Speech
Afroman Wins Defamation Lawsuit Brought by Adams County Sheriff’s Deputies Over Videos and Songs About 2022 Home Raid
A jury just ruled that making songs about what police did in your own home is exactly the kind of speech the First Amendment was built for.
Brazil Launches Mandatory Age Verification Law for Online Platforms
Brazil built a national age verification system, called it child protection, and buried the surveillance infrastructure in the footnotes.
Chat Control: EU Parliament Blocked One Form of Mass Surveillance, but Is Pushing for Another
Parliament won the battle over mass scanning, but the version of this law that actually passes could still harm encrypted communication forever.
UK Speech Regulator Chief Melanie Dawes Says US Free Speech Lawsuits Are “a Sign That We’re Having the Impact We Want”
The woman tasked with policing the internet has decided that getting sued across the Atlantic isn’t a setback, it’s a performance review.
Spain’s HODIO Program to Monitor and Rank Social Media Platforms on “Hate Speech”
Spain’s government will now grade tech companies on speech removal twice a year, with the same officials defining what counts as hate setting the scores.
Florida Gives Tech Platforms Deadline for Age ID Checks
Uthmeier’s April 8 deadline gives platforms one month to build the identity surveillance infrastructure that Florida’s child-protection framing was designed to make you forget about.
Qatar Arrests 313 Over Iran Missile Attack Videos
313 people documented what a missile attack on their country looked like in real time, and their government’s response was to make that a crime.
Australia VPN Boom as “Age Verification” Law Takes Effect
The law successfully drove millions of Australians to VPNs and unregulated sites.
UK Parliament Plans ISP Blocking and Age Verification Powers
The bill’s child protection framing obscures what it actually creates: a legal architecture for government-controlled internet access that has no natural stopping point.
New Zealand Parliamentary Committee Recommends Social Media Ban for Under-16s
Another country is moving toward getting in line with the agenda.
BC Tribunal Clears Student of “Hate Speech” Charge Over COVID-19 Video
A student who shared a pandemic video in a private chat walked away cleared, with a tribunal drawing a line that offended feelings and illegal discrimination are not the same thing.
How Grok’s Football Roasts Put X in the Crosshairs of Britain’s Online Censorship Law
The episode handed British regulators the pretext they’d been waiting for to wire censorship directly into the software itself.