Doğru, founder of red.media, was placed under EU sanctions on May 20, 2025 on the basis of allegations of “information manipulation” and having “systematically spread false information on politically controversial subjects with the intent of creating ethnic, political and religious discord.”

The EU Commission’s “hybrid threats” regime allows sanctions to be imposed on any person or organization deemed to promote “disinformation” that runs contrary to state narratives. Those affected are denied their right to due process and subject to asset freezes and travel bans with profound consequences for them and their families.

With Doğru’s digital accounts blocked, assets frozen, and movement restricted, this case should concern anyone who cares about free speech and the weaponization of anti-misinformation programming.

Our work on the German Censorship-Industrial Complex has shown a strong European Union-backed component that has only grown in recent years, mostly operating under the guise of countering “disinformation” or “hate speech” like the accusations lobbed at Doğru.

A democratic public sphere needs disagreement, criticism, and independent media. If governments can use sanctions to silence or punish critical reporting and dissenting analysis, every independent journalist, publisher, researcher, and citizen is made less free.

Below is our letter to the Australian Parliament outlining our opposition to the bill:

TO:
Committee Secretary
Environment and Communications Legislation Committee
Department of the Senate
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600
AUSTRALIA

FROM:
Andrew Lowenthal, CEO, liber-net

15 January 2026

RE: Opposing Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026

Dear Parliamentarians,

My name is Andrew Lowenthal, an Australian and longtime proponent of free expression in the Pacific and across the globe. I am CEO of liber-net, a digital civil liberties initiative that combats digital authoritarianism and works to reestablish free speech and civil liberties as the norm for our networked age. I also have over 25 years working at the intersection of human rights and technology.

In recent years we have seen increasing acceptance of intrusive monitoring, speech restriction, and algorithmic governance of public life. This shift should concern anyone who values a free and pluralistic society. Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 represents another step down this path. I write to express my opposition to the bill, which should be reconsidered rather than rushed into law.

Summary of Criticisms:

Discretionary powers invite political interpretation

Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 provides broad and dangerous discretionary powers to the Australian Federal Police Minister, does not ensure due process, and creates opportunities for misuse against perceived political opponents.

While the Attorney General must agree to any designations of what the bill terms “prohibited hate groups,” there is no mandatory judicial oversight of the AFP Minister nor any direct appeal mechanism for the group itself. The only parliamentary review possible is by the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which can recommend, but not enforce, changes. Given past politicisation of enforcement of speech laws by government — be it Home Affairs co-ordinating the takedown of memes during the pandemic, or eSafety going after ‘misgendering’ online — it is not only plausible but likely that this will lead to overreach where political or activist groups are unfairly swept up or even targeted.

This lack of due process appears to be a feature, not a bug. Indeed, who defines “hate”? The bill vests significant power in executive officials to define and apply the classification of hate to otherwise legitimate speech: while the current conceptualisations of “hate crimes” are explicitly tied to Criminal Code offences (e.g., urging violence against racial/ethnic groups) the bill expands this to include counselling, instruction, or praise that creates an “unacceptable risk” of leading to such crimes.

The bill’s vague standards are open to interpretation, crafted like a skeleton key for authorities to suppress public dissent against unpopular policies. While, to its credit, the bill acknowledges potential issues and risk of misuse by mandating a two-year review, this measly opportunity for oversight does not go anywhere near far enough.

Non-violence is the new violence: Pushing criminal law into new and unsafe territory
Protecting people from real-world harm, coercion, and intimidation is a legitimate and necessary function of the law. What should be resisted is the transformation of lawful expression into a criminal act where no tangible injury, threat, or victim can be established. This bill advances exactly that shift by attaching criminal consequences to speech on the basis that it might generate fear or offence, even in the absence of violence, physical injury, or a clearly identifiable harmed party.

Section 80.2BF, for example, creates a new crime for public conduct, including text or images shared on social media, intended to promote or incite hatred or ideas of superiority based on, among others, national origin, if it would cause a reasonable person in the targeted group to feel intimidated or fear violence/harassment. This “reasonable person” test is subjective and could easily sweep up provocative, but not explicitly dangerous, political commentary. 

Such an approach breaks with long-standing principles of criminal justice, which traditionally require a demonstrable act, intention, or credible risk of harm. Under the proposed framework outlined by the bill, serious penalties, including multi-year prison terms, necessarily rest on contested or imagined interpretation rather than objective evidence. 

Indeed, a substantial body of powers already exist in our country to address genuine threats to safety and national security: counter-terrorism offences and preparatory offences, preventative and control orders, extensive intelligence and surveillance authorities, migration and character-based exclusion powers, and coordinated watch-listing and information-sharing systems across agencies, among others. By international standards, these capabilities are already expansive. If these mechanisms exist to manage real risk, why is the legislative response now focused on expanding speech-based criminal liability instead of improving the consistent and accountable use of existing tools?

Masking governance failures and avoiding political accountability
When individuals who are assessed as dangerous or closely monitored are nevertheless able to operate freely in the community, ultimately causing real, physical harm, the problem is not usually a shortage of legislative authority. Instead, it points instead to weaknesses in enforcement, prioritisation, coordination, or policy execution.

Broadening the criminal net to capture increasingly wide categories of expression, including online commentary, does not remedy Australia’s operational shortcomings. Rather, it risks diverting attention and accountability away from whether institutions are effectively using the powers they already possess.

Recent regulatory and legislative trends in our country show a pattern: social tension and isolated acts of violence are increasingly met with attempts to tighten speech regulation rather than serious engagement with underlying causes. Australia has followed a path similar to other liberal democracies, particularly the United Kingdom, where complex social and political problems are treated as technical compliance issues to be managed through regulation and platform controls. This technocratic reflex may create the appearance of decisive action, but it often serves to suppress underlying core issues and dissent rather than resolving them.

Political leaders benefit from measures that signal control and unity while insulating them from scrutiny over difficult policy areas — including intelligence failures, inconsistent messaging, migration policies, and the willingness to confront antisemitism clearly and directly. Instead of addressing these contested domains openly, the impulse appears to be to manufacture surface-level harmony by constraining expression. New South Wales Premier Chris Minns said as much when, justifying his state’s new hate speech laws, he explained that the reason we don’t have fulsome speech protections like those in the U.S. is that “we want to hold together our multi-cultural community.” This approach risks entrenching resentment, weakening democratic feedback, and substituting image management for genuine problem-solving.

The rise of eSafety has proved Australia to be a testing ground for the most extreme policies of technocratic opinion-management. This is part and parcel with allowing a short 48-hour public submission window for this committee inquiry; limiting scrutiny is the name of the game, both within the operations of designating “hate speech” and in attempting to pass legislation with limited opportunity for opposition. True to recent form, our country’s leadership is attempting to force a mirage of aligned public opinion in an age of an expansive, diverse, and multicultural digital public sphere.

Australia is once again a frontrunner in the global push for speech control efforts. It is for these above reasons that I strongly oppose the bill.

Sincerely,

Andrew Lowenthal

CEO, liber-net

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0.

Over the past several years, investigative reporting has uncovered a range of coordinated efforts to suppress online speech in Western countries. Often described as the Censorship-Industrial Complex, these networks of information suppression (mostly operating under the guise of countering “disinformation” or “hate speech”) have been particularly widespread in the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union. In the EU, Germany plays a central role in this system, with numerous governmental and private actors monitoring online speech and urging ever-greater levels of content suppression.

Germany’s reputation as a hub of censorship has grown significantly in recent years. In early 2025, a US 60 Minutes investigation drew international attention for clips of dawn apartment raids by armed police on people who had posted offensive memes. In other clips, state prosecutors chuckled at the seizure of citizens’ devices and emphasized the seriousness of the offense of “insulting” a politician.

We applied the methodology liber-net had used previously in our collaboration with journalist MattTaibbi on the Twitter Files, in mapping the US-focused Censorship-Industrial Complex. With German specialists, researchers and advisers, we documented this system at a scale far beyond what we anticipated. It includes:

• a map of the leading content controls organizations in Germany, inspired by the original Censorship-Industrial Complex map (see above, or download the full-resolution image)
• a report exploring the origins, politics and scope of German content controls
• an organizations database including profiles of more than 330 government agencies, NGOs, academic centers, think tanks, foundations, and networks involved
• a grants database of more than 420 content controls awards and grants
• a series of infographics that visualize the above data

This reflects more than half a year of research and mapping. For more details of how we approached this research, read our methodology.

It is tempting to describe the more than 330 organizations as censorship advocates or even censors, but the reality is more complex. Some clearly are overtly censorious, such as the government-appointed “trusted flagger” organization HateAid. Similarly, the unironic Machine Against the Rage initiative provokes a “you can’t be serious?” response, but serious they are indeed. At the same time, our database includes more moderate initiatives, such as local governments offering small grants for counter-hate speech education as a way to combat increasing social fragmentation. 

We’ve included them all in the database and ranked them from one to five flags – with five flags indicating the worst offenders – to provide a full picture of this massive, tangled sector that maintains unusually close relationships with the government whilst presenting themselves as independent. 

There is a real problem in online discourse but we argue that heavy-handed approaches are liable to political weaponization and threaten free expression. We hope this material helps journalists, policymakers and advocates see the scale of current speech suppression, defend free expression and develop methods for dealing with beyond-the-pale content that resist political weaponization.

liber-net held two public events in November, 2025 to launch the report and databases. Full presentations from the European Parliament launch event and the Berlin launch event are available on YouTube.

Key media coverage

• Censorship Online: How the Internet Is Being Reshaped Around “Western Values” (Berliner Zeitung)
• The Censorship Industrial Complex’s Power Grip in Germany (Racket News)

• Censorship Network Germany: How the Government Uses NGOs to Undermine Freedom of Expression (Berliner Zeitung)

• German Censorship Funding Increases By 500% Since 2020 (UnHerd)

• Germany Has a Censorship Complex Bigger Than Anything We Found in the U.S. (Welt)
• Freedom of Expression Is Under Pressure in Germany (NZZ)

Das Zensurnetzwerk: Regulierung und Repression im heutigen Deutschland

Dieser Bericht wird unter einer Creative Commons Namensnennung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

In den letzten Jahren haben investigative Berichte eine Reihe koordinierter Bemühungen zur Unterdrückung von Online-Meinungsäußerungen in westlichen Ländern aufgedeckt. Diese Netzwerke zur Unterdrückung von Informationen, die oft als „Zensur-Industriekomplex” bezeichnet werden und meist unter dem Deckmantel der Bekämpfung von „Desinformation” oder „Hassrede” operieren, sind insbesondere in den Vereinigten Staaten, im Vereinigten Königreich und in der Europäischen Union weit verbreitet. In der EU spielt Deutschland eine zentrale Rolle in diesem System: Zahlreiche staatliche und private Akteure überwachen Online-Äußerungen und fordern immer strengere Maßnahmen zur Unterdrückung von Inhalten. Deutschlands Ruf als Zentrum der Zensur hat in den letzten Jahren erheblich zugenommen. Anfang 2025 erregte eine Reportage der US-Sendung „60 Minutes” mit Clips von Razzien bewaffneter Polizisten in den Wohnungen von Personen, die beleidigende Memes gepostet hatten, internationale Aufmerksamkeit. In anderen Clips lachten Staatsanwälte über die Beschlagnahmung der Geräte von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern und betonten die Schwere des Vergehens, einen Politiker „beleidigt” zu haben.

Wir haben die von liber-net in der Zusammenarbeit mit dem Journalisten Matt Taibbi bei den „Twitter Files” verwendete Methodik angewendet, um den auf die USA fokussierten Zensur-Industriekomplex abzubilden. Zusammen mit deutschen Spezialisten, Forschern und Beratern haben wir dieses System dokumentiert, dessen Umfang unsere Erwartungen bei Weitem übertrifft. Die Dokumentation umfasst:

• eine Karte der führenden Organisationen für Inhaltskontrolle in Deutschland, die von der ursprünglichen Karte des Zensur-Industriekomplex inspiriert wurde (siehe oben oder lade das Bild in voller Auflösung herunter) .
• einen Bericht, der die Ursprünge, den politischen HIntergrund und den Umfang der deutschen Kontrolle von Online-Inhalten untersucht.
• eine Datenbank mit Profilen von mehr als 330 beteiligten Regierungsbehörden, NGOs, akademischen Zentren, Thinktanks, Stiftungen und Netzwerken.
• eine Datenbank mit Fördermitteln, die mehr als 420 Zuschüsse und Fördermittel für Inhaltskontrolle umfasst,
• eine Reihe von Infografiken, die die oben genannten Daten visualisieren.

Dies ist das Ergebnis von mehr als einem halben Jahr Recherche und Kartierung. Weitere Einzelheiten zu unserer Vorgehensweise bei dieser Recherche finden Sie in unserer Methodik.

Es ist verlockend, die mehr als 330 Organisationen als Befürworter von Zensur oder sogar als Zensoren zu bezeichnen, aber die Realität ist komplexer. Einige sind eindeutig offen zensierend, wie beispielsweise die von der Regierung ernannte Organisation „HateAid”, die als Trusted Flagger fungiert. Ähnlich reagiert man auf die unironische Initiative „Machine Against the Rage” mit „Das kann doch nicht Ihr Ernst sein?”, aber ernst ist es ihnen tatsächlich. Gleichzeitig umfasst unsere Datenbank auch moderatere Initiativen, wie beispielsweise lokale Behörden, die kleine Zuschüsse für Aufklärungsmaßnahmen gegen Hassreden anbieten, um der zunehmenden gesellschaftlichen Fragmentierung entgegenzuwirken.

Wir haben sie alle in die Datenbank aufgenommen und mit einer bis fünf Flaggen bewertet – wobei fünf Flaggen die schlimmsten Verstöße anzeigen –, um ein vollständiges Bild dieses riesigen, verworrenen Sektors zu vermitteln, der ungewöhnlich enge Beziehungen zur Regierung unterhält und sich gleichzeitig als unabhängig präsentiert.

Es gibt ein echtes Problem im Online-Diskurs, aber wir sind der Meinung, dass hart durchgreifende Maßnahmen leicht zu politischen Zwecken missbraucht werden können und die freie Meinungsäußerung gefährden. Wir hoffen, dass dieses Material Journalisten, politischen Entscheidungsträgern und Aktivisten hilft, das Ausmaß der derzeitigen Unterdrückung der Meinungsfreiheit zu erkennen, die freie Meinungsäußerung zu verteidigen und Methoden zu entwickeln, um mit unzumutbaren Inhalten umzugehen, die sich nicht für politische Zwecke missbrauchen lassen.

liber-net veranstaltete im November 2025 zwei öffentliche Veranstaltungen, um den Bericht und die Datenbanken vorzustellen. Die vollständigen Präsentationen der Auftaktveranstaltung im Europäischen Parlament sowie der Veranstaltung in Berlin sind auf YouTube verfügbar.

Wesentliche Medienberichterstattung

• Zensur im Netz: Wie das Internet zur „Westlichen Wertewelt“ umgebaut wird  (Berliner Zeitung)
• Der zensurindustrielle Komplex und sein Einfluss in Deutschland (Racket News)

• „Zensurnetzwerk“ Deutschland: Wie die Regierung mit NGOs die Meinungsfreiheit untergräbt (Berliner Zeitung)

• Deutschlands Zensurfinanzierung ist seit 2020 um 500 % gestiegen (UnHerd)

• Deutschland hat Zensurkomplex, der größer ist als alles, was wir in den USA gefunden haben (Welt)
• Meinungsfreiheit unter Druck in Deutschland (NZZ)

Lowenthal, liber-net’s founder and a long-time digital rights activist, called for safeguarding civil liberties in an age of digital overreach, and underscored how escalating restrictions on discourse—for example, through censorship algorithms, de-platforming, and overbroad moderation policies—are posing an existential threat to freedom of expression.

Drawing on his experience in authoritarian countries in southeast Asia, Lowenthal warned about the rise of  the “censorship industrial complex” and expressed deep concern that Western democracies, especially the U.S. and EU, are now using their advanced infrastructure to implement censorship regimes under the guise of countering disinformation.

“What I’m seeing in the West is in some ways worse than Myanmar or Indonesia — they didn’t have the technical means for totalizing speech repression. But here, those means are available and growing daily with AI and other tools.”

TO: Federal Trade Commission

FROM: liber-net

DATE: May 21, 2025

SUBJECT: Re: Request for Public Comment Regarding Technology Platform Censorship 

liber-net would like to provide the Federal Trade Commission information related to its inquiry in question 5(b) relating to government involvement in technology platform censorship.

About liber-net

liber-net is a digital civil liberties initiative working to re-establish free speech and civil liberties as the default standard for our networked age. We are an initiative concerned about corporate and government censorship and a civil society that has discreetly pushed for and developed speech controls under the guise of combating “mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM).” 

liber-net seeks to enable free speech, both offline and online and support technologies which facilitate both individual agency, collective endeavor, and the free exchange and circulation of ideas. We accomplish this through writing, research and publication, media interventions, campaigning, events and network building. Our recent research has uncovered the extent of federal funding and involvement of content moderation as well as developing policy proposals to reverse these actions. We published the former as a searchable database and the latter as a policy paper. We are pleased to share this work with the Federal Trade Commission as it seeks to understand how consumers have been harmed by technology platform policies. 

Introduction
It is increasingly clear that the U.S. federal government had developed a large-scale system to coordinate the suppression of its citizens’ First Amendment-protected speech. Evidence supporting this assertion comes from the Twitter Files, discovery evidence in the combined cases of Murthy v. Missouri and Kennedy v. Biden, and the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. This body of evidence has demonstrated the existence of a network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academic institutions, think tanks, and major technology companies often working directly with, or under pressure from the government to control flows of information and censor online content. This network is sometimes referred to as the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

On August 27, 2024, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement confirming that the Biden administration pressured Meta to censor First Amendment-protected speech relating to Covid and the Hunter Biden laptop story. In the case of Covid, Zuckerberg revealed that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid content, including humor and satire,” and expressed regret that Facebook complied by suppressing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop after receiving a warning from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regarding a “Russian disinformation campaign.” Beginning in January 2025, Meta moved to roll back some of their speech controls on the platform, including severing relationships with third-party fact-checkers; liber-net issued a statement welcoming these developments and suggesting further reforms.

In addition to direct FBI pressure, 50 former national security officials claimed the Hunter Biden story was a “Russian information operation” in an effort to discredit it. A host of major media outlets, NGOs, and fact-checkers repeated this assertion in lockstep. The story was quickly suppressed on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, potentially influencing the outcome of the Presidential election, which was mere weeks away. 

Federal officials engaged in similar behavior through the entirety of Covid. Multiple leaked documents revealed the government placing direct pressure on social media platforms to censor online speech, including seeding or supporting academic and NGO consortiums to act as proxies to hide this government pressure. Perhaps the best-known example is the Virality Project, an endeavor initiated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and led by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). This project pushed for the censorship of academics and individuals who disagreed with  policies of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), even advising major social media partners to label true stories of vaccine side effects as “misinformation.”

Unfortunately, these high-profile incidents are likely just a small fraction of instances where the U.S. government has put its thumb on the scales to influence content moderation decisions on private platforms. While government officials have claimed that they are merely using their own speech capacities to make policy, their pressure campaigns are implicitly backed by the threat of using broader regulatory or legislative powers to bring companies to heel if they do not comply.

Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, essential for holding governments accountable and fundamentally protecting and empowering vulnerable groups. Protections for individual speech and expression apply not only to views we agree with but also to those we strongly oppose. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled in First Amendment cases that the “government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content,” and has explained that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” Indeed, as Justice Breyer noted, “it is perilous to permit the state to be the arbiter of truth,” even when such truth can actually be established (United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709, 731–32) – to say nothing of cases when truth, in fact, cannot. 

Notably, the First Amendment specifies not only government prohibition of speech, but the mere abridging thereof. The writers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights deeply understood that the ability to freely speak, write, and publish is a foundational element of human nature and is therefore an inalienable right. The protections they enshrined in the First Amendment remain some of the strongest bulwarks against authoritarian censorship and tyranny ever devised.

The broad pattern of government overreach we have witnessed over recent years demonstrates a strong need to reinvigorate free speech protections across the United States. liber-net is pleased to share a series of ideas for how the federal government might achieve this goal, complimenting our recent research into digital free speech-related legislation at the State level.

Our Federal MDM Funding Database

liber-net has built a searchable database of nearly 900 awards issued by the U.S. federal government covering the topics of “mis-, dis-, or malinformation” (MDM) and other content moderation initiatives from 2012 to 2025. These awards have each been manually reviewed, with the intention of providing nuance and an alternative to the fishing-with-dynamite style of attempted administrative reforms.

Not everything in this database can be labeled a “censorship initiative.” Rather, the database tells the story of how the U.S. Federal Government became the lead player in developing the anti-disinformation field, skewing funding towards top-down, expert-driven, content moderation. Among the many problems with this approach is the assumed omnipotence of those doing the moderation, to say nothing of the weaponization of “countering-disinformation” to attack political opponents.

The database includes a wide range of awards: from projects that sought to actively remove (or scale systems for removing) content from the Internet or report the results to officials, to programs that sought to leverage machine learning to detect “deepfakes” with no obvious plans to tilt the political scales.

Our methodology involved reviewing over 1,100 grants indexed on public funding databases including usaspending.gov (the main database for tracking historical grant, loan, and contract data), grants.gov (which displays current opportunities), sam.gov (a website tracking registration records, which include contract award data), the Federal Audit Clearinghouse (a repository of standardized Single Audits from organizations receiving federal funds,) and a variety of agency-specific award databases such as nsf.gov/awardsearch/ (NSF-specific), reporter.nih.gov (NIH-specific), defense.gov/News/Contracts (DOD-specific), and foreignassistance.gov (State Department/USAID-specific).

We primarily used keyword searches to uncover MDM and other information control initiatives revealing a host of universities, NGOs, and private actors undertaking content-flagging and moderation activity, education programs, and surveillance. Using a relational database system, we compiled information about both the grant and the recipient, the federal government agency source, funding amounts, types of activity funded, a rating, dates, relevant links, base country, and more.

While this database includes grants and contracts as far back as 2010, our primary focus was those from 2016 to the present day. This was based on the hypothesis that the anti-disinformation field rapidly expanded in the wake of the Trump election and the Brexit referendum; our findings confirm this hypothesis. 

Proposals to End Government Coercion of Social Media Platforms and Restrictions on Legal Speech

Much of the justification for government censorship has occurred under the rubric of countering so-called  “mis-, dis-, and malinformation” (MDM) and “hate speech.” An immediate step should be to remove the concept of “malinformation” from all government documents and policies. This concept is deeply flawed, as it often involves factual or true information presented in a context that is inconvenient for another social actor or interest group.

The concepts of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” should only come under the purview of the U.S. government when they clearly involve defamation, fraud, criminal activity, or large-scale foreign interference operations. Even then, caution is essential, as recent years have seen legitimate domestic dissent frequently labeled as “Russian disinformation” or other delegitimizing terms as a pretext for censorship. Indeed, the First Amendment creates “breathing space,” protecting hyperbole and even false statements “inevitable in free debate.” This applies even to deliberately false statements said with “actual malice,” as the Constitution does not allow for prosecutions for libel on the government as an entity.  (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 [1964]).

The second key justification for censorship has been claiming the need to counter “hate speech,” an inherently subjective concept. Courts have ruled that restrictions on hate speech would conflict with the First Amendment’s protection of the freedom of expression, and thus “hate speech” receives constitutional protection. The federal government cannot and should not police “hate speech,” except in limited cases of true threats, incitement to imminent lawless action, discriminatory harassment, or defamation. In all other cases, it is simply not within the purview of the government to police legal online speech. We do not mean to suggest that hate speech is not problematic in online spaces, but rather that it is not the government’s role to act as an arbiter of such speech. Other, more creative modalities that do not infringe upon the First Amendment need to be employed to tackle these challenges.

Unfortunately, the federal government has engaged in unprecedented attempts to control information flows and public opinion over the past few years, attempting to circumvent First Amendment limitations via the use of NGO, academic and think tank intermediaries who present themselves as research or policy initiatives but in fact frequently flag content to social media platforms for labeling and removal. 

Allowing free and rigorous debate within the marketplace of ideas, where disfavored speech is countered by favored speech, is the only acceptable – albeit, imperfect – alternative to centralized control of information. The Federal Trade Commission should prioritize reversing the digital speech restrictions and policies implemented in the past by:

1. Declaring that it will be the policy of the FTC to uphold First Amendment-protected speech across all of its Bureaus, policy making activities, enforcement actions, etc. 
2. Promulgate regulations to limit the ability of Interactive Computer Service (“ICS”) companies from removing users, label content as misinformation, or share user data, except in specific cases like criminal investigations or threats to public safety
3. Pursue legal actions and policies to promote the concept that the government violates the First Amendment when it privately solicits a third party to remove another person’s lawful political speech from an online platform, and move legal precedent away from a focus on the line between “persuasion” and “coercion,” since requests from government officials are inherently intimidating

Special attention should also be paid to Section 230 of the Communications Act, a critical law that generally protects ICS’ like social media companies from liability for user-generated content on their platforms. This legal shield allows companies like Meta (Facebook), Twitter (now X), and Google (YouTube) to host a vast range of content without liability for defamation, unlike news outlets, while simultaneously permitting them to moderate content by removing what they determine to be harmful or inappropriate without being liable for censorship claims. Social media companies as we know them would likely not exist without the delicate balance created by this section of law and the jurisprudence it has inspired.

Social media companies’ use of Section 230 has sparked heated debate over the past decade or so, as the role of these influential companies in controlling the flow of news and information has grown. Some critics have argued that these platforms have overreached in moderating content by removing posts or banning users without transparency, acts which potentially violate the spirit, if not the letter of Section 230. Others believe platforms should bear more responsibility, especially when their services are used to spread disfavored information. This has led to calls for reform from across the partisan spectrum, with proposals ranging from limiting the immunity provided by Section 230, to enhancing transparency in content moderation practices, to repealing the law altogether.

Should social media companies wish to continue curating the content on their platforms (as is their right), then the FTC should consider antitrust options to ensure that diverse viewpoints can be shared across a range of channels. While Section 230 has been vital in fostering the growth of social media, its future may include reforms aimed at addressing the complexities of moderating speech in the digital age. 

The following options should be considered as these changes are debated:

1. The FTC should collaborate with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to produce a collaborative report evaluating antitrust proposals that could break up large social media and technology companies and reset the market so as to create space for a wider range of platforms that could better express the diversity of viewpoints within the country
2. To the extent currently possible, encourage or require all large social media companies to submit to the FTC on a bi-annual basis detailed reports which the FTC shall make public 30 days after receipt, which must include: 
   • Descriptions of their content management and terms of use policies; 
   • Use of third party fact-checking organizations;
   • Who or what employees or systems are used to enforce their policies; and,
   • Detailed, fully de-identified information on the number of moderated or affected posts, the number of impacted individual users, and justifications for any actions taken.
3. Create an office within the FTC with the unique authority to enforce all new laws, regulations, and reporting requirements relating to large social media companies.

Conclusion

The previous  administration developed and unleashed a wide scale government-sponsored censorship effort. This modern, savvy system of information controls has been led by agencies and offices from DHS/CISA to the NSF, FBI, the White House, and the National Institutes of Health. Over the past few years, U.S. government funding of various projects to counter mis-and disinformation (“MDM”) has surged into the hundreds of millions of dollars, with federal money seeping into a variety of NGOs, for-profit government contractors, and nearly every corner of academia.

After years of tension, it is now widely acknowledged that the counter-MDM movement and “fact-checking” campaigns to censor and shape the speech of U.S. citizens violated core American values and norms of free expression. We believe the Federal Trade Commission is in a unique position to reverse some of the harmful information suppression initiatives of the previous administration. We thank the Commission for its consideration on this important matter.

Sincerely,

Andrew Lowenthal

CEO, liber-net

liber-net has built a searchable database of nearly 900 awards issued by the U.S. federal government covering the topics of “mis-, dis-, or malinformation” (MDM) and other content moderation initiatives from 2010 to 2025. These awards have each been manually reviewed, with the intention of providing nuance and an alternative to the fishing-with-dynamite style of attempted administrative reforms.

Not everything in this database can be labeled a “censorship initiative.” Rather, the database tells the story of how the U.S. Federal Government became the lead player in developing the anti-disinformation field, skewing funding towards top-down, expert-driven, content moderation as the solution to an over-supply of sometimes-unreliable information. Among the many problems with this approach is the assumed omnipotence of those doing the moderation, to say nothing of the weaponization of “countering-disinformation” to attack political enemies.

The database includes a wide range of awards: from projects that sought to actively remove (or scale systems for removing) content from the Internet or report the results to officials, to programs that sought to leverage machine learning to detect “deepfakes” with no obvious plans to tilt the political scales. While the latter project might in fact be a value-add, or at least neutral, both sit within the broader “anti-disinformation” ideology and are documented here.

In our review, we deliberately excluded innocuous grants, such as those not linked to recent political controversies and awards with language indicating they were not part of the dominant anti-disinformation ideology. An NIH grant to study “E-cigarette-related nicotine misinformation on social media,” for example, is an example of an award that was not included in our database.

We reviewed over 1,100 grants indexed on public funding databases including usaspending.gov (the main database for tracking historical grant, loan, and contract data), grants.gov (which displays current opportunities), sam.gov (a website tracking registration records, which include contract award data), the Federal Audit Clearinghouse (a repository of standardized Single Audits from organizations receiving federal funds,) and a variety of agency-specific award databases such as nsf.gov/awardsearch/ (NSF-specific), reporter.nih.gov (NIH-specific), defense.gov/News/Contracts (DOD-specific), and foreignassistance.gov (State Department/USAID-specific). 

We primarily used keyword searches to uncover MDM and other information control initiatives revealing a host of universities, NGOs, and private actors undertaking content-flagging and moderation activity, education programs, and surveillance. Using a relational database system, we compiled information about both the grant and the recipient, the federal government agency source, funding amounts, types of activity funded, a rating, dates, relevant links, base country, and more.

While this database includes grants and contracts as far back as 2010, our primary focus was those from 2016 to the present day. This was based on the hypothesis that the anti-disinformation field rapidly expanded in the wake of the Trump election and the Brexit referendum; our findings confirm this hypothesis. If, or as, more information emerges we will continue to add awards to the database as far back as 2008.

We note that nearly 150 MDM-related grants, mostly from the State Department, were awarded to “Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees.” Through some diligent and creative searching we were able to find names for a handful of these award recipients. However, most remain anonymous. It could be the case that this title is used when there are multiple organizations involved in the project; alternately, it could be the case that the State Department may not want the names of some grant recipients to be made public for any number of reasons.

As of today, there remain over 140 active federal awards for MDM and other content moderation initiatives. It is very much a live issue, as many of these awards continue to be paused or canceled. We are doing our best to track and update the database accordingly. Such historical documentation is important. With the recent political changes in the U.S., much of the content control funding is shifting to the U.K., the E.U., and private philanthropy. Knowing who the past key players were helps us identify possible new protagonists.

Rating system

In order to appropriately contextualize and filter such a large dataset, we set in place a rubric for rating all awards by how egregiously they appear to violate principles of digital rights and free expression, on a scale of one (least) to five (most) red flags. The criteria are as follows:

• Projects that pursued takedowns of Internet content, or flagging with intent to have content removed,
• Initiatives that included a high level of personal surveillance or privacy violations, such as tracking individual location data or collecting personal information,
• Projects with strong government collaboration, particularly with military, police, and intelligence services,
• Content-flagging and “fact-checking” initiatives, particularly those that assumed a top-down or expert class monopoly on truth,
• Projects that worked in real-time to instantaneously rank, evaluate, or respond to content, as they sought to scale the speed of surveillance and response that violated privacy or assumed they could achieve god-like knowledge,
• Projects with a high level of automation that placed undue faith in the competency of their algorithms, and as they sought to scale often biased moderation to a whole new level, or
• Projects that set out to protect authorities from legitimate criticism or critique by labeling such criticism as “disinformation” or “harassment.”

Updates and collaborations

We will continue to update the database over the coming months. We seek to be as accurate as possible; if you find errors or awards that are missing, please contact us.

If you are an academic interested in working with this data, please reach out. As a counterbalance to the many journals and Internet Studies researchers publishing papers promoting anti-disinformation programming and top-down content controls, we hope there might be an appetite for a critical meta-analysis of the sector.

Resources and articles

• An article further outlining the work can be found here.
• A collection of visualizations of this data is available here.
• A report by The Free Press featuring our research was published on April 16, 2025.

It has become increasingly clear that a network of NGOs, academic institutions, think tanks, and technology companies worked directly with, or were pressured by the U.S government to censor online content. The scale and scope of this operation demonstrates the urgent need to fortify free speech protections at the federal level.

This document, which complements our recent research into digital free speech-related legislation at the state level, lays out a series of discussion points and policy proposals for how a future administration might accomplish these critical reforms.

We also include an overview of the U.S. government funding landscape for information suppression programming across all departments, agencies, and federal institutes, outlining key trends and takeaways from liber-net’s research into active and recent historical grants.

The report considers policy and personnel reforms across the federal government, covering the areas of government coercion, social media, public health censorship, protecting children, and realigning US foreign relations.

We include several proposed executive orders, integrates existing ideas from previously introduced legislation, feature a list of important digital free speech-related government positions for political appointment, and end with an appendix of free-speech related bills introduced over the past few Congresses that could serve as models for future efforts.

Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, essential for holding governments accountable and fundamentally protecting and empowering vulnerable groups. It is always in the interests of citizens to protect the First Amendment, regardless of state of political discourse or which party controls the government.

This full set of recommendations is intended to contribute to a broad and growing movement across the country and the world to protect the first and most fundamental principle of human liberty: free speech

A PDF of the proposals is available for download here.

Originally released in November 2024, our Federal Policy Proposals to Protect Digital Free Speech in the United States was most recently updated on March 3, 2025.

We welcome Mr. Zuckerberg’s expression of regret and see this as an opportunity for reform and to reestablish trust with users and the community-at-large. The recommendations outlined below would improve transparency and accountability and reassure the public of Facebook’s future commitment to free speech and expression.

We recognize that under current legislation it is Meta’s First Amendment right to moderate content as it so chooses, as such these suggestions aim to highlight how Meta might better utilize that prerogative. Longer term there are questions regarding Section 230 and possible common carrier status that need to be resolved. 

The recommendations are as follows:

1. Appoint an independent team to investigate politically or ideologically motivated content suppression on Meta platforms that may have been conducted as part of efforts to counter misinformation and disinformation, whether alone or in collaboration with government, academia, or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
2. Publicly disclose all nonpublic portals used for communication with government officials, and close these portals except in cases involving criminal activity.
3. Make public any short- or long-term agreements where government, non-profit or academic researchers have been granted special or exclusive access to Meta product data or APIs.
4. Commit to publicly disclosing current and past communication portals between Meta employees and NGO or government officials related to content moderation of First Amendment-protected speech. A new section of the Facebook website should be created to catalog this information and make it permanently available to the public.
5. Make available all internal communications between Meta employees and U.S. government officials related to any free speech-related lawsuit, such as Murthy v. Missouri.
6. Dissolve the Oversight Board and develop a decentralized, multiple-viewpoint oversight system. Zuckerberg’s letter acknowledged significant failures in content moderation that the current Oversight Board did not address.
   
7. Remove existing “fact-checks”, flags, tags, or other algorithmic ranking methods relating to legal speech from user posts, and end privileged “fact-checking” access to politicized organizations. If real-time annotation is needed, we suggest an organic and representative crowd-sourced system that can display multiple viewpoints.
8. Desist from posting site-wide government announcements and politicized interactive user content, such election announcements and profile frames. Government announcements should be reserved solely for catastrophic events like natural disasters or instances of imminent danger to life or property.
9. Meta should aim to set new industry norms by revealing the revolving door between the federal government and Silicon Valley, committing to the yearly public disclosure of current employees who have worked in a government agency at GS-14, equivalent, or above, for two or more years, and where they have worked.
10. Strengthen existing whistleblower protection policies to explicitly cover current or former employees who expose content moderation policy violations within Meta.
11. Cease all corporate-level financial contributions to political candidates, parties, and committees, given Meta’s massive size and ability to influence the global flow of information and the political consciousness of its users.
12. Broaden transparency reporting through Meta’s “Transparency Center” by:
    • Committing to release quarterly public reports detailing the volume of political posts and how they are moderated, allowing multiple independent third-party audits of these reports; and
    • Making internal content ranking algorithms open-source and allowing independent third-party stakeholders to analyze and provide feedback.
13. Empower users by reimagining the Facebook timeline as well as other similar components of Meta products where information is curated by algorithm for users, specifically:
    • Restoring “Most Recent” as a default timeline option, allowing users to easily see an uncurated, non-algorithmic, chronological timeline on the homepage;
    • Developing robust new tools that allow users to filter their own timeline based on their own preferences, instead of deploying top-down content moderation and filtering; and
    • Allowing users to view, in a simple and easily digestible way, the process behind the curation of their feeds.

Below is our letter to the Australian parliament stating opposition to the proposed “Misinformation Bill”:

TO:
Committee Secretary
Environment and Communications Legislation Committee
Department of the Senate
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600
AUSTRALIA

FROM:
Andrew Lowenthal, CEO, liber-net
Hobart, Tasmania

29 September 2024

RE: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 [Provisions]

Dear Senators,

My name is Andrew Lowenthal, a native-born Australian and longtime proponent of free speech across the globe. I have worked in human rights and technology for more than 25 years. For almost 18 years I led EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific digital free expression non-profit. Most recently I worked with Matt Taibbi on the #TwitterFiles, including writing the Australian Twitter Files, and led the mapping of the Censorship-Industrial Complex for Racket News. I also helped coordinate the Westminster Declaration, a new free speech manifesto signed by a large number of high-profile artists and intellectuals. 

I was a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and Film Studies Center, and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. 

I am now CEO of liber-net, a digital civil liberties initiative that combats digital authoritarianism and works to reestablish free speech and civil liberties as the norm for our networked age. We oppose systems of online censorship, their growing social acquiescence, and the accelerating surveillance regimes operating in and through information technology.

With this experience in hand, I write to express my opposition to the proposed Misinformation Bill in the strongest possible terms. Its origins are fundamentally and irreparably flawed. The bill should be immediately stopped. 

Summary of Criticisms:

The bill builds on the voluntary disinformation code developed by DIGI in cooperation with First Draft. The leadership of First Draft participated in an Aspen Institute exercise to coordinate how to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, two months before the story broke publicly. The bill extends a code written by an organisation that itself took part in a disinformation operation, one that potentially impacted the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged that Facebook (who also participated in the exercise) wrongly suppressed the story, and censored legitimate Covid related content at the behest of the government.

The bill permits labelling content as “misleading” or “false” based on what is “reasonably verifiable,” but its broad definitions of misinformation and disinformation may also include truthful yet controversial or politically inconvenient content. 

The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill makes the Government an arbiter of truth, while hypocritically exempting select professional groups in media, science, and academia. While small improvements have been made since its initial introduction, the bill remains fundamentally flawed and authoritarian in nature. It would grant sweeping powers to the Australian government to regulate and control online content, risking the suppression of legitimate speech, dissent, and political discourse under the guise of protecting citizens. The desire to create a government-sanctioned, sanitised web content sets a dangerous precedent for global internet freedom, attempting to do for Australia what countries such as China have demanded and often received from Big Tech companies with a financial interest in operating there.

The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill expands government censorship to include questioning government health measures, stifling any legitimate debate and criticism of public policies. The major shifts in COVID-19 narratives the world has experienced since 2020 illustrate how definitions of “misinformation” can rapidly evolve, making strict censorship programs as proposed in the bill entirely unworkable.  Cumulatively, the proposals in this bill would have a strong chilling effect on journalism, as journalists and commentators fear self-censorship due to potential legal repercussions, limiting investigative journalism.

Detailed Criticisms:

The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill 2024 would radically expand the government’s ability to control and manipulate online speech and is part of a broader global push to reshape the online domain.

The Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill extends the voluntary disinformation code developed by the Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), whose members include Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, and previously Twitter/X. In the words of DIGI, the legislation “would enable the ACMA to have a longer-term mandate to oversee The Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, which DIGI developed and administers.” DIGI developed this code in partnership with US/UK NGO First Draft, now the Information Futures Lab. First Draft’s Asia-Pacific office was housed at the UTS Center for Media in Transition. AMCA’s report on the “adequacy of digital platforms’ disinformation and news quality measures” references First Draft more than half a dozen times, as does ACMA’s paper which guided misinformation code development.

First Draft (now the Information Future’s Lab at Brown University) is a key node in the global Censorship-Industrial Complex. Among other activities, First Draft participated in the Aspen Institute workshop that rehearsed how to suppress the now-verified Hunter Biden laptop story mentioned above. Two months later, the New York Post broke the story only for it to be effectively scrubbed from all major social media platforms as “misinformation.”  

First Draft was also the only NGO in the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a consortium of legacy media organisations including the BBC, The New York Times, Facebook, Twitter, and The Washington Post, among others. TNI coordinated to steer the prevailing Covid narrative in favour of the guidelines and mandates imposed by most major governments and to suppress dissent. A lawsuit against TNI has shown that TNI claimed it was misinformation to suggest that “COVID vaccines are not effective in preventing infection.”

The fact that the bill extends the work of this clearly dishonest NGO means it should be immediately scrapped.

Through the Australian Twitter Files, I discovered that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) requested Twitter remove 222 pandemic-related tweets: often jokes, commentary, scientific debate, and information that turned out to be true. Rather than relying on Australian scientists, the DHA referred Twitter to Yahoo! News and USA Today “fact-checks” to justify their censorship requests. FOIA documents revealed there were more than 4,000 such requests to social media. 

When asked for comment, the DHA stated that it was merely referring content to social media platforms for “review against their terms of service” and that “any action taken by digital platforms in response to these referrals was a matter for those platforms.” It sought to clarify that the Department “no longer refers COVID-19 misinformation or disinformation to digital platforms.”

The Twitter Files show that the Australian Twitter staff enthusiastically cooperated with the DHA to enable censorship. These same people also contributed to drafting the voluntary misinformation code. That code, which Twitter signed up to at the time, failed to protect free speech and instead shut down legitimate debate during Covid. The revelation of these close, interconnected relationships reveals a deeply concerning nexus between past censorship efforts and the latest iteration of the Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill.

The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill would also allow the Australian Media and Communications Alliance (ACMA) to levy fines of up to five percent of a company’s global turnover if they deem a platform has taken insufficient steps to remove “disinformation.” The existing eSafety regulations, which also sit within ACMA but do not cover disinformation, can already levy fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars per day, as per the Commissioner’s recent failed attempt to penalise X due to its refusal to censor images of a highly-publicised attack. The likely result of such harsh fines is that platforms will become more risk-averse and target for scrubbing legitimate Australian content, discussions, and information for fear of the costs.

Elites in academia and mainstream media have been exempted from the bill. This is particularly ironic as one of the main sources of misinformation after the recent Bondi Junction stabbing was a mainstream television news station which misnamed the attacker. Exempting academics from the bill is equally objectionable, since recent investigations into the Censorship-Industrial Complex revealed that several elite academic institutions are at the forefront of the new restrictions on free speech. 

Despite some changes from the previous version, Section 14 of the bill still contains an overly-broad definition of the critical term “serious harm.” ACMA would retain the authority to censor information that could be deemed “imminently harmful to the Australian economy including harm to public confidence in the banking system or financial markets”- an authority so broad as to cover everything from daily water-cooler conversations to professional financial advice and analysis. The latest definition of “serious harm” also retains any questions to the efficacy of public health measures, which is particularly unacceptable given the objectionable record of public health officials over the past four years.  Importantly, the bill only requires that the speech in question “contribute” to harm, which leaves open an enormous potential for abusive interpretation to the government’s benefit. 

Section 13’s definition of misinformation would cover content “provided on the digital service to one or more end-users in Australia,” which would include content created by non-Australians. As shown in the Australian Twitter Files, the Department of Home Affairs used the notion of “circulating a claim in Australia’s digital information environment” to justify requests to censor non-Australians. 

Conclusion

Of the many objectionable portions of this bill, what stands out from my point of view is the adaptation of a code written by First Draft, an organisation that took part in a disinformation operation that potentially impacted the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. But inherent to all the objectionable proposals in the bill is the notion that government officials are always and everywhere capable of objectively determining reality and declaring it to the citizenry as such. Aside from the fact that the entire history of complex, bureaucratically-managed society disproves this notion, it is deeply insulting to the intelligence of all Australians to suggest that a select class of officials in ACMA or any of the digital platforms covered by this proposal hold reasoning faculties superior to that of any informed citizen. 

Furthermore, it is practically impossible for the Australian public to know the backgrounds, qualifications, incentives, and political biases of fact-checking officials and their supervisors. Truth, genius, and objectivity are qualities that exist in varying degrees across the entire human family. They cannot and never will be exclusive to any particular group of people, especially in any professional, class, or status context. Allowing free and rigorous debate within the marketplace of ideas, wherein disfavoured speech is countered by favoured speech, is the only acceptable, albeit imperfect, alternative to centralised control of information as proposed in this dangerous bill.

Despite assurances to the contrary, the misinformation bill violates Australia’s commitment to freedom of opinion and expression, as laid out in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Australia is a signatory. The bill’s imprecise language leaves it open to abuse by the government of the day and unelected bureaucrats. As Australian Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay noted: “If we fail to ensure robust safeguards for freedom of expression online, then the measures taken to combat misinformation and disinformation could themselves risk undermining Australia’s democracy and freedoms.” And as former Deputy Chief Health Officer Dr. Nick Coatsworth recently wrote in a tweet: “Misinformation causes harm.  The weaponisation of misinformation as a term to shut down debate causes even greater harm.  This bill does the latter.”

A range of laws already exist to combat the kinds of issues the government seeks to address – from false advertising legislation, and defamation law, to the already overly broad eSafety legislation. Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society and is essential for holding governments accountable. Free speech fundamentally protects and empowers vulnerable groups. Individual speech and expression protections are not just for views we agree with but also for views we strongly oppose. I urge the Senate to immediately cease any further development of this bill. 

Sincerely,

Andrew Lowenthal

CEO, liber-net

liber-net is proud to announce the publication of its latest report, detailing the status of digital free speech-related legislation and legal actions across the 50 U.S. states from 2019 to the present. This report is the culmination of several months of dedicated legal and legislative research, offering a new look into the evolving landscape of free speech in America. With lawmakers and courts grappling with issues surrounding speech rights, censorship, misinformation, and content moderation, this report serves as a  resource for policymakers, legal professionals, and engaged citizens alike.

The full report is available now on our website, offering a comprehensive analysis of the key bills, court rulings, and major figures involved in shaping free speech policies across the nation. Details on legal and legislative activity in each state can be accessed by clicking on the map on the landing page, or by selecting from the list of states. A PDF summarizing our findings is also available for view and download here.

Each bill covered in the full report includes essential details such as:

• The year the bill was introduced
• A link to the official bill page on the state legislature’s website
• The bill number, the lead sponsor, and their party affiliation
• The current status of the bill

The full report also highlights key policymakers who have been instrumental in shaping the future of free speech. These individuals include legislators who have either successfully passed speech-related bills or have introduced multiple pieces of relevant legislation, whether in favor of free speech protections or advocating for more restrictions. The report also spotlights attorneys general who have been especially active in free speech-related battles.

Several state attorneys general have been at the forefront of defending free speech, taking action through amicus briefs, leading multi-state lawsuits, and making public stands on issues like content moderation and online platform regulation. Their efforts in these high-profile legal battles have not only shaped the interpretation and enforcement of free speech rights at the state level but have also played a pivotal role in influencing national policy and the broader legal landscape.

As free speech becomes an increasingly critical issue in public discourse, it is more important than ever to understand the laws and legal mechanisms that govern this right. Our report offers a balanced, comprehensive look at these mechanisms, helping readers gain a clearer picture of the policies that impact their freedom of expression. 

Whether you’re an advocate for free speech, a legal professional, or simply a concerned citizen, this report provides valuable insights into the current state of free speech in America and what it means for the future. We hope this research effort will help bring some clarity to this complex maze of federalism at a time when free speech faces extraordinary threats across the globe.

View Digital Free Speech and Censorship Across the U.S. States: Legislation and Legal Actions, 2019-Present