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)
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.
American culture can access Europeans at any time. Europeans consume American culture daily.Just to clarify. Website banned are often hostile propaganda or extremists.
This is only cringy lousy provocation for appearance of moral superiority.
Coming from a government notorious for spying on it's citizens it seems pretty ludicrous.
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.
> It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.
You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.
It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.
It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.
There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.
Yep! Maximally closed as much as possible under the law. They also shut down other programs which aim to sidestep propaganda (including US propaganda), though some of those are starting to come back. Radio Free Asia, for example, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-s...
This is somewhat counterintuitive: The US is the only country I know where most newspapers and government services use strict geoblocks to prevent me from accessing US sites in Europe. Conversely, I've never had any problems accessing European sites from the US. I know this is for a different set of reasons (likely GDPR cookie law or similar), but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.
This. I regularly face geo blocks from American websites. Like literally at least once a week. It's very common for whatever reason for smaller US shops, newspapers any size and other random sites.
Only EU site I had a problem accessing that i can remember was from my electricity provider.
Strangely enough they didn’t geoblock me but login threw an error because my local time didn’t match the local (German) timezone.
I changed my system timezone to Germany and it worked without issues, so I was wondering if it’s a very bad geoblock or something else entirely
It makes sense to me. They're blocked in Europe because of European government polices, not American ones.
Maybe there's some sort of legal immunity the US government could grant to domestic sites which would allow them to lift those blocks without fear of reprisal?
That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that.
> but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.
The search AIs tell me it's around a third of people.
Which US newspapers and which governments websites?
I happen to write this from Poland and I don't recall a single newspaper being geo blocked here. Not nyt, not washington post not anything I've ever accessed.
And didn't see US gov website geo blocked either.
So I ask again: which newspapers and which gov websites?
It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it.
Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.
> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA
Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.
Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount.
Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.
Most of the replies to this seem to think it's referring to some kind of secret government datacenter. It's us-east-1, and every other cloud provider's US East and GOV zones, which are all in NVA
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.
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?
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
The whole book banning thing is a little weird in 2026, IMO. It's exciting to think about, we all liked Fahrenheit 451, but a book not being bought for elementary schools doesn't really make it "banned" IMO.
There are a lot of books which probably shouldn't be in schools. I don't think children should be given copies of Mein Kampf or Camp of Saints, nor the random dark fantasy novels which are so popular today.
It feels disingenuous to pretend that school-book-choice is anything comparable to government level "book banning" when literally any of the books written about in that article can be freely checked out from any public library in the country.
As a parent, I believe there is no book that should be banned from being used by a teacher for instruction. I have the responsibility of ensuring that the school my child attends employs teachers who I trust to make effective and age-appropriate curriculum decisions.
Disingenuous framing. Book bans remove books from school libraries. A book sitting on a shelf is not giving a book to someone.
> of Mein Kampf or Camp of Saints
Why not? Genuinely, why not? What will happen if children have access to words on a printed page? Most of them have access to a supercomputer in their pocket.
To make my stance clear in case it’s not: there is no such thing as “age appropriate literature.” A free society depends on intellectual freedom. Restricting school libraries from holding certain books is a tactic to raise children to be closed minded adults.
The banned books are things like "All Boys Aren't Blue", a book which describes incestuous child rape and provides step by step instructions for anal sex.
If you think that book belongs in public schools the FBI should have a look at your computer.
It describes incestuous child rape, because the author describes his experience of being raped.
Victims speaking about their abuse, now that is one step too far and needs to be censored.
The US list one (1) banned book in a earlier version (Operation Dark Heart) because of national security.
>The first, uncensored printing of 9,500 copies was purchased for $47,300 in early September and destroyed by the publisher at the request of the Pentagon
Meanwhile, you can't even go on pornhub in certain states in the US, but yes let's let people go on X and engage in hate speech.
In fact I'm sure bad actors will use that site FROM the us, to anonymize their hate speech from Russia/China
Americans is land of the free until someone shows a nipple. Or copies a floppy. Or refuses to partake in flag shagging. Or says something critical of the president.
Basically America is very good at protecting hate speech, not so good at the rest.
Yeah. This effort feels perplexing. US just isn't the free-est country on Earth in terms of free speech protections, and the gap is slowly widening. IIRC there still isn't secrecy of communication baked into laws as principles.
> Americans is land of the free until someone shows a nipple. Or copies a floppy. Or refuses to partake in flag shagging. Or says something critical of the president.
Can you give an example of censoring of any of these type of content? AFAIK there is only age gating.
I principled stance would be against government censoring nipples AND speech of any kind, including what you call "hate speech".
My educated guess is that your definition of "hate speech" doesn't include people openly calling for assassinating federal employees (i.e. ICE).
BTW: properly applied 1st amendment is what led to un-banning censorship of nipples (see. Flynt v. United States, Miller v. California) as well as unbanning "obscene" books by Henry Miller and others (Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein)
I'm against censorship of nipples and speech including what you likely consider "hate speech". To me the line is calling to kill or physically harm someone. Which leftists are currently doing in spades and yet BlueSky doesn't ban them for that.
Do you want censorship (of porn, of "hate speech") or not?
Because it seems you don't want censorship of porn but do want censorship of speech.
"hate speech" is a made up thing that politicians use to jail people who complain about government.
If you're an American you should cherish 1st amendment. You should cherish the fact that founding fathers recognized that the greatest thread to your freedom is not another person with a gun but a thousand people with a gun i.e. government.
And giving government the power to censor speech they don't like is the fastest way to tyranny.
That's why freedom of speech is 1st amendment. Not second, not fifth. It's 1st because it's that important.
No state blocks access to PornHub. Some states have requirements requiring ID before viewing porn, but the state isn't stopping anybody from viewing it.
Requiring ID to buy alcohol isn't banning alcohol, just like requiring ID to view porn isn't banning porn.
I don't take issue with the idea of something like this (assuming it isn't expensive and is more of an information center than anything else), but yeah it is funny that while they evidently made this in response to the EU, if it ends up being what it sounds like it will, it's going to enable Americans to circumvent their own state's laws as well.
So interesting to see it become a popular opinion that we should "not let" people say certain things. Like, if necessary, we should jail people for speaking.
I remember learning about the ACLU[1] as a teen, 25 years ago, and how they took a lot of flak for defending people who said things we all agreed were gross, which at first glance seems disgusting. But the lesson we were taught was that the Constitutional guarantee of "freedom of expression" wasn't qualified with "as long as the opinions being expressed are cool ones."
Really, "hate speech" is defined as "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly." Right wingers think some or all porn is the "bad" kind of expression and apparently banworthy, and left wingers think saying pretty much anything about trans ideology (other than full-throated endorsement) is hate speech.
I'm aware that many who are of the "don't let people do 'hate speech'" aren't Americans and don't owe any respect for the ideas of our particular Constitution, and that's fine -- but many Americans also now feel that citizens should only be able to speak the subset of ideas that one party endorses, and that any other ideas should be punishable, as they are in the UK.[2]
[1] If I understand it correctly, I think the ACLU is under new management, and no longer defends anyone whose ideas are uncomfortable.
American free speech laws are the exception, not the rule. All European free speech laws have always been balanced and weighed up against other laws. This is hardly anything new. If anything, the internet has brought forth a short time period where everything goes and the status quo is now recovering.
The legal definition of hate speech (or rather, its local equivalents) is not just "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly".
complaining about losing the freedom to watch porn without ID while in the same comment pushing for more people to face state action for social media posts
porn is ok, posts that hurt my fee fees and ideological bias bad :'( (both are ok in my opinion btw)
I agree that hate speech must have limits but I have no idea where government trust comes from, especially in the current times. It's like people forget that voting swings and sways and that at some point in time, a government you won't agree with will be able to wield all these shiny new tools for censorship.
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.
These days what people receive of the US influence is mostly interference in politics to favour the far-right, military threats and economic war through tariffs. As well as just random verbal attacks on local politicians on local matters.
I'm sure there is a positive side to the US influence, but it's well hidden and they definitely don't advertise it.
Then won’t foreign governments just ban freedom.gov? This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead.
> This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead.
The US government is responsible for 35% of Tor's funding[1] and has been its primary sponsor since Tor was invented as a side project in the US Naval Research Lab.
It's a propaganda maneuver. And it's obviously just as critical of China as it is of Europe. The State Department's public voices may be immersed in the culture war but there are probably a few cooler heads left who have learned to keep out of the spotlight.
US can probably use their soft power to influence them not to do that. Also would imagine the US gov could also set up some more censorship resistant access methods.
In the same way they used their soft power to influence them not to block twitter and facebook? Because that power is slowly going from soft to limp...
This comment generated a lot of activity. It's very interesting watching the vote count of it move with the daylight (it went down during night in US/day in EU, and went back up when the US woke back up)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Readit News
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for...
Dead Comment
This is only cringy lousy provocation for appearance of moral superiority.
Coming from a government notorious for spying on it's citizens it seems pretty ludicrous.
Freedom of speech for me, not for thee
You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.
It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.
It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.
There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.
It's going to be a weird set of content on this website. Are they going to livestream La Liga sports?
I changed my system timezone to Germany and it worked without issues, so I was wondering if it’s a very bad geoblock or something else entirely
Maybe there's some sort of legal immunity the US government could grant to domestic sites which would allow them to lift those blocks without fear of reprisal?
The search AIs tell me it's around a third of people.
I happen to write this from Poland and I don't recall a single newspaper being geo blocked here. Not nyt, not washington post not anything I've ever accessed.
And didn't see US gov website geo blocked either.
So I ask again: which newspapers and which gov websites?
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...
Dead Comment
https://pen.org/report/the-normalization-of-book-banning/
There are a lot of books which probably shouldn't be in schools. I don't think children should be given copies of Mein Kampf or Camp of Saints, nor the random dark fantasy novels which are so popular today.
It feels disingenuous to pretend that school-book-choice is anything comparable to government level "book banning" when literally any of the books written about in that article can be freely checked out from any public library in the country.
Disingenuous framing. Book bans remove books from school libraries. A book sitting on a shelf is not giving a book to someone.
> of Mein Kampf or Camp of Saints
Why not? Genuinely, why not? What will happen if children have access to words on a printed page? Most of them have access to a supercomputer in their pocket.
To make my stance clear in case it’s not: there is no such thing as “age appropriate literature.” A free society depends on intellectual freedom. Restricting school libraries from holding certain books is a tactic to raise children to be closed minded adults.
If you think that book belongs in public schools the FBI should have a look at your computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...
The US list one (1) banned book in a earlier version (Operation Dark Heart) because of national security.
>The first, uncensored printing of 9,500 copies was purchased for $47,300 in early September and destroyed by the publisher at the request of the Pentagon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dark_Heart
Basically America is very good at protecting hate speech, not so good at the rest.
Can you give an example of censoring of any of these type of content? AFAIK there is only age gating.
My educated guess is that your definition of "hate speech" doesn't include people openly calling for assassinating federal employees (i.e. ICE).
BTW: properly applied 1st amendment is what led to un-banning censorship of nipples (see. Flynt v. United States, Miller v. California) as well as unbanning "obscene" books by Henry Miller and others (Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein)
I'm against censorship of nipples and speech including what you likely consider "hate speech". To me the line is calling to kill or physically harm someone. Which leftists are currently doing in spades and yet BlueSky doesn't ban them for that.
Do you want censorship (of porn, of "hate speech") or not?
Because it seems you don't want censorship of porn but do want censorship of speech.
"hate speech" is a made up thing that politicians use to jail people who complain about government.
If you're an American you should cherish 1st amendment. You should cherish the fact that founding fathers recognized that the greatest thread to your freedom is not another person with a gun but a thousand people with a gun i.e. government.
And giving government the power to censor speech they don't like is the fastest way to tyranny.
That's why freedom of speech is 1st amendment. Not second, not fifth. It's 1st because it's that important.
Death threats are illegal whether they happen offline or online.
Yelling "I HAVE A BOMB!" in an airport comes with consequences.
I believe we can agree on these two examples.
Hilarious to think that freedom.gov might be the workaround.
Requiring ID to buy alcohol isn't banning alcohol, just like requiring ID to view porn isn't banning porn.
So interesting to see it become a popular opinion that we should "not let" people say certain things. Like, if necessary, we should jail people for speaking.
I remember learning about the ACLU[1] as a teen, 25 years ago, and how they took a lot of flak for defending people who said things we all agreed were gross, which at first glance seems disgusting. But the lesson we were taught was that the Constitutional guarantee of "freedom of expression" wasn't qualified with "as long as the opinions being expressed are cool ones."
Really, "hate speech" is defined as "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly." Right wingers think some or all porn is the "bad" kind of expression and apparently banworthy, and left wingers think saying pretty much anything about trans ideology (other than full-throated endorsement) is hate speech.
I'm aware that many who are of the "don't let people do 'hate speech'" aren't Americans and don't owe any respect for the ideas of our particular Constitution, and that's fine -- but many Americans also now feel that citizens should only be able to speak the subset of ideas that one party endorses, and that any other ideas should be punishable, as they are in the UK.[2]
[1] If I understand it correctly, I think the ACLU is under new management, and no longer defends anyone whose ideas are uncomfortable.
[2] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/uk-arrests-for-twee... This fact-check points out that "only" 10% of the 30 arrests per day for online postings end up with convictions, and that it's rare to have "long" prison sentences. Very comforting.
The legal definition of hate speech (or rather, its local equivalents) is not just "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly".
porn is ok, posts that hurt my fee fees and ideological bias bad :'( (both are ok in my opinion btw)
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
I'm sure there is a positive side to the US influence, but it's well hidden and they definitely don't advertise it.
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
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.
Also it is cheap, easy, non-controversial domestically in the US, and ethically coherent with American values.
Do you mean that VPN will blur the nipples when you watch pictures of classical paintings through it?
I don't think European countries have been shy or sneaky about their restrictions on online content.
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.
You can also call it "U.S. government spying on Europeans".
Deleted Comment