| ▲ | US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere(reuters.com) |
| 265 points by c420 a day ago | 335 comments |
| https://freedom.gov |
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| ▲ | schoen 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | Waterluvian 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through. | | |
| ▲ | Mikhail_Edoshin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And lies. | | | |
| ▲ | nomilk 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | NuclearPM 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Access to information is dangerous when the information is controlled propaganda. | | |
| ▲ | simianparrot 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes Europe is in a really bad spot propaganda-wise. See Germany’s latest crusade against online «hate speech» — ie. unapproved political views. | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java an hour ago | parent [-] | | That does not compute. | | |
| ▲ | raincole an hour ago | parent [-] | | It computes quite well. > It was a 2021 case involving Andy Grote, a local politician, that captured the country's attention. Grote complained about a tweet that called him a "pimmel," a German word for the male anatomy. His complaint triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government. A police raid for calling a politician a dick. Let it sink. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros... | | |
| ▲ | abraae 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | A little bit like a country's leader calling for the death penalty for a decorated pilot and astronaut who reminded service members of their duty to reject unlawful orders. |
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| ▲ | ceteia 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Would educating people instead and giving them more options for information, not be better than banning access to information? | | |
| ▲ | synecdoche 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | That depends on what "education" entails. If it's one source only chances of it being propaganda is high. | |
| ▲ | glwiththat 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | schiffern 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any [bad stuff]
I think you're confusing "works" and "works perfectly."Education works. It doesn't work perfectly. | | |
| ▲ | pwndByDeath an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | ceteia an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | ffsm8 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | shevy-java an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People need to decide on their own, so I am against censorship. | |
| ▲ | ceteia 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why not then encourage people to seek information from a wide variety of sources? Edit, replying to ffsm8: You mentioned a source could be problematic, but instead of shutting that source down, it might make more sense to encourage people to seek out a wide variety of sources. | | |
| ▲ | ffsm8 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your phrasing implies someone spook out against that, but nobody did? |
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| ▲ | whattheheckheck 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | Aloisius 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Didn't Doge gut the USAGM? | | | |
| ▲ | bzhxb45 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Its also proven ineffective. But since its easy the chimp troupe keeps doing it out of habitus. History will teach it has no basis in information theory and the info processing constraints of a 3 inch chimp brain. But carry on. | |
| ▲ | reactordev 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | n2d4 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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... | | |
| ▲ | RajT88 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | reactordev 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. https://youtu.be/JR6YyYdF8ho That was 14 years ago… We have MUCH more capabilities today. | | |
| ▲ | petcat 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The datacenter is in Utah, not Virginia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center | | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | mc32 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | reactordev 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | nozzlegear 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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." | |
| ▲ | IAmGraydon 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Let’s be serious for a minute here. If you’re claiming to have secret clearance on an Internet forum, you don’t. | | |
| ▲ | mwilliaams 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | You may be surprised how cavalier some people are about their clearance. | | |
| ▲ | dmoy 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Secret is also like... really common to have. 5 million people or whatever. |
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| ▲ | cookiengineer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | Henchman21 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s not a single data center, it’s about 200 of them. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Mtinie 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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... | |
| ▲ | reactordev 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | jen20 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | coliveira 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | suhputt 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | metadat 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | rtkwe 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | NGRhodes 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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... |
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| ▲ | rtkwe 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | wasabi991011 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | recursive 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA. | | |
| ▲ | dboreham 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "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. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | coliveira 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | Henchman21 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | PenguinCoder 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | They will never believe you until you show them and that requires a clearance. | | |
| ▲ | dmoy 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | reactordev 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Correct but local governments using Palantir will need to provide it to them somehow. | | |
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| ▲ | Den_VR 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So they… drive the data around NOVA? | | |
| ▲ | shimman 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, but if you want to collaborate with the federal government it makes it more convenient to be located where the federal government resides. | |
| ▲ | reactordev 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, but you can visit a “clean room” and look at the data at any number of sites. |
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| ▲ | rootusrootus 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | syspec an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | beej71 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Meanwhile, you can't even go on pornhub in certain states in the US. Hilarious to think that freedom.gov might be the workaround. |
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| ▲ | nomilk 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | gpt5 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | According to Reuters, it will essentially be a free VPN. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-... | | |
| ▲ | touristtam 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So you're not paying for it? In corporate america how is that going to be moneytized? | | |
| ▲ | EagnaIonat 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | VPNs are in no way secure. I'm sure they will be taking all your data and using it. | |
| ▲ | trimethylpurine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | HomeLabCrap 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Let the NSA deal with that… |
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| ▲ | techterrier 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | can we use it for, erm, other 'freedoms' ? | |
| ▲ | isodev 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Free Trump VPN to go with one's Trump Phone? |
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| ▲ | andrewflnr 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It probably won't work. At least, it won't do anything interesting. It exists mostly to make Trump look anti-woke, and maybe to subvert other countries' policy a little bit. This is not an administration that does technological innovation. Trump's "social media site" started as just rebranded Mastodon. | | |
| ▲ | andrewflnr 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I didn't expect "Trump does yet another symbolic, counterproductive stunt" to be the political hot take that ticked off the hive. |
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| ▲ | oaiey 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | randomNumber7 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | paganel a minute ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | bastawhiz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As someone who lives in North Carolina and can't even open most mainstream porn sites, I too am waiting for the freedom |
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| ▲ | balls187 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Porn Sites? How about an interview with a politician on a late-nite network television show. |
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| ▲ | crossroadsguy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | IAmGraydon 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | rdudek 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | jadenPete 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | jjmarr 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tor_Project | |
| ▲ | nickorlow 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | crossroadsguy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | At this point US has close to zero (if not negative) "soft" power. | | |
| ▲ | rtkwe 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | crossroadsguy 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | riffraff 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | micw 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Would be a good reason for the EU to start a 200% tariff for US software and cloud services then. | |
| ▲ | happymellon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | coliveira 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is what democrats and Hollywood are for. Some people still believe in them. |
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| ▲ | copperx 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Which soft power are you talking about? | | |
| ▲ | petcat 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | XorNot an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | kulahan 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | pornel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | kataklasm an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | polski-g 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Anyone who wants to trade in USD. Protection of maritime trade routes. Nuclear shield. Netflix, YouTube, Nvidia, OpenAI, Amazon. | | |
| ▲ | XorNot an hour ago | parent [-] | | What sort of soft power do you imagine Netflix represents? It exists but it's not leverage. |
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| ▲ | ohyoutravel 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, maybe USAID could have helped here. Or a robust State Dept. | | |
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| ▲ | carlosjobim 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | warkdarrior 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | sp527 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Freedom of speech. I didn't expect to have to spell it out. | | |
| ▲ | sp527 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | scythe 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | zmgsabst 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | calmworm 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is grade-school level mind games. Is it really that easy? | | |
| ▲ | thomasingalls an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not convinced that this whole discussion section isn't astroturf... some real out there opinions popping up in here | |
| ▲ | globular-toast an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | mesk 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | tills13 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A state sponsored vpn is probably not (only) gonna do what you think it's doing. |
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| ▲ | ivan_gammel 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If something looks like MITM, chances are it is MITM. |
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| ▲ | 1970-01-01 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | shakna 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wonder of China can pay Trump with a golden limosuine to get backdoor access to it. |
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| ▲ | tracker1 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | MiiMe19 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | its like we have different smaller governments that can pass their own laws inside of one larger government or something | | |
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| ▲ | alistairSH 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Won't those other nations just ban freedom.gov? |
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| ▲ | Aloisius 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | tjohns 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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.) | | |
| ▲ | Aloisius 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I thought airlines still had to file passenger manifests with CBP separately, no? | | |
| ▲ | tjohns 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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). |
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| ▲ | crossroadsguy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 :) |
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| ▲ | IAmGraydon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | crest 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They wouldn't dare ban a .gov domain and we will hide all of behind Cloudflare! /s |
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| ▲ | 1vuio0pswjnm7 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Text-only, no Datadome Javascript, HTTPS optional: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1WCCeV... Simple HTML: {
x=AA1WCCeV
ipv4=23.11.201.94
echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
(printf '%s\r\n%s\r\n\r\n' \
"GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/$x HTTP/1.0" \
'Host: assets.msn.com') \
|nc -vvn $ipv4 80 |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134'
} > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
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| ▲ | mlh496 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | carlm42 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | sublimefire 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | gpt5 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | codethief 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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) | | |
| ▲ | pembrook 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | codethief 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | ljlolel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | tchalla 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | gpt5 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Free speech in America is specifically about protecting you against the government. Your neighbor is still not allowed to defame you. |
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| ▲ | drnick1 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | 0xy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | codethief 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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... | | |
| ▲ | 0xy 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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... | | |
| ▲ | codethief 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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"? | |
| ▲ | codethief 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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... |
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| ▲ | seattle_spring 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | 0xy 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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... | | |
| ▲ | seattle_spring 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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... |
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| ▲ | api 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | 0xy 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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”." |
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| ▲ | PolygonSheep 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | Aloisius 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | https://euvsdisinfo.eu/disinformation-cases/?disinfo_keyword... | |
| ▲ | wasabi991011 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | codethief 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to […] privacy Uh what? :-) | |
| ▲ | touwer 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | dmitrygr 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | Epa095 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | stinkbeetle 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is calling people nazis hate speech? | | | |
| ▲ | fungi 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | bitcurious 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >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. | | |
| ▲ | joelwilliamson 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think tourer was arguing that the Nazis were a template for how to use speech restrictions to maintain power. |
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| ▲ | LAC-Tech 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | perching_aix 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | LAC-Tech 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | bdangubic 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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... |
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| ▲ | Hikikomori 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well they kinda did,long before the Nazis and der Sturmer put a torch on it. |
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| ▲ | theandrewbailey 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "There is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys." - RFK Jr. |
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| ▲ | NewJazz 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's so sad US elites are so desperate for mindshare that they have to resort to dumping (mis)information on everyone else, everywhere. |
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| ▲ | amarant 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What content bans does Europe have? /Confused European |
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| ▲ | drnick1 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Porn (now requires age verification), online libraries, movies, some news websites, sports (because of obscure copyright laws) and countless other things. | | |
| ▲ | viraptor 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | This is another "in Europe" thing. There's no "in Europe". Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, etc. will all have different rules. | |
| ▲ | josefrichter an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’m in the EU and haven’t encountered any of these, except the copyright restrictions - which is really a different matter. | | |
| ▲ | ivan_gammel 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | warkdarrior 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ooooh, if freedom.gov helped bypass copyrights on sports and streaming websites, that would be fantastic! | |
| ▲ | jusssi an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | List please. Surely there is a wiki page you can drop a link to, right? |
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| ▲ | cal_dent 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | its wild to me how so much of online america has been radicalized into becoming nothing more that digital curtain twitchers | |
| ▲ | ljlolel 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Russia Today is banned, for one | | |
| ▲ | Epa095 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | Gustomaximus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | amarant 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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! |
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| ▲ | kettlecorn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One is Russian media, just as Russia bans European media. Also the world's largest library is banned in Germany. | | |
| ▲ | amarant 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | Epa095 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | He probably means a famous pirating site, called library dot something. |
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| ▲ | pembrook 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Censorship_in_Europe | | |
| ▲ | amarant 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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..... | | |
| ▲ | pembrook 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | amarant 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Can you filter the ones that aren't obviously harmless like laws banning Nazi salutes or agitating violence against people based on race? | | |
| ▲ | handoflixue 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | seattle_spring 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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." | | |
| ▲ | amarant 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh, is that what y'all are on about? I'm not too worried then. About Europe. | |
| ▲ | stinkbeetle 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | amarant 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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! | |
| ▲ | seattle_spring 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | stinkbeetle 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > > 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. | | |
| ▲ | oezi 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | LAC-Tech 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | deaux 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | stinkbeetle 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | reisse 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fun hypothetical question - will it be restricted to users in sanctioned locations (where it's most needed) because of, well, sanctions? |
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| ▲ | iugtmkbdfil834 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | Ancalagon 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Will this bypass the porn bans in conservative states |
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| ▲ | stubish 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | DeathArrow 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The EU will probably build its own version of the Great Firewall of China. |
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| ▲ | entropyneur 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | riffraff an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Can't wait for them to realize this allows sidestepping geoblocks on media and Hollywood to freak out. |
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| ▲ | walthamstow 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So it'll have porn? |
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| ▲ | general1465 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | plorg 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ojbyrne 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Pretty sure it will be like TrumpRX. Big PR blitz and when the details are exposed, a nothing burger. |
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| ▲ | Animats 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | graemep 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | mvc 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh no! Not 4chan. How ever will we Europeans keep up with the latest theories about which celebrities are actually AI influencers. | | |
| ▲ | petcat 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Sounds like censorship is already becoming normalized in the EU and UK. Terrifying. | |
| ▲ | pembrook 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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." |
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| ▲ | crest 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | kojacklives 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | They will probably (first) have to bounce off freedom.ccTLD
for any ccTLD but .us. |
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| ▲ | mcs5280 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| All content will likely be pre-approved by Larry Ellison and his other billionaire friends, so how much freedom will this really have? |
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| ▲ | ReflectedImage 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So going forward all countries will be providing citizens of other countries free access to the internet whilst censoring their own citizens? |
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| ▲ | freakynit 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | LAC-Tech 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | tantalor 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's not very "America First" Why are my taxes paying for benefits for Europeans? They already killed USAID. |
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| ▲ | speedgoose 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The cost of running such a VPN is perhaps worth it when you consider the value of the intelligence it can collect. | |
| ▲ | josefrichter an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | For Europeans? They don’t need anything like this, zero benefit. May benefit someone in North Korea, China or the United States. | |
| ▲ | 1970-01-01 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They will force their users to pay for the service in Trump's crypto and call it a win for freedom. | |
| ▲ | bdangubic 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | this administration is the least “america first” we’ve had … like ever! |
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| ▲ | c420 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Anyone know why this would be appearing on the front page but completely absent from https://news.ycombinator.com/active |
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| ▲ | nimbius 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wild flex from the country that literally bought their own tiktok to control the propaganda. |
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| ▲ | reconnecting 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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... |
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| ▲ | nomilk 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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). | | |
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| ▲ | m000 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Does this mean we will be able to read RT from Europe again? |
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| ▲ | _HMCB_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| All the while the FCC was grilled yesterday for trying to shut down free speech. Make it make sense. |
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| ▲ | Buttons840 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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.) |
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| ▲ | calmworm 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Orwellian quotes are bandied about so much these days… does anything more need to be said? |
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| ▲ | 1970-01-01 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/ |
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| ▲ | comex 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | astro1138 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is that going to accelerate copyright violations for AI training? https://cuiiliste.de/domains contains just a lot of piracy sites. |
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| ▲ | general1465 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | rkagerer a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Or they could just make a donation to Tor and similar projects, and get way more mileage for their money. |
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| ▲ | eviks 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do they plan online portal for content banned in the U.S.? |
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| ▲ | Nnnes 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Cool, maybe I'll be able to access www.census.gov from outside the US now |
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| ▲ | crest 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | At least the starting page is reachable from Germany without a VPN. |
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| ▲ | tachyons 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's kind of ironic given how much USA is censoring content based on their interest. |
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| ▲ | andsoitis 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It's kind of ironic given how much USA is censoring content based on their interest. What’s a good example? | | |
| ▲ | _HMCB_ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | mjmsmith 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | TikTok. | | |
| ▲ | andsoitis 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | petcat 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which content is being censored? |
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| ▲ | panny 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Can I use freedom.gov to bypass age verification though? :) |
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| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do they plan to allow residents of various US states to access sites that are now required to have documented ID evidence? |
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| ▲ | dfee 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | api 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | touwer 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Maybe they can redirect from stupid.gov |
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| ▲ | astahlx an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | FpUser 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >"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) |
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| ▲ | Hamuko 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The joke that I saw online was "Does it have Colbert on it?" |
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| ▲ | cyberax 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but you'll have to spend equal time browsing Pravda^W Truth Social. |
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| ▲ | mjmsmith 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Finally, a resource for oppressed people in backward countries to find information about abortion. |
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| ▲ | freitasm 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Portal team includes former DOGE member Coristine" "...user activity on the site will not be tracked." Ok, stopped reading right there. |
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| ▲ | shadowgovt 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | diego_moita 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Can it be used to help people in the Bible Belt watch porn? |
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| ▲ | nomilk 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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?) |
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| ▲ | sunshine-o 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | 13415 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The irony is big in this one. |
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| ▲ | pjc50 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But will they put the complete Epstein files on there? |
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| ▲ | lbrito 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is also going to debut in Saudi Arabia, right? ...Right? |
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| ▲ | EGreg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | csrse 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fantastic! Now EU just needs to setup freedomgov.eu that bounces off freedom.gov so americans also can browse whatever with no restrictions. |
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| ▲ | Aloisius 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What restrictions do Americans have now that would make that useful? | | |
| ▲ | Hikikomori 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Facts on .gov websites. | |
| ▲ | kg 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Increasingly widespread age restriction laws? | | |
| ▲ | GlacierFox 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | tick_tock_tick 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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? | |
| ▲ | 0xy 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | csrse 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | doggojenkins 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| hold up, you're telling me the US gov't who censored the hunter biden laptop and Ashley Biden diary are going to make sure citizens of other countries get unfiltered news? |
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| ▲ | verdverm 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | apothegm 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | What it is is a teaser for what will undoubtedly be a giant load of far-right propaganda. | | |
| ▲ | verdverm 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | JumpinJack_Cash 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| After the Trump checks and the Trump jabs ....the Trump porn? I'd rather not... |
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| ▲ | 2OEH8eoCRo0 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How long until Europe says, "fuck your copyright claims then?" |
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| ▲ | crest 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just tell everyone who wants to downloads warez to use the US .gov VPN and refuse to resolve the IP addresses when they complain. |
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| ▲ | doggojenkins 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The same gov't who censored and lied about the 1)Hunter Biden laptop story and 2) Ashley Biden diary (with inappropriate showers between Joe Biden and Ashley) is going to give people the world "unfiltered news"? Am I reading that correctly? |
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| ▲ | dangus 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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! |
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| ▲ | sequence7 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wow, it's actually real: https://freedom.gov/ |
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| ▲ | sega_sai 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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). |
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| ▲ | xvxvx a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | reisse 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | When U.S. Govt sponsors Tor, which does expose exactly what your describe, the reaction is usually positive. |
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| ▲ | derelicta 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Great! I sure hope it means Americans will stop censoring pro-Palestinian and pro-workers movements! |
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| ▲ | black_puppydog 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | nradov 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | In enlightened, civilized countries speech is protected regardless of whether anyone subjectively considers it to be "valuable". | | |
| ▲ | black_puppydog 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | sgnelson a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | ericmay 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | mrighele 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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... | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | throw-the-towel 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ironically, this effectively is a pro-Trump comment because it's the Trump administration that defunded US propaganda outlets. | | |
| ▲ | idiotsecant 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | throw-the-towel 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're probably right, I was speaking as someone from outside the States, and hence more familiar with the outside-focused US outlets. |
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