Tag: censorship

DOJ Refuses Cooperation, Warns France to Back Off Censorship Probe Targeting X Platform

The U.S. Justice Department has flatly refused to help French authorities investigate Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

In a letter sent Friday obtained by The Wall Street Journal , the DOJ’s Office of International Affairs said the French probe is an attempt to regulate a U.S. company through criminal law.

“This investigation seeks to use the criminal legal system in France to regulate a public square for the free expression of ideas and opinions in a manner contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution,” the letter states.

The department added that France’s requests “constitute an effort to entangle the United States in a politically charged criminal proceeding aimed at wrongfully regulating through prosecution the business activities of a social media platform.”

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Big Advertisers Settle Case with FTC over Leftist Censorship in Advertising and Suspected Collusion Against Breitbart, Other Conservatives

Three of the world’s largest advertising companies settled Wednesday with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over claims that they colluded on policies to combat alleged misinformation that denied advertising revenue to conservative publishers such as Breitbart News.

The FTC said in a complaint filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas that WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis coordinated on policies that limited the number of ads that ran on sites with content that the industry had identified as misinformation. The policy resulted in fewer ads running on media outlets such as Breitbart News, punishing outlets that ran content that was “lawful but disfavored.” The filing explained that these advertisers sought to impose common “brand safety” standards across the digital advertising industry. The FTC stated that the ad agencies, with their primary competitors, Omnicom and IPG, operated through their trade associations to establish a “Brand Safety Floor” to combat “misinformation.”

“The ad agencies’ brand-safety conspiracy turned competition in the market for ad-buying services on its head,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a written statement. “The antitrust laws guarantee participation in a market free from conduct, such as economic boycotts, that distort the fundamental competitive pressures that promote lower prices, higher quality products and increased innovation.”

“As we explain in our complaint, the brand-safety agreement limited competition in the market for ad-buying services and deprived advertisers of the benefits of differentiated brand-safety standards that could be tailored to their unique advertising inventory,” the FTC chairman said.

Ferguson continued:

This unlawful collusion not only damaged our marketplace, but also distorted the marketplace of ideas by discriminating against speech and ideas that fell below the unlawfully agreed-upon floor. The proposed order remedies the dangers inherent to collusive practices and restores competition to the digital news ecosystem.

A spokesman for WPP said in a statement that the agreement “reflects our existing and ongoing commitment to provide our clients with unbiased advice as they decide where to place their media.” A spokesman for Dentsu said the company was “fully committed to operating transparently, with integrity, and in strict compliance with all applicable laws.” Publicis had not responded to a request for comment from the New York Times.

The FTC said in its filing that the ad agencies “coordinated” through the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an entity created by the World Federation of Advertisers, of which the three advertisers are members.

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UK Southport Inquiry Pushes Mass Surveillance and VPN Restrictions

On July 29 2024, a teenager walked into a children’s Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England, and murdered three young girls with a knife. He injured ten others.

It was, by any measure, one of the most horrifying attacks on British soil in recent memory, and what followed should have been a reckoning with the catastrophic state failures that let it happen.

Instead, the British government looked at the smoldering aftermath and decided the real enemy was the internet, and the solution just so happens to be the mass surveillance censorship proposals the government is already working on.

After the attack, outrage on social media turned to protests. Protests became riots. And the state’s response landed with a speed and ferocity that it had never managed to direct at, say, the agencies that let a known danger walk free for years.

A former childcarer named Lucy Connolly was jailed for 31 months for a single post on X. That is three months longer than the sentence given to a man who physically attacked a mosque during the same period of unrest.

The UK was already a country where arrests for “offensive” social media posts had nearly doubled in seven years, climbing from 5,502 in 2017 to 12,183 in 2023. The overall conviction rate for those arrests was falling at the same time. Police were locking people up for what they typed at a rate that was going up, while the number of convictions that actually stuck was going down.

The Southport riots became the accelerant. A House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report used the unrest to call for a “new national system for policing” with enhanced capabilities to surveil social media activity, framing public anger as a problem of online “misinformation” rather than a consequence of the state’s own failures.

The state was dodging accountability by demanding censorship and surveillance and blaming the internet for unrest.

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YouTube Removes Pro-Iran Channel Producing Anti-Trump Videos

Google, the owners of YouTube, has removed a channel on the platform belonging to a pro-Iran group producing Lego-themed videos mocking Donald Trump.

“Upon review, we’ve terminated the channel for violating our Spam, deceptive practices and scams policies,” a YouTube spokesperson told Middle East Eye. “YouTube doesn’t allow spam, scams, or other deceptive practices that take advantage of the YouTube community.” 

Explosive Media’s content largely consists of animations ridiculing the US war effort against Iran and poking fun at the US president.

YouTube did not specify how the channel had violated its policies, but the company has previously been described as being “aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps”.  

One of the group’s videos depicts Trump hurling a chair at US military figures, while Iranian generals press a red button with the label “Back to the Stone Age,” referencing a threat made by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Another depicts Trump with a flaming bottom, holding a sign that reads: “VICTORY! I am a loser.”

A number of videos reference Shia Islamic mythology, including depictions of Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who is a key symbol of resistance and spiritual leadership for Shia Muslims. 

Writing on X, Explosive Media hit out at Google for suspending its channel, saying it had been done because its content was “violent”. It wrote: “Seriously! Are our LEGO-style animations actually violent?” 

Explosive Media, known in Persian as Akhbar Enfejari, has denied it is backed by the Iranian government and its videos have reached millions of viewers across a range of social media platforms.

Its most recent video prior to being suspended appeared to show Trump carrying out the war in Iran to distract from the Epstein files and at Israel’s behest.

It also implied that Epstein and his associates had engaged in cannibalism, for which there is no evidence. An earlier video referenced other victims of US violence through history, including Native Americans, the Vietnamese and the children of Gaza, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also quoted Malcolm X. 

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How UK Regulator Ofcom Quietly Bypassed International Law to Police American Speech

A Freedom of Information response has confirmed what the UK’s speech regulator would probably have preferred to keep quiet. Ofcom fired off 197 information demands to American tech companies under the Online Safety Act, and not a single one went through the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, the formal diplomatic process that exists for exactly this kind of cross-border legal enforcement. Every one of those 197 notices was sent directly, by email or post, to companies operating entirely on American soil.

The number comes from a FOI request filed by Daniel Lü, who asked Ofcom a series of pointed questions about how it enforces the Online Safety Act against non-UK targets.

Ofcom confirmed that as of February 26, 2026, it had issued 197 Section 100 notices to US businesses. Zero through MLAT. The treaty between the US and UK that governs how one country’s legal process gets enforced in the other’s jurisdiction was treated as optional. Ofcom decided it didn’t apply.

That admission drew an immediate response from Preston Byrne, the American lawyer who represents 4chan and other US companies targeted by Ofcom.

Byrne called the 197 notices a “breathtaking” “attack on the First Amendment” and pointed out the uncomfortable math.

Only two US companies, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, have publicly refused to comply with Ofcom’s demands. If Byrne’s assessment is right, that leaves Ofcom enjoying “a 98% compliance rate with foreign censorship orders that violate the First Amendment.”

A British regulator sent nearly 200 demands to American companies, bypassed every established legal channel, and almost all of them appear to have simply done what they were told. The chilling effect is already here.

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Ban on step incest porn and ‘barely legal’ content in government climbdown

The government will ban so-called “barely legal” pornography of adults role-playing as children and depictions of some step-incest in a further crackdown on harmful online content.

There will also be a review into how pornography sites verify the age and consent of people featured in their videos, which will look at ways to allow people to withdraw previously given consent, Sky News has learnt.

The new measures mean the UK could have some of the strongest regulations of online pornography in the world, MPs told Sky News.

The government initially did not support the changes, leading to threats of a rebellion from female MPs who had been demanding further safeguards in light of a review into online pornography by the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin.

The review found online pornography was insufficiently regulated compared to offline, leading to an explosion of degrading, misogynistic and violent content.

Baroness Bertin tabled several amendments, which were passed in the House of Lords last month, inflicting defeats on the government.

This included a ban on pornography of adults pretending to be children, a ban on step incest pornography, the requirement for sites to verify age and consent and to allow people featuring in the videos to withdraw consent.

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UK Foreign Affairs Committee Calls for Government Agency to Police Online “Disinformation”

The UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee wants the government to build a new censorship agency. The proposed “National Counter Disinformation Centre” would be given the power to identify and act against speech the state considers “disinformation,” placed on a statutory footing, and modeled on bodies like Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency, which once ran a public campaign warning citizens about the dangers of memes.

The committee’s report, published on March 27 2026, goes further than a single new body.

It calls for new censorship rules in a forthcoming Representation of the People Bill to target AI-generated content and “the creation and dissemination of disinformation.”

It wants amendments to the Online Safety Act that would force platforms to publicly display where user accounts were created and whether the user connected through a VPN. It wants more money for the FCDO’s Hybrid Threats Directorate. And it wants the government to review the National Security Act’s foreign interference offense because, apparently, an existing law that carries up to 14 years in prison isn’t strict enough.

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UK Government’s TWISTED Priorities Exposed…

In Two-tier Britain words trigger instant action, but violent offenders get indefinite leave to remain.

UK border policy under Keir Starmer’s Labour government has never looked more lopsided.

An Afghan migrant who carried out a ‘horrific’ bottle attack on a 14-year-old girl and her mother has been allowed to stay in the country despite his violent criminal record. At the same time, the Prime Minister moved swiftly to block Kanye West from headlining the Wireless festival.

The contrast exposes the reality of Britain’s immigration system: tough on controversial speech, soft on actual predators who crossed the Channel or arrived via asylum claims.

Starmer stated: “Kanye West should never have been invited to headline Wireless. This government stands firmly with the Jewish community, and we will not stop in our fight to confront and defeat the poison of antisemitism. We will always take the action necessary to protect the public and uphold our values.”

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Kiwi Farms Challenges DMCA Subpoenas as Tools to Unmask Anonymous Speech

A new lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York offers a clean example of something that keeps happening and keeps getting ignored: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act being used to censor speech and unmask anonymous speakers.

The case is Lolcow LLC v. Fong-Jones, filed on March 12, 2026, and it pits the operator of the web forum Kiwi Farms against Liz Fong-Jones, an activist and field Chief Technology Officer at SaaS observability platform Honeycomb, who has been filing DMCA subpoenas in an attempt to identify anonymous forum users.

The content Fong-Jones wants censored is a screenshot of a Fong-Jones Bluesky post and an edited version of a Fong-Jones headshot, both related to what Fong-Jones has previously described publicly as a “consent accident.”

Forum users posted and discussed those images. Fong-Jones responded by claiming copyright ownership and filing DMCA subpoenas to force the site to hand over the identities of the people who posted them.

The copyright claims seem thin. Kiwi Farms operator Joshua Moon argues that the screenshot is a derivative work over which Fong-Jones holds no copyright, and that the edited headshot represents a textbook case of fair use, given that the image has no commercial value and was modified specifically for purposes of criticism and commentary.

That argument carries weight. Courts have long recognized that transformative use of images for commentary or ridicule sits comfortably within fair use protections.

What makes this case useful as a case study is less the copyright question itself and more the mechanism being exploited. The DMCA subpoena process, codified in Section 512(h), allows copyright holders to obtain a judicial subpoena to unmask the identities of allegedly infringing anonymous internet users just by asking a court clerk to issue one and attaching a copy of the infringement notice.

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Apple Removes Bitchat from China App Store at Cyberspace Administration Order

Apple deleted Bitchat from the China App Store, acting on a direct order from the Cyberspace Administration of China. Jack Dorsey, who created the app, posted a screenshot of Apple’s removal notice to X with a short caption: “bitchat pulled from the china app store.”

The notice Apple sent to Dorsey is almost a copy-paste of the one it sent to Damus three years earlier. The language is identical. The accusation is identical. The CAC determined that Bitchat violates Articles 3 of the Provisions on the Security Assessment of Internet-based Information Services with Attribute of Public Opinions or Capable of Social Mobilization.

That regulation, enacted in 2018, requires any online service capable of influencing public opinion or organizing collective action to undergo a government security assessment before going live. If a service hasn’t submitted to that assessment, the CAC can order it pulled.

It targets the capacity for “public opinions” and “social mobilization.” The Chinese government has decided that the ability to communicate outside state-approved channels is itself a security threat, and Apple consistently treats that determination as sufficient grounds for deletion.

Bitchat is a peer-to-peer messaging app that operates over Bluetooth mesh networks. It requires no internet connection, no phone number, no email address, and no user account.

Messages are end-to-end encrypted and stored only on the devices involved. There are no central servers to subpoena, no user databases to hand over, and no content moderation pipeline for the CAC to plug into.

Dorsey built the initial version over a single weekend in July 2025, coding it with Goose, Block’s open-source AI assistant. He published a white paper on GitHub and opened a TestFlight beta that hit its 10,000-user cap within hours.

That design is precisely the problem from Beijing’s perspective. China’s internet censorship apparatus depends on having a chokepoint.

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