US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
reuters.comhttps://freedom.gov I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent governments from blocking them. I'd like to remind everyone that the U.S. government has been one the largest funders of that research for decades. Some of it is under USAGM (formerly BBG, the parent of RFE/RL) 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. But part of Agency has just been defunded https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for... This new "portal" will most likely only allow de facto government controlled sites like X. "government controlled sites like X" - I thought the control was the other way around? It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through. So far the current admin has been very successful in obliterating all the soft power the US built up through the decades. I have no idea why they would do this, but I often wonder if maybe soft power becomes less valuable in a world where more countries are able to empower themselves on their own. Perhaps soft power itself is only valuable as long as this asymmetry is sustained. Otherwise, it’s all about hard power. Exactly. We are heading out of a time where soft power is stronger than hard. We are going back to the days of hard power being the only thing that really matters. As resource competition becomes more intense, and economies stagnate, you can no longer afford to play “nice” with your countries’ future. It’s pretty annoying to me a lot of commenters on the internet are apparently too ideological or immature to grasp that. Hard power was always stronger.
That’s why the US was so successful in the past century - they just have a lot of weapons and little hesitation to use them. It’s a pretty bellicose culture too. 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. Modern democracy is screwed because of hyperpropaganda and political parties. Liberating EU from Nazis, a long time ago, no one cares anymore. Rock’n’roll not that popular now. Hippie movement is dead, replaced by woke. Hollywood is becoming devalued due to AI and other countries creating their own content, and most things are remakes now. Early internet culture is gone, everything is siloed into social media apps. The United States has nothing now, back to imperialism it seems. Their soft power is being cashed in for the benefit of an oligarchy. Because that softpower spread a toxic culture, that has poisoned western civilization from within? What are you referring to?
The US poisoned themselves or got poisoned by the people they exerted soft power over? Look at the state of affairs that swept a cretin like trump into power, the us was rotting away ever since 1990, it needed external competition, that threatened the social fabric to stay stable. Now every utopist living in play pretend land can declare his reality absolut and ignore all the piled up problems. And lies. And truth. > > And lies. > 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] I tried accessing betfair site. It's not your ISP or govt blocks it but betfair themselves blocks traffic from countries they are not legally have business. This definition is so broad it basically encompasses all communication. I've got an Orwell book on my shelf whose title, at least, has the same thesis! https://archive.org/details/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays... All communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, yes. There's also debate and ego-less teaching for the sake of truth-seeking. Well, since nobody is ego-less, no truth is universally accepted, and debate is a means to pursue an agenda, what are we left with? > and debate is a means to pursue an agenda 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. >Scount mindset: the discovery of the truth to the best of our ability without fear or favour. That's a mind-slave mindset. Why is the scout working for the general and not for himself? Why do you see the negative in everything, even metaphors? There's no slavery here. There's not even "slavery" even in actual scouts working for actual generals. 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. For the sake of truth seeking you will selectively teach information that your ego deems true. Some are as you say. 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. >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. Yeah, that's what everyone says. They really don't. 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. How would you define it? I mean, in a way, all communication is propaganda. Its one person or group trying to influence you with their information. I don't think so. I strive to lay the facts out neutrally so people can decide what to do with that information, even if the outcome is not ideal for me. 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. And regular people talking their mind You don't have to worry about projecting truth. The truth gets through. This is about projecting lies. > The truth gets through. 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... most common people were aware of the cliff in economy between capitalist and communist states. Hence we had so many revolution and communism lost. This was a communist apparatchik. Its like showing truth to MAGA people. Most wont accept it. > 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. see it this way. Yelzin's reaction was very surprising. You can see how other communist burocrats reacted to facts. 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. Somehow I feel "we can vote them out" is going to be thoroughly tested in the next US elections. Good luck, Earthlings ... I dont live in the US, next election I can vote them out > You don't have to worry about projecting truth. The truth gets through. This is about projecting lies. 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 truth gets through." Yeah I agree, we shouldn't be too concerned about Iran, Russia, or China, censoring the internet, the truth gets through. No need to go so far. "Global tariffs all over the spectrum help the US economy! Look at my Beautiful Big Chart !" ... yeah, right. In other words, a free system is inevitably ruled by hypocrites, while in dictatorships they are rejected that opportunity. This is another variant of “in democracy, people cannot rule because they’re stupid.” Statists, failing to admit their guilt, blame everyone but themselves. And no, the truth does not get through, even after centuries. What if the truth is that something is a lie? Promoting truth and opposing lies are the same thing. Truth does not get through. Worse, half-truths and half-lies. That's why diversity of sources is the only way to escape censorship: you get one half truth from one source, another half truth from another source, then two halves make whole truth. That's also trivial to manipulate; control the narrative, and you control the Overton window. People picking the middle of two fake options are still under the influence of whoever chose those options — just ask any stage magician. Narrative is controlled by censorship. This was the old world. In our world narrative control is not by restrictions, but by abundance. Flood the zone writ large. If you don't know other sources, they are of no help for you indeed, but censorship does worsen the situation. And/or propaganda. 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. Propaganda works when it's the only source of information. This situation is created by censorship, especially in internets, where you don't need to walk to open a distant site. Propaganda *also* works when it's the main source of information. This can be done in many ways. 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. Your links give examples of campaigns that happened, but didn't quite work. You think the problem is their very happening? 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. You can suppress it only by censorship, not by propaganda. In any case using shitposting sites as a source of information is tricky, journalism isn't that bad yet. > Your links give examples of campaigns that happened, but didn't quite work. You think the problem is their very happening? 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. This assumes you have the cognitive resources to do that. Most people just switch to someone they trust to avoid exactly this. Matter of fact, that was the major advantage of the net back in the day. I think people have to deal with pluralism of opinions in everyday life too, since different people have different opinions. Aren't they socially maladapted if they can't do that? But RT is banned in most of europe > That's why diversity of sources is the only way to escape censorship: 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 find it hilarious when people who are pro censorship bring up Karl Popper and the Paradox of Tolerance. 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. Fascism means diversity of opinions, democracy means everyone is only allowed to have the opinions you want them to have? Democracy is having the laws Americans approve of, because God wrote their Constitution. Fascists in the original sense, Mussolini, didn't tolerate opposition. 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... Ah, a new "WTF": Worse Than False! > And truth. 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? American culture can access Europeans at any time. Europeans consume American culture daily.Just to clarify. Website banned are often hostile propaganda or extremists. 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. Europe should just create their own social media companies where the government can act as a moderator of content then. "Europe" is a continent made up of independent nation states. Each of those nations has chosen to have its own rules about what is and is not legal, which is the right of every country. Those nation states want companies operating within their territory to follow their rules. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, it is up to each individual country. At the same time, I do not understand how what you wrote is in any way relevant to the topic. EU gives out tons of grants for tech and the W project was already being spun as a European social network (despite not yet being funded) https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1qiauhd/bye_x_europ... Sorry, I clearly misunderstood the intent of your comment. I thought you were saying they should just build their own platform if they want to moderate it. My mistake. 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. It might do that too, but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently. Will it work when the US government is the one cracking down, banning interviews, etc? In some cases yes. Tor for instance was created by the USG and is not easily controlled by the USG. That is a problem with no other country caring as much about free speech, not with the US having an anti-censorship program. We have free speech here in the UK. We can record police doing their job and publish it without getting shot in the head. For now. Then again, Egypt was definitely driven by Western agitators, as was the case Iran recently. Iran probably got Russian tech to trace starlink users during the blackout which put a target on many Western assets in Iran. I'm not saying the Iran government didn't also kill and torture independent actors nor that I support state violence (against its citizens, in this case). Just saying that any government will use violence to stay in power and to ensure regime change doesn't happen outside of whatever system the state upholds. The claim that Iranian protesters were western agitators is a pernicious lie. Evidence to the contrary abounds regarding Egypt. Secretary of State Clinton famously rejected the popularly-elected Muslim Brotherhood government and pledged support to Mubarak. This tacit approval led him to have a successful coup against the popularly elected government. 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. Access to information is dangerous when the information is controlled propaganda. That's what Iran, China, and Russia are saying too, right ? :o) Would educating people instead and giving them more options for information, not be better than banning access to information? If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards, or smokers, druggies, gamblers, people addicted to doomscrolling or video games or ragebait "news" or… Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives Education works. It doesn't work perfectly. Cause and correlation, education gives you options, it always comes to a choice, I know the donuts lead somewhere but I choose to eat two anyway. 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. > If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards 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. Many people believe their mind is a passive reflection of reality, thus any change that happens to mind is infallible by definition. I wonder how can they possibly resist addiction with such mindset. Clearly education doesn't work, so Europe must ban any speech concerning fattening foods, drinking alcohol, smoking, drugs, gambling, upsetting news and video games. If you oppose these speech bans... Why you're as silly as a preacher telling teens not to fuck! Oh my, that is a depressing view on the human condition. But can't you then set up a system such that if a person only picks one source or a few sources, and that turns out to be bad, that it primarily impacts negatively only themselves? Letting it be their own responsibility? That depends on what "education" entails. If it's one source only chances of it being propaganda is high. Intuitively yes, but it's possible that this is one of our biases speaking 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 > 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... 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. People need to decide on their own, so I am against censorship. In this thread, which comment gave you the impression they were in favor of censorship? 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 What if educating people takes decades and lies can be prompted in a few minutes? Then you failed at education if a prompt can undo decades of education. 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. What if it's easier to call opposing viewpoints "lies" than it is to defend yours. For real... the species is not going to last long if a subset of it gets to control the information flow of the other part... literally unsustainable Yet the US president unilaterally shut down Voice of America because he didn't like its message Freedom of speech for me, not for thee Huh? Voice of America is a basically a government organization blasting out US propaganda. The president runs VOA, it's not some separate entity he decided to censor. > US president unilaterally 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. That is not what unilaterally means when the US government takes action. It means none of the other decision makers or branches were involved. Don’t be obtuse > It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through. 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. Didn't Doge gut the USAGM? Yep! Maximally closed as much as possible under the law. They also shut down other programs which aim to sidestep propaganda (including US propaganda), though some of those are starting to come back. Radio Free Asia, for example, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-s... Thanks for the link. This should be indeed understood in the context of stations like Radio Free Asia, Voice of America etc. This is somewhat counterintuitive: The US is the only country I know where most newspapers and government services use strict geoblocks to prevent me from accessing US sites in Europe. Conversely, I've never had any problems accessing European sites from the US. I know this is for a different set of reasons (likely GDPR cookie law or similar), but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need. And imgur has geoblocked the UK, which is extremely annoying as it was the reddit image host of choice. It's going to be a weird set of content on this website. Are they going to livestream La Liga sports? This. I regularly face geo blocks from American websites. Like literally at least once a week. It's very common for whatever reason for smaller US shops, newspapers any size and other random sites. The geoblocks happened because of our (EU) governments making punitive rules of the website doesn't follow European standards. It's easier for an American website targeted at Americans to just not bother with Europeans. That may explains the news sites with thousands of cookies and tracking bullshit, but it doesn't explain small brick and mortar stores blocking traffic Why wouldn't it? It exposes them to unknown risks because they're not lawyers while providing negligible returns since they are not geared towards a European audience. I would've done the same thing. Only EU site I had a problem accessing that i can remember was from my electricity provider.
Strangely enough they didn’t geoblock me but login threw an error because my local time didn’t match the local (German) timezone. 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 It makes sense to me. They're blocked in Europe because of European government polices, not American ones. 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? That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that. > but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need. The search AIs tell me it's around a third of people. The EU has problems reaching non-US sites. RT for example. The block isn't on RT or Russia's side. Which US newspapers and which governments websites? 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? I don't browse US newspapers that often, but I regularly observe blocked ones, particularly smaller ones. Non-deterministic, e.g.: New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Dallas Morning News, Virginian-Pilot. Beyond that, a lot of CA and San Francisco Government and local utility services are geo-restricted (which I think, from a security standpoint, makes at least somewhat sense..). Btw. asking once is enough ^^ Nexstar's stations blocked access from European IPs, providing a 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons response code; Nexstar are the largest TV station owner in the US, so a large number of sites for local affiliates were unavailable. I think other networks (Sinclair) may have also one so. 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.) https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/GDPR%2... That's a good start (might not be 100% up-to-date, but vast majority of them are still 451 blocked). "has been" => "had been" (since a few days ago) I suppose COPPA is a form of internet censorship we help children bypass? But will it let me torrent? /s It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it. 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. > Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA 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. He was likely referring to the claim that 70% of the internet flows through Loudon County, Virginia, where AWS us-east-1 is located, although the more accurate number is probably somewhere around 22%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudoun_County,_Virginia#Econo... Every cloud provider worth talking about is there too. Both public and sovereign/gov data centers. 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. > Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true. 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. > Neither would anybody have believed that 8 out of 10 hard drive chips can contain any rootkits. Yet, here we are I haven't heard this before. Do you have any links I can read on this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_Group Check the snowden leaks for IRATEMONK and TAO (tailored access operations) related documents. I wish I could upvote this more than once. Just because your client is in Switzerland and your data center is in Germany, doesn’t mean a data center in Virginia doesn’t have a copy. That was 14 years ago… We have MUCH more capabilities today. The datacenter is in Utah, not Virginia. That’s cold storage Right, where the copies are stored. It's referring to us-east-1 Sure, but the specific NSA datacenter that stores copies of every piece of data that transits the internet is in Utah, not Virginia. Do you have a single actual source for anything you’re saying about this happening 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. That claim makes no sense in today's world. For over a decade, the likes of Youtube, Netflix and short form video make the majority of throughput. Why in the world would anyone want to monitor known catalogs of content? Most of which are delivered by POPs in data centers distributed all over the world. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93dnnxewdvo 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. Let’s be serious for a minute here. If you’re claiming to have secret clearance on an Internet forum, you don’t. You may be surprised how cavalier some people are about their clearance. Secret is also like... really common to have. 5 million people or whatever. You have clearance enough to imply that these things are going on but not enough to actually prove anything? Surely the requirements of your clearance would come with some basic terms like "don't use winks and nudges to implicate us in vast conspiracies on public forums," or the far more simple "don't mention this to anyone." Have you seen the kinds of people that the US government has employed recently? I suspect many in DOGE were given high levels of security clearance based on their ability to create dank memes on x Never tapped a port, eh? 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. > Never tapped a port, eh? 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. It’s not a single data center, it’s about 200 of them. Just minutes ago you said this: > Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA Where are you getting this new 200 numbers? Share a source please. I have no data or information on the topic, but the use of English was fine for the apparent intended meaning: "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. You're right. It's fantastic to see how English comprehension is decaying, even in groups that supposedly are smarter than average. There's a fast decaying tendency in language comprehension overall, and I can only point to the fact that much of the new generation is unable and unwilling to read even a single book. https://broadbandbreakfast.com/dateline-ashburn-data-centers... “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... One of… 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. So you're saying my french ISP tunnels all traffic from my hotel to my office through to America? 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’m saying your ISP isn’t being entirely forthcoming about what goes on on their networks… take that as you will. So every ISP in every country in the world is feeding thousands of terabits of data to a hostile American intelligence agency. Not just netflow, the actual contents, and not a single ISP employee has actually come out with this evidence. 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. Another way to think about it, many websites the data gets transmitted before you hit submit, between various type ahead reactive frameworks, soft keyboards with networked spell checking, your AI powered mood ring, always listening smart watch/car/home etc. Grandad always said don't say anything on the radio you wouldn't say in public, well we're up to don't think out loud or see how your crazy idea looks in text before you edit the Mel Gibson tones out of it. Tinfoil hats are off, on, locked! the time it takes for light to travel from los angeles to virginia is 12 - 16 ms, round trip is 30ms lets say - that is a noticeable delay, and it could be easily disproven that 80% of traffic is literally routed through VA now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably? And how useful would this information be? srcIP:port_dstIP:port pairs with almost all traffic encrypted. Pretty boring from a sigint pov. 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. There is the small possibility that the NSA has found cracks in some of the popular cyphers and could actually make sense of the encrypted data. It's not completely out of the question, their cryptanalysis has been shown to be ahead of the public best efforts in the past. They demonstrated it back in the 70s with DES S-boxes hardening them against a technique no one publicly knew about until the 80s. What the point if they can have decrypted data from cloudflare? i used to work, 15 years ago, on a (permissive, not covert) monitoring service for a UK national public service, the NHS spine core. We used switches to mirror ports and capture traffic in promisciouse mode on a few dozen servers
split across a few datacentres that all the traffic went througg. We had certs installed to decode https. We could get enough hardware to do this step easily, but fast enough storage was an issue, we had 1 petabyte of usable storage across all sitesn that could hold a few days of content. We aimed to get this data filtered and forwarded into our central Splunk (seperate storage) and also into our bespoke dashboards within 60s. We often lagged... You can only decode those https certificates if you are mitming them (and have a compromised certificate) 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. It's also possible to generate ephemeral keys deterministically, e.g. key=hash(escrow, sslrandom). The point they were making was that you could tell via ping times if the traffic was literally being routed through VA unnecessarily because the extra unavoidable light speed delay that extra distance would add between a user and the server if they weren't already very near to VA. Could be mirrored via the type of monitoring you're talking about but that'd only get you mostly encrypted traffic unless the 90s cypherpunk paranoia turns out to have been true. But you are only tapping your own data that's already passing by you not? Not 80% of the internet that has nothing to do with you. Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA. "Going through" doesn't necessarily imply store and forward. It could be tapped elsewhere and shipped to WVA. fwiw the idea of running a network in order to tap it is hardly new. The British operated largest telegraph network in the world in the 1800's for that reason. You think there's an entire shadow infrastructure across the United States or world that carries 80% of all internet traffic all the way to VA? It would have to be several times larger than the internet infrastructure itself due to the distances involved. All built and maintained in secret? You just don't have imagination. Google, just by itself, controls 89% of the traffic in the Internet. And we know that the government can get any information they want from them, without even asking too much. If you combine this with other major companies operating very close to the US government, it is probable that more than 95% of the web traffic outside China that is easily within reach of these sinister 3 letter organizations. > Google, just by itself, controls 89% of the traffic in the Internet. 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? No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume. > Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume 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. While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself. They will never believe you until you show them and that requires a clearance. A decent number of people reading this probably do have secret clearance. But that's not really the relevant point. 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. No need for a clearance, merely explain that 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. That is simplifying it to the point of a lab experiment. It’s a bit more complicated but yes, you can split light and route that light anywhere you want. Yes you can trivially tap a fibre -- https://www.gigamon.com/products/access-traffic/network-taps... for example 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. Correct but local governments using Palantir will need to provide it to them somehow. https://amp.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-... 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… Most of the replies to this seem to think it's referring to some kind of secret government datacenter. It's us-east-1, and every other cloud provider's US East and GOV zones, which are all in NVA So they… drive the data around NOVA? No, but if you want to collaborate with the federal government it makes it more convenient to be located where the federal government resides. No, but you can visit a “clean room” and look at the data at any number of sites. When I worked for a CLEC (during that moment in history when they were briefly a Thing), we had a USG closet at our main datacenter, and we are nowhere even close to NoVA. I expect they still handle it this way rather than try to funnel any significant amount of traffic to a particular geographical region. Can someone ELI5 how it actually works? 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? According to Reuters, it will essentially be a free VPN. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-... Free ... as in they'll spy on everything you do. They already record as much global traffic as possible. Sure but now suckers probably using their DNS, or if not they still got a human name to IP / time / duration map. So you're not paying for it? In corporate america how is that going to be moneytized? it would be extremely naive to believe that certain corporations allied with the regime wouldn’t have complete, entire, total access to all of the traffic to feed their data collction. VPNs are in no way secure. I'm sure they will be taking all your data and using it. With end-to-end encryptions, https etc.., how can they collect any data besides IP addresses and SNI? It's a government program. The tax payer pays the service provider, a company owned by some government official's cousin. Monetization happened just before your employer paid you this week. Money is the smallest concern here. It could easily replace the content with state-approved versions and the majority would never know, or at the least redirect to other sites/pages as needed. After all, it's being described as a 'portal' not a simple service. Are you implying that paying does in any way reduce chance of your data being further monetized in the same way? I'm sure Palantir will volunteer Let the NSA deal with that… You are the product That may be pretty useful for torrenting, actually. Oh they’re definitely going to be watching for that. You can have the propaganda but if you start stealing from rich people they’ll be after you. So nothing new. We can just use cloudflare warp Can people use it for sailing the high seas? Free Trump VPN to go with one's Trump Phone? can we use it for, erm, other 'freedoms' ? And since euthanasia is not favoured by the religious right in the US (I assume here for sake of argument) it would be filtered by VPN / DNS anyway in the VPN Maybe the EU can open a book portal for the US. The whole book banning thing is a little weird in 2026, IMO. It's exciting to think about, we all liked Fahrenheit 451, but a book not being bought for elementary schools doesn't really make it "banned" IMO. 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. As a parent, I believe there is no book that should be banned from being used by a teacher for instruction. I have the responsibility of ensuring that the school my child attends employs teachers who I trust to make effective and age-appropriate curriculum decisions. I feel like you're making a silly distinction. I mean, we ban cigarette use for minors because it's bad for them.. are you against that too? You're admitting that you think certain books are inappropriate for kids, but saying that we shouldn't do anything about preventing their use in schools.. why? Not every kid goes to a school with wonderful teachers. I think banning books for use in schools is justifiable. So you're saying if a teacher decides to use a book in class that's wholly inappropriate for the age group they're teaching we should ban the teacher, not the book? 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? Is it? Just because it's inappropriate for one age group at a school doesn't mean it's inappropriate for all age groups. You can generally categorize the age groups present in a school by... looking at the grades served in the school. shocker. I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean. Like... yes? But my point was, a school may have a very wide range of age groups. A K-12 school will have students from ages ~4 to ~18. Even a regular primary school will have 7 year olds along with 14 year olds. Point being, a book that is inappropriate for the younger students at a school may not be for the older students; and I don't see why the older students shouldn't have access to those books. Books are already made available to different age groups in different ways. Libraries that serve different ages put different books on different shelves. There are books on shelves young kids can’t reach, and there are books behind the counter. > I believe there is no book that should be banned from being used by a teacher for instruction 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. When we talk about books in school we are talking about books from mainstream publishers, distributed by educational distributors, and purchased by career librarians. There are zero such books that can be compared to the lot of things you are trying to compare them to. OP posted a super short 2 sentence post and yet you managed to take that out of context and twist it into the exact opposite of what they meant. Incredible. I don't think OP is the one with the insane opinions. OP posted a comment that said they don't think there's anything off limit, which is the natural conclusion. Some things should not be shown to children. this should not be a controversial topic. Find a book in a public school library that should not be shown to children, that’s so horrible it will warp minds. 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. How do we ensure schools employ only teachers we trust? Whats the criteria and initial/review process? Also, teachers are human. They change views and opinions like the rest of us. What guarantees they don't break that trust? I’m active in local government - that’s how you make sure the school board is strong and the superintendent is the best candidate. But also voting is effective. But there are no guarantees - except that those who wish to ban access to books are never to be trusted. > I don't think children should be given copies 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. > there is no such thing as “age appropriate literature.” Would you be comfortable with a 5 year old reading "Morning Glory, Milking Farm"? Another disingenuous framing. We’re talking about banning books from school libraries, not my personal comfort with an individual child reading an individual book. How about letting the professional educators figure it out instead of emotionally-charged propaganda-fueled activists and their cynical politicians? What's wrong with "dark fantasy novels"? Banned in public schools... The banned books are things like "All Boys Aren't Blue", a book which describes incestuous child rape and provides step by step instructions for anal sex. If you think that book belongs in public schools the FBI should have a look at your computer. It describes incestuous child rape, because the author describes his experience of being raped.
Victims speaking about their abuse, now that is one step too far and needs to be censored. I knew there had to be a rational explanation as to why this book was chosen as a "bad book'. What is wrong with teens learning about anal sex? It's not like not having the information is going to stop them from doing it, if that's your goal. So not books banned from the general public? Got it! If you compare that list of "really banned" books, it sounds like creating a European portal would be a net negative. 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 Banned in the same way you don't show certificate 18 films to 6 year olds. Meanwhile, you can't even go on pornhub in certain states in the US, but yes let's let people go on X and engage in hate speech.
In fact I'm sure bad actors will use that site FROM the us, to anonymize their hate speech from Russia/China Americans is land of the free until someone shows a nipple. Or copies a floppy. Or refuses to partake in flag shagging. Or says something critical of the president. Basically America is very good at protecting hate speech, not so good at the rest. Yeah. This effort feels perplexing. US just isn't the free-est country on Earth in terms of free speech protections, and the gap is slowly widening. IIRC there still isn't secrecy of communication baked into laws as principles. A popular meme, but consider that part of the discourse around the EU censorship is Grok's undressing feature. > Americans is land of the free until someone shows a nipple. Or copies a floppy. Or refuses to partake in flag shagging. Or says something critical of the president. Can you give an example of censoring of any of these type of content? AFAIK there is only age gating. I principled stance would be against government censoring nipples AND speech of any kind, including what you call "hate speech". 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. So your line is in a different place to majority of Americans and certainly the majority of the world 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. I'm confused about your principles. 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. Freedom of speech is not absolute anywhere, not even under the 1st amendment in the USA. 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. Yes, we can. 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. Where would any of your hate speech examples actually be illegal? UK's made a fair few arrests for exactly those kinda things The US should make an alternate internet without europeans so we can avoid them This will happen naturally. As countries continue to impose their laws on the internet, it will eventually fracture into numerous regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders. The internet will one day cease to exist. Countries in Europe (and most of the world) have positive constitutions, which defines what the government "must do" (for its citizens), whilst the USA has a negative constitution that defines what the government "cannot do" (against its citizens). 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. >In Europe we recognize that Hitler came to power by abusing free speech, 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). Hitler was literally banned from public speaking for two years. 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. Joseph Goebbels would have been disappointed to learn that his office was superfluous and irrelevant! Goebbels and his office represent the direct opposite of freedom of speech, just to counter your Reddit-inspired mic-drop hot take comment. The point was how they gained absolute power, and I would also say that there were multiple factors at work, and I doubt that the GP meant that “abusing free speech” was the only method or reason, but was it not a factor at all? There is often so much “not this but that”, folks should consider “both-and”. They gained absolute power through violence. 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. > Yelling "I HAVE A BOMB!" in an airport comes with consequences. 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. That's a convoluted way of saying "You have a freedom of speech but not after the speech" It's more like the content of the speech matters. If you tell someone you're going to kill them, it becomes self defense if they kill you before that happens. > Meanwhile, you can't even go on pornhub in certain states in the US. Hilarious to think that freedom.gov might be the workaround. No state blocks access to PornHub. Some states have requirements requiring ID before viewing porn, but the state isn't stopping anybody from viewing it. Requiring ID to buy alcohol isn't banning alcohol, just like requiring ID to view porn isn't banning porn. I don't take issue with the idea of something like this (assuming it isn't expensive and is more of an information center than anything else), but yeah it is funny that while they evidently made this in response to the EU, if it ends up being what it sounds like it will, it's going to enable Americans to circumvent their own state's laws as well. > let people go on X and engage in hate speech 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. American free speech laws are the exception, not the rule. All European free speech laws have always been balanced and weighed up against other laws. This is hardly anything new. If anything, the internet has brought forth a short time period where everything goes and the status quo is now recovering. The legal definition of hate speech (or rather, its local equivalents) is not just "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly". American free speech laws are the superior option. A government that has the power to arrest people for saying "hateful" things is no better than China or North Korea. But at least you won't need to deal with people saying mean things (that you can block) on your computer (that no one is forcing you to use for social media) anymore, right? >> A government that has the power to arrest people for saying "hateful" things is no better than China or North Korea. 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. If the government ignored who people voted to president, it sure wouldn't be a free country would it? The eu "balancing" the right to freedom of speech is the same thing every authoritarian regime says. "We need to balance your right to speak to make sure you don't cause any disruption to the status quo (and knock us out of power)." Modern Europe is simply following the same line of thinking that every authoritarian regime has since forever. Just keep letting your rights get eroded. Boring American arrogance. 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. Fascist propaganda = i don't want 3 gorillion immigrants coming into my country every day. 12 thousand people arrested per year for social media posts is "balanced"? https://archive.ph/bdEqK 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 What the law says and what law enforcement does are two different things. 90% of those arrests don't lead to conviction. The law isn't the problem here. do you think being arrested for social media posts can lead to a chilling effect on those social media posts? why are we pretending that being "arrested but not convicted" is anywhere near acceptable for speech the government doesn't like? Cops can arrest anyone for any reason. If it wasn't for speech, it'd be for public intoxication or accusations of being a paedophiles or for potentially possessing a weapon. 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. >America-style "you can even yell bomb in an airport" 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 I think "balanced" here is about how it works rather than about the end result. complaining about losing the freedom to watch porn without ID while in the same comment pushing for more people to face state action for social media posts porn is ok, posts that hurt my fee fees and ideological bias bad :'( (both are ok in my opinion btw) I agree that hate speech must have limits but I have no idea where government trust comes from, especially in the current times. It's like people forget that voting swings and sways and that at some point in time, a government you won't agree with will be able to wield all these shiny new tools for censorship. As someone who lives in North Carolina and can't even open most mainstream porn sites, I too am waiting for the freedom Porn Sites? How about an interview with a politician on a late-nite network television show. Is YouTube blocking that in your state? is that really the point? you don't see the rest of it all as a little... disturbing? North Carolina hasn't banned porn. The EU has banned RT and other sites. North Carolina has effectively banned porn by requiring porn sites to collect IDs. Did all US states effectively ban alcohol by requiring an ID? Did all US states ban driving by requiring ID? Did every country ban flying by requiring ID? When I go to a liquor store, the cashier doesn't store my ID in a database associated with my porn browsing habits Well they have security cameras aiming at you throughout the store including when you show your id. Some stores, Home Depot for example, are having you scan your face at self checkout. We are a few years away from the exact thing in stores. Such an irony that there are two sides trying to control the Internet in their own lovely ways and in the end it's the people who will have to suffer one way or the other. But I do think countries around the world should have a hard look at how the Internet is, even today, de facto controlled by the US. Take ".com" and ".net" domains for example. Like there are efforts underway to get away from SWIFT (and hopefully one day USD as well), this should be independent. In a way, at least in the long term, this US administration might be a net positive for the world at least in the term of depolarisation. Or maybe the focal points will shift from existing ones to new ones. You think you want US influence to weaken, but you may feel very differently should it happen. There is a lot you’re taking for granted. These days what people receive of the US influence is mostly interference in politics to favour the far-right, military threats and economic war through tariffs. As well as just random verbal attacks on local politicians on local matters. I'm sure there is a positive side to the US influence, but it's well hidden and they definitely don't advertise it. Since you guys voted for Trump 2 it's guaranteed and it's happening right now. But, at least you deserve it. Then won’t foreign governments just ban freedom.gov? This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead. > This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead. 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. Is, or was? I vaguely recall Doge gutting this among many other things? It's a propaganda maneuver. And it's obviously just as critical of China as it is of Europe. The State Department's public voices may be immersed in the culture war but there are probably a few cooler heads left who have learned to keep out of the spotlight. US can probably use their soft power to influence them not to do that. Also would imagine the US gov could also set up some more censorship resistant access methods. At this point US has close to zero (if not negative) "soft" power. This is what democrats and Hollywood are for. Some people still believe in them. Trade and tarriff relief are an option still. Despite how shitty the US has been and the distrust that will cause in the future access to US markets will be very attractive until the economy collapses. Soft power isn't just from countries liking you after all. Access to US market? Is that a joke you are trying to crack? An “access” that literally depends upon how loud the orange fool farted on the commode that morning — that access and that market? I mean do you really not see what’s happening or you are just being a nice contrarian? Because this baffles me. It's still a very rich market and I'm mostly looking to a post Trump world. I completely understand other countries are going to be much more dubious about giving things up permanently for long term promises but things like not blocking sites or allowing US access to the markets both of which can be easily in response to another Trump-esque flailing is a much easier ask and negotiation. 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. > Trade and tarriff relief are an option still. 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. Would be a good reason for the EU to start a 200% tariff for US software and cloud services then. How would this work? Wouldn't a reciprocal tariff with identical parameters by the US against EU tech companies completely obliterate EU tech landscape? Most EU tech companies probably have primarily European customers (given that services export from the US to the EU is much larger than the other way around). Second, all those EU customers are looking for EU alternatives that do not have a huge tariff. Reciprocal tariffs would (for the EU) hurt export of goods much more, since that is where the EU has a large surplus. The number of tech companies matters less than their scale. SAP, Spotify, and Dassault Systèmes likely have more economic impact than ten thousand tiny software shops combined. And notably, all three derive a huge portion of their revenue from the US market. The US simply has more numerous and more important companies that rely on being able to freely export their services globally. The leverage here is with Europeans not only because of this asymmetry but because there is also more political appetite there to punish America than there is in America to punish Europe. ...and collapse their own economies in the process > Trade and tarriff relief are an option still 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. There's a huge range of stuff way below trying to annex Greenland or the strong arming he tried to use against Greenland. This thread was talking about how the US could get countries to not block their free anti-censorship VPN not territory annexation. It's a way smaller ask, comparing them borders on absurd. I was not clear, I am not saying telling Canada not to make a deal with China is the same as telling the UK not to limit porn. I am saying we have seen multiple instances where countries have stopped considering Trump's deals, cause they cannot be relied on. Tarriff relief isn't much of an option as of a few mins ago... There are still loads of completely legally valid tariff and other trade barriers ripe for negotiation that existed long before the ill named 2025 "Freedom Day". Bro literally nobody trusts you any more. We do what you say, you put tariffs on us, we don't do what you say, you put tariffs on us. We don't care any more. We don't like you. Do you understand? Which soft power are you talking about? I think we're all aware that EU is trying to become more independent, but as of right now basically everything they do online, or really anything with technology at all, is American in some way. That's a lot of "soft power" and it will take decades, maybe a century, for EU or UK to replace it. Tarrifs cost US consumers not EU consumers. If the US wants to ban AWS from operating in the EU that's just going to accelerate the shift away, for example. There are no tarriffs being applied on digital services. That's obviously intentional considering how much soft power those services exert on countries the USA wants to maintain an outsized influence over. How would tarrifs be applied on digital services? 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. Right, I'm aware of that. Which is why I don't know why you brought up tarriffs in a discussion about the "soft power" that US technology services impose. Because you said "that's obviously intentional" as though that's a thing that could be done. 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). Sure, it's decreasing under Trump, but to pretend the richest, most militarily powerful, most culturally influential nation on the planet somehow doesn't have any soft power is... certainly a choice. Republicans are spending all of US's remaining soft power on stealing Greenland. If it ends with the Navy showing its non-soft power, Europe won't have any fucks left to give about some website. We already don't. We want the Americans to pack up their bases and fuck off. Ami, go home! They've done enough work to stir up chaos and war all over the planet in the last 7 decades. You’re entirely free — at any time — to leave NATO, develop your own replacement weapons programs, and fully fund your own defense. I suspect most Americans would actually be quite supportive. You’ll just have to figure out how to actually pay for it. The only country Americans care about is Israel, it doesn't really matter, we get it. We don't care. Please close Ramstein :) Germany is free to exit NATO and close Ramstein. I believe it only requires a 1-2 year notice period. 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. We have no real aspirations for global hegemon status. Ramstein is for your benefit, really. That is the key difference. You might not, but military deterrence is what keeps those with auch aspirations at bay. If you prefer to be a Russian vassal state, that is a choice. Yeah they should pack up and leave seriously, go serve Israel and attack Iran, I want no part in that. Yeah actually we hate you. Apparently you've still got a loft of soft power in Nigeria, though. Most Europeans are now firmly anti-America. It really doesn’t matter, the leaders who need to overlook personal grudges are the ones who do the wheeling and dealing here. 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. Typical American arrogance. You assume you can treat everyone around you like shit and we'll just put up with it. 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. You've misread my comment pretty aggressively. Then again, this is about the level of discourse I typically get from "amerikkka bad" commenters, so I guess I'm not surprised. Anyways, China is trying to invade other nations, so that's a super moot point. Anyone who wants to trade in USD. Protection of maritime trade routes. Nuclear shield. Netflix, YouTube, Nvidia, OpenAI, Amazon. To be honest, only the last few holdouts in Europe still believe in the US nuclear shield. The fact that Germany is trying to make a deal with France should tell you everything. 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. More European countries need nuclear deterrent, after all that is what seemingly gets Trump to write love letters to Kim Jong-un and meet him. What sort of soft power do you imagine Netflix represents? It exists but it's not leverage. It allows export of American culture. In the same way they used their soft power to influence them not to block twitter and facebook? Because that power is slowly going from soft to limp... No government can stand up to the might of La Liga This comment generated a lot of activity. It's very interesting watching the vote count of it move with the daylight (it went down during night in US/day in EU, and went back up when the US woke back up) Well, maybe USAID could have helped here. Or a robust State Dept. Wait until you find out who funded Tor development... The US Navy. Why would that be surprising? Sure — but the UK or EU has to accept the constant rhetoric of “you clearly don’t support free speech, you block freedom.gov” when discussing with the US. 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. This is grade-school level mind games. Is it really that easy? I'm not convinced that this whole discussion section isn't astroturf... some real out there opinions popping up in here Late reply, but it’s not about mind games so much as rhetorical artifacts to actuate the levers of power. 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.” I’m unclear as to what the difference is between my comment and your reply other than a more detailed explanation, which I do appreciate. You’ve just described “mind games”, though. When did you stop being a child? Can you point to the actual day it happened? Guess what... It didn't happen to anyone else either. Yes. And then, if he doesn’t like the regime because they haven’t done him enough favours the orange one will rage about it on his social network. Maybe that's the purpose? Pushing European and global "allies" to show their cards. Some citizens will support more censorship, while some will start questioning. It's good to know where your rivals stand. Also it is cheap, easy, non-controversial domestically in the US, and ethically coherent with American values. > ethically coherent with American values Do you mean that VPN will blur the nipples when you watch pictures of classical paintings through it? > 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. > Pushing European and global "allies" to show their cards. Some citizens will support more censorship, while some will start questioning. It's good to know where your rivals stand. I don't think European countries have been shy or sneaky about their restrictions on online content. That's a good point. > 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. Freedom of speech. I didn't expect to have to spell it out. Note that in 36 odd states in the USA companies and their officers (i.e real people) cannot boycott Israel (or even say nasty things) and then do business with the state. By law. So, not so much free speech. But if you say the American government is occupied by zionists loyal to a foreign government, that's "hate speech" and would land you in prison if not for the enduring strength of the first ammendment (which several Europeans ITT think is bad, because they think "hate speech" is bad and they lack the mental fortitude to admit that sometimes right wing meanies might actually have a valid point.) You mean the freedom of speech that gets you shot when you protest the gestapo? 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). Yet another illusion. A lot of Americans are very good at finding ways to persecute people for having an opinion, often using economic consequences as a cudgel to enforce groupthink. And, at this very moment, the government is compiling lists of people it regards as enemies, purely on the basis of their "free" speech. If something looks like MITM, chances are it is MITM. It is indeed one marvelous honeypot. The most obvious honeypot I've ever seen, to be quite honest. What's MITM? The most effective way to intercept messages encrypted with public key cryptography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack You can also call it "U.S. government spying on Europeans". Man In The Middle. They're saying that the US is intercepting the traffic. What do you think cloudflare is? This is just them coming out with it now. Also MITM? The comment you are replying to in no way implies that this is the only MITM. Since they masquerade as example.com with an https certificate that your browser will trust: yes. It is much more convenient to catch the fish that eats particular sort of worms putting such worm on a hook than finding the right fish among many others in a fishnet. I am not claiming the OP ist right or wrong. I am merely explaining what MITM is and what the OP meant. MAGA-Infused Trump Machine. i'll take US mitm harvesting my data over the european alternative (man in the jail) well now you can have both simultaneously. A state sponsored vpn is probably not (only) gonna do what you think it's doing. It probably will do what I think it's doing. Won't those other nations just ban freedom.gov? Nothing stops them from hosting it on fbi.gov, state.gov, etc. 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. Nit: If you're filing a flight plan, you do it with the country you're departing from. Even if you're piloting an aircraft departing into the US, it wouldn't have any effect on operations if you couldn't reach US websites. There's also several alternative ways for pilots to file flight plans outside of the web. (The flight plans get passed between countries via AFTN/AMHS, which are dedicated telecommunications networks independent of the Internet.) I thought airlines still had to file passenger manifests with CBP separately, no? Yes, though that's separate from the flight plan. 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). Europeans don't generally use .gov so if the US tries to pull that, they'll just block whatever .gov their VPN is hosted on. 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. As a Brit/European, would I notice or care if fbi.gov was blocked via consumer internet providers? I'd probably not notice if *.gov was blocked. I'm fairly sure government-level internet provisioning has a very different set of restrictions to the general population for those who need access to US Gov services, in the same way that I'm sure the Chinese state itself isn't subject to the rules of the Great Firewall. The fbi.gov example is more about whether INTERPOL or local police would care since it would hinder collaboration on international investigations. 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. If a Govt decides that I am pretty sure they won't stop at anything but TLD level banning. Besides I don't know about other countries (or EU) but I won't be surprised if our giant industrious neighbour already has infrastructure in place just for such
Trumpian shenanigans :) Since no one seems to have a serious answer to this…the answer is yes, it would easily be blocked. Beyond that, absolutely no one would use this service. Therefore, it can be considered to be nothing more than political posturing by a weak administration. They wouldn't dare ban a .gov domain and we will hide all of behind Cloudflare! /s Until you have to validate your id/age to continue... Seriously though... we have one segment undermining foreign lockdowns while the same and other segments are literally doing the same here. its like we have different smaller governments that can pass their own laws inside of one larger government or something While I get that... I'm talking about hypocrisy not sovereignty in that it's the same or overlapping group doing both. This comment made my day :) What about all the age restriction stuff coming online here in the US in various states? Those are cool right? This service is definitely a honeypot for tracking. I'm guessing China will simply block it at the firewall. It would be hilarious to witness the US Gov validating The Pirate Bay's hydra domain approach. Maybe some squatting isn't a bad idea: freedom.live
freedom.xyz
freedom.space
etc. I wonder of China can pay Trump with a golden limosuine to get backdoor access to it. Previous discussion: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-... 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. (This comment was posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072613 but we merged the threads) It's a waste of resources, but please do it! The entire "European Union censors" narrative is a hoax [1], so the portal will achieve nothing, but you've got to do what you've got to do! [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. As someone living in an EU state who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access, I can't agree with you that it's a "hoax". It's inconvenient enough for me that I'm looking into having a custom router that will switch between VPN destinations depending on what site I'm accessing. 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". I really hope they go ahead and create the portal. I mean it. > who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access, 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? DCMA. United states censoring all around the world. So please host a VPN to get around that. I don't think high seas sites hosted in off-shore jurisdictions particularly care about the DMCA... Most access blocking is through ISP DNS servers. Just set your DNS to an open one, no need for a VPN. Which country ? Italy. Examples of sites I can't access without VPN: torrent sites (including legal uses), betfair.com (which I use as a more accurate political predictor than polls), and various non-EU sites which block access because they've decided it's easier than complying with extra-territorial requirements imposed by the EU (this one isn't direct EU censorship, but it amounts to the same thing indirectly. 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. Italian here. I can access most of the torrent sites and betfair.it (which I guess is the localized version) without vpn I might have changed my dns in the past I'm unfamiliar with Italian piracy laws and surveillance but I can tell you that accessing torrent sites for me was a simple matter of choosing a proper DNS provider. This is a definition of censorship that seems to equate restrictions to any website or data stream as freedom, not whether the content of the site breaks local laws. This is a bit extreme, since most countries have laws against gambling, and if you could get around it by just setting up servers abroad, what value are local laws? I'm not sure I see any practical difference between a government saying "we will block website X because we don't like it" and "we will block website X because we say that website X is illegal". For example if Iran blocks a website which is critical of the regime, do you consider it important whether such criticisms are against the law or not in Iran? I think most people would consider it censorship either way. 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). Gambling of a certain type is illegal in India but the workaround has been to place ads from sites based outside of India. How would you solve this. Make gambling legal and regulated? Or tell citizens they are on their own and may be violating the law if they gamble, then look the other way and occasionally promote stories about citizens losing their money to illegal gambling. 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. Why make gambling legal just to satisfy people who are circumventing the laws? That too by basing themselves outside of the country, as opposed to state lines. 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. Because what you’re asking for is untenable in a world of billions of people scattered across countless nations, at least without cutting off the internet outside your borders entirely like North Korea. And trying to force the issue domestically just results in oppression and restriction of human rights. The global digital world is a formless, borderless space; this “freedom VPN” thing, Tor, I2P, v2ray, satellite internet, etc, you will simply never be able to fill all the gaps. Those who want to will get around it. 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! In which case the country with the least laws decides how everyone else functions. 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. There is no answer except to sever yourself from the network. If you could somehow undo all of computing history and rebuild the internet on different principles, using completely locked down and centralized machines, then you could accomplish what you want to. But the tools to escape control are out there and are widely available. The skills to open new avenues outside of control are distributed among millions. The structure of the current network is woven into everything from banking to dishwashers. 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.) >what value are local laws 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. "Your law enforcement is censorship, while my censorship is law enforcement " Got it I also live in the EU. betfair.com is not blocked by my ISP here. Rather, they are blocking my ISP ("[...] you may be accessing the Betfair website from a country that Betfair does not accept bets from [...]"). That the website not only prevents betting but also does not show any odds is a technical decision on their part. Gambling regulation is also usually domestic, and not EU law. 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. yeah, i'm calling bullshit. unless this person tries to surf the russian web or get behind the great firewall of china. See my sibling comment to yours. I have no reason to lie. What content are you missing? Off the top of my head, the type of content most likely to ve missing in Europe would be: - 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. In Spain many parts of the Internet are shut down when there's a LaLiga match to "prevent piracy". They usually block Cloudflare as a whole but also Vercel, GitHub,... had issues. For example last Sunday I couldn't access some of the stories submitted here. I could also not access the documentation of hledger, a FOSS contability tool. Piracy would be IP protection, not censorship / stopping dissidents/ controlling ideas. Plus this wouldn’t be an EU wide policy. Blocking huge swaths of the internet skips right past IP protection in my opinion. No, it is censorship. IP protection would be punishing the pirates after they do something illegal. I think what you're sensing is that it is censorship in support of intellectual property rather than censorship aiming at political repression. 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. Germany has an "Index" of banned media. Mostly nazi content, so if you're looking for that, freedom.org will be _right_ place for that. Ah yes, the nazis. So yeah, censorship is great then because nazis. Is HN becoming reddit? See my reply on the other sub-comment. There's no need to accuse me of deliberately contorting the truth. We can keep the discussion civilised. And yes, I would call at least the second point (GDPR) indirect censorship, because it's a consequence of the fact that the EU has imposed the requirements extra-territorially ("your website must comply with our rules even though you aren't within our jurisdiction, and your website is fully legal within your jurisdiction"). The GDPR does not dictate what websites can say, it dictates rules for handling collected personal information. Those are not the same thing, it’s not censorship. Notice how you went from "censorship is a hoax" to "not having access to these things is not important", while also implicitely assuming control of deciding the matter. > EU state who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access 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. Press freedom !== entirety of freedom of speech 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. The US's low press freedom index is precisely because people are being legally intimidated for wrongthink. It is not limited to the press, either. Mahmoud Khalil (the Palestinian activist detained by ICE on fake immigration charges for his political speech) is a famous example, but there are many. The US's "commitment to free speech" is nowadays not very much more noble than Russia's principled stand against economic sanctions. Plenty of people in the UK are arrested for wrongthink. You might think that's justified (e.g. because it is hateful) but it is still arresting someone for speech. I didn't say that they weren't. Hundreds of people were arrested for opposing the proscription of Palestine Action. The UK's defence of free expression is not great. 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. Arrested for incitement not wrong think… if they had done the same thing in the street and there was evidence they would have been arrested too Well, there was a labour councillor who said people should have their throats slit on camera in the street, and he was let off. If this is a real take you need to rethink your view on the world. Got anything substantive to say? False equivalency. As a green card holder he does not share the same freedom of speech rights as that of a US citizen. Do I need to point out that the OP describes a US commitment to the free speech of Europeans? The worst part is that its "outsourced" to private organizations and NGOs - and thus the state claims its "not state driven" censorship. They want social stability- but have no grasp of the concept of that stability being only a leaky abstraction for situational stability. You can not claim the world is peaceful and utopia is at hand, sitting in a ski chalet in the alps- while the whole mountain slowly comes down with that house on it. Reality cant be reasoned away, the rain will fall, no matter how much laws there are against it. There are so so many reasons to get arrested for social media posts that have nothing to do with censorship. Be that as it may, people are being arrested for expressing wrong think No, people are being arrested for making malicious communications. They would have suffered the same punishment if they had used email, letter, graffiti on a billboard. You cannot go around threatening to harm people without repercussions. "Malicious communications" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. This veteran was arrested for retweeting this meme (https://abuwjaawap.cloudimg.io/v7/_lgbtqnation-assets_/asset...). 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. He was arrested for refusing to allow officers to enter his home on a pre-agreed return visit to discuss the complaints: 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). Re-read what you just linked. In the response from the JIMU: "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. Why on earth was he legally obligated to have that discussion in the first place? Those complaints should have been laughed at and ignored. The law might be a bad one (and probably is) but on balance better that police investigate suspected illegality than don’t. Overall I’d rather be somewhere where even a former royal can be arrested than somewhere the rule of law is optional. Oh yes, the bastion of truth that is the Daily Mail. Sorry, my eyes just rolled out if my head. The story is widely reported: 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? Just Google it. It's been reported on various news sites. eg: 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. What this one? Haha, any comments on that? The police didn't even apologize or admit a mistake, they believed they were doing the right thing and just made a waffle statement about "reflects need in our local communities." Police make mistakes, in some countries they arrest someone trying to incite an arrest and that's bad. In some countries they shoot someone for driving 5mph over the limit, that's worse. The police in the UK do far worse than wrongful arrests so while bad, it's not really on my "top ten problems" list. They didn't admit it was a mistake. It was what they intended and will continue to do, based on the statements they made. Nope. People are certainly being arrested for speech (e.g. opinions) that would be protected by the first amendment in the US. Guising it under a scary sounding law doesn’t change the nature of it. People are certainly being arrested *in the USA* for speech (e.g. opinions) that are theoretically protected by the first amendment. 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 It’s bad now and not perfect for sure, but I doubt these instances would be upheld by the higher courts. Kinda irrelevant, given that the go-to examples I see on Hacker News of this happening in the EU and UK are either actual death/violence threats etc. (which are also not protected speech in the USA) or also not upheld in higher European courts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce... Incitement is only illegal when "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action". And? I didn't say anything about "incitement", I said "actual death/violence threats", because I meant people making actual threats of violence up to and including death, are the actual things tweeted in the most commonly seen examples given on Hacker News (besides the aforementioned "also not upheld" that the commenter I was replying to tried to use to justify when Americans get arrested for tweets). The people in Europe have a different view of freedom of speech and that’s fine. Not everything that’s a slightly different perspective on freedom of speech and what that entails and includes is tyranny. I’m European and I do not. France and the UK especially come from the same liberal intellectual root as the USA. What we see today is a bastardisation of these principles in Europe. Only the US was smart enough to canonise it into law. Democracy also includes sometimes things not happening the way you want to … happens to me all the time, too. 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. Yet the US has far worse attacks on free speech. And plenty of European countries also canonised it into law. So there is censorship, you just think that it is good. That's fine! But you should own the position and justify it on its own terms instead of pretending that it doesn't count as censorship. Sure but filtering what you say is also a form of censorship. Swinging the term around like it's some form of morality is silly; anyone who isn't for a form of censorship is just a moron and an asshole. Or even worse: a liberal. Examples please. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/14/transgender-... [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. [1] is illegal Not sure what [2] is about. [3] doesn't appear relevant either. “Is illegal” 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. Considering all forms of sharing information as freedom, USA have huge problem with copyrights. Copyright limits people right to speech to protect interest of corporations, same as ban of stalking or slanders limits freedom of speech to protect victims. I think people getting arrested for social media posts is specifically a UK thing. That and Russia are the only European countries where I've heard of that happening. 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. I think nations should add content moderation as part of mandatory volunteer duties. 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. The last thing the world needs is a state mandated hoarde of european reddit moderators plaguing the internet. no thanks. Come now - why should it just be self selected volunteers or outsourced workers. 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. This portal will just contain propaganda to serve the fascist agenda of the current US government. Not saying that things are perfect in Europe but the US talking about freedom and freedom of speech sounds like a joke. > [1] First, the EU countries have much higher World Press Freedom Index than the US 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. The organization that publishes the WPFI also considers online harassment a major threat to press freedom and scores accordingly. I am European and I would like to challenge you a little. Both the US and Europe have major issues with press and freedom of expression. To give you some examples from the European side. Specifically, the UK: * 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. > 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 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. > 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. Thanks for your input on UK society. FWIW, despite the coordinated attacks we are doing just fine. If you live your life through social media it might look like we are one step from North Korea though. > FWIW, despite the coordinated attacks we are doing just fine. What a sad handwaive of the current state of affairs All sorts of issues. Personally I would put housing as the number one issue the country faces, and has done for years, but I can see arguments about inability to deliver projects, planning rules in general, a concentration of wealth into fewer hands What problems are you thinking about Is there something specific you would like to discuss? Preferably not a copy and paste "info" dump like the parent that is designed to be difficult to respond to unless someone is unemployed or an LLM. how about the ~12k arrests per year for social media posts? are you able to discuss a bit of that with your busy work schedule? ...as long as your views wouldn't be offensive to the average Guardian reader, you're OK. Russia Today is blocked in the EU. Yes I know you’ll tell me it’s for my own good. Spare me. But don't worry their press freedom index is higher according to themselves!. "We ranked ourselves and found we were number one!" I personally love the idea that they think people are so desperate to logon to facebook or tik tok that they will use some government vpn to access advertising laden slop. It's not a hoax, it's a straight up lie. >>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. Ignore the cherry picking and sensationalism around this. There are a few cases which are thrown out which were overreach. 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. > It's not a hoax, it's a straight up lie > 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 "What is illegal offline should be illegal online: Council agrees position on the Digital Services Act" 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. the UK is located in europe, this US plan is about pushing for more free speech in europe 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 Text-only, no Datadome Javascript, HTTPS optional: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1WCCeV... Simple HTML: What content bans does Europe have? /Confused European In Germany there are some examples for the suppression of speech.
For example popular examples are:
(1) getting your house raided for calling a politician a dick
(2) getting your house raided for calling a politician stupid
(3) most recent, just in this week, a retiree gets into trouble with the police for asking worried questions about migration (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. (1) Is also because it's literally vandalism.
(2) Also points out that there were posts of holocaust denial, which has been illegal in most of europe for literal decades.
(3) Is an article about an investigation into whether or not the cart was protected by freedom of expression or whether there would be grounds for further trial. Nobody is in trouble yet. 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. (1) Calling a politician a dick is vandalism? That's nonsense. (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: So, yes my links support my assertion. People will lie in your face about number two even though both the Amtsgericht Bamberg as well as the press have been saying that the arrest was made in a case of 188 StgB for months now. (1) - there's a photo of a graffiti in the article. But the translation of the article to English doesn't mention the insult was actually painted on a wall... (1) That is just a symbolic image. The person answered „Du bist so 1 Pimmel“ (english: „You're such a dick“) to a post of the politician on twitter. According to Wikipedia it was an answer to the following tweet https://twitter.com/AndyGrote/status/1399001436973899780 First article, second paragraph states that the search was ruled illegal. The one who got in trouble was ultimately the dick, not the one who called him that.... Getting your house raided is trouble/punishment... So no the one that called him a dick also got into trouble.. and obviously such events discourage people from expressing their opinions. > Also points out that there were posts of holocaust denial, which has been illegal in most of europe for literal decades. 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. Porn (now requires age verification), online libraries, movies, some news websites, sports (because of obscure copyright laws) and countless other things. I’m in the EU and haven’t encountered any of these, except the copyright restrictions - which is really a different matter. I'm in the UK and can't access https://imgur.com/ - an American service that now refuses to serve content to Britain because "On September 30, 2025, Imgur blocked users from the United Kingdom in response to a potential fine from the Information Commissioner's Office regarding its handling of children's personal data". I presume that means OSA. 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. Why would Imgur cave in and pay the fine when it's easier to block UK users? This is political battle for you to fight or sooner than later all you will be able to access is BBC state propaganda. Imgur self-blocking is nothing to do with propaganda, but it does make the internet worse for it with all many image now not showing. In any case, why should I go to bat for Imgur if they are mishandling the PII of children? The fact that so many images are centralised in a single (now unreliable) service is a prime example of the enshittification of the common web. Services should be hosting their own media files not relying on a third party. if you are in Germany, try opening ria.ru. It’s not like we are deprived of something worthy - it is Russian propaganda after all, but it tells enough about freedom of speech. With the German border maybe 10 minutes to the east of me, I can open that website just fine. Seems like an exclusively German problem, not a European one. 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. Unfortunately EU is now developing practice of extrajudicial sanctions on EU and national level, targeting both media and individuals expressing points of views alternative to position of Brussels or Berlin. Vance was surprisingly right back then in Munich. 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). These are very broad generalizations and accusations based on very few individual cases, each of which has its own specific context. And "expressing points of view alternative to position of Brussels and Berlin" sounds like typical propaganda nonsense. Vance couldn't be further from truth, and his remarks sound even more ridiculous in the light of what's happening on US soil. Do you have any specific argument about why that specific context matters and how it can justify violation of basic human rights? or it is just a dismissal with „broad generalization“? I'm in Czechia, next to Germany. Just opened Ria Novosti and Russia Today in two other tabs, nothing blocked here. I am. It just opens. But I can't read russian ^^ Looks like German firewall has more holes than Russian or Chinese one. Are you using VPN? It’s still blocked for me. Germany uses DNS blocks.. So you can circumvent the censorship by using a DNS provider different than the DNS provider of your ISP. There is no such thing like a German firewall. Works for me. Ooooh, if freedom.gov helped bypass copyrights on sports and streaming websites, that would be fantastic! True American freedom requires free NFL for all This is another "in Europe" thing. There's no "in Europe". Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, etc. will all have different rules. Spaniard here. No, we don't. Every country has different laws. The European Union share some laws but not these. LaLiga? Malversation. A major porn site's reaction to France requiring age verification was quite funny, they replaced their content by complaints instead of implementing the verification. Liberty isn't always a good thing, allowing teens to simply click to say they're adults doesn't cut it. List please. Surely there is a wiki page you can drop a link to, right? No? its wild to me how so much of online america has been radicalized into becoming nothing more that digital curtain twitchers Russia Today is banned, for one You mean the TV station lost broadcasting-rights, or you mean the website it actually banned? Cause the website is certainly accessible for me from my European country, although that does not rule out that it is banned in some European countries. The website rt.com is banned in the whole EU due to a decret by von der Leyen which bypassed parliament. It's trivial to bypass since it's "only" a DNS block but it's still censorship (no matter how you think about the content of RT). Same for Sputnik and the relevant TV channels. That’s a complete lie. I’m in Germany and can access rt.com perfectly fine No, it is not. I'm also german and rt.com is DNS blocked by the Telekom. It's a per country thing as the EU is not 1 country. In Italy for example RT website is blocked. Why do you accuse me of lying when you can literally google it and the decret that got passed? Not every ISP seems to participate (if you'd googled it you find news articles complaining that it isn't censor enoughed ironically: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/business/media/russia-rt-...). EDIT: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32... you're right, I apologize for the knee-jerk reaction. I completely forgot my router doesn't use my ISP DNS. Thanks for the calm response and links, even after my inflammatory comment. Unfortunately I cannot edit or delete it anymore It's ok, it's a heated topic. Kudos for apologizing :) No it isn't. t. EU citizen. It is, see the other comment. t. also EU citizen rt.com works fine in Finland at least. I don't think we have website bans in general aside something like CSAM and copyright reasons, and even the latter at least is rare. There seems to be a manufactured narrative from the US right how "Europe" is somehow doing large scale censorship. rt.com loads just fine for me. If you want to do research into/get brainwashed by Russian propaganda, nothing is stopping you here. I'm in Germany and rt.com does not resolve for me. If I use a VPN and access via, say Austria, it does work. That seems crazy to me I read news there occasionally as I like to view opposite sides. Go to BBC, RT, France24 ,Al-Jazeera type sites and see what each has as their focus stories. 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. I’m in fulll agreement with you True! Though I can't really say I mourn the loss, it is a Russian propaganda outlet dedicated to helping their expansion war. Is this the speech the USA is going to protect? It's still weird to me that the gringoes are helping the commies now, I guess I'm stuck in the old world order! I see your perspective. Can you see the risks? One is Russian media, just as Russia bans European media. Also the world's largest library is banned in Germany. The first one I'm ok with, the second one I'm not sure what you're saying? Google suggests the largest library in the world is the US Congress library, but I couldn't find any sources saying it's banned in Germany? (Also, it's a physical place in the US... What?) 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? Yes, I'm referring to the pirate site, which is the largest collection of books in the history of mankind. Of course it is a bit fringe to talk about censorship when it comes to piracy, but I would say that it is. While noting that the US also censors pirate websites. He probably means a famous pirating site, called library dot something. Piracy is illegal in most countries. Unless you mean the American Library of Congress, but that's an American decision, not a European one. This site claims to list them out: https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm I cannot vouch for its accuracy but I thought it was interesting. Can we filter for current censorship? Hate to brake it to you but the top category in that page, "censorship in the soviet union" does not apply anymore..... Spain 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. Can you filter the ones that aren't obviously harmless like laws banning Nazi salutes or agitating violence against people based on race? See, the problem is, "obviously harmless" varies by person: if you think it is obviously harmless to ban an entire political party, which ostensibly won a legitimate election, and certainly had a lot of popular support... well then, of course we should also ban whichever current political party you consider most evil, right? And then the next most evil political party, and so on, until people have the freedom that comes from knowing only Good, Proper, State-Sanctioned Political Parties exist! 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? Child mutilation is obviously harmless to ban of course. Though calling trans resources that is equally obviously disingenuous. 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. I think part of this is preempting concerns that the EU could ban or limit X / Twitter. 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. There's a hate speech / violence law in the UK that is getting some people arrested for saying things like "round up all people of race X, put them into a hotel, and burn the hotel down." People like Joe Rogan and his ilk are re-packaging those examples as "people being arrested for just sharing their opinion." I don't know what Joe Rogan says or who his ilk are, but this is a pretty extreme characterization of the situation that I don't think is accurate. For 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? Damn I keep forgetting the UK is still located in Europe. Ever since they left the union they feel like their own continent. Actually they feel like they might secretly be the fifty first state! > 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%. Isn't the conviction rate the number of people convicted divided by the number charged, not the number arrested? > 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 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. > > 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 > 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. The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech, online harassment and such. Thus lawmakers are acting to find laws which encapsulate these. 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. If you come from a common law context the whole idea might seem strange. > The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech 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. Agreed > The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech, online harassment and such. 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. I think if you come from a German context the concept of free speech is probably strange to you in general - because no one in living memory has ever had it. Not in Weimar, not in the Nazi period, not in East Germany and not in the Federal Republic. 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. That isn't really what we perceive (at least if educated). We see that Free Speech is not an absolute right, but is secondary to the most important right which for Germans is Human Dignity. It might be foreign to you because your constitution and history doesn't put the same value on it than our history taught us. I'm not American but I similarly don't care for the meek subservience to the government which characterizes European attitude on this. 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. It is often easy to assume this position if you are majority, white, employed, etc. 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? > It is often easy to assume this position if you are majority, white, employed, etc. 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? How could German history have taught you anything about human dignity? 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. A little less hyperbole would maybe help your arguments, but trying to argue that one of the most liberal democracies in the world is comparable to one of the most repressive regimes is hurting your argument (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/liberal-democracy-index). 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. This is a textbook case of German Schuldstolz - you feel having been militaristic and having mass human right abuses entitles you to lecture others. 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. > Schuldstolz 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. Oh, is that what y'all are on about? I'm not too worried then. About Europe. lol ok https://archive.ph/bdEqK Fun hypothetical question - will it be restricted to users in sanctioned locations (where it's most needed) because of, well, sanctions? Amusingly, there typically are various exceptions made for those. All technical and whatnot, but for example, Iran is heavily sanctioned, but has all sorts of exceptions for stuff like that precisely because of the impact it can have. This is good. But because societies are democratic, and most voters are now economically irrelevant, something has to be done about possibility to create discontent simply to shake things and weaken countries - because there is nothing this discontent can achieve (you can't turn objectively irrelevant people, relevant again). 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. Will I be able to use this to watch Democrats get interviewed by Stephen Colbert? Wild flex from the country that literally bought their own tiktok to control the propaganda. That's not very "America First" Why are my taxes paying for benefits for Europeans? They already killed USAID. The cost of running such a VPN is perhaps worth it when you consider the value of the intelligence it can collect. Non-monetary, indirect value (Goodwill, "soft power", leverage, future gains) is not, and has never been a consideration for President Trump [1]. All accounts must be settled immediately.
Funny how he had to take out a full-page ad, because he couldn't get this opinion actually published in any newspaper. [1] Donald Trump - Letter on Foreign Policy - September 2, 1987 I like that the US government finally speaks out about the rampant censorship from the EU regime but I wouldn't trust a state VPN. But they put the topic on the radar. Hope they can pressure enough to abolish the DSA. And USAID was just funding for propaganda outlets. > I like that the US government finally speaks out about the rampant censorship from the EU regime Are you a EU citizen? Yes. For Europeans? They don’t need anything like this, zero benefit. May benefit someone in North Korea, China or the United States. Or the UK This is a valid tool for intelligence and propaganda operations, for both USA and Israel (since they have access to whatever. 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. this administration is the least “america first” we’ve had … like ever! They will force their users to pay for the service in Trump's crypto and call it a win for freedom. So it'll have porn? I wonder if American citizens from states which requires age verification to access porn (25 US states today) will be fine with it or these states will start demanding ID to access freedom.gov. It would be delicious irony. Or, since it's apparently run by HHS, surely they will protect people looking for resources about abortion, hormones, etc. Real rich material coming from the government demanding it's biggest Internet companies unmask government critics. Pretty sure it will be like TrumpRX. Big PR blitz and when the details are exposed, a nothing burger. Right. Porn will probably be most of the traffic. The number of people in Europe who really want to access US neo-Nazi sites is probably not large. There is a lot more blocked than porn and neo-nazis. This will also allow access to sites that block access because of laws: Imgur is not accessible from the uk, nor are a lot of smaller US news sites. Ofcom are after 4 chan too. Oh no! Not 4chan. How ever will we Europeans keep up with the latest theories about which celebrities are actually AI influencers. Sounds like censorship is already becoming normalized in the EU and UK. Terrifying. First off, the UK isn't in the EU, and 2nd, not a single website is blocked for me here in the Netherlands, quite literally none. I can access Discord without an ID, I can watch all the porn I want, I can pirate anything I want from anywhere etc. 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... > First off, the UK isn't in the EU 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. > At the very least I know you have censored search results as that is an EU wide requirement of the right to be forgotten. 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. > 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, 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. > Criminals and politicians have used it to get removed from search results. The news article might be there, but no one will find it. 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. > 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. 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. If 4chan is unimportant, why is it being censored? Amazed to see so many government bootlickers on "hacker" news these days. 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." Previous propaganda channels from the government couldn't legally be broadcast within the US itself, so it's possible they'll try to pull the same thing here. Government mandated uncensored free porn access. I wonder if this will this also apply in US states requiring age verification to legally access such content? They will probably (first) have to bounce off freedom.ccTLD
for any ccTLD but .us. So going forward all countries will be providing citizens of other countries free access to the internet whilst censoring their own citizens? Better than the alternative where they don't, I suppose. Kind of like how for some political things you have to use yandex to search because US search companies suppress the results. This will be like a global circus of free speech: 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. Will this bypass the porn bans in conservative states Governments around the world could setup, in solidarity with the US, freedom.ca, freedom.eu etc. Hosting provided by Pornhub. Maybe Pornhub could even start registering the TLDs now where available. Or they could just make a donation to Tor and similar projects, and get way more mileage for their money. They do support Tor, actually[0]. Which makes this even more confusing. That funding was recently cut: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070658 The point is for them to track their users, which they can't do if their users are all using Tor. Does this mean we will be able to read RT from Europe again? Will Texans be able to access Pornhub with it? Heh. Weird, I'm in "Europe" and I can read the blatant Russian propaganda site all I want! Screams giant honey pot to me. And my taxes need to fund a VPN when there’s 50 cheap VPNs on the market? What happened to reducing spending? Can't wait for them to realize this allows sidestepping geoblocks on media and Hollywood to freak out. All the while the FCC was grilled yesterday for trying to shut down free speech. Make it make sense. Politicians want power over people in the country, but also internet technology is one of the only things the US is best at, and so we don't want the entire world dividing into separate internet silos. (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, so the US students will be able to read school banned books ?
Or US state banned research papers ?
Or US state banned historic books or photos ?
Or soft banned late night shows - so Colbert will continue ? Kimmel ?
Or domains of shadow book libraries banned by FBI/corporate requests ?
And it will circumvent geoblocking enforced mostly by US companies ? 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. When has the US ever banned students from reading certain books or research papers? What research papers can I not legally read? The domains of shadow libraries are banned for copyright infringement, you can still read the books legally by purchasing a copy. Here you can find short sample of those `dangerous` books: https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/ 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... Those book "bans" are just librarians' decision on what to use finite shelf space to stock. Students are 100% free to bring any of the "banned" books to school and read them. By this logic, when a librarian changes out an older set of YA novels with a newer set, those older novels are being "banned". So to answer your question: > 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. Sure, librarians wouldn't know how to do they work, if they didn't get a list on 'not approved' books from the school boards. /s 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... getting your paper in a research publication or your book in a library is a question about the allocation of public funds Is that going to accelerate copyright violations for AI training? https://cuiiliste.de/domains contains just a lot of piracy sites. It is like ultimate throwing stones in a glass house. Americans are dependent on other countries following IP and copyright protections and yet they will go great lengths to undermine it because it is short term beneficial for their companies. The quest for quarterly returns will be our downfall. As an EU citizen this is damn nice. The US might have some things to still work on/improve, but when it comes to freedom of speech it is still light years ahead of everybody else, and good for them. Last copy if from 2005 (2) according to the Web Archive. I like vote from 1998, if Internet Remain Tax Free (3). 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20050209024923/http://freedom.go... 2. https://web.archive.org/web/19981201060504/http://freedom.go... And before that, looks like the domain was used to give updates from the House Majority Leader (e.g. things like voting info, social security updates, legislative changes, tax info etc). Gov't Not Ready For Y2K! https://web.archive.org/web/19990423190847/http://www.freedo... The speak out about cloning gif is wild. Dolly the sheep anyone? As a retaliation the EU should set up a barge in international waters right outside the US east coast where Americans can get unpasteurized cheese, kinder surprise and cheap insulin The joke that I saw online was "Does it have Colbert on it?" Yes, but you'll have to spend equal time browsing Pravda^W Truth Social. Anyone check out the site? Wild that freedom right now is basically a gif of a cowboy riding a horse with a gun pointed out front. Just shooting our way to freedom seems reasonable 'in these times'. 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. > added that user activity on the site will not be tracked. Oh I'm sure Will it also bypass content bans in the US? Or should Europe create its own freedom.eu for that? 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. >"and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked" 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) So I will finally be able to access those US news websites that block EU access because of the cookie banner? > I will finally be able to access those US news websites that block EU access because of the cookie banner? They block the EU not because of cookie banners, but because they don't understand GDPR.
Or vpn's. It is undemocratic that European countries insist on making laws that Americans don't like. I see, there is a danger of US propaganda not getting through, so they are trying a new way. I'm looking forward to going there to find out what's happening in Palestine. at one point, HN was anti-censorship. this discussion shows how ideologically aligned this concept has become. 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? "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It" This project is hardly some emergent property of the Internet or even Internet culture. The existence of VPNs and proxies in general is. They are easy to set up and hard to block. But this project, if it launches, will be a single well-known target which, at a technical level, countries could easily block access to. Whether blocking actually occurs will depend on the whims of geopolitics, but it’s not exactly a robust situation. It's kind of ironic given how much USA is censoring content based on their interest. > It's kind of ironic given how much USA is censoring content based on their interest. What’s a good example? See yesterday’s FCC hearing before congress. It’s hypocritical for the US to be doing the exact opposite of what they’re doing at home. TikTok. > TikTok. 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. Which content is being censored? Cool, maybe I'll be able to access www.census.gov from outside the US now At least the starting page is reachable from Germany without a VPN. Anyone know why this would be appearing on the front page but completely absent from https://news.ycombinator.com/active This reminds me of "Radio Free Europe" and "Radio Liberty", which were basically bankrolled (and likely largely influenced) by the CIA. They wanted to distribute all kinds of programming into USSR that was banned there, same with Solzhenitsyn's books etc. Eventually the USSR fell apart. 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. So can this be used to loop back to US age restricted content? Excellent. I look forward to other service providers responding by cutting traffic from the US. If the goal is to balkanize the internet, this administration has hit upon an excellent step. Personally I think the EU goes too far when I'm not even allowed to access books on the internet where the author died more than 100 years ago. So I like it xD The Americans are just as bad when it comes to intellectual property (70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication). By American copyright standards, you can read The Silmarillion for free around 2072. 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. I can read that for free, and even hang on to it for a couple of weeks, as soon as the library opens today. 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 can access almost every book and every paper that exist in seconds over the internet... I also got a job in science and I think it's partly because I read a lot of papers (illegaly) since years. Which book is that? Gutenberg.org was DNS blocked for a very long time. Now it's not DNS blocked anymore but I think it will detect your IP and restrict access for some books if you are in the EU. Of course very easy to circumvent if you know s.th. about tech. What is the difference between those cases and Steamboat Willie? Besides the obvious that those happened in different countries. what americans think happens in the EU: which books? Sorry I'm not allowed to tell you. Do they plan online portal for content banned in the U.S.? Can I use freedom.gov to bypass age verification though? :) Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless. Sad that the United States are pushing so hard to encourage the propagation of propaganda & lies. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless. Sad that people can’t see past their ideological bubbles. Tech spaces used to be dominated by people who saw free speech as an imperative. Now their own political biases have them supporting censorship. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr... What limits? You can do pretty much what you want but make sure you can defend yourself in the court. I feel there is a bit of a disconnect in terms where people get the news where in US you kind of expect biggest news providers to be biassed, eg Fox, hence reliance on social media. In Europe gov media is quite strong and objective, and the idea that it restricts something is odd. A great example is the banning of RT, they lost licenses IMO in multiple countries, but the agency was spreading a lot of lies. IMO what we all want is objective news reporting. Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media. In Italy, people have faced criminal charges for simply criticizing the prime minister. When the government does not allow its population to freely speak against it, it's just waiting to be abused by one bad leader. > Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media. 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) > has largely been unchanged for 150 years. I really don't understand the recent outrage over these and other laws. We have been fine 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. > The last 150 years of Germany have...ahem...not been what I would call "fine." 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. almost all communication was oral 20 years ago, now-- especially since covid -- it's almost all, even casual comments, through text messages which can easily be used in evidence That's a good point. Though I wouldn't say text as a medium is the critical factor, it's that more communication is taking place in the open (over social media) and being recorded for everyone to see. 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. > Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media. 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. Free speech in America is specifically about protecting you against the government. Your neighbor is still not allowed to defame you. >Your neighbor is still not allowed to defame you. 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. There is a special law for politicians. > A great example is the banning of RT, they lost licenses IMO in multiple countries, but the agency was spreading a lot of lies. IMO what we all want is objective news reporting. You shouldn't need a "license" to publish a website. They had TV licenses. Also they are the state media arm of a country that is in a proxy war with the EU and NATO. I don't think that situation would even pass muster in the US. I have heard of RT lying but I have never actually seen examples of specific lies. Is there any list out there where they list any specific ones? If they do it a lot, it should be quite easy, no? This is a propaganda website funded by the EU. Here's a source with some: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html > 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. Thousands of people in the UK have been arrested for social media posts, some for speech recognized as protected by international organizations. 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. > 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. 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... Huh? You're saying the German Chancellor does not represent the German government? [1] Large swathes of the CDU support it as well. 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... > Huh? You're saying the German Chancellor does not represent the German government? 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"? > the Digital Services Act […] The UK in particular 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... Original OP clearly said "Europe", not the EU. As for the DSA censorship, I don't think you've read it. https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/foreign-cen... > Original OP clearly said "Europe", not the EU. 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.) It cites specific sections of the DSA. Your previous claim was that DSA did not have hate speech provisions. Are you claiming DSA Article 22 does not exist, for example? > It cites specific sections of the DSA. 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. > some for speech recognized as protected by international organizations. 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. Absolutely. There are several examples that are not calls for violence or unambiguous harassment that were documented by The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/15/hundreds-charged... The only semi-concrete example that article gives: > 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... Ten seconds of searching: 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. You didn't search very hard. 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”." Compared to the USA, we have incredible privacy in the EU. It's so sad US elites are so desperate for mindshare that they have to resort to dumping (mis)information on everyone else, everywhere. > Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to […] privacy Uh what? :-) The EU is pushing to intercept and scan all private chat messages and all emails to "protect" the children and give all this information to Europol to keep in perpetuity so they can build a profile on you but sure everything is peachy. 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. It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. We know, we had the Nazis. Seems the US still has to learn a lesson or two, considering the current political situation. Hope it will not be as bad > It's smart to ban hate speech 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. In general the justice system don't care much what your idea of the law is. 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. Do you really not understand the sort of slippery slope that presents? My point is that this is the norm, not the exception in legal systems. It's good for laws to be clear cut and unambiguous, but in practice the world is not, and laws gets interpreted as courts use them. Yes — a very clear and unambiguous “speech is allowed” is the correct solution. If your feelings got hurt, you can cry to your mommy. The world does not owe anybody comfort. Is calling people nazis hate speech? A rose by any other name… That didn't answer my question. But it did. Calling something what it is doesn’t matter one way or another. It is still what it is. No it didn't. Okay. It depends. One prominent figure of the right-wing populist party AfD in Germany has been called a Nazi. When he sued the originator the court decided that, considering the circumstances, was not an insult in the sense of the law. That was argued to be a satirical skit rather than sincere statement I think. Which is quite an outlier but would be still probably quite interesting to compare with other cases. 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? As mentioned before - it depends on the circumstances. If you call someone wearing a full Nazi outfit a Nazi, it probably will not be seen as hate speech/insult. If you call someone showing nothing in that regard a Nazi out of the blue, it could. But that would be handled as personal insult, then. For hate speech it needs to affect more than one person, I believe. I see. So are there any situations where it could be considered verboten-speech? > It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. 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. >We know, we had the Nazis. 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. I think tourer was arguing that the Nazis were a template for how to use speech restrictions to maintain power. Banning Nazi and ISIS propaganda doesn't and hasn't negativity affected anyone but Nazis and Jihadists. It's just plain good policy. 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. "There is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys." - RFK Jr. This argument has always struck me as ridiculous. You think if only the Weimar Republic had had Hate Speech laws everything would have been fine? Right, I guess the people there just magically all woke up one day hating the jews and voting in Hitler. Crazy how that happens. Why do political factions even spend money on campaigning? Those silly geese. Wait, your operating theory on why the NSDAP became popular is because they... tricked everyone into hating jews? 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. > If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists. 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. people are sheep mate... in 2026 with the social media at politicians disposal you can convince most people of just about anything you want. current politics in the US is basically cultism. if trump says that Russians are now great guys, 99% of people who grew up during the cold war that are "maga" now are going "oh, what a turnaround, love them Russians now." 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... Well they kinda did,long before the Nazis and der Sturmer put a torch on it. Without net neutrality it's kinda dead on arrival. I don't think that Europe has a censorship problem, but a US government funded VPN sounds great! I suppose it works for banned websites and pornsites banned in US some states right?
Other wise it would be pretty hypocritical. All content will likely be pre-approved by Larry Ellison and his other billionaire friends, so how much freedom will this really have? Perhaps Europe can offer its own freedom VPN, then we can finally read whatever we want by switching back and forth. Will be Pre-approved by Israel* Do they plan to allow residents of various US states to access sites that are now required to have documented ID evidence? When can we get our kinder egg portal? Finally, a resource for oppressed people in backward countries to find information about abortion. To best destroy the idea of an objective truth, you need to control it first. This is so very strange. I don't trust the motivations behind this. Can it be used to help people in the Bible Belt watch porn? I think the states themselves don't block porn, but require sites to verify users' ages, and sites would rather block access in those states than comply. (although not sure how they do that from a technical standpoint, based on IP geolocation, perhaps?) I would have loved to be in the meeting where they were wondering how to replace the highly costly and complex influence tool that was USAID, and then someone said: - Why don't we just make a website? - Yes let's just do that. What even is this? It looks to technically be Next JS with a single canvas element. But what does in protend...? visuals with the only text on screen being... --- "Freedom is Coming" Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression.
Get ready. What it is is a teaser for what will undoubtedly be a giant load of far-right propaganda. Turns out it's to "uncensor" content blocked in other countries, which we know will be a process free of bias /s They also gutted the prior org that helped people do this in other countries on the ground Won't they simply blacklist freedom.gov? The irony is big in this one. Ah yes the 'freedom' USA is giving other people 'freedom'. 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 Ah yes, freedom of speech for the Europeans! And when we travel to US, they need to check our social media to see if our opinions align with the US government. Orwellian quotes are bandied about so much these days… does anything more need to be said? But will they put the complete Epstein files on there? The EU will probably build its own version of the Great Firewall of China. "Portal team includes former DOGE member Coristine" "...user activity on the site will not be tracked." Ok, stopped reading right there. So instead of using a VPN that might have weird relationships with spy agencies, you just use one run by the US government? Clever idea to spy on the stupidest people in the world I guess. 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. Maybe they can redirect from stupid.gov Fantastic! Now EU just needs to setup freedomgov.eu that bounces off freedom.gov so americans also can browse whatever with no restrictions. What restrictions do Americans have now that would make that useful? Facts on .gov websites. Increasingly widespread age restriction laws? Like the ones we have in the UK? I can't even look at the craft beer Sub-Reddit anymore without handing over my ID. Link to the US government banning free speech on the internet. You have no credibility when the UK, Spain, Germany and France have been railing against free speech and calling it "bullshit" in the last month. It was just a bit of fun, pointing out a ridiculousness of the situation.
But for the sake of argument, age verification? lcelist? Annas? Not showing your state that you look at a democrat website?
Or do you mean the free speech, non-censor freedom.gov will "filter" these sites? What's the point of the EU hosting an empty page? While tons freedoms and content is legal in the USA that isn't in the EU I don't know of any opposites. Do you have any examples? This is just weird. I mean… Spending tax dollars so that foreigners can watch porn without age verification sounds like a bad use of budget. How long until Europe says, "fuck your copyright claims then?" Just tell everyone who wants to downloads warez to use the US .gov VPN and refuse to resolve the IP addresses when they complain. This is also going to debut in Saudi Arabia, right? ...Right? In the end, facts are useless. You belief what you think your social bubble, and in particular, the group you think you belong to, is thinking. And many people do not speak up. Mostly those with strong (often selfish) interests speak up, and often in a manipulative way. Having narcissist or sociopaths as leader can indeed be a bad thing. Some sort of media control is good, to protect core values, to protect the law against mass manipulation. Another dumb idea by our braindead administration. 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! Wow, it's actually real: Thanks - we'll put that link in the toptext. And the site even has a French translation. I guess it will allow to access information unless it is about abortion or it is negative about DJT. 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). After the Trump checks and the Trump jabs ....the Trump porn? I'd rather not... The world will be exposed to hardcore pornography, child endangerment, AI CSAM, and militant algorithms by force, if needed! 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. When U.S. Govt sponsors Tor, which does expose exactly what your describe, the reaction is usually positive. Anything but help your citizens I guess. Go capitalism This comes across not as some noble to support free speech and more an attempt to exempt US firms like Grok, Meta, etc. from laws banning AI generated child porn and deliberately addicting social media. Sorry, but whatever you think about the laws that lead to these blockages, how else are european governments supposed to take that than a direct attack on their executive powers by a foreign government? 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 In enlightened, civilized countries speech is protected regardless of whether anyone subjectively considers it to be "valuable". rofl, go ahead try spreading lies about someone in the US. IIUC, the slander laws are just as draconian over there. the difference is in whether you can spread the same lies about someone with or without deep pockets without retribution. Great! I sure hope it means Americans will stop censoring pro-Palestinian and pro-workers movements! Why? Seriously, why do we care so much about this? 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. > 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. Historically the US did care a lot, in a way it reminds me of the Crusade for Freedom [1] and Radio Free Europe [2]. 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... These things have been going on forever. Since WWII and until right now, there has been radio stations broadcasting into enemy territory, to bypass censorship. Ironically, this effectively is a pro-Trump comment because it's the Trump administration that defunded US propaganda outlets. No, the Trump administration is an enormous supporter of propaganda outlets, just not the ones that already existed. They don't care about maintaining the rules based world order. Their propaganda is much more inward-focused. You're probably right, I was speaking as someone from outside the States, and hence more familiar with the outside-focused US outlets. Good. I’m bypassing the UK altogether since they can throw you in jail for thought crimes. https://www.newsweek.com/policing-thought-crime-should-have-...
I think you're confusing "works" and "works perfectly." >If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any [bad stuff]
{
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.htm
Translated to english: 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
(3) He is in trouble in terms that there is an police investigation against him and no it is not okay to have police investigations just because a person expressed his worries about migration. 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.
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: 35
