Free Speech Online

A New York federal judge has intervened to block the Trump administration from deporting Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) CEO Imran Ahmed after the State Department announced sanctions against him and four other Europeans for waging censorship campaigns against Americans.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has reportedly filed hundreds of criminal complaints against members of the public for insulting him during his tenure as a politician.

Google’s prized AI pioneer, Noam Shazeer, has ignited a heated debate within the company over free speech and inclusivity after he expressed his personal views on internal forums. The AI legend has angered Google’s notoriously left-wing employee population by making common sense statements such as “It is not okay to sterilize children.” 

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger told Tucker Carlson during Monday’s episode of The Tucker Carlson Show that anyone can easily look up a list of Wikipedia’s blacklisted sources. Breitbart News features prominently on the list of media outlets that users are forbidden from citing when editing articles on the leftist “encyclopedia.”

James Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer during Russiagate and later a key operative inside Twitter’s pre-Musk  censorship apparatus, has resurfaced on the board of a fresh institutional effort to lock down online speech.

Google on Tuesday promised to restore YouTube accounts that have been banned for political speech, and said that the Biden administration pressured Google to censor Americans that did not violate the video, in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH). 

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage warned the U.S. Congress that censorship laws in Britain will have a stifling effect on free speech throughout the West and urged the American government to pressure London to adhere to its values of liberty.

Award-winning Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan said that he was arrested in London over posts on social media criticising transgenderism.

The U.S. State Department has found that the human rights situation in the United Kingdom has deteriorated over the past year, pointing to the growing level of censorship from the government.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) this week released the “UK Censorship Files,” in which he detailed how the United Kingdom (UK) government “tried to censor criticism” of immigration during “large-scale riots in Augusts 2024.”

A vulnerability in Google’s search engine reportedly allowed individuals to maliciously remove specific web pages from search results, potentially enabling targeted suppression of information.

The Trump administration reportedly dispatched a team to meet with victims of Britain’s draconian speech restrictions amid growing concerns over the state of liberty in the United Kingdom.

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, has claimed that the head of France’s foreign intelligence agency asked him to ban Romanian conservatives ahead of the country’s elections, a request he says he refused.

A retired British police officer was arrested for “thought crime” comments criticising the spread of antisemitism in the country.

Free speech platform Gab has blocked its services in the UK after the government “demanded we hand over private information,” according to CEO Andrew Torba.

British police have been accused of acting in a “Kafkaesque” manner after they arrested the parents of a nine-year-old girl over complaints they made about her primary school on WhatsApp.

Britain’s speech police have come under fire yet again after they showed up at a grandmother’s doorstep to give her “advice” after criticising left-wing politicians on social media.

American broadcaster CBS followed German police as they raided homes for speech crimes, such as posting a “racist cartoon” on the internet after U.S. Vice President JD Vance criticised censorship across Europe.

In vindication of U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s warnings of encroaching authoritarianism in Britain and Europe, a report has found that hundreds of people in the United Kingdom have been charged under the 2023 Online Safety Act, including for spreading “fake news.”

The leftist British government is reportedly willing to walk back some of draconian online censorship rules to avoid falling into a trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump.

A coalition of more than 70 “fact checking” organizations have penned an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, expressing their outrage over Meta’s decision to move away from biased left-wing “fact check” organizations and toward crowdsourced moderation on its platforms in the United States.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has come under fire from both the “Facebook Supreme Court” and its own employees following Zuckerberg’s decision this week to embrace free speech on his heavily censored platforms.

In a move to “maximize unregretted user-seconds,” Elon Musk has unveiled plans for an algorithm change on his social media platform X that he claims will curb excessive negativity. Critics contend the algorithm changes will have troubling outcomes like censoring criticism of the FBI.

Fledgling social media upstart Bluesky has enjoyed a surge in new users over the past week, more than doubling its user base to over 15 million as leftists flee from X/Twitter. However, the rapid growth has also brought significant moderation challenges for the young company. The overwhelmingly leftist userbase has been flooded the company with flagged posts, requests for censorship, and even child pornography.

Britain’s Orwellian speech police door knocked a veteran journalist on Remembrance Sunday morning over allegedly “stirring up racial hatred” on social media.

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said that Europe must enact strict speech regulations on Elon Musk’s X platform to fight so-called “disinformation”.

Elon Musk took to his X/Twitter account over the weekend to point out that if anyone needs “further proof that I strongly support freedom of speech,” they should note that “nutcase” Keith Olbermann, “who is literally calling for my arrest” is not being censored on his social media platform.

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of a recently passed California law aimed at curbing the spread of AI-generated deepfakes depicting political candidates. In his decision, Judge John Mendez wrote, “While a well-founded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape may be justified, this fear does not give legislators unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment.”

A federal judge has ruled that the discovery in a lawsuit filed by video platform Rumble against leftist pro-censorship advocates Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, co-founders of Check My Ads, will proceed, denying the defendants’ request to stop or delay the discovery phase of the lawsuit.

Encrypted messaging company Telegram announced it will now share user data with law enforcement to combat illegal activities on the platform. This massive U-turn in privacy policy comes after the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France last month.

The Irish government has abandoned plans to implement controversial new hate speech laws following widespread backlash from free speech advocates.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared at a recent event that his days of apologizing are over. The Facebook founder attempted to blame conservatives themselves for the rampant censorship on his platforms, stating, “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor certain Covid-related content in 2021, including “human and satire,” expressing regret for not being more outspoken against the government’s actions.

Telegram, the popular messaging app known for its largely hands-off approach to moderation, has responded to the arrest of its CEO and founder, Pavel Durov, by French authorities outside of Paris.

The World Bank has halted all paid advertising on Elon Musk’s X after CBS News accused the social media platform of promoting ads under racist content.

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France on Saturday after his private jet landed at Le Bourget Airport, French media reported.