about the negotiations.

Washington and London are “working very hard on a trade deal” within the new US tariff regime, he told the British website UnHerd on Tuesday. 

However, the sources reportedly claimed to the Independent that Vance’s optimism on a trade deal “is a way of putting further pressure on the UK over free speech.” 

“If a deal does not go through, it makes Labour look bad,” they reportedly said. 

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Declassified Biden-Era Domestic Terror Strategy Reveals Broad Surveillance, Tech Partnerships, and Global Speech Regulation Agenda

A once-classified federal strategy paper has surfaced, pulling back the curtain on how the Biden administration planned to address domestic terrorism. Released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard after legal pressure from America First Legal (AFL), the document shows a government effort that stretches far beyond traditional national security work.

We obtained a copy of the documents for you here.

The 15-page plan, dated June 2021, outlines a series of objectives aimed at curbing domestic extremism. What’s caught critics’ attention, however, is how broadly the strategy defines the threat. Violence is only part of the concern. The rest seems focused on speech, ideology, and the online flow of information.

AFL sounded the alarm in an April 2 letter, accusing the administration of turning federal power inward. The group warned that officials were labeling “disfavored views” as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “hate speech” and then moving to suppress them under the banner of national security. The letter called it an attempt to “weaponize” the government against its own citizens.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Tulsi Gabbard responded on April 5, thanking AFL “for your work” and promising action. “We are already on this,” she said, “and look forward to declassifying this and other instances of the government being weaponized against Americans.” She pledged to restore “transparency and accountability” across the intelligence community.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio Shuts Down US Censorship Agency Remnants

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has officially ordered the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) office, ending a controversial chapter in what he described as a “shameful” period of federally sanctioned speech suppression.

The move dismantles the only formal office in the department tasked with countering foreign propaganda but, as Secretary Rubio and many others have noticed, it had morphed into something far more troubling: a taxpayer-funded engine that repeatedly ended up silencing American voices.

“For centuries, the United States served as a beacon of hope for millions of people around the world,” Rubio said in a statement. “Over the last decade though, individuals in America have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions…That ends today.”

His decision to eliminate R/FIMI follows years of escalating concern over how programs meant to counter foreign disinformation have instead repeatedly targeted domestic speech.

The office, created in late 2024 as a scaled-down continuation of the now-defunct Global Engagement Center (GEC), claimed to focus exclusively on foreign influence campaigns. Yet evidence increasingly showed that both R/FIMI and its predecessor were entangled in activities that penalized Americans for their political views.

While framed as a defensive measure against foreign adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran, the actual outcomes of these efforts routinely involved actions that resulted in blacklisting American media outlets, throttling their reach online, and labeling dissenting opinions as dangerous misinformation. The censorship was indirect but impactful: through partnerships with nonprofits and tech platforms, GEC-funded projects influenced what Americans could say, see, and share.

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Canada: Mark Carney Vows Internet Speech Crackdown if Elected, Citing Online “Pollution” of Misogyny, Conspiracies

It was supposed to be a routine campaign pit stop, the kind of low-stakes political affair where candidates smile like used car salesmen and dish out platitudes thicker than Ontario maple syrup. Instead, Mark Carney found himself dodging verbal bricks in a Hamilton hall, facing hecklers who lobbed Jeffrey Epstein references like Molotovs. No rebuttal, no denial. Just a pivot worthy of an Olympic gymnast, straight to the perils of digital discourse.

“There are many serious issues that we’re dealing with,” he said, ignoring the criticism that had just lobbed his way. “One of them is the sea of misogyny, antisemitism, hatred, and conspiracy theories — this sort of pollution online that washes over our virtual borders from the United States.”

Ah yes, the dreaded digital tide. Forget inflation or the fact that owning a home now requires a GoFundMe. According to Carney, the real catastrophe is memes from Buffalo.

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