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.
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.
Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.
"Going through" doesn't necessarily imply store and forward. It could be tapped elsewhere and shipped to WVA. fwiw the idea of running a network in order to tap it is hardly new. The British operated largest telegraph network in the world in the 1800's for that reason.
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.
Then again, Egypt was definitely driven by Western agitators, as was the case Iran recently. Iran probably got Russian tech to trace starlink users during the blackout which put a target on many Western assets in Iran. I'm not saying the Iran government didn't also kill and torture independent actors nor that I support state violence (against its citizens, in this case). Just saying that any government will use violence to stay in power and to ensure regime change doesn't happen outside of whatever system the state upholds.
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?
It probably won't work. At least, it won't do anything interesting. It exists mostly to make Trump look anti-woke, and maybe to subvert other countries' policy a little bit.
This is not an administration that does technological innovation. Trump's "social media site" started as just rebranded Mastodon.
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.
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.
What limits? You can do pretty much what you want but make sure you can defend yourself in the court. I feel there is a bit of a disconnect in terms where people get the news where in US you kind of expect biggest news providers to be biassed, eg Fox, hence reliance on social media. In Europe gov media is quite strong and objective, and the idea that it restricts something is odd. A great example is the banning of RT, they lost licenses IMO in multiple countries, but the agency was spreading a lot of lies. IMO what we all want is objective news reporting.
I have heard of RT lying but I have never actually seen examples of specific lies. Is there any list out there where they list any specific ones? If they do it a lot, it should be quite easy, no?
Sad that the United States are pushing so hard to encourage the propagation of propaganda & lies. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.
It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. We know, we had the Nazis. Seems the US still has to learn a lesson or two, considering the current political situation. Hope it will not be as bad
Right, I guess the people there just magically all woke up one day hating the jews and voting in Hitler. Crazy how that happens. Why do political factions even spend money on campaigning? Those silly geese.
Wait, your operating theory on why the NSDAP became popular is because they... tricked everyone into hating jews?
You are not only entirely misunderstanding why the NSDAP appealed to people, you're also completely misunderstanding what post WWI Germany was - a republic hastily brought about with little care so that Woodrow Wilson would offer Germany peace based on his 14 points (he didn't). It was doomed to fail from the very beginning. If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists.
The idea that freedom of speech was what led to its downfall does not stand up to even the smallest scrutiny. Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.
people are sheep mate... in 2026 with the social media at politicians disposal you can convince most people of just about anything you want. current politics in the US is basically cultism. if trump says that Russians are now great guys, 99% of people who grew up during the cold war that are "maga" now are going "oh, what a turnaround, love them Russians now."
same goes the other way, Germany can return to 1930s in the time one political campaign starts and ends given the state of society at the moment.
I am not advocating for limits on free speech, I am a free speech absolutist. and with that come the consequences we see not just in the united states but around the world. but to think that allowing anyone to say anything cannot lead to absolute catastrophies/hatred/... in the year of our lord 2026 is very misguided...
Nit: If you're filing a flight plan, you do it with the country you're departing from. Even if you're piloting an aircraft departing into the US, it wouldn't have any effect on operations if you couldn't reach US websites. There's also several alternative ways for pilots to file flight plans outside of the web.
(The flight plans get passed between countries via AFTN/AMHS, which are dedicated telecommunications networks independent of the Internet.)
There's also several different ways to transmit the passenger manifest to CBP - including over a CBP-provided VPN and IATA "Type B" messages sent through ARINC/SITA.
The network for Type B messages is also independent of the Internet (it was developed 60 years ago).
And before that, looks like the domain was used to give updates from the House Majority Leader (e.g. things like voting info, social security updates, legislative changes, tax info etc).
Amusingly, there typically are various exceptions made for those. All technical and whatnot, but for example, Iran is heavily sanctioned, but has all sorts of exceptions for stuff like that precisely because of the impact it can have.
Weird title, but worthy of discussion. From the little info available so far this appears to be little more than political posturing. If you want to fight censorship, an "online portal" to access all the censored content is the wrongest possible way to go about it. But we'll see.
I wonder if American citizens from states which requires age verification to access porn (25 US states today) will be fine with it or these states will start demanding ID to access freedom.gov. It would be delicious irony.
There is a lot more blocked than porn and neo-nazis. This will also allow access to sites that block access because of laws: Imgur is not accessible from the uk, nor are a lot of smaller US news sites. Ofcom are after 4 chan too.
Government mandated uncensored free porn access. I wonder if this will this also apply in US states requiring age verification to legally access such content?
It is like ultimate throwing stones in a glass house. Americans are dependent on other countries following IP and copyright protections and yet they will go great lengths to undermine it because it is short term beneficial for their companies.
Better than the alternative where they don't, I suppose. Kind of like how for some political things you have to use yandex to search because US search companies suppress the results.
What's the point of the EU hosting an empty page? While tons freedoms and content is legal in the USA that isn't in the EU I don't know of any opposites.
I would have loved to be in the meeting where they were wondering how to replace the highly costly and complex influence tool that was USAID, and then someone said:
I think the states themselves don't block porn, but require sites to verify users' ages, and sites would rather block access in those states than comply. (although not sure how they do that from a technical standpoint, based on IP geolocation, perhaps?)
The world will be exposed to hardcore pornography, child endangerment, AI CSAM, and militant algorithms by force, if needed!
Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine (2018) directly claims the internet is “the most effective weapon the government has ever built,” tracing its roots to Pentagon counterinsurgency projects like ARPA’s efforts in Vietnam-era surveillance.
The book argues surveillance was “woven into the fabric” from the start, linking early ARPANET development to intelligence goals, and extends to modern tech giants like Google as part of a military-digital complex.
Why? Seriously, why do we care so much about this?
Do we not have better uses of our money. Also the irony considering recent moves by the US government in terms of control of the internet and free speech.
> Also the irony considering recent moves by the US government in terms of control of the internet and free speech.
Well you've got plenty of countries doing it, including France, Iran, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Brasil, Australia, you name it. Not that it's good, but a criticism for the goose is a criticism for the gander, as a manner of speaking.
As to which, why or why do we care so much about this? Idk, same reason our government funds tens of thousands of initiatives and cares about lots of different things that people find equally important or unimportant.
Historically the US did care a lot, in a way it reminds me of the Crusade for Freedom [1] and Radio Free Europe [2].
So I find this in line with the behavior of many American administration, the weird thing being that this time the target is not the just usual suspects (China, Iran, etc.) but also European allies.
(not saying this is a good thing btw, just trying to put it in perspective)
These things have been going on forever. Since WWII and until right now, there has been radio stations broadcasting into enemy territory, to bypass censorship.
No, the Trump administration is an enormous supporter of propaganda outlets, just not the ones that already existed. They don't care about maintaining the rules based world order. Their propaganda is much more inward-focused.
Sorry, but whatever you think about the laws that lead to these blockages, how else are european governments supposed to take that than a direct attack on their executive powers by a foreign government?
This being besides the fact that the folks crying wolf over "censorship" regularly conflate flat-out lies with valuable and protected speech.
Edit: I mean, I love tor as much as the next person, but imagine the reaction you'd get if an EU state (say, Germany) was to launch an official page with the express goal of allowing access to information censored by the Chinese government, targeting it directly to chinese citizens.
Could you make a moral case for this? Probably.
But would you be surprised or offended if the Chinese government took any measures they saw fit to strong-arm Germany into shutting that site right back down? Probably not. And the crowd here would probably go "bruh what did you expect?"
... Now waiting for examples of exactly that having happened already. :D
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)
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.
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.
Never tapped a port, eh?
Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.
Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA.
"Going through" doesn't necessarily imply store and forward. It could be tapped elsewhere and shipped to WVA. fwiw the idea of running a network in order to tap it is hardly new. The British operated largest telegraph network in the world in the 1800's for that reason.
You think there's an entire shadow infrastructure across the United States or world that carries 80% of all internet traffic all the way to VA?
It would have to be several times larger than the internet infrastructure itself due to the distances involved.
All built and maintained in secret?
Correct but local governments using Palantir will need to provide it to them somehow.
So they… drive the data around NOVA?
No, but if you want to collaborate with the federal government it makes it more convenient to be located where the federal government resides.
It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.
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.
Then again, Egypt was definitely driven by Western agitators, as was the case Iran recently. Iran probably got Russian tech to trace starlink users during the blackout which put a target on many Western assets in Iran. I'm not saying the Iran government didn't also kill and torture independent actors nor that I support state violence (against its citizens, in this case). Just saying that any government will use violence to stay in power and to ensure regime change doesn't happen outside of whatever system the state upholds.
Didn't Doge gut the USAGM?
Can someone ELI5 how it actually works?
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?
It probably won't work. At least, it won't do anything interesting. It exists mostly to make Trump look anti-woke, and maybe to subvert other countries' policy a little bit.
This is not an administration that does technological innovation. Trump's "social media site" started as just rebranded Mastodon.
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.
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.
Well, maybe USAID could have helped here. Or a robust State Dept.
Which soft power are you talking about?
Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.
What limits? You can do pretty much what you want but make sure you can defend yourself in the court. I feel there is a bit of a disconnect in terms where people get the news where in US you kind of expect biggest news providers to be biassed, eg Fox, hence reliance on social media. In Europe gov media is quite strong and objective, and the idea that it restricts something is odd. A great example is the banning of RT, they lost licenses IMO in multiple countries, but the agency was spreading a lot of lies. IMO what we all want is objective news reporting.
I have heard of RT lying but I have never actually seen examples of specific lies. Is there any list out there where they list any specific ones? If they do it a lot, it should be quite easy, no?
Sad that the United States are pushing so hard to encourage the propagation of propaganda & lies. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.
>stop saying what you want !! you can only say stuff fact checked by mr. European center-left bureaucrat !!
Elon let a bunch of people generate lewd photographs depicting minors, then published it.
It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. We know, we had the Nazis. Seems the US still has to learn a lesson or two, considering the current political situation. Hope it will not be as bad
Banning Nazi and ISIS propaganda doesn't and hasn't negativity affect anyone but Nazis and Jihadists. It's just plain good policy.
I guess that's why arguments against it always fall back on straw men and hypothetical slippery slopes.
There are plenty of actual things that do negatively affect societies free speech but this isn't even close to one of them.
This argument has always struck me as ridiculous. You think if only the Weimar Republic had had Hate Speech laws everything would have been fine?
Right, I guess the people there just magically all woke up one day hating the jews and voting in Hitler. Crazy how that happens. Why do political factions even spend money on campaigning? Those silly geese.
Wait, your operating theory on why the NSDAP became popular is because they... tricked everyone into hating jews?
You are not only entirely misunderstanding why the NSDAP appealed to people, you're also completely misunderstanding what post WWI Germany was - a republic hastily brought about with little care so that Woodrow Wilson would offer Germany peace based on his 14 points (he didn't). It was doomed to fail from the very beginning. If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists.
The idea that freedom of speech was what led to its downfall does not stand up to even the smallest scrutiny. Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.
people are sheep mate... in 2026 with the social media at politicians disposal you can convince most people of just about anything you want. current politics in the US is basically cultism. if trump says that Russians are now great guys, 99% of people who grew up during the cold war that are "maga" now are going "oh, what a turnaround, love them Russians now."
same goes the other way, Germany can return to 1930s in the time one political campaign starts and ends given the state of society at the moment.
I am not advocating for limits on free speech, I am a free speech absolutist. and with that come the consequences we see not just in the united states but around the world. but to think that allowing anyone to say anything cannot lead to absolute catastrophies/hatred/... in the year of our lord 2026 is very misguided...
Well they kinda did,long before the Nazis and der Sturmer put a torch on it.
"There is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys."
- RFK Jr.
It's so sad US elites are so desperate for mindshare that they have to resort to dumping (mis)information on everyone else, everywhere.
A state sponsored vpn is probably not (only) gonna do what you think it's doing.
Won't those other nations just ban freedom.gov?
Nothing stops them from hosting it on fbi.gov, state.gov, etc.
It's one thing to block some random .gov site unused for anything else, it's another thing to block a domain used for, say, filing flight plans.
Nit: If you're filing a flight plan, you do it with the country you're departing from. Even if you're piloting an aircraft departing into the US, it wouldn't have any effect on operations if you couldn't reach US websites. There's also several alternative ways for pilots to file flight plans outside of the web.
(The flight plans get passed between countries via AFTN/AMHS, which are dedicated telecommunications networks independent of the Internet.)
I thought airlines still had to file passenger manifests with CBP separately, no?
Yes, though that's separate from the flight plan.
There's also several different ways to transmit the passenger manifest to CBP - including over a CBP-provided VPN and IATA "Type B" messages sent through ARINC/SITA.
The network for Type B messages is also independent of the Internet (it was developed 60 years ago).
They wouldn't dare ban a .gov domain and we will hide all of behind Cloudflare! /s
If something looks like MITM, chances are it is MITM.
What's MITM?
Man In The Middle. They're saying that the US is intercepting the traffic.
What do you think cloudflare is? This is just them coming out with it now.
The most effective way to intercept messages encrypted with public key cryptography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack
You can also call it "U.S. government spying on Europeans".
Until you have to validate your id/age to continue...
Seriously though... we have one segment undermining foreign lockdowns while the same and other segments are literally doing the same here.
its like we have different smaller governments that can pass their own laws inside of one larger government or something
Last copy if from 2005 (2) according to the Web Archive. I like vote from 1998, if Internet Remain Tax Free (3).
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20050209024923/http://freedom.go...
2. https://web.archive.org/web/19981201060504/http://freedom.go...
And before that, looks like the domain was used to give updates from the House Majority Leader (e.g. things like voting info, social security updates, legislative changes, tax info etc).
Gov't Not Ready For Y2K!
https://web.archive.org/web/19990423190847/http://www.freedo...
Fun hypothetical question - will it be restricted to users in sanctioned locations (where it's most needed) because of, well, sanctions?
Amusingly, there typically are various exceptions made for those. All technical and whatnot, but for example, Iran is heavily sanctioned, but has all sorts of exceptions for stuff like that precisely because of the impact it can have.
Previous discussion: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...
Weird title, but worthy of discussion. From the little info available so far this appears to be little more than political posturing. If you want to fight censorship, an "online portal" to access all the censored content is the wrongest possible way to go about it. But we'll see.
(This comment was posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072613 but we merged the threads)
So it'll have porn?
I wonder if American citizens from states which requires age verification to access porn (25 US states today) will be fine with it or these states will start demanding ID to access freedom.gov. It would be delicious irony.
Right. Porn will probably be most of the traffic. The number of people in Europe who really want to access US neo-Nazi sites is probably not large.
There is a lot more blocked than porn and neo-nazis. This will also allow access to sites that block access because of laws: Imgur is not accessible from the uk, nor are a lot of smaller US news sites. Ofcom are after 4 chan too.
Government mandated uncensored free porn access. I wonder if this will this also apply in US states requiring age verification to legally access such content?
They will probably (first) have to bounce off freedom.ccTLD for any ccTLD but .us.
Is that going to accelerate copyright violations for AI training? https://cuiiliste.de/domains contains just a lot of piracy sites.
It is like ultimate throwing stones in a glass house. Americans are dependent on other countries following IP and copyright protections and yet they will go great lengths to undermine it because it is short term beneficial for their companies.
The quest for quarterly returns will be our downfall.
So going forward all countries will be providing citizens of other countries free access to the internet whilst censoring their own citizens?
Better than the alternative where they don't, I suppose. Kind of like how for some political things you have to use yandex to search because US search companies suppress the results.
Or they could just make a donation to Tor and similar projects, and get way more mileage for their money.
They do support Tor, actually[0]. Which makes this even more confusing.
[0]: https://www.torproject.org/about/supporters/
That funding was recently cut: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070658
The point is for them to track their users, which they can't do if their users are all using Tor.
Can I use freedom.gov to bypass age verification though? :)
Cool, maybe I'll be able to access www.census.gov from outside the US now
At least the starting page is reachable from Germany without a VPN.
Do they plan to allow residents of various US states to access sites that are now required to have documented ID evidence?
Maybe they can redirect from stupid.gov
The irony is big in this one.
But will they put the complete Epstein files on there?
Fantastic! Now EU just needs to setup freedomgov.eu that bounces off freedom.gov so americans also can browse whatever with no restrictions.
What's the point of the EU hosting an empty page? While tons freedoms and content is legal in the USA that isn't in the EU I don't know of any opposites.
Do you have any examples?
What restrictions do Americans have now that would make that useful?
Increasingly widespread age restriction laws?
Facts on .gov websites.
I would have loved to be in the meeting where they were wondering how to replace the highly costly and complex influence tool that was USAID, and then someone said:
- Why don't we just make a website?
- Yes let's just do that.
Can it be used to help people in the Bible Belt watch porn?
I think the states themselves don't block porn, but require sites to verify users' ages, and sites would rather block access in those states than comply. (although not sure how they do that from a technical standpoint, based on IP geolocation, perhaps?)
After the Trump checks and the Trump jabs ....the Trump porn?
I'd rather not...
How long until Europe says, "fuck your copyright claims then?"
Just tell everyone who wants to downloads warez to use the US .gov VPN and refuse to resolve the IP addresses when they complain.
What even is this? It looks to technically be Next JS with a single canvas element. But what does in protend...?
visuals with the only text on screen being...
---
"Freedom is Coming"
Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.
What it is is a teaser for what will undoubtedly be a giant load of far-right propaganda.
Turns out it's to "uncensor" content blocked in other countries, which we know will be a process free of bias /s
They also gutted the prior org that helped people do this in other countries on the ground
Wow, it's actually real:
https://freedom.gov/
And the site even has a French translation.
Thanks - we'll put that link in the toptext.
The world will be exposed to hardcore pornography, child endangerment, AI CSAM, and militant algorithms by force, if needed!
Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine (2018) directly claims the internet is “the most effective weapon the government has ever built,” tracing its roots to Pentagon counterinsurgency projects like ARPA’s efforts in Vietnam-era surveillance.
The book argues surveillance was “woven into the fabric” from the start, linking early ARPANET development to intelligence goals, and extends to modern tech giants like Google as part of a military-digital complex.
When U.S. Govt sponsors Tor, which does expose exactly what your describe, the reaction is usually positive.
"Portal team includes former DOGE member Coristine"
"...user activity on the site will not be tracked."
Ok, stopped reading right there.
The joke that I saw online was "Does it have Colbert on it?"
Yes, but you'll have to spend equal time browsing Pravda^W Truth Social.
Great! I sure hope it means Americans will stop censoring pro-Palestinian and pro-workers movements!
Why? Seriously, why do we care so much about this?
Do we not have better uses of our money. Also the irony considering recent moves by the US government in terms of control of the internet and free speech.
> Also the irony considering recent moves by the US government in terms of control of the internet and free speech.
Well you've got plenty of countries doing it, including France, Iran, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Brasil, Australia, you name it. Not that it's good, but a criticism for the goose is a criticism for the gander, as a manner of speaking.
As to which, why or why do we care so much about this? Idk, same reason our government funds tens of thousands of initiatives and cares about lots of different things that people find equally important or unimportant.
Historically the US did care a lot, in a way it reminds me of the Crusade for Freedom [1] and Radio Free Europe [2].
So I find this in line with the behavior of many American administration, the weird thing being that this time the target is not the just usual suspects (China, Iran, etc.) but also European allies.
(not saying this is a good thing btw, just trying to put it in perspective)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_for_Freedom
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
These things have been going on forever. Since WWII and until right now, there has been radio stations broadcasting into enemy territory, to bypass censorship.
Ironically, this effectively is a pro-Trump comment because it's the Trump administration that defunded US propaganda outlets.
No, the Trump administration is an enormous supporter of propaganda outlets, just not the ones that already existed. They don't care about maintaining the rules based world order. Their propaganda is much more inward-focused.
You're probably right, I was speaking as someone from outside the States, and hence more familiar with the outside-focused US outlets.
Sorry, but whatever you think about the laws that lead to these blockages, how else are european governments supposed to take that than a direct attack on their executive powers by a foreign government?
This being besides the fact that the folks crying wolf over "censorship" regularly conflate flat-out lies with valuable and protected speech.
Edit: I mean, I love tor as much as the next person, but imagine the reaction you'd get if an EU state (say, Germany) was to launch an official page with the express goal of allowing access to information censored by the Chinese government, targeting it directly to chinese citizens.
Could you make a moral case for this? Probably.
But would you be surprised or offended if the Chinese government took any measures they saw fit to strong-arm Germany into shutting that site right back down? Probably not. And the crowd here would probably go "bruh what did you expect?"
... Now waiting for examples of exactly that having happened already. :D
In enlightened, civilized countries speech is protected regardless of whether anyone subjectively considers it to be "valuable".