The UK’s Online Safety Act mandates that platforms like X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Meta, and others proactively identify and restrict access to content deemed “harmful.” This includes not just illegal material but vaguely defined “legal but harmful” categories such as misinformation, hate speech, or anything that might cause “psychological harm.” Platforms face fines up to…
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The European Union is on the verge of enacting one of the most sweeping surveillance regimes in the West, under the benign-sounding pretext of child protection. The legislation—dubbed Chat Control by critics—would force messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram to scan every private message sent on their platforms, destroying the concept of encryption and…
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SUMMARY In late April, a “disinformation” summit was held at the University of Cambridge in the UK, attracting well-known figures from the international censorship industry. One UK politician boasted of his regional legislature’s plans to weaponize the judicial system to ban political candidates from running for office if they violate online censorship laws. Another panelist…
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SUMMARY A 2022 memo prepared for the State Department advises rolling out “media literacy” and “digital literacy” lessons in schools to combat disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech. The report shows that children’s online safety was not the original motivation of the US federal government’s push for media and digital literacy curricula — it was the…
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SUMMARY A British media agency is at the center of a diplomatic row after allegations of election interference from the Slovakian government, under the pretext of “countering disinformation.” The agency, Zinc Network, has received over $12 million from the UK Foreign Office and over $13.7 million from USAID, the U.S. Department of State, and the…
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SUMMARY A new British censorship law threatens American liberties. The Online Safety Act went into force in the UK on July 25th. The Act requires tech companies to clamp down on hate speech, dis- and misinformation, and “racially or religiously aggravated” offenses. Under its provisions, American employees of non-compliant tech companies could face criminal charges…
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A growing theme across the western world has been the weaponization of the judiciary to crush populist uprisings. Recent cases include the five-year election ban against Marine Le Pen in France, and the overturning of the first-round victory of a Romanian presidential candidate on grounds of “Russian disinformation.” Speaking at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit in…
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SUMMARY Under the previous administration, DHS spent $7 million, funneled through FEMA, to push media literacy lessons into schools. Ideologically biased, pro-censorship organizations including the Southern Poverty Law Center and NewsGuard have led the way in building media literacy curricula. Numerous states including California, Rhode Island, Texas and Florida have passed new laws to ensure…
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SUMMARY Founded in the UK, Bellingcat is an “open source investigations” organization that received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED is an international NGO created by the U.S. government in the 1980s to perform influence operations previously carried out by the CIA. Bellingcat has been a major supporter of efforts to censor…
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SUMMARY Housed at DHS, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s ostensible purpose is to help American communities respond to major disasters. FFO research has discovered that in the last 5 years, FEMA diverted to a new role: censorship and political indoctrination, by disbursing funds to Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, a DHS “counter-extremism” program that…
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