Tag: censorship

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Internet controversy litigation

Sony’s Scam Scuttled

Supreme Court, copyright, censorship, free speech, property

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can’t be forced to deprive customers of Internet access on the basis of an unverified complaint about copyright violation. And can’t be held liable for refusing to kill a customer’s access.

The ruling holds that a service provider “is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement. . . .”

The plaintiff? Sony. 

The defendant? Cox Communications. 

According to the ruling, Sony “alleged that Cox contributed to its users’ infringement by continuing to provide Internet service to subscribers whose IP addresses Cox knew were associated with infringement.”

Of course, Cox cannot “know” that a user had infringed some copyright merely because it got an automated notice that a user had done so. Cox is just an Internet service provider, not a judge, jury, or hander-out of penalties for unestablished crimes.

Had the high court ruled otherwise, the consequences would have been dire.

“Under the legal standard the labels wanted,” Reclaim the Net observes, “an ISP that received enough of these automated complaints and didn’t disconnect the account could face catastrophic financial liability. A Virginia jury bought that theory in 2019 and hit Cox with a verdict of over $1 billion.”

The decision bodes well for rulings on other attempts to transform ISPs — or PC operating systems, satellites, or any other gateway to modern life — into instant wielders of crippling punishment . . . no trial, no judgment, no justice allowed. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs

Fecklessly Fining 4chan

UK, censorship, 4CHAN, surveillance

You host a website. Users can say whatever they want on this site. Next thing you know, a UK regulatory agency is sending you, an American organization based in the United States, a letter announcing a trillion-dollar fine for failure to comply with UK censorship demands. How much do you panic?

If you’re 4chan, not much.

4chan hasn’t been fined a trillion dollars yet. But some day the ever-increasing meaningless fine may reach that level.

The redcoat-staffed regulatory agency is called Ofcom. It has fined 4chan £520,000 — in dollars that’s about $693,000 — “Under a Law That Doesn’t Apply in the US.” The bulk of the fine is for failing to implement age verification — that is, failure to force users who are by and large anonymous to identify themselves.

The back-and-forth between Ofcom and 4chan started in April 2025. Ofcom isn’t getting the message. 4chan’s lawyer says the company “has broken no laws in the United States, my client will not pay any penalty. Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States. . . . As has been explained to your agency, ad nauseam, the United Kingdom lost the American Revolutionary War. We are not in the mood to discuss the matter further. . . .”

The only problem for 4chan I see on the horizon is the struggle in the U.S. to impose a similar regulatory regime here. Fortunately, our own courts still somewhat recognize the relevance of our First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

Modern Tech Irrelevant

censorship, Fauci, free speech, First Amendment

“I’ve never been more pleased by ‘losing’ in my life,” tweeted Jay Bhattacharya.

What makes the Director of the National Institutes of Health a “loser”?

Well, the doctor (who also serves as current Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control) has not always served in the federal government. In his days between Trump administrations he’d run afoul of censors on social media. Now he’s jubilant that a major case against censorship has come to a freedom-of-speech conclusion.

Aptly, he started that post on X with “Huzzah!”

The actual news? “The New Civil Liberties Alliance, on behalf of its clients Jill Hines and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty,” reads the official press release of the lawyers, “has reached a settlement agreement and Consent Decree concluding the landmark Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against government-induced social media censorship.”

This follows an executive order by President Trump on the first day of his new administration. The president had declared that the federal government, under President Joe Biden, had “infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

This not a judicial ruling. It’s an agreement, the key point being, “The Parties agree that modern technology does not alter the Government’s obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment.”

Specifically, the agreement (in the lawyers’ words) “prohibits the U.S. Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from threatening social media companies into removing or suppressing constitutionally protected speech on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and YouTube.” And more.

Director Bhattacharya calls it a “huge win for all Americans.”

You bet Huzzah!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war First Amendment rights

Iran and the Rubicon

Tucker Carlson, Iran, Trump, free speech, censorship, foreign policy

Last weekend, Cenk Uygur, of the alternative news commentary show The Young Turks, focused on the Iran war, including one of its stranger developments, rumors that the Trump Administration is planning to arrest a different news commentator, Tucker Carlson. 

And try Mr. Carlson for treason.

“If @TuckerCarlson is actually arrested, the government will have crossed the Rubicon,” Mr. Uygur posted to X. “Whatever ridiculous charges they bring up, everyone will know real reason was that he opposed the war and Israel. He’ll be considered [the] first American political prisoner within our own country.”

A factual corrective to this was provided Sunday, on this site, at least about the historical background of imprisoning journalists critical of a U.S.-involved war: Woodrow Wilson did that. He “crossed the Rubicon” over a hundred years ago. And he wasn’t the first president to do so.

But is there any real push to try Tucker Carlson for treason?

Robbie Soave, writing on Tuesday, surmised that, considering Carlson’s connections with the administration, the commentator is not likely paranoid or making things up.

And you can certainly find arguments pushing a treason case, and worse — for example, Israeli journalist and historian Yair Kleinbaum wrote in JFeed that “Carlson, Fuentes and Owens Must Be Jailed Inside a WWII-Style Internment Camp.”

At least, apparently, “while America is locked in a struggle against the dark forces of Shia Islam.” (Note that one consequence of the Iraq War was to attack Sunni Islam and install Shia Islam in Mesopotamia.) “Once the war is won and the threat is neutralized, we can release them,” Kleinbaum concludes.

Let’s hope this treason talk is all rumor. Arresting Tucker Carlson won’t improve the popularity of the Iran War.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy privacy

Think of the VPNs

UK, surveillance, VPN, censorship

It’s for the kids. Let’s remember that. If bureaucrats and politicians get massive amounts of new power to lord over us, this is just a happy side effect.

Reclaim the Net reports that during recent debate in the U.K.’s House of Commons about a Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, lawmakers rejected proposed amendments that would have required age verification to use virtual private networks (VPNs) and certain other services. 

That’s good. People use VPNs to avoid being tracked and identified by such tyrannical governments as those of China or the United Kingdom.

And any ID requirement would increase the chances that governments discover the identity of users no matter what rules VPN providers are supposed to follow to prevent this.

But Brits cannot relax just yet. Amendments that lawmakers did approve would compel Internet service providers to “restrict children’s access to specific online platforms, impose time-of-day limits on when services can be used, and mandate age verification across nearly any platform that enables users to post or share content.”

Time-of-day limits? Aren’t parents the ones who tell their kids when it’s bedtime?

If we do descend into a dark totalitarian night with no freedom, no privacy, a telescreen in every room, we’ll have to look on the bright side: It was for the kids. The kids needed to be protected from algorithms, choice, freedom, the deficiencies of merely parental oversight, and books with pages addictively connected to adjacent pages. 

Those kids. Always causing trouble.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs

The Skeleton Haunting Europe

skeleton, Europe, EU, control, authoritarianism, censorship, obey

Give Emanuel Brünishol credit for pluck.

The man uttered opinions on social media with which some people disagreed. A Swiss court fined him 500 Swiss francs. He refused to pay — believing that one should not be fined or condescend to pay fines for merely uttering opinions, no matter how annoying they may be.

So the Swiss government sent Brünishol to prison for ten days.

His terrible views?

That skeletons can be only male or female. He also seemed to suggest that trans people are mentally ill.

The post: “If you excavate LGBTQI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex] people after 200 years, you will only find men and women among the skeletons; everything else is a mental illness that was fostered by the curriculum!”

Agree, disagree, in whole or in part — not the issue. The issue is why Brünisholz’s wading into issues of sex and gender caused the Swiss police to haul him in for questioning “on suspicion of incitement to hatred.”

If somebody’s gonna hate you because you disagree with them on a question, the only alternative to “inciting hatred” is staying mute or uttering opinions so empty that not even the most eager censor would think to call the cops about it. And then how can we ever discuss anything that is both controversial and important?

Of course, none of the sensitive Europeans forwarding Facebook posts to the police are being fined for their own hatred — of freedom of speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

skeleton, Europe, EU, control, authoritarianism, censorship, obey

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy regulation

Hating X: The Naked Truth

DEMS, censorship, Senate, EU, X, Twitter

Why do so many U.S. Democrats, like some Europeans, want to outlaw X?

The current stage of the U.S. assault on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter takes the form of senatorial demands that X be removed from iOS and Android app stores.

Why the enmity? 

Well, under the ownership of Elon Musk, X lets people say and write stuff that Democrats dislike. Such as criticism of Democratic policies and politicians, just the kind of speech the First Amendment was drafted to protect. (Criticism of Republican, Libertarian, communist, and anarchist policies and politicians? Also protected.)

The rationalization for the proposed ban is that X’s AI software, Grok, can generate pictures of nude or nearly nude people.

The ability to generate such images is hardly unique to this particular chatbot. If X is to be banned from app stores because of the possibility that users may post generated nudes on the platform, many more social media platforms would, logically, also have to be snared by the censorship net.

Yet, reports Reclaim the Net, the letter sent to the CEOs of Apple and Google “by Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Luján, and Ed Markey asked the tech giants only about X and demanded that the companies remove X from their app stores entirely.”

Unsurprisingly, X has announced that the nude-ifying feature of Grok has been limited. I asked Grok, and it said that “there is now a taboo/restriction on generating or editing nudes (or near-nudes/revealing attire) of real, existing people from photos. It will refuse prompts to digitally ‘undress’ or sexualize identifiable real individuals. Attempts often result in refusal, blurring, or error messages.”

Fixed?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture international affairs regulation social media

U.S. Bans EU Censors

EU, censorship, free speech, Visa

European leaders are condemning American use of visa bans to penalize European enemies of American freedom of speech.

Which is understandable, since the U.S. State Department more than merely condemned the European Union.

In the words of Marco Rubio, the five just-sanctioned persons “have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”

Thierry Breton. Former EU commissioner and top proponent of the Digital Services Act, which seeks to force U.S. tech giants to “police illegal content more aggressively” or face big fines. “Illegal” here doesn’t mean speech deployed to commit bank robberies; it’s speech EU censors dislike.

Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg. Leaders of HateAid.

Clare Melford. Leader of Global Disinformation Index, which, the State Department observes, exhorts “censorship and blacklisting of American speech and press.”

Imran Ahmed. Leader of Center for Countering Digital Hate, described by Breitbart as the “deplatforming outfit which defined its central mission as ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter.’ ” CCDH also worked hard to get Breitbart and other sites blacklisted from social media.

Maybe none of these villains was planning a trip to the United States anytime soon.

And, doubtless, much more could be done to combat overseas attempts to censor Americans. But at least this much action against enemies of our First Amendment rights is warranted, even if mostly symbolic.

Just give us a little more time, European leaders. We’ll do more to oppose and thwart your obnoxious global censorship agenda. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights media and media people national politics & policies too much government

Governing the News

FCC, censorship, covid, surveillance

“The Fairness Doctrine was controversial and led to lawsuits throughout the 1960s and ’70s that argued it infringed upon the freedom of the press,” explained FCC commissioner Ajit Pai for the Wall Street Journal, in an op-ed I quoted yesterday.

“The FCC finally stopped enforcing the policy in 1987, acknowledging that it did not serve the public interest. In 2011 the agency officially took it off the books. But the demise of the Fairness Doctrine has not deterred proponents of newsroom policing. . . .”

Thankfully, this is old news. The former FCC commissioner’spiece was actually published nearly twelve years ago. Mr. Pai has since moved on to the private sector, in April becoming President and CEO of CTIA, the wireless industry trade association.

We can breathe a sigh of relief. The FCC is not planning on regulating the news for biased content.

Well, supposedly, anyway. 

So why rehash an old issue — why revive something from the proverbial slush pile?

To compare and contrast. Bias is a continuing problem, but the biggest threat to news reporting and dissemination since that time has revealed itself in a very different form, not as “abridgments” to press freedoms but as secret government commands and direction.

Remember what we learned in the Trump-and-pandemic years?

During the recent pandemic, and the release of the Twitter Files, we learned of a massive effort of government and “ex-government” personnel directing social media outlets to platform-censor dissent, going so far as to squelch new sources . . . as happened regarding the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story.

The FCC Fairness Doctrine was nothing compared to the meddling that has more recently occurred behind the scenes, but which we all experienced, on social media. It played a role in the election results favoring Biden in 2020, and in the dysfunctional, disastrous public health response to COVID-19. 

The FCC doesn’t handle that level of biased manipulation of news.

So who does?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies too much government

The FCC’s Press Bias Fix

censorship, FCC, news, media, propaganda

You are operating a newsroom or, let’s say, a commentary room. Somebody accuses you of bias in how you decide what to publish.

You deflect: Of course different media organizations have different perspectives; each to its own. Sometimes, too, we choose what to run less rationally than the Platonic philosopher-journalist would demand.

Bias is everywhere, inevitable.

Which makes the only cure maximal freedom of speech and openness of discourse. The answer to deficient speech is better speech, not either direct or indirect government censorship.

Nevertheless, the FCC has proposed to “investigate” the selection process of newsrooms.

Any such investigation is necessarily biased from the get-go against freedom of speech and press. Even if it never gets to the regulation stage, the investigation itself constitutes interference. It is impossible for anyone being asked formal investigatory questions by the FCC to be unaware that the questioner has the power of government behind him.

How, for example, is a conscientious employee who respects the rights of his boss supposed to answer this loaded question: “Have you ever suggested coverage of what you consider a story with critical information for your customers that was rejected by management?”?

FCC commissioner Ajit Pai reports that this is one query being considered as part of a “Critical Information Needs” study to determine how stories are selected, “perceived bias,” and how responsive a newsroom is to “underserved populations.”

Pai, who opposes the project, says: “The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.”

Or not covering others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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