US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Globa...
and some of it has been under the State Department, partly pursuant to the global Internet freedom program introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2010 when she was Secretary of State.
I'm sure the political and diplomatic valence is very different here, but the concept of "the U.S. government paying to stop foreign governments from censoring the Internet" is a longstanding one.
Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/15/us-tech-...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/05/calls-to-ha...
https://theweek.com/tech/palantir-influence-in-the-british-s...
https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2026/02/01/palantir-in-aus...
Mmmmkay…
It would have to be several times larger than the internet infrastructure itself due to the distances involved.
All built and maintained in secret?
No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there.
Simply having secret clearance doesn't mean you can just go digging around arbitrary secret classified info that you have no business reading. And it certainly doesn't mean that discussion can be had on hackernews.
1. fibre-optic traffic is a beam of light
2. this beam can be passed through a glass prism…
3. the prism splits off say 20% of the light by intensity
4. this 20% is identical to the 80%
5. both the 20% and 80% component are 'bright' enough to be used
6. the 80% continues on its merry way, the 20% is redirected for 'other' uses.
You can even do this without breaking the fibre
What you can't do is ship 80% of the traffic across the world to the US without either the ISPs agreeing, and thus a conspiracy of thousands of people in thousands of ISPs, or doing it outside the data centres, meaning millions of taps in various ducts around the globe, which would be found on a daily basis.
This is completely false and it should be obvious to anyone thinking about it critically.
Are you confusing search engine query share with internet traffic?
Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.
Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount.
Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.
Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.
I have. I have a background in high speed networking.
Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia?
If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about.
> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA
Where are you getting this new 200 numbers? Share a source please.
Ashburn, VA is the data center capital of the world.
When you type and hit submit, even on this site, your data will hit one of those data centers.
The few exceptions are government networks and China.
Or are you saying that the NSA has a hidden tap on the equipment without my ISP knowing. How does that traffic get from the ISP router to the NSA?
I can believe IXPs in many countries will send netflow data to their state's intelligence org, but that's a long way from what was being suggested.
"Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in X"
Does not mean that all traffic goes through a single data center in X. Just that it goes through one of potentially many data centers that happen to be in X.
“Loudoun County currently has 199 data centers, with another 117 in development, according to Michael Turner, vice chair of the board of supervisors transportation and land use committee and Ashburn’s district supervisor.”
https://virginiabusiness.com/loudoun-county-advances-changes...
now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably?
Instagram, YouTube, misc Web traffic, and torrents, with a side of minutae.
I'm certain the three letter agencies yearn for the days before letsencrypt was de facto.
A copy of the certificate and private keys won't help thanks to the magic of Diffie–Hellman, you can't passively (assuming you haven't got a practical quantum computer) read the stream
Your company will have deployed root certificates to devices and run as a MITM. This is standard corporate firewall behaviour.
That was 14 years ago…
We have MUCH more capabilities today.
I’m well aware of the historical surveillance programs. I’m asking for a source for all of your claims about what’s happening today regarding 80% of internet traffic.
As for traffic, I can’t cite numbers, you’ll just have to trust me when I say it. I can’t give you packet breakdown or IP4 vs IP6. To have that discussion requires a secret clearance at least.
I suspect many in DOGE were given high levels of security clearance based on their ability to create dank memes on x
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudoun_County,_Virginia#Econo...
And of course all the privately owned ones too. It is bananas. Not just because of government either - low ping times to the biggest population center of North America.
Neither would anybody have believed that 8 out of 10 hard drive chips can contain any rootkits. Yet, here we are, and the insanity of it is that we've found lots of malware attributed to EQGRP, and the Snowden leaks (from the perspective of Booz Allen) have confirmed it.
You should read up on quantum routing.
They don't have to route through any specific location if they can just infiltrate the routers of your neighbors. Any data packet from the originating server will arrive slower at your location than the data packet of your neighbor. In that scenario TLS becomes pretty useless if the CA itself is also exchangeable, because you can't rely on TCP or UDP. Ironically the push for UDP makes it much easier to implement in the underlying token ring architectures and their virtual routing protocols like VC4 and later.
That's how the internet and a star topology (or token ring topology on city level) was designed.
I haven't heard this before. Do you have any links I can read on this?
Check the snowden leaks for IRATEMONK and TAO (tailored access operations) related documents.
If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.
From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...
But ymmv, social studies are always hard to trust, because it's borderline impossible to prove cause and effect
Ironically the studies of that nature are often themselves a form of propaganda, because it's entirely straightforward to structure the study to produce your preferred outcome.
There is a well-known human bias where people use information they know to try to guess information they don't. If you're given three random people and the only thing anyone has told you about them is that one is a drug addict and then you're asked to guess which one is a thief, more people are going to guess the drug addict. So now all you have to do is find a situation where the thief isn't actually the drug addict, let the media outlet tell people which one is the drug addict, and you'll have people guessing the wrong answer a higher proportion of the time than they would by choosing at random.
I hope it's not me, whom you responded to, because I cannot fathom how you could've gotten that impression considering my phrasing...what's up with this topic getting so many people with arguing via complete strawmen
Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
>If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any [bad stuff]
Education works. It doesn't work perfectly.
Education doesn't cause good choices but it is sometimes correlated to better situations, the difference between the criminals in prison and the ones in the C suite is only education.
This assumes that a) everyone is the same, and b) education would always work. Matthew Perry explained that this is not the case. Some people respond differently to drugs. Whether these people are educated or not, changes very little. Education helps, but not in the way as to be able to bypass physiological aspects completely.
> Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
Education can still help. For instance, I decided very early on that the best way to avoid e. g. addiction is to not "give in and try once". So I never tried drugs (ok ok, I did drink a beer occasionally). This was the much simpler and easier strategy to pursue, simply via avoidance behaviour.
Thus I disagree that the premise can be "if educating worked" - people will always respond differently to drugs. And they will have different strategies to cope with something too - some strategies work, others don't work. One can not generalize this.
If you oppose these speech bans... Why you're as silly as a preacher telling teens not to fuck!
And the failure of education was an intentional feature, not a bug, since the government wants obedient tax cattle that will easily accept their propaganda at elections, not freethinkers that question everything because then they might notice your lies and corruption.
It's like building a backdoor into your system thinking you're the only one who gets to use it for the upper hand, but then throw fits when everyone else is using your backdoors to defeat you.
Everyone can feel censorship, everyone can learn what they're punished for saying.
Propaganda, though, that can feel like learning, like personal growth and development.
If censorship comes with a stick, propaganda is a carrot.
And today, we have as much of a problem with metaphorical obesity as with literal obesity.
One way is simple repetition of the exact same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
Another is to have many different lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
Taking a step back, there is another way for propaganda to function that doesn't even require being the main source, but simply to make the lie so huge that people can't process the idea someone would be *that* level of dishonest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
Consider your own previous comment:
> you get one half truth from one source, another half truth from another source, then two halves make whole truth.
What happens when one source says that the Alpha Party* consists of child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5 who caused the 9/11 attacks to cover up how the mind-control chemtrail fluid they were making in the WTC burned hot enough to melt steel beams, and the other source says the Alpha Party is standing on a platform of reducing the tax burden on hard-working families?
The latter can be a half-truth, but you don't get even a little closer to a full truth by adding any part of the "other side".
* A made-up party, any similarities to actual persons is coincidence and all the usual disclaimer.
They clearly did work, though.
Problem? No, the problem isn't their very happening, it's more that they are effective strategies. Some also used by advertising agencies.
> And the very fact that you know about child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5 shows that an opinion is available no matter what propaganda you use against it as long as it's not censored.
I don't know anything about child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5, that doesn't mean I can't talk about them. It's called "making stuff up".
Not sure where you're going with that sentence though. You do realise, I hope, that this was supposed to be a string of nonsense? That the point was that no matter which half you take from a string of nonsense, you can't combine it with a half-truth to get a full truth, you just get a half truth with a different false part.
Which in this example might be something like "the Alpha Party* caused the 9/11 attacks to cover up how the mind-control chemtrail fluid they were making in the WTC burned hot enough to melt steel beams, and wants to reduce the tax burden on families where the parents earn more than double the national average income between them".
The half-truth remains, at best, a half-truth. But that's the best case, and you only get that if you already knew what part was less than honest before you considered what to dismiss, at which point you didn't need anything from other statements in the first place.
> You can suppress it only by censorship, not by propaganda.
That's the point of disagreement: you, as a human, can only pay attention to so much. For example, if I buy all the ad space around you and fill it with only my own message, that is propaganda that denies the same space to anyone who wants to tell the truth.
> In any case using shitposting sites as a source of information is tricky, journalism isn't that bad yet.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/09/25/1-in-5-am...
* A made-up party, any similarities to actual persons is coincidence and all the usual disclaimer etc etc.
No, it's a page out of the old fascist playbook where flooding the stage with propaganda generates enough confusion to help fascists further their hateful agenda.
I'm not sure about modern fascists, but US politics does look rather Kayfabe-y to me. Fake opposition, there for the purpose of being an opponent.
Of course then you get all the discourse about what even counts as fascism, and someone brings up that the origin of the word is the Roman "fasces" (bundle of sticks) and how that etymological root points to the concept of "strength through unity" which is also why the Lincoln memorial has Lincoln resting his hands on them[0] and why trade unions often use the "strength through unity" phrasing (and get annoyed/upset by the connection).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Memorial_statue_a...
You can tell they've never read his work because his conclusion in the end is that you should tolerate intolerance up and until it promotes specific violence.
So total freedom of speech up and until it starts inciting violence. It's basically the same stance the US Constitution has.
It often doesn't at all, drowned amongst lies.
And sometimes it takes a lifetime or two.
It took Boris Yeltsin, who had just become the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, actually visiting a random grocery store in Houston before he realised what the truth was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_visit_by_Boris_Yeltsin_to...
This was a communist apparatchik. Its like showing truth to MAGA people. Most wont accept it.
Could be. That was the other example I was considering using besides Yeltsin, but I figured it would immediately get met with "no u" responses from those who, as you say, won't accept it. That makes for boring conversations where I learn nothing.
Even in democratic societies politicians don't change their beliefs so fast (maybe most human?). But luckily we can vote them out so this is not a big problem.
Good luck, Earthlings ...
Yeah I agree, we shouldn't be too concerned about Iran, Russia, or China, censoring the internet, the truth gets through.
"Global tariffs all over the spectrum help the US economy! Look at my Beautiful Big Chart !" ... yeah, right.
Statists, failing to admit their guilt, blame everyone but themselves.
And no, the truth does not get through, even after centuries.
Promoting truth and opposing lies are the same thing.
I wouldn't be so sure. Significant part of Russian population believes that they are purging Ukraine of evil nazis, for example. Or that WW2 started on 22 June 1941.
The world is yet to find a single piece of truth coming out of the Trump administration. I mean, shall we discuss how Trump claims the Epstein files exonerate him when he is reported as directly, deeply, and personally involved in every single gruesome aspect of the criminal organization?
> And truth.
In short, propaganda.
Propaganda (noun): Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. Propaganda can be found in a wide variety of different contexts.[0]
Preventing non-ideal outcomes is not about lying, but not doing things you might regret in the future.
This is why I'm no politician, though.
There's also debate and ego-less teaching for the sake of truth-seeking.
My ego prefers to be the kind of person who ends up at truth over being one who has fooled themselves into thinking they have already found it, which makes changing my mind easier than others find it.
I am pleased to say, others have also remarked that I am closer to this ideal than others they know.
Yeah, that's what everyone says.
One of my childhood life-lessons, which took far too many examples to internalise, was all the people who are very happy to follow the crowd because it is the crowd.
In fact, what you're doing now suggests my approach is so alien to you that you yourself are right now not only not even telling yourself this but also labelling yourself as someone who does not say this.
Scount mindset: the discovery of the truth to the best of our ability without fear or favour.
The metaphor is: A scout who tells the general his troops are strong when they are weak, that the enemy is weak when it is strong, is a bad scout.
The opposite is a soldier mindset: a soldier who fears to fight when ordered, no matter the strength of the enemy, isn't a good soldier.
You can call the search for truth an agenda in its own right if you wish, but it lacks the "primarily used to influence or persuade" aspect of propaganda.
That's a mind-slave mindset. Why is the scout working for the general and not for himself?
And a general needs the same *mindset*, even if they must also engage in performative ho-rah-ing to the troops.
A general may need to order their troops to die for the greater good, they may need to lie to the troops to up morale, but if a general lets themselves believe they're strong when they're weak, they're bad at being generals. If they don't listen to their scouts, if they shoot the messenger, they're bad at being generals.
https://archive.org/details/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays...
You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.
It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.
It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.
There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.
Freedom of speech for me, not for thee
The whole truth here would be that technically he did not do it unilaterally but as a representative of his voters, so basically almost as far from unilaterally as possible.
Don’t be obtuse
The president runs VOA, it's not some separate entity he decided to censor.
I still think that soft power helped the US tremendously. For all their faults i really had a very positive view on the US, most of it was coloured through soft power. “Inventing” modern democracy, liberating EU from the nazis, Rock’n’Roll, hippie movement, Hollywood, early internet culture - all that overshadowed the imperialism.
Now the mask has come off. And I believe you are right that it ultimately may not matter too much. But then again I doubt the US will be able to style itself again as the “good guys”, the ones who spread democracy to all the oppressed people and and so on without significant effort.
The United States has nothing now, back to imperialism it seems.
This is only cringy lousy provocation for appearance of moral superiority.
Coming from a government notorious for spying on it's citizens it seems pretty ludicrous.
At the same time, I do not understand how what you wrote is in any way relevant to the topic.
In any case, you’re right. The only concern is that projects like this that start in Europe often end up being acquired by American companies, so I’m worried it could end up the same way.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for...
I would've done the same thing.
It's going to be a weird set of content on this website. Are they going to livestream La Liga sports?
I happen to write this from Poland and I don't recall a single newspaper being geo blocked here. Not nyt, not washington post not anything I've ever accessed.
And didn't see US gov website geo blocked either.
So I ask again: which newspapers and which gov websites?
Btw. asking once is enough ^^
Here's a HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27854663
(I worked with Nexstar and experienced this directly. Looks like this may have changed recently.)
That's a good start (might not be 100% up-to-date, but vast majority of them are still 451 blocked).
The search AIs tell me it's around a third of people.
I changed my system timezone to Germany and it worked without issues, so I was wondering if it’s a very bad geoblock or something else entirely
Maybe there's some sort of legal immunity the US government could grant to domestic sites which would allow them to lift those blocks without fear of reprisal?
Say I'm a UK citizen with advanced glioblastoma (implying loss of faculties, seizures, and pain; no cure, and things to worsen before eventually passing away, possibly some time from now). Suppose I wish to view websites on euthanasia options, but am blocked from doing so by the UK's Online Safety Act.
How does/will Freedom.gov help? (is it essentially a free VPN?)
Also, as others have pointed out, couldn't the censoring government simply block access to freedom.gov?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...
The US list one (1) banned book in a earlier version (Operation Dark Heart) because of national security.
>The first, uncensored printing of 9,500 copies was purchased for $47,300 in early September and destroyed by the publisher at the request of the Pentagon
There are a lot of books which probably shouldn't be in schools. I don't think children should be given copies of Mein Kampf or Camp of Saints, nor the random dark fantasy novels which are so popular today.
It feels disingenuous to pretend that school-book-choice is anything comparable to government level "book banning" when literally any of the books written about in that article can be freely checked out from any public library in the country.
This is an insane opinion. In the same way, I care about what movies, music, YouTube videos my children consume because they all can have a massive impact on a child's development.
Some things should not be shown to children. this should not be a controversial topic.
Is it conceivable that some librarian went off their meds and put a pornographic manga title on the shelf? Yea. But what we are talking about are books that are selected by educators getting banned because they represent ideas that small minds are threatened by.
There are zero such books that can be compared to the lot of things you are trying to compare them to.
I suppose that makes sense. But if the book in question is still available in the school library for any 7 year old to read or check out isn't that still a potential problem?
Also, teachers are human. They change views and opinions like the rest of us. What guarantees they don't break that trust?
But there are no guarantees - except that those who wish to ban access to books are never to be trusted.
Not every kid goes to a school with wonderful teachers. I think banning books for use in schools is justifiable.
Disingenuous framing. Book bans remove books from school libraries. A book sitting on a shelf is not giving a book to someone.
> of Mein Kampf or Camp of Saints
Why not? Genuinely, why not? What will happen if children have access to words on a printed page? Most of them have access to a supercomputer in their pocket.
To make my stance clear in case it’s not: there is no such thing as “age appropriate literature.” A free society depends on intellectual freedom. Restricting school libraries from holding certain books is a tactic to raise children to be closed minded adults.
Would you be comfortable with a 5 year old reading "Morning Glory, Milking Farm"?
If you think that book belongs in public schools the FBI should have a look at your computer.
Hilarious to think that freedom.gov might be the workaround.
So interesting to see it become a popular opinion that we should "not let" people say certain things. Like, if necessary, we should jail people for speaking.
I remember learning about the ACLU[1] as a teen, 25 years ago, and how they took a lot of flak for defending people who said things we all agreed were gross, which at first glance seems disgusting. But the lesson we were taught was that the Constitutional guarantee of "freedom of expression" wasn't qualified with "as long as the opinions being expressed are cool ones."
Really, "hate speech" is defined as "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly." Right wingers think some or all porn is the "bad" kind of expression and apparently banworthy, and left wingers think saying pretty much anything about trans ideology (other than full-throated endorsement) is hate speech.
I'm aware that many who are of the "don't let people do 'hate speech'" aren't Americans and don't owe any respect for the ideas of our particular Constitution, and that's fine -- but many Americans also now feel that citizens should only be able to speak the subset of ideas that one party endorses, and that any other ideas should be punishable, as they are in the UK.[2]
[1] If I understand it correctly, I think the ACLU is under new management, and no longer defends anyone whose ideas are uncomfortable.
[2] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/uk-arrests-for-twee... This fact-check points out that "only" 10% of the 30 arrests per day for online postings end up with convictions, and that it's rare to have "long" prison sentences. Very comforting.
The legal definition of hate speech (or rather, its local equivalents) is not just "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly".
America wants to be free to spread fascist propaganda and child sexual abuse material all over the world, i.e., it's utterly degenerate culture.
You are free to try, we are free to ban it. It's all good.
The US government is quite literally shooting dead American citizens in the street with zero consequences. You have a president who was found in civil court to be a rapist. He was impeached and had dozens of charges brought against him. He's unilaterally murdering people at sea and kidnapping foreign leaders.
EU countries balancing the right to freedom of speech against other rights is a drop in ocean compared to what's going on in the land of the free.
at this point it's the #1 principle of the UK government, everything else comes second after putting people in jail for saying the wrong things
Like the linked article states: the law doesn't permit the police to do what they do. Even if you implement an America-style "you can even yell bomb in an airport" speech law, the cops would still arrest people to intimidate them. Changing the law does nothing when the police force is simply ignoring the law.
that's not even remotely close to reality, you have zero understanding of what the free speech laws in america are if you believe this is covered by the first amendment
porn is ok, posts that hurt my fee fees and ideological bias bad :'( (both are ok in my opinion btw)
Basically America is very good at protecting hate speech, not so good at the rest.
My educated guess is that your definition of "hate speech" doesn't include people openly calling for assassinating federal employees (i.e. ICE).
BTW: properly applied 1st amendment is what led to un-banning censorship of nipples (see. Flynt v. United States, Miller v. California) as well as unbanning "obscene" books by Henry Miller and others (Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein)
I'm against censorship of nipples and speech including what you likely consider "hate speech". To me the line is calling to kill or physically harm someone. Which leftists are currently doing in spades and yet BlueSky doesn't ban them for that.
Which is fine, and also why crying about “freedom of speech” is disingenuous. Everyone has different views on what’s allowed and what’s not, but everyone agrees there must be restrictions.
Can you give an example of censoring of any of these type of content? AFAIK there is only age gating.
Do you want censorship (of porn, of "hate speech") or not?
Because it seems you don't want censorship of porn but do want censorship of speech.
"hate speech" is a made up thing that politicians use to jail people who complain about government.
If you're an American you should cherish 1st amendment. You should cherish the fact that founding fathers recognized that the greatest thread to your freedom is not another person with a gun but a thousand people with a gun i.e. government.
And giving government the power to censor speech they don't like is the fastest way to tyranny.
That's why freedom of speech is 1st amendment. Not second, not fifth. It's 1st because it's that important.
Death threats are illegal whether they happen offline or online.
Yelling "I HAVE A BOMB!" in an airport comes with consequences.
I believe we can agree on these two examples.
But that's not what "hate speech" is code word for.
At this point in time any opinion to the right of extreme leftist ideology is considered by said leftist to be "hate speech".
Examples of "hate speech": criticism of muslims (but jews are ok), or minorities, or men playing in women's sport or breast amputation of 15yr olds, or immigration.
Nick investigating Somali fraud is racist and hateful.
The "hate speech" box is big enough that you can put a lot in it.
So yeah, we agree that there are limits to free speech. We agree that death threats cross the line.
But you tell me if we agree where that line is.
If you think there's such think as "hate speech" and it crosses the line, then we do not agree.
What constitutes hate speech is carefully defined in the constitutions of EU countries. Politicians can't just amend or extend the definition at will, except in the UK which has a strange system of laws and not a constitution like you're used to in the USA or in the EU.
In Europe we recognize that Hitler came to power by abusing free speech, which is why using the same rhetoric now can land you in trouble with the law. We also recognize that the pen is mightier than the sword and that unfettered speech can be used to persuade groups of people to use violence against other groups of people.
The Nazis came to power through widespread normalized political violence, not speech, and banning Hitler from speaking did nothing but further undermine the legitimacy of the government’s mandate to rule.
The Nazi party had a private paramilitary wing — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung — and political violence was both common and integral to their rise.
When the Enabling Act was deliberated and passed, giving Hitler effectively absolute power, Sturmabteilung paramilitary members were positioned both inside and outside the chamber.
That period of history was fraught with political violence enacted by people who claimed a moral imperative to curtail the freedoms of others.
I've heard this again and again - no one mentions that the Nazis had roving bands of men intimidating people like a mob, and that Hitler came to power because of a false flag operation that burned the Reichstag.
But we should forget the physical threats of the Nazis and focus on thin parallels to their ideas, under the guise 'hate'.
When you do that, you end up with people arbitrarily deciding what's hateful and not, depending on their own values. Chants about English culture threatened by Muslims, hate, chants about Israel and Jews dominating the country, not hate (courtesy of UK hate speech protections).
The US should make an alternate internet without europeans so we can avoid them
It's not the speech itself that's illegal, it's the fact that they made everyone nearby aware they could have the means to mass murder everyone around them. People will obviously react to that by taking down the potential threat.
Requiring ID to buy alcohol isn't banning alcohol, just like requiring ID to view porn isn't banning porn.
We are a few years away from the exact thing in stores.
I'm sure there is a positive side to the US influence, but it's well hidden and they definitely don't advertise it.
If it ends with the Navy showing its non-soft power, Europe won't have any fucks left to give about some website.
I suspect most Americans would actually be quite supportive.
You’ll just have to figure out how to actually pay for it.
The defense budget required to operate without US assistance is another matter entirely; you’re looking at doubling existing spending, plus hundreds of billions in one-off procurement costs — and that assumes ongoing access to US weapons systems.
The US subsidizes the massive weapons development programs you currently rely on; cost sharing agreements and unit purchases do not come close to offsetting the full sunk R&D costs the US covers.
Replacing those weapons programs, and the existing US industrial base and supply chain they depend on, would run into the trillions of dollars.
Just the R&D portion of the US defense budget is $150B a year — the entire EU’s aggregate defense R&D spending is only ~€15B/year.
A truly independent EU that did not depend on the US for its security would be a very different place.
Probably worth noting that if the US isn’t at the head of the table, it’s moved to China by default, not Europe. Though their propaganda seems to be quite successful lately.
Don't you understand? You're threatening to invade us, China isn't. So no matter how bad China may be, you're still worse at the moment.
You're so blinded by arrogance. You cannot imagine a world in which you are hated, but it's already here.
If the US wants to ban AWS from operating in the EU that's just going to accelerate the shift away, for example.
Tarriffs are a tax on imports to the US applied by the US government.
You can't tarriff selling a service overseas, in fact since AWS in other countries is a locally incorporated entity you can't even meaningfully demand they charge more AWS in the UK is a separate corporation incorporated and taxed under UK law, for example.
My point was that tarriffs or other trade sanctions on Europe are hardly going to change the calculus or consumption of services by Europe - the most that could be done is accelerate the migration away, but European consumers wouldn't notice a thing by those mechanisms (because US digital services are an import - "kind of" - given actual corporate structures).
Netflix, YouTube and OpenAI are completely meaningless and we could drop it tomorrow. NVIDIA and AWS are a different story. The only problem is that once things become transactional (as opposed to mutually trusting allies), Europe can leverage ASML and possibly ARM. So it doesn’t bring much soft power anymore, only mutually assured economic destruction.
That surely is running out of steam. Everyone's got whiplash from trying to watch America and it's tariffs. How do you know it won't be applied anyway, or forgiven for whatever flavour of the day policy it changes to.
There is very little point in conceding to it when you'll have another opportunity for something else that might be more amicable before the inks dry on that tariff.
I'm not saying things will return to the pre-Trump semi-hegemony but I do think it's over the top to think the US economy will have zero soft power in the years after Trump too.
Reciprocal tariffs would (for the EU) hurt export of goods much more, since that is where the EU has a large surplus.
Are they though? Trump tried to use them to get ownership of Greenland a few weeks ago and just gave up. Then he tried to bully Canada again, and also gave up again. I think at this point nobody takes his offers of relief or threats seriously anymore, since any deal you make can be invalidated a couple weeks later.
I am saying we have seen multiple instances where countries have stopped considering Trump's deals, cause they cannot be relied on.
We don't care any more. We don't like you. Do you understand?
I don’t think it’s meant to be a perfect solution; I think it’s meant to be a political tool.
Also, the US does fund Tor — originally US Navy + DARPA, now through Dept of State. Entirely possible that they’ll eventually operate a Tor onion site for freedom.gov too.
When the US issues reports saying the EU is actively working against US values both within the US and globally, that report can be elevated by later US administrations to justify military drawdowns, exiting NATO, etc. The EU should produce counter artifacts demonstrating they do align with US values, but instead they responded as if this was a power struggle.
Your comment about “mind games” suggests too simple an interpretation:
This isn’t about what people believe is true, but what facts are available to the machinery of government policy making — much like litigating semantics and debating evidence inclusion within a court case.
This is about constructing the sentence:
“The EU’s widespread blocking of the freedom.gov free speech platform for the past decade demonstrates a divergence from American values that means NATO no longer functions as an effective vehicle for American vision on the global stage.”
Also it is cheap, easy, non-controversial domestically in the US, and ethically coherent with American values.
I'm a lifelong US citizen and burst out laughing at this. What values? What coherence?
Do you mean the NSA man-in-the-middleing all that traffic and leaving a backdoor for Mossad? Imagine the most despicable possible invasion of privacy and the most reprehensible shadow oppression and manipulation of an uneducated populace you can conjure up.
Now imagine something way worse than that. This is America.
Where critical late night shows get cancelled because a small group of Trump-aligned people control most media?
Seriously, the world is looking in amazement how all the talk about free speech and democracy was purely performative.
The US becoming Hungary (or maybe Russia).
By law.
So, not so much free speech.
I don't think European countries have been shy or sneaky about their restrictions on online content.
Do you mean that VPN will blur the nipples when you watch pictures of classical paintings through it?
No, it means they will send a SWAT team to your house if you use it to download a movie.
The US government is responsible for 35% of Tor's funding[1] and has been its primary sponsor since Tor was invented as a side project in the US Naval Research Lab.
I am merely explaining what MITM is and what the OP meant.
You can also call it "U.S. government spying on Europeans".
It's one thing to block some random .gov site unused for anything else, it's another thing to block a domain used for, say, filing flight plans.
(The flight plans get passed between countries via AFTN/AMHS, which are dedicated telecommunications networks independent of the Internet.)
There's also several different ways to transmit the passenger manifest to CBP - including over a CBP-provided VPN and IATA "Type B" messages sent through ARINC/SITA.
The network for Type B messages is also independent of the Internet (it was developed 60 years ago).
Southern European countries are blocking whole Cloudflare IP ranges because of the massive grip on the government the sports licensing maffia has there. These countries also don't feature any direct flights to America as far as I can tell.
These blocks may cause (temporary) issues for American business relations and tourism, but such side effects may not be considered so problematic if the US leverages their government infrastructure to attack European legislators.
You are correct that if they only blocked it for consumers, it would be less of an issue, though that would be difficult for mobile providers.
Seriously though... we have one segment undermining foreign lockdowns while the same and other segments are literally doing the same here.
This service is definitely a honeypot for tracking.
freedom.live freedom.xyz freedom.space etc.
Weird title, but worthy of discussion. From the little info available so far this appears to be little more than political posturing. If you want to fight censorship, an "online portal" to access all the censored content is the wrongest possible way to go about it. But we'll see.
[1] First, the EU countries have much higher World Press Freedom Index than the US. Second, once you start reading how little there is of the alleged "censorship" in the EU, you realize it's a no-brainer aiming to protect people.
European politicians are calling every day to censor social media. People are arrested regularly for social media posts.
Censorship is absolutely an issue in Europe and it’s only getting worse. I welcome such an attitude as this.
You cannot go around threatening to harm people without repercussions.
Guising it under a scary sounding law doesn’t change the nature of it.
[2] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Scottow-...
”Margaret Dodd of one offence of improper use of a public communications network, contrary to section 127(2)(c) of the Communications Act 2003. This provides that a person commits an offence if “for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another [she] … persistently makes use of a public electronic network”.”
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/dec/23/uk-police-le...
Regarding Graham Linehan who is by far the best example.
Not sure what [2] is about.
[3] doesn't appear relevant either.
Well yes, that’s my point. :)
2. Is a woman being arrested and charged with causing “anxiety” for a series of tweets.
3. Is the same; wrongthink guised as “threats” etc
If you just want to defend the censorship as is your right then just say so instead doing the usual:
“It’s not happening”
“Ok. It’s happening and that’s a good thing”
Rigmarole and wasting my time.
Obviously free (and not merely democratic societies) need strong protections of minorities and broad freedoms, but I don’t see free speech implementations in Europe broadly infringing on that.
Unfortunately, last I tried to look this up, I found that there simply do not exist useful and easy to find stats for "malicious communications" in the UK such that stalkers and people making death threats can be separated from mere political correctness.
And even with actual death threats, there's stuff like this, where I don't myself have a single sustained state of my own mind about how I would respond to such a tweet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11066477/Veteran-ar...
He was offered to undergo "re-education." You might not like this meme. You might find it offensive. But should he be arrested by several officers for it? Of course not. This is just one example of many people being being arrested and imprisoned for offending people. It is against the law to offend people in the UK.
Sorry, my eyes just rolled out if my head.
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/irishman-arrested-for-...
https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/irishman-arrested...
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/08/03/memes-police-matter...
https://www.hrla.org.au/uk_man_arrested_for_social_media_mem...
Is this normally how you evade things which make you uncomfortable? Attacking the source?
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/irishman-arrested-for-...
Maybe it's not on The Guardian or the BBC but it obviously doesn't fit their bias so you may have to accept other sources.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/arrest_of_mr_darren_b...
This is why the Daily Mail causes rolled eyes (along with Spiked and the rest of the right-wing agitprop).
Those complaints should have been laughed at and ignored.
"A 51-year-old man from Aldershot was arrested on suspicion of sending by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing message or matter."
This is the legal basis for the arrest. Without the retweet, police would not have had authority to turn up to his place of residence - twice - and demand entry. No doubt they preferred Brady voluntarily submit himself for interview at the station, but he refused, which I hope we can all agree is the morally correct position. No one should have police turn up outside their house - TWICE - because of a parody retweet.
Not saying that things are perfect in Europe but the US talking about freedom and freedom of speech sounds like a joke.
The US's "commitment to free speech" is nowadays not very much more noble than Russia's principled stand against economic sanctions.
What I did say is that the US's position is not as a defender of free speech either (and as Russia is not a defender of free trade). They have particular speech they like to promote (the KKK, stormfront) and particular speech they like to suppress (criticism of war crimes, books about being trans). Draw whatever conclusions you like from that.
The online commons and tasks are too complex and absurd, and we have many people who value speech, who would be the ideal people to take on these tasks. Putting their values into action so to speak.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so the moment people volunteer for this, they will themselves see whether the claims of misinformation and disinformation are overblown, and then vote accordingly.
Obviously speech is a super important part of our online lives, and should be treated as such.
Even now on HN we are lucky with who moderates it but this should be more commmon.
And Mandatory service for your own nation. How else will you have a citizenry who can be plugged into their information economy.
In most European countries, you'd have to go pretty far to get in legal trouble for social media posts. It's not impossible, but that's also true in the US. There are and have always been limits to speech. Everywhere. Also in the US (and not just under Trump, although he'd definitely increasing government censorship).
* Threats
* Blackmail
* Libel/slander
These are all restricted by law, because they hurt, silence or coerce people. Hate speech does the exact same thing. It's ridiculous to call hate speech protected free speech, while threats and blackmail are not.
A far worse attack on free speech is banning or restricting criticism of the government. That is the primary reason for free speech protections, and yet that's the very thing that the current US government is attacking on an unprecedented scale. See for example recent attacks on Jimmy Kimmel and Steven Colbert. That's something that would be unimaginable in many European countries.
>>Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages
>The police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms.
>Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail.
>Custody data obtained by The Times shows that officers are making about 12,000 arrests a year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.
But nearly all of them are direct threats to people, stalking, repetitive abuse, support for terrorism and admissions of actual criminal activity.
If you wrote these things on a wall outside your house you'd be arrested. If you said them down the pub you'd get the shit kicked out of you in 30 seconds. Do you expect these to be ignored under "free speech"? No because they wouldn't be even in the US.
This increased because people feel safe saying these things on social media because there are other people saying them in their social bubble.
> There are a few cases which are thrown out which were overreach <-- You are here
> Well overreach and sentencing is happening, but it's not common enough to care
> Yeah sentencing to prison is common now, but as long as you stay within the confines of the law you won't be affected
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021...
I believe you are referring to UK examples, which are not representative for Europe or covered under the DSA.
The overall message still applies; harassment and death threats are no less legal and no more legal because they happen online.
whether or not 30 arrests per day for social media posts is exclusive to the UK it is relevant to the OP link
>harassment and death threats
we both know that this is not what's being discussed here
Also "EU countries have higher press freedom than the US" is a strawman argument. We're not talking about press freedom. It's also an example of the fallacy of relative privation ("X isn't bad, because Y is worse than X"). It's like saying "It's a hoax that the US executes some prisoners, because Iran executes even more".
Sometimes I set my VPN destination to the UK (my country of origin) to get around these. Then I find that I have other problems. For example, certain Reddit posts are unavailable to me because someone has posted a comment that some algorithm has decided is NSFW (and therefore triggers age verification under the UK Online Safety Act 2023).
The result is that I have to turn my VPN on and off depending on what I'm trying to do.
If you want to make gambling illegal, then make gambling illegal and then enforce that law. You don't need to resort to indirect measures that go beyond the law (e.g. by preventing me from merely viewing the odds on a gambling website).
How would you solve this.
US citizens living in states without legal gambling can often drive across state lines or to the nearest Native American reservation to gamble. There’s no way of preventing this nor does there need to be.
Indian society is unconcerned, if not outright supportive of this law.
Your counterpoint zeroes in on the specific example, but in addressing it avoids the spirit of the issue.
People want certain laws and restrictions. You are arguing that if people choose to circumvent those laws, tough beans.
Heck, you could just have nations destabilize neighbors by this lassiez faire approach.
Even China, who has probably the most sophisticated information controls in the world, can’t prevent leaks through the Great Firewall. They just rely on it being “good enough” to restrain the general public.
Put another way, your country can make all the laws it wants, but it can’t change the laws of another country or force them to change how their network behaves, at least not without a fight. And in a world of billions of people, the global network will always be doing something that you don’t approve of, somewhere!
Remember we started are working from here
> If you want to make gambling illegal, then make gambling illegal and then enforce that law. You don't need to resort to indirect measures that go beyond the law (e.g. by preventing me from merely viewing the odds on a gambling website).
From your argument the only option is to not make anything illegal that is legal in the nation of minimum laws.
Are you arguing that nations - voters - should have no say in what laws they want to live under ?
Do note that I am all for less government control. But our current regulatory and rights landscape is not resolving the questions our voters and infrastructure is throwing up.
Eventually, everything runs on some infrastructure. Control will be forced.
If we want to prevent it, we need to have answers to the issues being thrown up by users.
You can make certain digital behavior illegal for your citizens, but enforcement is always going to be difficult. If you invasively spy on them to try and force them into your model digital behavior, it will cause unrest. If you try to block specific sites at the border, you will take down unrelated sites and breed contempt for the law. By pushing people farther and farther underground, you eventually connect them with organized crime and foreign governments.
In the long run, your insistence that the network be controlled is going to lead to either civil breakdown or totalitarianism. Perhaps that’s the inevitable consequence of connecting humanity as we’ve done. But I suspect that countries who are more digitally permissive will not face the same dilemma.
(Note that people usually accept laws where a victim can be identified. A digital crime with a real victim is still a crime, and standard policing methods can often track down the perpetrator. No need to break the internet for these cases.)
local laws are local and not global. otherwise we could start obeying Iran's or North Korea's laws just to be safe of not breaching any local laws.
Got it
I might have changed my dns in the past
Websites deciding EU users are not valuable enough to comply with GDPR is, as you say, also not censorship. It is again the technical decision of some website owners to provide their content only in conjunction with illegal processing of your data.
I have not had issues accessing torrent indices from the EU. This too is usually handled domestically and has little to do with the EU.
There is legitimately dangerous (current and upcoming) EU legislation (Chat Control, eIDAS, age verification, previously the Data Retention Directive), so I don't think it necessary to weaken your argument by listing non-examples.
- geofenced media
- commercial sites intentionally removing eu access because of gdpr.
That's it. Those are the only cases where I could not access sites from tbe EU. At least the ones I encountered.
And do notice, both of them are not filtered by the EU or anything like this. They are enforced at the publishing website. Would you call this censorship? It kind of feels like a stretch. If not a deliberate contortion of truth.
There's something similar in RealityVoid's comment where it is identified that EU law promotes censorship, but that is discounted because the understanding is it in aid of privacy rather than politically motivated. Although given Europe's rich history of sliding into authoritarianism that does seem like an optimistic take on where the European elite are heading. A part of political censorship is making it hard for people to realise that popular political viewpoints are being censored and providing cover by claiming the censorship is for some good cause would be pretty routine.
Is this because the EU or your country has blocked access, or some news site from the US blocking access from the EU because they don't want to deal with GDPR?
Because you really think this “portal” is going to let you access websites diffusing copyrighted content?
That's by far the most prevalent kind of blocking and I don't think the current admin is against that at all, they just want to to promote Nazi speech (which is barely blocked in the first place).
I wonder what they'll do about pedophile stuff though.
* Police in England and Wales recorded 12,183 arrests in 2023 for online speech. This number is growing fast, but the government isn't releasing the data anymore. A few years ago this man retweeted a meme (pretty milquetoast by internet standards) and was arrested and asked if he would undergo re-education: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11066477/Veteran-ar...
* The UK records "non-crime hate incidents," whereby if someone complains about you because they don't like you, and if the officer also doesn't like you, they record your behaviour on your permanent record, even if you haven't committed any crime. This record is accessible and used by many industries such as teaching, firefighters, and police. If you have even one non-crime hate incident on your record, you can be excluded from a job.
* The UK Online Safety Act 2023 requires websites with content which "could" harm children to age verify all users. Porn sites. Social media. Etc. This required people sending in their government ID to be permanently retained by a multitude of private companies. There are already many examples of sensitive data being leaked and hacked. Now that kid are using VPNs to access porn sites, the current ruling government is seeking to ban VPNs ("for children", of course).
* UK law criminalises “threatening,” “abusive,” or “insulting” words. The legal test is (I am not making this up), whether someone took offense. This has led to outrageous examples such as this man who is facing a longer sentence for burning a Quran than the man who stabbed him (for burning said Quran): https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8xr12yx5l4o
* In 2023–2024, the government obtained a court injunction preventing publication of details relating to a major data breach involving Afghan relocation applicants (the ARAP scheme). Parts of the reporting were restricted for national security and safety reasons.
* The Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice system allows the government to advise editors not to publish information that could harm national security. They have broad authority here.
* The Official Secrets Act 1989 criminalizes unauthorized disclosure of classified government information. Journalists themselves can potentially be prosecuted. There is no formal public interest defense written into the Act.
* The Contempt of Court Act 1981 restricts what can be published once someone is arrested or charged if publication could prejudice a trial.
* Ofcom regulates broadcast media under impartiality rules. News broadcasters must follow “due impartiality” rules. They can have their licenses revoked if they're not following some rather vague rules.
If I'm honest, I'm very envious of the First Amendment. It's clear that we do not have the same right to free expression in Europe. No doubt there are supporters of this system who prefer a society in which one may not say offensive or unkind things. But I think there are too many examples where suppression of speech inevitably leads to authoritarianism.
What a sad handwaive of the current state of affairs
What problems are you thinking about
This is a more than a bit misleading. The Quran-burner received a £240 fine, his assailant got 20 weeks suspended. Also, though he went for him with a knife, he wasn't successful - nobody was stabbed.
You haven't kept up with the news. The Crown Prosecution Service has lodged an appeal: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3v7w1yw771o
You are correct on one count: Hamit Coskun was not stabbed. He was "knocked down, spat at, and kicked." I'm not sure that's the gotcha you were hoping it would be.
Yes I know you’ll tell me it’s for my own good. Spare me.
"We ranked ourselves and found we were number one!"
I don't think the placement of the US on the World Press Freedom Index is necessarily informative of whether there's censorship in the EU. I'd expect they both rank higher than North Korea, but that doesn't tell us much either.
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1WCCeV...
Simple HTML:
{
x=AA1WCCeV
ipv4=23.11.201.94
echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
(printf '%s\r\n%s\r\n\r\n' \
"GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/$x HTTP/1.0" \
'Host: assets.msn.com') \
|nc -vvn $ipv4 80 |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134'
} > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmFor example, UK police track what they consider to be undesirable "non-crime" speech, build databases of people, and intimidate them for these non crimes (knock on their doors, invite them to come to police station, advise them not to say such things, etc). This is quite a new thing, within the past ~10 years.
There have also been other high profile cases of people being arrested for posting things that were not like that burn the hotel down case. They arrested 12,000 people in 2023 and convicted 1,100 of those. For cases where the evidence is as cut and dried as posts made online, they could only secure convictions in 8% of cases, which seems staggering to me when UK's conviction rate generally is like 80%.
Even the conviction rate, even if you say yes there are laws to prohibit certain speech, how far is too far? Are these kinds of laws and convictions needed? Why don't all other countries need them? Why didn't UK need them 20 years ago when there was still internet and social media? Is it not concerning to you that we're told this kind of action is required to hold society together? I'm not saying that calls to violence don't happen or should be tolerated, but if it is not a lie that arresting thousands of people for twitter posts and things is necessary to keep society from breaking down then it seems like putting a bandaid on top of a volcano. It's certainly not developing a resilient, anti-fragile society, quite the opposite IMO.
Is nobody allowed to be concerned about any of this without being some horrible underground extremist, in your opinion?
Actually they feel like they might secretly be the fifty first state!
Such as?
> Is nobody allowed to be concerned about any of this without being some horrible underground extremist, in your opinion?
Horrible underground extremist? Not so much. More likely just someone who consumes a very particular slice of media that puts a dishonest (at best) spin on situations like this.
> Such as?
That was the only thing in my comment you took issue with? Great, that's easy to clear up because there's a few around. Here's one
https://www.leeds-live.co.uk/news/leeds-news/yorkshire-man-a...
Arrested for saying "F--- Palestine. F--- Hamas. F--- Islam. Want to protest? F--- off to Muslim country and protest."
> Horrible underground extremist? Not so much. More likely just someone who consumes a very particular slice of media that puts a dishonest (at best) spin on situations like this.
Hmm. Was your previous post a dishonest (at best) spin on it too? That would be consistent with your claim if you are a consumer of a very particular slice of media and did not know you can find articles from a whole range of publications about this stuff easily on the internet.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/19/arresting-pa...
https://www.forbes.com.au/news/world-news/people-are-being-t...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2922w73e1o (Online speech laws need to be reviewed after Linehan arrest, says Streeting)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/13/uk-decision-to-ban-...
https://www.politico.eu/article/freedom-speech-suspicion-bri...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/world/europe/graham-lineh...
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/palestine-action-ruling...
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/03/uk/uk-farage-free-speech-...
https://www.fire.org/news/uk-government-issues-warning-think...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/shocking-cases-reveal-britains...
You really don't need to be some obscure basement dweller to have any kind of vague inkling that something might be a little on the nose in the proverbial state of Denmark.
If you come from a common law context the whole idea might seem strange.
Regardless of my personal thoughts on this (complicated), simply putting "many" in front of "Europeans" does a lot to diminish further alienation of those who don't, helping you achieve your goals. It takes 0.5 seconds.
Do they? Or is it being pushed upon them? And why is it "the key thing" here?
> Thus lawmakers are acting to find laws which encapsulate these.
I suspect it has been the reverse, the ruling class desperately wants those powers and if the common people are now in favor of them it is more than likely because of intensive campaigns from their governments and corporations to change their minds.
> In Germany, we have some simple ones surrounding using Nazi symbols and speech. These rules generally work well in our civil law context. Civil law usually is rather broad strokes and there might be cases where something injust happens which requires tuning laws.
Some laws existing does not mean some other laws won't be unjust. Or that legislated laws will always be right and not require "some tuning".
> If you come from a common law context the whole idea might seem strange.
The different systems of law don't seem all that strange to me at least, but the thread you are replying to is discussing censorship in the European nation of the UK.
Further, what we are discussing involves executive police powers (intimidation, arrests, compiling lists), as well as legislated laws, so it is not really just some quirk of common law at all.
Unless you understand concepts like "Natural Rights" the idea of a government not being able to curtail what you say will remain completely foreign to you.
You went from a military dictatorship to an unstable republic to a fascist state, then you split into military occupation zones, and then one of your military occupation zones annexed the other, the militaries left but you kept the laws, and now you arrest people for saying "from the river to the sea".
Using your German-ness to talk to anyone else about freedom or human dignity is patently ridiculous. If you have an ideological point to make, make it, but the whole "as a German" angle just does not hold water. "As a German" your history shows you don't understand this.
Your concept of Freedom of Speech is much closer to the Mainland Chinese model than an Anglo one.
Nobody is perfect, but Germans have learned a lot in the last century and a half. One of the things is that Freedom of Speech doesn't deserve the pedestal that primarily US Americans put it on. It has boundaries and one of those is calling for the displacement of an entire nation.
You make it sound like that Germany is just a puppet without its own mind, but in reality it is just some 80m people all with their own mind, history and education. The reality is that Germans are more aware of their history and the impact seemingly small decisions can have on the life of millions. That's why I talk about the German-ness, because many other countries can't or don't want to understand the weight of responsibility which arises from being the perpetrator of two world wars and the holocaust.
All you learned in the last centuries and a half is that you dont have the logistics to fight massive wars. You did not abandon anything due to your own enlightenment, you abandoned it because of massive foreign military interventions, where every single one of your newspaper, radio and television stations were replaced by your military occupiers.
The worst part about your Schuldstolz is that... the regime who did the most to end yours was even less moral and killed even more people than your own. Meaning you aren't even the best at being awful.
So no, I do not care what you have to see about freedom "as a German". You were militarily, ideologically and mentally conquered. Lecturing Anglos is this is just reflecing back our own beliefs but distorted with a German mindset that has no history or tradition of freedom of speech.
Never heard that word before. And I don't think I am lecturing you about something you should do. I was just talking about why Germans in their own free country are choosing to make decisions about their own laws.
If you feel like we are missing something about freedom of speech, that's fair enough. You are entitled to your opinion. What is strange to me is that Americans (and you as somebody from NZ) are starting to lecture us on that we are being censored by our government. Which in itself is ridiculous and even when explaining why we are preferring the rules we have, we get attacked for it.
Germans aren't mentally conquered, this is just bullshit. We have the same freedom to think what we want as all other Europeans. Things are also evolving, the second world war is so long ago, that very few Europeans were first hand involved. What we considered American values (I don't think the Anglo sphere is very united in these) has also rapidly changed. Americans no longer believe in multi-lateralism and shared values, so not sure what reflection you are alluding to.
Your views on the war are also not very informed. West Germany and East Germany were vastly differently handled by the occupation forces. While for East Germany your talking points of a total replacement it true, in West Germany many of the old elites had to be put back in power to aid the western allies in propping up Germany against the Russians. It took a lot of counter culture to fight those brown remains.
Last, I don't know where you take the energy and insights to say that we have no history of XYZ, but it just isn't true.
Human dignity is not foreign to me at all, I just don't believe a life where the state protects your feelings from words, and that dictates what you may and may not talk about is not a dignified one.
Your argument is similar to saying that we shouldn't have rules when driving cars. "Why life cannot be dignified if I have to observe stop signs."
In every are of life there are balances to be struck. I am sure your country has rules for slandering individuals (because most have). What's the difference to also having rules against slandering entire people?
What is your evidence to that claim?
I think it is actually not easy to assume that position, as evidenced by vast numbers of Europeans who do not assume that position. I think that it is in fact far easier (as a majority, white, employed, etc.), to go through life believing your government will solve everything and protect your feelings from being hurt by hearing what other people think. I just think it is an undignified existence.
> Your argument is similar to saying that we shouldn't have rules when driving cars. "Why life cannot be dignified if I have to observe stop signs."
I can see how bewildering this is for you, but my "argument" is also quite different in important ways.
> In every are of life there are balances to be struck. I am sure your country has rules for slandering individuals (because most have).
Adjudicating disputes between private parties is clearly one of the real roles of government.
> What's the difference to also having rules against slandering entire people?
I'm not sure if you are being rhetorical and actually want me to list the differences because you are unaware of them? Civil actions brought by private parties are different from government censorship and criminalization of speech. And I can be sued in civil court for what I say, I never said or even hinted that this should be disallowed that seems to be a strawman you have made up.
I don't think it should be easy to be found liable for damage if you tell the truth or give your opinion though.
What about you? Do you think calling AfD voters in general racists or extremists or selfish or xenophobic should be censored and criminalized by your government?
Isn't the conviction rate the number of people convicted divided by the number charged, not the number arrested?
1) Catalan Referendum Website Seizures (2017)
Spanish courts ordered ISPs to block dozens of pro-independence domains and mirror sites during the referendum. Civil Guard units physically entered data centers to seize servers tied to the Catalan government’s digital voting infrastructure.
2) GitHub Repository Takedown (2017)
Spain obtained a court order forcing GitHub to remove a repository that mirrored referendum voting code and site information, extending censorship beyond Spanish-hosted domains.
3) Rapper Convictions for Online Lyrics
Spanish rapper Valtònyc was convicted for tweets and lyrics deemed to glorify terrorism and insult the monarchy; he fled the country and fought extradition in Belgium for years.
⸻
France
4) Blocking of Protest Pages During Yellow Vests (2018–2019)
Authorities requested removals of Facebook pages and livestreams tied to the Yellow Vest protests, citing incitement and public order concerns.
5) Court-Ordered Removal of Election Content (2019 EU Elections)
French judges used expedited procedures under election-period misinformation law to order removal of allegedly false political claims within 48 hours.
6) Prosecution of Political Satire as Hate Speech
Several activists were fined or prosecuted for online posts targeting religious or ethnic groups in explicitly political contexts, even where framed as satire.
⸻
Germany
7) Mass Police Raids Over Social Media Posts
German police have conducted coordinated nationwide dawn raids targeting individuals accused of posting illegal political speech under hate-speech laws.
8) Removal of Opposition Content Under NetzDG
Platforms removed thousands of posts from nationalist or anti-immigration political actors within 24 hours to avoid heavy fines under NetzDG enforcement pressure.
9) Criminal Convictions for Holocaust Commentary Online
Individuals have received criminal penalties for online statements denying or relativizing Nazi crimes, even when framed in broader political debate contexts.
⸻
United Kingdom
10) Police Visits Over Controversial Tweets
British police have conducted “non-crime hate incident” visits to individuals’ homes over political tweets, creating official records despite no prosecution.
11) Arrests for Offensive Political Posts
Individuals have been arrested under public communications laws for posts criticizing immigration or religion in strongly worded terms.
12) Removal of Campaign Content Under Electoral Rules
Election regulators required digital platforms to remove or restrict political ads that failed to meet transparency requirements during active campaigns.
⸻
Italy
13) Enforcement of “Par Condicio” Silence Online
During mandated pre-election silence periods, online political content—including posts by candidates—has been ordered removed or fined.
14) Criminal Defamation Charges Against Bloggers
Italian bloggers critical of politicians have faced criminal defamation prosecutions for investigative posts during election cycles.
⸻
Finland
15) Conviction of Sitting MP for Facebook Posts
Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen was prosecuted for Bible-based comments posted online regarding sexuality and religion; although ultimately acquitted, the criminal process itself was lengthy and high-profile.
⸻
Sweden
16) Convictions for Anti-Immigration Facebook Posts
Swedish courts have convicted individuals for Facebook comments criticizing immigration policy when deemed “agitation against a population group.”
⸻
Netherlands
17) Criminal Case Against Opposition Politician
Dutch politician Geert Wilders was convicted (without penalty) for campaign-rally remarks later amplified online, deemed discriminatory.
⸻
Austria
18) Rapid Court Orders Against Political Posts
Austria’s updated online hate-speech regime enabled expedited court orders compelling removal of allegedly unlawful political speech within days.
⸻
Belgium
19) Prosecution of Political Party Messaging
Members of the Vlaams Belang party have faced legal sanctions for campaign messaging shared online deemed racist or discriminatory.
⸻
Switzerland
20) Criminal Fines for Referendum Campaign Speech
Swiss activists have faced criminal fines for online referendum messaging judged to violate anti-discrimination law during highly contentious votes.
And of course, once it's illegal to agitate against violence, we just have to redefine violence: for instance, posting about Nazis puts them in danger, and they're all white, so clearly you're a racist for opposing Nazis.
These aren't hypothetical examples: the people defending Free Speech have watched these slippery slopes get pulled out again and again. Misgendering a trans person is a "hate crime", reporting on the location of gestapo agents is "inciting violence", protesting against the state is "terrorism"
And fundamentally, this is a lever that gets wielded by whoever is in power: even if you agree with the Left censoring Nazi salutes, are you equally comfortable with the Right censoring child mutilation sites (also known as "Trans resources")?
SURELY "child mutilation" is "obviously harmless" to ban, right?
Maybe Americans should take a break from criticizing the EU and fix their own shit first. It's incredibly frustrating to constantly see far right goons swing around "freedom of speech" as if that term hasn't been a fig leaf for ages. In the US, if you do something that the powers that be dislike that is covered by freedom of speech, they'll manufacture something else to hit you with. At least here in the EU, when you get investigated for something that freedom of expression covers, you'll at least get acquitted eventually.
You're aware news sites are used to push agenda, some more than others, but that's half the interest of seeing what they push. And sometimes the more fringe have stories on what should be news but don't make it to mainstream media channels.
...anyway I'm more a believer in assuming people have a brain and can figure stuff out vs banning sites, both have danger to them but censorship seems the bigger danger to me.
dig @192.168.2.1 rt.com
; <<>> DiG 9.18.39-0ubuntu0.24.04.2-Ubuntu <<>> @192.168.2.1 rt.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 64757
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;rt.com. IN A
;; Query time: 30 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.2.1#53(192.168.2.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Fri Feb 20 09:17:58 UTC 2026
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 35In Italy for example RT website is blocked.
EDIT: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...
There seems to be a manufactured narrative from the US right how "Europe" is somehow doing large scale censorship.
Also the world's largest library is banned in Germany.
Closest thing I could find to library banned in Germany was a collection of pirated material, which was blocked at a DNS level, meaning many users bypass the ban accidentally, and anyone who wants to can trivially use a different DNS.
I mean I'm probably more in favour of digital piracy than the next guy, but I had completely missed that were calling copyright protection censorship now?
I don't think foreign propaganda was ever exempt from freedom of speech here in Europe (except the countries and regimes which lacked free speech, of course), it just wasn't much of a problem before the internet made opinions so easy to broadcast.
It’s not just Russian propaganda, but now it is conveniently used as a blanket cover to sanction even EU citizens (see case of German journalist Hüseyin Doğru, whose only connection to Russia was a hosting of his pro-Palestinian outlet on a platform affiliated with RT).
It does lend credibility to the blocks when it's US companies trying to dodge fines while mishandling PII. The suggestion of using a US freedom gov to dodge US-based self-censorship is as ironic as it is stupid when the real solution is pay the fine and handle the data properly.
They've already fined X heavily for lacking transparency, like not providing a database of advertisers or allowing researchers to access internal data to evaluate misinformation concerns. The EU has threatened that if they need to they may ban or limit X.
Musk and conservatives view X as a critical tool to spread their preferred ideology, and Musk has shown he's not beyond algorithmic and UX manipulation to achieve desired outcomes.
(1) https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/hamburg-wohnungsdurch... (2) https://www.justiz.bayern.de/media/images/behoerden-und-geri... (3) https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article6996cb47fc148...
These are examples that spontaneously come to my mind. So I can not talk for whatever country you live in but Germany has a problem about being able to express opinions.
Isn't it convenient how all posts that say something that rhymes with "You can get in trouble in EU country X for just doing Y." The "just" is doing a lot of concealed lifting? None of your three links actually support your assertion.
(2) The corresponding prosecutor made clear that his house was raided for calling the politician stupid and NOT for anything else. You would have known that if you would have read the document I linked to. To quote it:
Wegen des Tatverdachts einer gegen Personen des politischen Lebens gerichteten
Beleidigung gem. §§ 185, 188, 194 StGB erfolgte am vergangenen Dienstag, 12.11.2024, eine
richterlich angeordnete Durchsuchung der Wohnung des Beschuldigten durch Polizeibeamte
der Kriminalpolizei Schweinfurt
Due to suspicion of an offence of insulting persons in political life
pursuant to Sections 185, 188, 194 of the German Criminal Code (StGB), a
judicially ordered search of the accused's apartment was carried out last Tuesday, November 12, 2024, by police officers
from the Schweinfurt Criminal Investigation Department.
So, yes my links support my assertion.
According to Wikipedia it was an answer to the following tweet https://twitter.com/AndyGrote/status/1399001436973899780
The one who got in trouble was ultimately the dick, not the one who called him that....
The arrest wasn't made for this but for the insulting of a politican. Stop lying. The press has been correcting this case for months.
I cannot vouch for its accuracy but I thought it was interesting.
If top 10% of people create half of all spending and more of the spending on nonessentials, thus feeding majority of economy/creating majority of value, things will revolve around them. Something has to be done so that the other 90% won't be trying to break things down just for the sake of it. It's also that top 3% pay half of all federal taxes. Can we expect that the government will really care about others? It's also that same top 3% have a net worth of $5-6M and up - in the "never have to work again unless it's real fun" range.
If the majority of government funding and good half of corporate value comes from people who don't care anymore because they have arrived, can we expect anyone to be a responsible voter? We are firmly in 'bread and circuses' area.
Why are my taxes paying for benefits for Europeans?
They already killed USAID.
[1] Donald Trump - Letter on Foreign Policy - September 2, 1987
Are you a EU citizen?
In this age this is akin to funding and arming a militia in a foreign country, or what would've been on old times preemptive land operations.
How ever will we Europeans keep up with the latest theories about which celebrities are actually AI influencers.
How many states require IDs to go to porn sites, again? How many journos is it now that Trump blacklisted from the White House? Yeah, lotta freedoms over there...
I would guess that is why the GP said "EU and UK"
> ot a single website is blocked for me here in the Netherlands, quite literally none
One EU country. At the very least I know you have censored search results as that is an EU wide requirement of the right to be forgotten.
> I can pirate anything I want from anywhere etc.
Multiple EU countries are blocking pirate sites. https://torrentfreak.com/european-isps-complain-about-dispro...
Some countries have very broad definitions of hate speech.
There are definitely American sites that block EU visitors because of the cost/risk of GDPR compliance.
How is the right to be forgotten a bad thing exactly? You can't request a news article be deleted if you're a prominent public figure for obvious reasons, but if you're a random Joe Schmoe then being able to force companies to take down things they've collected about you is a good thing.
And are you implying search engines in the US don't have things "censored" all the time anyway? If you look up basically any form of media on Google, at the bottom will be a large list of links removed due to DMCA takedowns. Hell, Youtube literally steals all ad revenue from creators hit with DMCA takedowns, even falsified ones, where's your complaint about Google censoring its own creators?
> Multiple EU countries are blocking pirate sites
And that's idiotic, but definitionally not the case in "The EU" as can be seen by my country which is part of The EU, the Netherlands, not blocking access to any pirate sites. I would know, I pirate media quite literally every single day of my life, both private and public trackers without even having a VPN or anything of the sort. I'm sure it's not the only EU country to not block anything, even though corrupt idiots in Spain and Italy also exist.
> There are definitely American sites that block EU visitors because of the cost/risk of GDPR compliance.
I mean, good? If business are so incompetent/malicious that they can't even comply with the GDPR, which just states that users have to be informed and have to give explicit consent to companies harvesting their data, then they can fuck off. If your company goes bankrupt because the GDPR makes it impossible to earn money, good riddance to that parasitic business model I say, maybe get a real revenue stream that doesn't rely on fucking over every single one of your users instead? The people who are against GDPR are really telling on themselves and how little they respect their own users.
But anyways wtf does the GDPR have to do with "censorship" or hate speech? If anything this sounds like you're arguing that the US companies are the ones doing the censorship, considering they're the ones blocking it for EU users (apparently, I've literally never come across a blocked page due to GDPR, and it's not like California doesn't have similarly stringent regulations either like the CCPA).
Next you're going to tell me HIPAA is censorship as well.
Criminals and politicians have used it to get removed from search results. The news article might be there, but no one will find it.
> I'm sure it's not the only EU country to not block anything, even though corrupt idiots in Spain and Italy also exist.
Exactly my point. You cannot generalise about the EU and say "it does not happen in the EU"
> And are you implying search engines in the US don't have things "censored" all the time anyway?
I never said that!
> I mean, good? If business are so incompetent/malicious that they can't even comply with the GDPR
So, to be clear, you think its good that people in the EU cannot read some news sources?
> I've literally never come across a blocked page due to GDPR
Maybe your interests are too mainstream. I often find news stories I would like to read that are blocked for people from the UK and EU.
Sure, there have doubtlessly been some cases of people abusing it, but that's an argument for refining how the law works, not scrapping the right entirely. The alternative is just "companies can collect and display whatever they want about anyone forever with zero recourse," which is obviously worse. If anything the fix is clearer rules about who qualifies, not throwing the whole thing out.
> Exactly my point. You cannot generalise about the EU and say "it does not happen in the EU"
Fair enough, and I'll concede that. But the same goes the other way, you can't make a blanket statement like "websites in the EU are censored/blocked" when that's simply not true in every EU country. Most people on HN talk about "The EU" like it's a singular borg entity with identical laws across the board, which it isn't.
> So, to be clear, you think its good that people in the EU cannot read some news sources?
The sites choosing not to serve EU users is on them, not the EU. The GDPR doesn't say "block European visitors," it says "if you collect their data, follow these rules." The sites are making a business decision that compliance isn't worth it, which again just tells you everything about how central harvesting user data is to their whole operation. If a news site is literally non-functional without hoovering up your personal data without consent, that's not the EU's fault, and frankly no one should be giving these privacy ruining entities anything anyways if that's the case.
You can't dump chemicals into the water table just because proper disposal is inconvenient and expensive, why do we suddenly clutch our pearls when the same logic is applied to people's privacy?
> Maybe your interests are too mainstream. I often find news stories I would like to read that are blocked for people from the UK and EU.
I read pretty niche stuff and have never once hit a wall here in NL. What specifically are you being blocked from? It's not something I've ever run into.
Certainly true, and similarly in the US. Every US state makes their own laws. Some states want Porn ID, and some don't. And therefore don't have it.
Gone are the days of the misfits and pirates and the innovators.
"Tie me up and tell me what I'm allowed to do daddy government, I will agree no matter what, you know what's best."
Real rich material coming from the government demanding it's biggest Internet companies unmask government critics.
Country-1: "Absolutely free speech! Except when it's about Country-4 -> rights revoked."
Country-2: "Criticize Country-4 all you want, but talking smack about Country-5 is treason buddy."
Country-3: "Wait... so I can roast Country-4 but not Country-5... and also not Country-6? My head hurts."
Country-4: "We don't block anything! ...Just not that thing you're talking about."
Country-5: "See Country-3? We absolutely love speech. As long as it praises us. Freedom yay!"
In the end, we might end up having the very same private vpn';s (or tor) routing their traffic over these gov. vpn's based on keyword matches in the request.. or customer's will be able to choose .. kinda like auto-model feature on openrouter lol.
And my taxes need to fund a VPN when there’s 50 cheap VPNs on the market? What happened to reducing spending?
(The other things we're best at is having a huge military and having legally protected free speech, which is ironically being weakened, as you say.)
Cool, such a heroic effort to remove censorship from theinternet that US enforces on us :-)
Ooh, almost forgotten there also some porn and media pirating sites blocked in the EU that will surely get also unblocked. But who cares, there are thousands of theese....
Btw. did Putin and Xi allowed this ? Or their `free` internet will remain free as before.
The domains of shadow libraries are banned for copyright infringement, you can still read the books legally by purchasing a copy.
And https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/cdc-orders-retracti...
And, I know those shadow libraries are banned because of copyright, but that's just an excuse. If someone pushes such a broad understanding of Freedom as US does, than copyright should maybe not be the one exception that's ok. People should have freedom to publish anything and other should have freedom to read/play/watch anything. If US can ban something because of so abstract as copyright, why can't EU ban something because of so abstract as `its all lies and state sponsored propaganda` ?
NOTE: just playing devils advocate here, to show the hypocrisy of it all...
> Cool, so the US students will be able to read school banned books ?
The answer is "whenever they want."
Furthermore, the CDC's calls for retraction don't prohibit anyone from reading the retracted papers.
It's something else if something can't be bought or placed on the shelf because its on some school provided list, and if you (librarian) decide you don't buy it because of (whatever reason).
The same with research, if something is not published, or funding on research is stopped because `we know climate change doesn't exists`, that no one can read it, because its not even created. But who cares, its useless debate...
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20050209024923/http://freedom.go...
2. https://web.archive.org/web/19981201060504/http://freedom.go...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990423190847/http://www.freedo...
What's the meaning of this? Is it just theatre? And what is the message of the show? Is it a real fear that people have of lack of information that will set them free and they need to cowboy up and get there no matter what? Struggling to get this.
Oh I'm sure
I'm sure I don't have to point out the irony of the current censorship-happy government in the US pretending to be a champion of free speech in other countries. I mean, there are plenty of countries with far worse censorship of course, but for the US to attack the EU specifically on this, is pure propaganda.
Until it will. Please do not make me laugh. This will probably be used to help organize converting regimes or look for potential spies. Not denying possible positive value. If they're so generous they should expose Youtube this way and some generic communication platform if they believe they can pull it off (reliable ban bypassing)
They block the EU not because of cookie banners, but because they don't understand GDPR. Or vpn's.
there are volleys back and forth of "what censorship" followed by links to wikipedia enumerating it. RT and Joe Rogan are thrown in the mix.
when did this experiment fail?
What’s a good example?
Case that it's not censorship: it is not about what content TikTok shows, it's about who owns the algorithm and data. Forcing a sale to a US owner keeps the platform available while removing a (perceived) national security risk. The government isn't suppressing any particular speech.
Case it is censorship: forcing the sale of a platform used by 10s of millions of Americans does affect speech of both creators and viewers. The government is making a structural intervention in a speech platform based partly on the potential for future manipulation.
The argument that some would use is that it is more accurately framed as economic nationalism or geopolitical competition dressed in free speech clothing. Others see it as a legitimate national security risk with acceptable free speech tradeoffs.
Now they are treating Europe like they treated USSR. Musk and other big influencers on X have already been calling for the breakup of the EU, after the EU fined X $100M. I bet that was at least some of the reason behind this.
The irony is that the Trump admin has been deporting non-citizens for speech, his FCC has been intimidating media like ABC and CBS into firing people or canceling programs and interviews, his DOJ has been telling social networks to fork over the identities of citizens who criticized ICE online, and his CBP will begin demanding that tourists hand over 5 years of their social media history, as well as their biometrics, family's information and whatever else.
This is the administration who would lecture Europe about freedom of speech? Didn't they just get through 10 years of telling European countries to be "nationalist" and resist the influence of their own federal government in Brussels -- but I guess we can just ignore their laws and broadcast anything into their countries, tempting them to set up a "great firewall" like China.
Well, if freedom of speech means violating other countries' laws, in this case can European governments just start streaming copyrighted movies for free to US viewers, and piss off the RIAA / MPAA? Or maybe they can do what Cory Doctorow has been proposing: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-29...
It's like when USA ignores European trademarks (actually even stronger, PDOs) like Champagne or Parmesan but expects Europeans to honor US trademarks.
If the goal is to balkanize the internet, this administration has hit upon an excellent step.
Of course very easy to circumvent if you know s.th. about tech.
The difference in approach (American companies suing and financially ruining a select few downloaders versus European lobbyists going attempting to block the distribution points) makes piracy slightly less convenient in Europe but the basis for the copyright problem was turned into a global problem at the Berne Convention.
Actually I don't need to wait, because it's available immediately over the Internet in eBook format, with my library card.
There are also CDs, DVDs, and on-demand audio/video available with a library card.
I visited a library across town, and many sections were given over to video games for various popular console systems.
I also got a job in science and I think it's partly because I read a lot of papers (illegaly) since years.
You are not only entirely misunderstanding why the NSDAP appealed to people, you're also completely misunderstanding what post WWI Germany was - a republic hastily brought about with little care so that Woodrow Wilson would offer Germany peace based on his 14 points (he didn't). It was doomed to fail from the very beginning. If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists.
The idea that freedom of speech was what led to its downfall does not stand up to even the smallest scrutiny. Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.
same goes the other way, Germany can return to 1930s in the time one political campaign starts and ends given the state of society at the moment.
I am not advocating for limits on free speech, I am a free speech absolutist. and with that come the consequences we see not just in the united states but around the world. but to think that allowing anyone to say anything cannot lead to absolute catastrophies/hatred/... in the year of our lord 2026 is very misguided...
Oh okay, all good then...
> Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.
Can you think in even more absolute, even more reality-divorced terms? I was trying to mock this with my previous comment, but clearly that angle did not reach you.
"Oy vey, the insane ideas I craft, that people aren't actually saying, are insane." Yes, they do be. Congratulations.
- RFK Jr.
I guess that's why arguments against it always fall back on straw men and hypothetical slippery slopes.
There are plenty of actual things that do negatively affect societies free speech but this isn't even close to one of them.
Yes, I keep thinking about the bastion of free speech that gave birth to the Nazi movement. If only the Weimar Republic had anti-hate speech laws, perhaps the Shoah could have been avoided? Oops, turns out it did have those laws, and those very laws were subverted to suppress dissent.
Everyone has their own idea what hate is. For me: it is anyone saying any word with “a” in it. Better stay quiet, or it is hate speech.
If its not clear through the actuall law or the accompanying comments what constitutes hate speech, it will be cleared up by the court itself.
But in general if you were walking down the street or talking about something on the internet and somebody else called out or posted and said you are a nazi. Hate speech?
Blatant lies have to be legal. Firstly because it isn't philosophically possible to tell if someone is lying, it can only ever be strongly suspected. Secondly because it is a bog-standard authoritarian tactic to accuse someone of telling a blatant lie and shut them down for challenging the authoritarians.
Banning "blatant lies" is pretty much a textbook tell that somewhere is in political trouble and descending into either a bad case of group-think in the political community or authoritarianism. The belief that it is even possible to ban blatant lies is, if it has taken root, itself a lie people tell themselves when they can't handle the fact that some of the things they believe and know are true, aren't.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
> The January 14, 2016, edition of Weekly Disinformation Review reported the reemergence of several previously debunked Russian propaganda stories, including that Polish President Andrzej Duda was insisting that Ukraine return former Polish territory, that Islamic State fighters were joining pro-Ukrainian forces, and that there was a Western-backed coup in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.11
> Sometimes, Russian propaganda is picked up and rebroadcast by legitimate news outlets; more frequently, social media repeats the themes, messages, or falsehoods introduced by one of Russia’s many dissemination channels. For example, German news sources rebroadcast Russian disinformation about atrocities in Ukraine in early 2014, and Russian disinformation about EU plans to deny visas to young Ukrainian men was repeated with such frequency in Ukrainian media that the Ukrainian general staff felt compelled to post a rebuttal.12
> Sometimes, however, events reported in Russian propaganda are wholly manufactured, like the 2014 social media campaign to create panic about an explosion and chemical plume in St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, that never happened.15 Russian propaganda has relied on manufactured evidence—often photographic. Some of these images are easily exposed as fake due to poor photo editing, such as discrepancies of scale, or the availability of the original (pre-altered) image.16 Russian propagandists have been caught hiring actors to portray victims of manufactured atrocities or crimes for news reports (as was the case when Viktoria Schmidt pretended to have been attacked by Syrian refugees in Germany for Russian's Zvezda TV network), or faking on-scene news reporting (as shown in a leaked video in which “reporter” Maria Katasonova is revealed to be in a darkened room with explosion sounds playing in the background rather than on a battlefield in Donetsk when a light is switched on during the recording).17
> RT stated that blogger Brown Moses (a staunch critic of Syria's Assad regime whose real name is Eliot Higgins) had provided analysis of footage suggesting that chemical weapon attacks on August 21, 2013, had been perpetrated by Syrian rebels. In fact, Higgins's analysis concluded that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks and that the footage had been faked to shift the blame.18 Similarly, several scholars and journalists, including Edward Lucas, Luke Harding, and Don Jensen, have reported that books that they did not write—and containing views clearly contrary to their own—had been published in Russian under their names.
I found that source on the Wikipedia page for RT after a couple of minutes. You can find more pretty easily.
Germany is currently actively campaigning to force everyone to use their real names on all social media and force ID checks to do so, a clear chilling effect for free speech.
Macron has been railing against free speech specifically in recent months, calling it "bullshit".
Europe is against free speech, any argument to the contrary must contend with the above examples of them trampling on rights.
Can you share some concrete examples from reputable sources that show these? Every examples I've seen have been clear-cut calls for violence, or unambiguous harassment.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/15/hundreds-charged...
> After the Southport stabbings, several people were questioned by police over false communications for spreading claims the attacker was a Muslim immigrant. In one instance, a man pleaded guilty to the offence for a livestreamed video on TikTok where he falsely claimed he was “running for his life” from rioters in Derby.
That very much seems like an attempt to harass or invite harassment against a group of people...
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1qv0vpi/...
The propaganda take I keep seeing is that you can get arrested for misgendering people or something, but these are at least close to incitement to violence. Some clearly cross that line.
To be clear I’m closer to the American view. I think the bar should be very, very high for speech to be criminally actionable. Just pointing out that it doesn’t seem as nuts as some make it sound.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...
"Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"
"A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/15/hundreds-charged...
"Legal experts have also questioned the new rules. David Hardstaff, a serious crime expert at the law firm BCL Solicitors, said the fake news offence was “problematic both for its potential to stifle free speech if misused, but equally for its lack of clarity and consistency”."
Source? (Other than one derailed politician, which unfortunately we get to call our chancellor, having a moment? He's still not "Germany", though, not even "the German government".)
> Macron has been railing against free speech specifically in recent months, calling it "bullshit".
I think you're misrepresenting what he said:
https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuelmacron-calls-social-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-18/macron-bl...
Macron was responding to criticism of the Digital Services Act, which contains censorship provisions for 'hate speech', which is repeatedly and routinely used by European nations to crack down on protected political speech. For example, it has been used as an excuse to censor political views leaning anti-immigration.
The UK in particular has used Ofcom as a weapon to target American companies that enable free speech communications, notably 4chan.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/germanys-merz-calls-real...
I'm saying, there is a huge difference between a random utterance of the chancellor, which by next week he'll likely already have forgotten about, and "Germany actively campaigning" e.g. at the EU or federal level, both of which would require both ruling parties to get behind the chancellor's demands, which – based on how similar discourses have turned out in the past – is completely unlikely.
I'm not defending Merz's position, not by a long shot. I'm just saying that, based on previous experience, we're still quite far away from the "actively campaigning" stage and very, very, very far away from Merz's ideas being turned into law. I'm concerned about many things but this is not one of them. Civil rights organizations are already rallying and telling him how stupid he is¹ for suggesting that real name enforcement would be a good idea. :-) It's the usual political discourse.
¹) See how I am exercising my right to free speech and am not at all concerned about being charged for "insulting a politician"?
You do realize that the UK is not part of the EU? So I'm not sure how UK's supposed "weaponization" of Ofcom has anything to do with Macron's statement.
> which is repeatedly and routinely used by European nations to crack down on protected political speech.
I'm really looking forward to your sources here. The DSA does not contain any provisions that change anything about the legality of speech. It's mostly meant to harmonize procedural aspects across the member states.
https://www.csis.org/blogs/europe-corner/does-eus-digital-se...
https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/quick-take/a-clear-eyed-look-at-th...
As for the DSA censorship, I don't think you've read it.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/foreign-cen...
But the Digital Services Act is EU-specific? Macron's statement referenced the DSA specifically, so I don't know what the UK has to do with that.
> As for the DSA censorship, I don't think you've read it.
I have. In fact, it seems you didn't read the links I shared, given that the second reference specifically addresses the – quite frankly – bullshit House Judiciary Comittee Republicans' report you linked to. (Again, to emphasize, this report was authored by the committee's Republican members only. In today's MAGA-controlled congress, I don't think such a report can count as authorative reference any longer.)
Just to be sure, by "it" you're referring to the committee report?
> Your previous claim was that DSA did not have hate speech provisions. Are you claiming DSA Article 22 does not exist, for example?
Please do quote the parts of DSA Article 22 that regulate hate speech or speech in general. It says absolutely nothing of the kind. It concerns itself with "illegal content" and defines procedures to handle it. What content is legal or illegal is defined by the laws already in place in the different member states. Also, procedures to handle illegal content already existed at a national level before DSA was enacted, so the only thing that DSA did was to harmonize them.
When the government does not allow its population to freely speak against it, it's just waiting to be abused by one bad leader.
Germany restricts insulting individuals / your neighbour, police officer, a pastor or a minister. There’s no special law for politicians. Political criticism is protected under the Basic Law (constitution). Go ahead and be crucial about a politician’s actions but don’t insult their person’s honour or use a slur. That’s not your freedom of speech, that’s the dignity. In fact, you can even insult the government! You can say German government as the government is not a person.
Anyone can defame anyone else on the US. The only time the libel or slander laws apply is when the defamed person can prove real harm in court. Not harm to dignity, but monetary loss, personal loss, or physical injury. These are very high bars to clear.
If people could sue and win just for proving willful or negligent defamation of character, a lot of extremist influencers would be in the poor house.
You're not allowed to insult anyone, https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__185.html , though the term "insult" is not nearly as broadly defined as in everyday speech. The law dates back to the 18th century, and has largely been unchanged for 150 years. I really don't understand the recent outrage over these and other laws. We have been fine.
More background: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beleidigung_(Deutschland)
The last 150 years of Germany have...ahem...not been what I would call "fine."
It would be interesting to have a replay of history without this law and similar ones related to it. Could be nothing different happens.
On the other hand, any law regulating speech is going to have a reverberating effect on the marketplace of ideas with 2nd and 3rd order outcomes that are impossible to disentangle after the fact.
But it's certainly not been because of that law…
At the very least I'm sure you'll agree we've been fine the last 80 or so years. Again, I'm just saying I don't understand the outrage right now.
However, I don't see how this would imply the law that's been in place for 150 years would suddenly be bad. In fact, one might argue that precisely because so much communication is happening in public now, more regulation is needed.
You shouldn't need a "license" to publish a website.
Uh what? :-)
Then you have the German chancellor saying that we should all have our real names attached to all our online accounts but rest assured, nothing nefarious going on here.
France arrested the Telegram founder a few months ago for no apparent reason and the French Justice minister also not long ago wanted to ban EtoE because it makes their job harder so wouldn't it be nice if everyone could just simply share their private life with the government voluntarily?
The UK is looking into getting rid of VPNs to, you guessed it, "protect the children" and Denmark has re-introduced blasphemy laws.
Finally there is the DMA that has been approved the EU which outlaws hate speech on online platforms except that hate speech is never defined in the text so you can pretty much use this law to ban any content you want without due process and without consulting the population.
The US has many flaws, nobody is denying that but to assume that the EU has better privacy is a mirage from a bygone era. The EU politicians are now looking at what China is doing and use that as playbook.
- Why don't we just make a website?
- Yes let's just do that.
visuals with the only text on screen being...
---
"Freedom is Coming"
Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.
They also gutted the prior org that helped people do this in other countries on the ground
Has nothing to do with propaganda or with just reading all the traffic for the cia/fbi/whatever snowden told us.
USA became so fast an enemy, its crazy :(
They should start again funding services like https://nsidc.org/ice-sheets-today instead of 'freedom'.gov
And when we travel to US, they need to check our social media to see if our opinions align with the US government.
"...user activity on the site will not be tracked."
Ok, stopped reading right there.
Also I’m guessing they won’t allow this to be used to get around the sorts of content blocking project 2025 calls for in the US.
Do you have any examples?
I mean… Spending tax dollars so that foreigners can watch porn without age verification sounds like a bad use of budget.
...Right?
The site will just be blocklisted by countries who don’t want you to use it. Duh.
You’d have to have some horrendous security instincts to use a government-hosted VPN.
Remember January 2025 when we were pitched the idea that the Trump administration was going to make the federal government efficient and cut frivolous programs?
Let me know when the budget deficit starts to decrease!
It is really a joke to pretend that current US cares about freedom of internet access, given all the attacks on free press it things like voice of America radio in the states.
I assume US will also provide a portal to Russian citizen if it is so eager to allow people to bypassing content bans (/s).
I'd rather not...
Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine (2018) directly claims the internet is “the most effective weapon the government has ever built,” tracing its roots to Pentagon counterinsurgency projects like ARPA’s efforts in Vietnam-era surveillance.
The book argues surveillance was “woven into the fabric” from the start, linking early ARPANET development to intelligence goals, and extends to modern tech giants like Google as part of a military-digital complex.
This being besides the fact that the folks crying wolf over "censorship" regularly conflate flat-out lies with valuable and protected speech.
Edit: I mean, I love tor as much as the next person, but imagine the reaction you'd get if an EU state (say, Germany) was to launch an official page with the express goal of allowing access to information censored by the Chinese government, targeting it directly to chinese citizens.
Could you make a moral case for this? Probably.
But would you be surprised or offended if the Chinese government took any measures they saw fit to strong-arm Germany into shutting that site right back down? Probably not. And the crowd here would probably go "bruh what did you expect?"
... Now waiting for examples of exactly that having happened already. :D
Do we not have better uses of our money. Also the irony considering recent moves by the US government in terms of control of the internet and free speech.
Well you've got plenty of countries doing it, including France, Iran, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Brasil, Australia, you name it. Not that it's good, but a criticism for the goose is a criticism for the gander, as a manner of speaking.
As to which, why or why do we care so much about this? Idk, same reason our government funds tens of thousands of initiatives and cares about lots of different things that people find equally important or unimportant.
So I find this in line with the behavior of many American administration, the weird thing being that this time the target is not the just usual suspects (China, Iran, etc.) but also European allies.
(not saying this is a good thing btw, just trying to put it in perspective)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_for_Freedom
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
https://www.newsweek.com/policing-thought-crime-should-have-...