I write a fair bit about censorship and ways to work around it. The following is a list of many instances of either threats or actual state-sponsored censorship. I think many people are not aware of just how much censorship has grown in the past few years, both in the US and around the world.
IMO, more censorship is coming no matter who wins the next presidential election: both Harris and Trump are hostile to freedom of speech. I would not be surprised if Elon Musk is arrested for violating some non-US country’s draconian censorship policy, especially shortly before the election.
Please do not despair though! There’s much you can do to both work around censorship and fight back against it. I’ve described some of these technologies in the past, and will describe more of them in the future.
"According to FIRE's new survey of 59k college students, many have a disastrously illiberal ideas about free speech.:
32% said that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable to some degree — up from 27% last year and 20% two years ago.
52% said that blocking other students from attending a speech is acceptable to some degree — up from 45% last year and 37% two years ago."
69% of students said it is acceptable for other students to shout down a speaker to some degree — up from 63% last year."
https://rankings.thefire.org/
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov arrested in France
Telegram announces it will start surveiling/censoring private chats
"Telegram will start moderating private chats after CEO’s arrest / The company has updated its FAQ to say that private chats are no longer shielded from moderation."
EU warns Musk that Twitter faces ban over content moderation
https://www.ft.com/content/a07ca1ae-9f9a-46ee-9457-27bb30e18ed2
"Elon Musk is under renewed pressure from the US and EU over his ownership of Twitter, as regulators clamp down on the billionaire’s push to transform the social network into a freewheeling haven of free speech.
The European Commission on Wednesday threatened Musk with a ban unless Twitter abides by strict content moderation rules, as US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen indicated that Washington was reviewing his purchase of the social network."
London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley threatens to extradite US citizens for violating UK hate speech laws
"We will throw the full force of the law at people and whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online we will come after you."
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6360173208112
UK comedian found guilty of hate crime for filming pug's 'Nazi salutes'
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925
Elderly UK man arrested for Facebook comments
Tulsi Gabbard put on Quiet Skies watch list the day after she criticized Kamala Harris’ ties to the military industrial complex.
Brazilian Supreme Court justice bans Twitter
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3rnl5qv3o
Brazil's Supreme Court says anyone using VPN to access Twitter/X is subject to fines up to $8,874 a day
Democratic ex-Labor secretary Robert Reich calls for arrest of Elon Musk
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/30/elon-musk-wealth-power
"Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X."
"I am the enforcer. I represent the law, which is the will of the state and the people."
-- Thierry Breton
"Twitter leaves EU voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation," Breton tweeted two weeks ago. "But obligations remain. You can run but you can't hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be legal obligation under #DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement."
-- Thierry Breton
https://reason.com/2023/06/05/e-u-s-digital-services-act-threatens-americans-free-speech/
"The Digital Services Act will essentially oblige Big Tech to act as a privatized censor on behalf of governments — censors who will enjoy wide discretion under vague and subjective standards."
Given that the law prescribes a potential penalty of "6% of the annual worldwide turnover of the provider of intermediary services" for companies that fail to satisfy regulators, online services have a powerful incentive to restrict more speech rather than less to please a multitude of censors"
New Zealand Prime Minister calls for global censorship
"After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?"
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/09/25/new-zealand-prime-minister-calls-for-global-censorship-system/
New Zealander facing up to 14 years after pleading guilty to sharing mosque shooting video
"A Christchurch businessman has pleaded guilty to sharing a livestream video that was recorded by a gunman last month as he began killing 50 people at two New Zealand mosques.
Philip Arps pleaded guilty to two counts of distributing the mosque video and will remain in jail until he’s sentenced June 14. He faces a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison." [Arps was ultimately sentenced to 21 months.]
US Democrats Daniel Goldman, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, and Susan Gold express support for Brazil's crackdown on free speech
https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1788234166552953238
Starlink blocks X in Brazil in order to comply with Brazilian ban and avoid seizure of Starlink's assets in Brazil
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/sep/04/elon-musk-x-starlink-brazil
Rumble banned in Brazil
https://reclaimthenet.org/rumble-challenges-brazil-censorship-demands
Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz claims:
"There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy."
https://x.com/TPostMillennial/status/1821228536306491677
Tim Walz set up snitch 'hotline' for people to report Covid-19 lockdown violators
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1820858276537655376
Kamala Harris calls for Trump to be censored
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/that-kamala-harris-video-and-censorship-1e89c380
"He has lost his privileges and it should be taken down. And the bottom line is that you can’t say that you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.":
Former President Donald Trump blocked from five of the top social media platforms over the years
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits to bowing to White House demands to censor users
"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” ...
During the pandemic, Facebook added misinformation alerts to users when they commented on or liked posts that were judged to contain false information about Covid.
The company also deleted posts criticising Covid vaccines, and suggestions the virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory."
"Canada Sanctions 34 Crypto Wallets Tied to Trucker 'Freedom Convoy'"
"The federal police agencies, working with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), are investigating cryptocurrency donations supporting the weeks-long protest against Canada’s vaccine mandate. The protests are now deemed illegal under the Emergencies Act invoked by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the first time since the law was passed in 1988."
"Trudeau Government Used Faked Intelligence To Illegally Frame Protesting Truckers As Violent Extremists"
"On February 14, 2022, Trudeau took the extraordinary measure of invoking the “Emergencies Act” for the first time in Canada’s history. The Act gave the government sweeping powers to arrest protesters, freeze their bank accounts, seize property, and dismantle blockades, which is what Trudeau did.
Central to Trudeau’s invocation of the Act was the alleged threat of right-wing extremism and violence, but new documents that podcaster Jeremy Mackenzie obtained through Canada’s freedom of information law show that this drastic measure was based on fabricated intelligence. What’s more, Canada appears to have shared this disinformation with other members of the Five Eyes alliance. Five Eyes includes Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. "
Rumble Is Part of an ‘Active and Ongoing’ SEC Investigation
https://www.wired.com/story/rumble-sec-investigation/
"The SEC confirmed to WIRED that the financial regulator has launched an investigation involving Rumble, a “free speech” video platform. The nature of the probe remains unknown
Remember that SEC prosecutors crushed the corporation running LBRY /
Odysee, the most popular open source, censorship resistant alternative to Youtube.
Roger Ver arrested in Spain weeks after publishing book "Hijacking Bitcoin"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/bitcoin-roger-ver-arrest-spain-b2537875.html
"Operation Choke Point 2.0: How U.S. Regulators Fight Bitcoin With Financial Censorship"
"...Operation Choke Point”, targeted a wide range of business categories, including ammunition sales, drug paraphernalia, payday loans, dating services, pornography, telemarketing, tobacco sales, and government grants.
...
“The clandestine Operation Choke Point had more in common with a purge of ideological foes than a regulatory enforcement action”, wrote Frank Keating, a former governor of Oklahoma who served in the DOJ during the Reagan administration, in a 2018 editorial for The Hill. “It targeted wide swaths of businesses with little regard for whether legal businesses were swept up and harmed. In fact, that seemed to be the goal.”
"Kamala Harris’ Prosecution of Ex-Backpage Owners Argues Against POTUS Candidacy"
"In 2016, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris arrested ex-Backpage owners Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin on bogus charges, one of many disconcerting acts in her long political career.
...
Ex-Backpage owners and renowned journalists Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, and four others, were arrested, in part, for multiple alleged violations of the U.S. Travel Act, a Kennedy-era law that makes it illegal to use a mechanism of interstate commerce to facilitate a business enterprise engaging in certain illegal acts in violation of state laws, such as prostitution.
The takedown of Backpage and the passage of FOSTA/SESTA led to widespread self-censorship on the internet, effectively silencing a whole swath of adult-themed speech online that websites feared could get them indicted criminally, regardless of its legality."
Progressive lawmakers are worst on free speech, but conservatives are little better:
Despite Repeated Evidence That It's Unnecessary And Damaging, Trump Signs SESTA/FOSTA
"This was no surprise, but as everyone expected, yesterday President Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law leading to the usual excitement from the bill’s supporters — despite the fact that events of the past couple weeks have proved them all wrong. The bill’s supporters repeatedly insisted that SESTA/FOSTA was necessary to stop one company, Backpage.com, because (they falsely insisted) CDA 230 made the site completely immune. Except, that’s clearly not true. In the two weeks since the bill was approved by Congress, two separate courts declared Backpage not protected by CDA 230 and (more importantly) the DOJ seized the whole damn site and indicted most of the company’s execs — all without SESTA/FOSTA.
And, on top of that, many many sites have already shut down or modified how they do business because of SESTA/FOSTA proving that the bill’s reach clearly is impacting free expression online — just as tons of civil liberties experts warned. And that’s not even touching on the very real concerns of those involved in sex work on how SESTA/FOSTA literally puts their lives in danger — and how it makes it that much more difficult to actually rescue victims of sex trafficking."
"Donald Trump proposes making burning an American flag punishable by 1-year in prison. "
https://x.com/FOX4/status/1828149971746451586
"Donald Trump expressed in a speech his belief that public criticism of judges and Supreme Court justices who rule in Trump’s favor should be illegal."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-proposes-ban-on-criticizing-pro-trump-judges.html
"Project 2025 Co-Author Caught Admitting the Secret Conservative Plan to Ban Porn"
"In a hidden-camera recording, Russ Vought explains that age verification laws are just pretext to shut down porn sites."
https://theintercept.com/2024/08/16/project-2025-russ-vought-porn-ban/