Free Republic

Sir Sadiq Khan has accused social media giants of tarnishing London’s reputation by allowing a “dark blizzard of disinformation” to spread on their platforms. The Mayor of London has claimed that sites such as X, Facebook and Instagram are fuelling lies about the capital online, specifically when it comes to crime and racial segregation. Such disinformation is damaging the capital’s standing as “one of the most successful multicultural societies on Earth”, he told the Cambridge Disinformation Summit on Thursday. “Disinformation has become an industry: an ‘outrage economy’ organised around a ‘division dividend’ which allows people to profit from poison,” he...

False claims about the safety of mifepristone, the abortion pill used in roughly two-thirds of U.S. abortions, are driving legislative and investigative action in Congress, even as major medical organizations and decades of clinical evidence support the drug’s safety. The Monitor also examines how competing interpretations of what censorship and free speech mean for policy and law are contributing to recent developments, including a Supreme Court ruling, a federal lawsuit settlement, and new legal challenges with implications for how health misinformation is managed, moderated, and allowed to spread.

Lower courts have ruled school can ban wearing such apparel as ‘can reasonably be interpreted as profane’ The case of two Michigan middle-school brothers who were told to remove their hoodies emblazoned with the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The siblings are represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression which says the boys’ school violated their First Amendment rights. The phrase was popularized during a 2021 NASCAR event when a crowd was shouting “F*** Joe Biden!” but the NBC interviewer told racer Brandon Brown they were yelling “Let’s go Brandon!” A judge...

Full title: Finnish Politician, Pastor’s Wife Accused of ‘Incitement of Hatred’ Over Booklet ‘Male and Female He Created Them’ HELSINKI — A lawmaker and pastor’s wife in Finland who was already being probed by police over a social media post in which she questioned the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland’s partnership with a Helsinki Pride event is now also facing a preliminary “incitement” investigation over a booklet that she wrote 15 years ago entitled “Male and Female He Created Them.” The Office of the Prosecutor General of Finland issued a press release on Monday noting that while Päivi Räsänen’s 2004...

Finnish parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen was found guilty of hate speech and fined by the Supreme Court of Finland on Thursday over a pamphlet describing homosexuality as a psychosexual development disorder more than 20 years ago.Räsänen, who led Finland's Christian Democratic Party from 2004 to 2015 and served as the country's interior minister from 2011 to 2015, was found guilty in a slim 3-2 decision of "making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group," according to a press release from the U.S.-based legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International.Police first began investigating the grandmother of 12...

The government censorship machine took a huge hit Tuesday in a historic win for First Amendment rights. What is being billed as an “unprecedented” agreement will bar the three government agencies central to killing speech the Biden administration didn’t like from pressuring social media platforms from doing so in the future. “This case began with a suspicion, that blossomed into fact, that led to Congressional hearings and an Executive Order that government censorship of Americans’ social media posts should end,” said John Vecchione, Senior Litigation Counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the nonprofit civil rights group that has...

The second edition of the Malta Biennale opened in previews this week, and it was not without controversy. Women on Waves, a nonprofit that provides information on safe abortion in restrictive settings, accused the Biennale’s organizers of “censoring” an artwork by the organization just before the opening on Tuesday. The work originally featured a banner reading Need Abortion Pills? in English and Maltese. According to a press release from Women on Waves, the banner was altered, at the Biennale’s request, to read Do You Need a Safe Abortion?, with the word Pills crossed out. The nonprofit said organizers then informed...

Spain will launch a tool to measure hate speech on digital ‌platforms as part of a broader strategy ‌to increase oversight of social media companies, Prime Minister Pedro ​Sanchez said on Wednesday. The country announced a wider plan last month to regulate social media, including a ban on its use for younger teenagers and ‌measures to hold ⁠platform executives accountable for illegal or hateful content hosted on their services. The new ⁠tool, called HODIO — an acronym in Spanish for Footprint of Hatred and Polarisation — will allow the ​government to ​systematically track the presence, ​amplification and impact of ‌hate...

The bipartisan push to remove anonymity from the internet is ushering in an era of unprecedented mass surveillance and censorship.

Virginia's legislature has passed a bill prohibiting schools from teaching what it considers to be falsehoods about the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, including portraying it "as peaceful protest." The General Assembly approved the measure Thursday, as a first-of-its-kind legislation to combat false statements by supporters of President Trump. The bill says that school instruction must "Not describe, portray, or present as credible a description or portrayal of the actions precipitating or involved in the events of the January 6, 2021, insurrection as peaceful protest." Schools may also not "state, suggest, or present as credible a statement or suggestion...

X Freeze@XFreezeThe “Wikilaundering” scandal is finally blowing wide open and it’s worse than we thoughtA massive investigation by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism just exposed the ugly truth: Wikipedia is corrupt to its coreYou do not get information. You get propaganda.... articles manipulated by the highest bidder, billionaires, PR firms, and woke activistsHere’s exactly how the rot works:📍 Shadow Network: London-based PR firms like Portland Communications run secret “black hat” editors and middlemen to bypass every rule📍 Reputation Scrubbing on Steroids: They delete scandals, human rights abuses, and even controversial Epstein files for powerful politicians...... while scrubbing migrant worker deaths...

@MJTruthUltra Tucker Carlson calls for Mark Levin to be Immediately FIRED from Fox News for saying Iran currently has Nuclear Tipped ICBM’s pointed at the United Staes “Iran doesn’t have nuclear tipped ICBM’s aimed at the United States. That is a lie. That is a provable lie. Why is he saying that? He hopes to whip his listening into such a frenzy of fear and rage..”

Editors say the decision raises serious questions about press freedom and readers’ access to primary sources. J. D. Vance delivering his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2025 THOMAS KIENZLE / AFP. A Belgian online news outlet has been reprimanded by the country’s press ethics body after publishing the full text of a speech by U.S. vice president J.D. Vance, sparking debate about censorship and media freedom. The controversy stems from a speech delivered on February 14th, 2025, at the Munich Security Conference, a major annual gathering of Western political and military leaders. Speaking the day after a deadly...

First they asked, “Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically?” Among the students they interviewed, 88% said yes. Then they broke it down into specific questions: 80% said they’d submitted classwork that misrepresented their views to align with professors. 78% said they self-censor their own beliefs about gender identity.

This week’s major developments include a number of secondary explosions: government bureaucrats who censored free speech on internet platforms using NGOs as covers will be facing court action; the fallout from the boomeranging Epstein disclosures keep damaging the Democrats and their foreign allies; the media’s promotion of the moronic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only served to highlight that she is ill-informed and too lazy to prepare for interviews; and DOGE and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent are making it very hard to keep hiding Democrat corruption. Censors Face the MusicThe CCDH (Center for Countering Digital Hate) is an NGO headed by...

Russian soldiers and military bloggers have railed against the Kremlin after it restricted access to the Telegram messaging app. Widespread disruptions to the app were reported on Monday and Tuesday as Roskomnadzor, the Russian state media regulator, said it would levy its strongest restrictions on Telegram’s operations yet. The internet watchdog said the move would safeguard Russian citizens against “criminal and terrorist” content, in Moscow’s latest crackdown on the free internet. Roskomnadzor, which has for years crusaded for a “sovereign internet” liberated from Western influence, has over the past six months imposed new limits on Telegram and WhatsApp at least...

A media ratings website is suing the Federal Trade Commission for investigating alleged efforts to blacklist conservative news outlets, in a clash that is effectively dueling accusations of censorship. NewsGuard Technologies sued the FTC in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, alleging the Trump administration was trying to censor it, “simply out of disagreement with NewsGuard’s First Amendment-protected journalistic judgments about the reliability of news sources.” “Under the guise of a supposed antitrust investigation, the FTC has demanded all documents (memos, emails, texts, reporters’ notes, subscriber lists, analyses, financial reports, and more) that NewsGuard has...

Another sterling week for the Trump administration, another interval of agony for his opponents. The attention of those less politically minded is focused on the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy -- always fodder for the would-be Colombos and Miss Marples -- and the Olympics. Yet this week saw some victories for the administration along with some serious unfinished business. The ousted dictator Nicolás Maduro seems isolated, depressed, and devoid of funds sufficient to hire teams of lawyers to defend him. Any claims he might have for immunity seem destined to fail. The evidence establishes he was born in Colombia;...

Pedro Sánchez’s government is pushing dangerous new regulations that threaten your internet freedoms. Announced just yesterday, these measures could turn Spain into a surveillance state under the guise of “protection.” Here’s why they’re a red flag for free speech and privacy: 1. Ban on social media for under-16s with mandatory age verification: This isn’t just about kids—it requires platforms to use strict checks, like needing IDs or biometrics. ⚠️ Danger: It sets a precedent for tracking EVERY user’s identity, eroding anonymity and opening doors to mass data collection. What starts with minors could expand to all, stifling open discourse. 2....

The House Judiciary Committee’s recent findings present a simple but unsettling conclusion. American speech is being curtailed in the United States, not because Congress has changed the First Amendment, but because foreign governments have learned how to route around it. Europe’s Digital Services Act, presented as a domestic regulatory framework, has in practice become a lever for global speech control. Its effects now reach deep into the American public square. To see how this happens, begin with a basic fact about the modern internet. Major platforms operate with global content moderation rules. They do so not out of ideology but...