Danish citizens are reporting that some ISPs were displaying a National Police Cyber Crime Center (NC3) message on the Bitchute.com domain, blocking access to free speech video sharing platform BitChute on the grounds that it contains “dangerous information” and “misinformation” related to COVID-19.
Users of the providers Stofa and Telmore were temporarily unable to access BitChute and were presented with a message noting that the platform has been blocked by NC3.
The full translated message states:
“STOP
The National Police Cyber Crime Center (NC3) has blocked the homepage that your browser has tried to access contact as there is reason to assume that from the website commits a violation of criminal law, which has a background in or connection with the covid-19 epidemic in Denmark.
The website is blocked due to a ruling from the court. If the police have decided to block a website, the possession will be within 24 hours from the blocking implementation submitted to the court.
If you are the registrant of the website that is blocked, can you contact the National Police at NC3 at [email protected].
Information on criminal offenses on the Internet can passed on to the police website at www.politi.dk.
Further information about the covid-19 situation in Denmark can be found at https://politi.dk/coronavirus-i-danmark”
The DNS block appears to have been be site-wide meaning that some Danish citizens weren’t just being prevented from viewing alleged COVID-19 misinformation on BitChute – they were being blocked from viewing any BitChute videos, regardless of the topic.
Danish Twitter users have blasted the censorship by comparing Denmark to China, describing it as a “totally fascist police state,” and questioning whether the block violates Denmark’s constitution which forbids censorship.
The blocking of BitChute in Denmark follows some ISPs in other countries such as Australia also blocking access to the video-sharing platform.
Big Tech companies have also implemented far-reaching censorship rules against BitChute.
Last year, Twitter blocked all links to the site and then this year, it banned users from posting links to BitChute before eventually lifting the blocks.
Google also banned a third-party app for BitChute from its Play Store – a move that impacted more than 100,000 users of the app.
