US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-content-bans-europe-elsewhere-2026-02-18/

by c420 • 5 months ago

481 830 5 months ago

xvxvx• 5 months ago

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.

reisse2• 5 months ago

When U.S. Govt sponsors Tor, which does expose exactly what your describe, the reaction is usually positive.

rkagerer• 5 months ago

Or they could just make a donation to Tor and similar projects, and get way more mileage for their money.

gzread• 5 months ago

The point is for them to track their users, which they can't do if their users are all using Tor.

kyboren• 5 months ago

They do support Tor, actually[0]. Which makes this even more confusing.

[0] https://www.torproject.org/about/supporters/

greyface-• 5 months ago

That funding was recently cut: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070658

sgnelson• 5 months ago

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.

carlosjobim6• 5 months ago

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.

throw-the-towel3• 5 months ago

Ironically, this effectively is a pro-Trump comment because it's the Trump administration that defunded US propaganda outlets.

idiotsecant• 5 months ago

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.

ericmay• 5 months ago

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.

mrighele• 5 months ago

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...

sequence7• 5 months ago

Wow, it's actually real:

https://freedom.gov/

dang2• 5 months ago

Thanks - we'll put that link in the toptext.

throw-the-towel3• 5 months ago

And the site even has a French translation.

verdverm2• 5 months ago

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.

apothegm• 5 months ago

What it is is a teaser for what will undoubtedly be a giant load of far-right propaganda.

verdverm2• 5 months ago

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

entropyneur• 5 months ago

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.

dang2• 5 months ago

(This comment was posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072613 but we merged the threads)

astro1138• 5 months ago

Is that going to accelerate copyright violations for AI training? https://cuiiliste.de/domains contains just a lot of piracy sites.

general14652• 5 months ago

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.

ortusdux• 5 months ago

The quest for quarterly returns will be our downfall.

Hamuko• 5 months ago

The joke that I saw online was "Does it have Colbert on it?"

cyberax• 5 months ago

Yes, but you'll have to spend equal time browsing Pravda^W Truth Social.

derelicta• 5 months ago

Great! I sure hope it means Americans will stop censoring pro-Palestinian and pro-workers movements!

walthamstow• 5 months ago

So it'll have porn?

general14652• 5 months ago

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.

Animats• 5 months ago

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.

plorg• 5 months ago

Or, since it's apparently run by HHS, surely they will protect people looking for resources about abortion, hormones, etc.

Real rich material coming from the government demanding it's biggest Internet companies unmask government critics.

jeroenhd10• 5 months ago

Previous propaganda channels from the government couldn't legally be broadcast within the US itself, so it's possible they'll try to pull the same thing here.

crest4• 5 months ago

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?

kojacklives• 5 months ago

They will probably (first) have to bounce off freedom.ccTLD for any ccTLD but .us.

freitasm• 5 months ago

"Portal team includes former DOGE member Coristine"

"...user activity on the site will not be tracked."

Ok, stopped reading right there.

reisse2• 5 months ago

Fun hypothetical question - will it be restricted to users in sanctioned locations (where it's most needed) because of, well, sanctions?

iugtmkbdfil834• 5 months ago

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.

pjc502• 5 months ago

But will they put the complete Epstein files on there?

alistairSH• 5 months ago

Won't those other nations just ban freedom.gov?

crest4• 5 months ago

They wouldn't dare ban a .gov domain and we will hide all of behind Cloudflare! /s

Aloisius6• 5 months ago

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.

tjohns2• 5 months ago

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.)

crossroadsguy4• 5 months ago

If a Govt decides that I am pretty sure they won't stop at anything but TLD level banning. Besides I don't know about other countries (or EU) but I won't be surprised if our giant industrious neighbour already has infrastructure in place just for such Trumpian shenanigans :)

jeroenhd10• 5 months ago

Europeans don't generally use .gov so if the US tries to pull that, they'll just block whatever .gov their VPN is hosted on.

Southern European countries are blocking whole Cloudflare IP ranges because of the massive grip on the government the sports licensing maffia has there. These countries also don't feature any direct flights to America as far as I can tell.

These blocks may cause (temporary) issues for American business relations and tourism, but such side effects may not be considered so problematic if the US leverages their government infrastructure to attack European legislators.

antonyh4• 5 months ago

As a Brit/European, would I notice or care if fbi.gov was blocked via consumer internet providers? I'd probably not notice if *.gov was blocked. I'm fairly sure government-level internet provisioning has a very different set of restrictions to the general population for those who need access to US Gov services, in the same way that I'm sure the Chinese state itself isn't subject to the rules of the Great Firewall.

IAmGraydon3• 5 months ago

Since no one seems to have a serious answer to this…the answer is yes, it would easily be blocked. Beyond that, absolutely no one would use this service. Therefore, it can be considered to be nothing more than political posturing by a weak administration.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 months ago

How long until Europe says, "fuck your copyright claims then?"

crest4• 5 months ago

Just tell everyone who wants to downloads warez to use the US .gov VPN and refuse to resolve the IP addresses when they complain.

Nnnes• 5 months ago

Cool, maybe I'll be able to access www.census.gov from outside the US now

crest4• 5 months ago

At least the starting page is reachable from Germany without a VPN.

schoen• 5 months ago

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.

reactordev13• 5 months ago

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.

recursive• 5 months ago

Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA.

Den_VR• 5 months ago

So they… drive the data around NOVA?

Aurornis7• 5 months ago

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.

rootusrootus• 5 months ago

When I worked for a CLEC (during that moment in history when they were briefly a Thing), we had a USG closet at our main datacenter, and we are nowhere even close to NoVA. I expect they still handle it this way rather than try to funnel any significant amount of traffic to a particular geographical region.

ascorbic3• 5 months ago

Most of the replies to this seem to think it's referring to some kind of secret government datacenter. It's us-east-1, and every other cloud provider's US East and GOV zones, which are all in NVA

Waterluvian• 5 months ago

It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.

nomilk4• 5 months ago

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.

Mikhail_Edoshin• 5 months ago

And lies.

locknitpicker3• 5 months ago

It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.

You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.

It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.

It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.

There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.

iso16319• 5 months ago

Yet the US president unilaterally shut down Voice of America because he didn't like its message

Freedom of speech for me, not for thee

pousada4• 5 months ago

So far the current admin has been very successful in obliterating all the soft power the US built up through the decades.

hsuduebc24• 5 months ago

American culture can access Europeans at any time. Europeans consume American culture daily.Just to clarify. Website banned are often hostile propaganda or extremists.

This is only cringy lousy provocation for appearance of moral superiority.

Coming from a government notorious for spying on it's citizens it seems pretty ludicrous.

Aloisius6• 5 months ago

Didn't Doge gut the USAGM?

awwaiid• 5 months ago

Yep! Maximally closed as much as possible under the law. They also shut down other programs which aim to sidestep propaganda (including US propaganda), though some of those are starting to come back. Radio Free Asia, for example, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-s...

pasc1878• 5 months ago

But part of Agency has just been defunded

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for...

RobotToaster• 5 months ago

This new "portal" will most likely only allow de facto government controlled sites like X.

Helmut100012• 5 months ago

This is somewhat counterintuitive: The US is the only country I know where most newspapers and government services use strict geoblocks to prevent me from accessing US sites in Europe. Conversely, I've never had any problems accessing European sites from the US. I know this is for a different set of reasons (likely GDPR cookie law or similar), but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.

herbst2• 5 months ago

This. I regularly face geo blocks from American websites. Like literally at least once a week. It's very common for whatever reason for smaller US shops, newspapers any size and other random sites.

pjc502• 5 months ago

And imgur has geoblocked the UK, which is extremely annoying as it was the reddit image host of choice.

It's going to be a weird set of content on this website. Are they going to livestream La Liga sports?

kjksf4• 5 months ago

Which US newspapers and which governments websites?

I happen to write this from Poland and I don't recall a single newspaper being geo blocked here. Not nyt, not washington post not anything I've ever accessed.

And didn't see US gov website geo blocked either.

So I ask again: which newspapers and which gov websites?

tbrownaw2• 5 months ago

but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.

The search AIs tell me it's around a third of people.

pousada4• 5 months ago

Only EU site I had a problem accessing that i can remember was from my electricity provider. Strangely enough they didn’t geoblock me but login threw an error because my local time didn’t match the local (German) timezone.

I changed my system timezone to Germany and it worked without issues, so I was wondering if it’s a very bad geoblock or something else entirely

Ajedi322• 5 months ago

It makes sense to me. They're blocked in Europe because of European government polices, not American ones.

Maybe there's some sort of legal immunity the US government could grant to domestic sites which would allow them to lift those blocks without fear of reprisal?

philwelch• 5 months ago

That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that.

ImJamal5• 5 months ago

The EU has problems reaching non-US sites. RT for example. The block isn't on RT or Russia's side.

throwaway247782• 5 months ago

I suppose COPPA is a form of internet censorship we help children bypass?

adrian_b• 5 months ago

"has been" => "had been" (since a few days ago)

Noaidi• 5 months ago

But will it let me torrent? /s

tills13• 5 months ago

A state sponsored vpn is probably not (only) gonna do what you think it's doing.

soulofmischief• 5 months ago

It probably will do what I think it's doing.

ReflectedImage• 5 months ago

So going forward all countries will be providing citizens of other countries free access to the internet whilst censoring their own citizens?

LAC-Tech6• 5 months ago

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.

freakynit• 5 months ago

This will be like a global circus of free speech:

Country-1: "Absolutely free speech! Except when it's about Country-4 -> rights revoked."

Country-2: "Criticize Country-4 all you want, but talking smack about Country-5 is treason buddy."

Country-3: "Wait... so I can roast Country-4 but not Country-5... and also not Country-6? My head hurts."

Country-4: "We don't block anything! ...Just not that thing you're talking about."

Country-5: "See Country-3? We absolutely love speech. As long as it praises us. Freedom yay!"

In the end, we might end up having the very same private vpn';s (or tor) routing their traffic over these gov. vpn's based on keyword matches in the request.. or customer's will be able to choose .. kinda like auto-model feature on openrouter lol.

13415• 5 months ago

The irony is big in this one.

sunshine-o• 5 months ago

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.

ivan_gammel6• 5 months ago

If something looks like MITM, chances are it is MITM.

engineer_22• 5 months ago

What's MITM?

trelane2• 5 months ago

Man In The Middle. They're saying that the US is intercepting the traffic.

diego_moita2• 5 months ago

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".

latentsea• 5 months ago

MAGA-Infused Trump Machine.

zorked• 5 months ago

It is indeed one marvelous honeypot.

Sophira2• 5 months ago

The most obvious honeypot I've ever seen, to be quite honest.

dirasieb10• 5 months ago

i'll take US mitm harvesting my data over the european alternative (man in the jail)

avh022• 5 months ago

well now you can have both simultaneously.

tracker12• 5 months ago

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.

MiiMe195• 5 months ago

its like we have different smaller governments that can pass their own laws inside of one larger government or something

feature20260213• 5 months ago

This comment made my day :)

tracker12• 5 months ago

While I get that... I'm talking about hypocrisy not sovereignty in that it's the same or overlapping group doing both.

mlh496• 5 months ago

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.

touwer2• 5 months ago

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

LAC-Tech6• 5 months ago

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?

theandrewbailey• 5 months ago

"There is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys."

- RFK Jr.

fungi• 5 months ago

Banning Nazi and ISIS propaganda doesn't and hasn't negativity affected 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.

bitcurious• 5 months ago

We know, we had the Nazis.

Yes, I keep thinking about the bastion of free speech that gave birth to the Nazi movement. If only the Weimar Republic had anti-hate speech laws, perhaps the Shoah could have been avoided? Oops, turns out it did have those laws, and those very laws were subverted to suppress dissent.

dmitrygr3• 5 months ago

It's smart to ban hate speech

Everyone has their own idea what hate is. For me: it is anyone saying any word with “a” in it. Better stay quiet, or it is hate speech.

stinkbeetle10• 5 months ago

Is calling people nazis hate speech?

roenxi2• 5 months ago

It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that.

Blatant lies have to be legal. Firstly because it isn't philosophically possible to tell if someone is lying, it can only ever be strongly suspected. Secondly because it is a bog-standard authoritarian tactic to accuse someone of telling a blatant lie and shut them down for challenging the authoritarians.

Banning "blatant lies" is pretty much a textbook tell that somewhere is in political trouble and descending into either a bad case of group-think in the political community or authoritarianism. The belief that it is even possible to ban blatant lies is, if it has taken root, itself a lie people tell themselves when they can't handle the fact that some of the things they believe and know are true, aren't.

carlm42• 5 months ago

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.

zefalt• 5 months ago

Sad that people can’t see past their ideological bubbles. Tech spaces used to be dominated by people who saw free speech as an imperative. Now their own political biases have them supporting censorship.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...

sublimefire• 5 months ago

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.

PolygonSheep• 5 months ago

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?

0xy7• 5 months ago

Thousands of people in the UK have been arrested for social media posts, some for speech recognized as protected by international organizations.

Germany is currently actively campaigning to force everyone to use their real names on all social media and force ID checks to do so, a clear chilling effect for free speech.

Macron has been railing against free speech specifically in recent months, calling it "bullshit".

Europe is against free speech, any argument to the contrary must contend with the above examples of them trampling on rights.

gpt53• 5 months ago

Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media. In Italy, people have faced criminal charges for simply criticizing the prime minister.

When the government does not allow its population to freely speak against it, it's just waiting to be abused by one bad leader.

drnick13• 5 months ago

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.

You shouldn't need a "license" to publish a website.

NewJazz3• 5 months ago

It's so sad US elites are so desperate for mindshare that they have to resort to dumping (mis)information on everyone else, everywhere.

codethief9• 5 months ago

Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to […] privacy

Uh what? :-)

rdm_blackhole• 5 months ago

The EU is pushing to intercept and scan all private chat messages and all emails to "protect" the children and give all this information to Europol to keep in perpetuity so they can build a profile on you but sure everything is peachy.

Then you have the German chancellor saying that we should all have our real names attached to all our online accounts but rest assured, nothing nefarious going on here.

France arrested the Telegram founder a few months ago for no apparent reason and the French Justice minister also not long ago wanted to ban EtoE because it makes their job harder so wouldn't it be nice if everyone could just simply share their private life with the government voluntarily?

The UK is looking into getting rid of VPNs to, you guessed it, "protect the children" and Denmark has re-introduced blasphemy laws.

Finally there is the DMA that has been approved the EU which outlaws hate speech on online platforms except that hate speech is never defined in the text so you can pretty much use this law to ban any content you want without due process and without consulting the population.

The US has many flaws, nobody is denying that but to assume that the EU has better privacy is a mirage from a bygone era. The EU politicians are now looking at what China is doing and use that as playbook.

mortarion2• 5 months ago

Compared to the USA, we have incredible privacy in the EU.

JumpinJack_Cash• 5 months ago

After the Trump checks and the Trump jabs ....the Trump porn?

I'd rather not...

csrse2• 5 months ago

Fantastic! Now EU just needs to setup freedomgov.eu that bounces off freedom.gov so americans also can browse whatever with no restrictions.

Aloisius6• 5 months ago

What restrictions do Americans have now that would make that useful?

Hikikomori2• 5 months ago

Facts on .gov websites.

kg• 5 months ago

Increasingly widespread age restriction laws?

tick_tock_tick• 5 months ago

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?

0xy7• 5 months ago

Link to the US government banning free speech on the internet. You have no credibility when the UK, Spain, Germany and France have been railing against free speech and calling it "bullshit" in the last month.

csrse2• 5 months ago

It was just a bit of fun, pointing out a ridiculousness of the situation. But for the sake of argument, age verification? lcelist? Annas? Not showing your state that you look at a democrat website? Or do you mean the free speech, non-censor freedom.gov will "filter" these sites?

PaulDavisThe1st• 5 months ago

Do they plan to allow residents of various US states to access sites that are now required to have documented ID evidence?

touwer2• 5 months ago

Maybe they can redirect from stupid.gov

panny• 5 months ago

Can I use freedom.gov to bypass age verification though? :)

nomilk4• 5 months ago

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?

gpt53• 5 months ago

According to Reuters, it will essentially be a free VPN.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...

isodev• 5 months ago

Free Trump VPN to go with one's Trump Phone?

touristtam• 5 months ago

So you're not paying for it? In corporate america how is that going to be moneytized?

techterrier• 5 months ago

can we use it for, erm, other 'freedoms' ?

jeroenhd10• 5 months ago

That may be pretty useful for torrenting, actually.

shiroiuma• 5 months ago

Can people use it for sailing the high seas?

tokenless2• 5 months ago

Free ... as in they'll spy on everything you do.

fbn79• 5 months ago

So nothing new. We can just use cloudflare warp

oaiey• 5 months ago

And since euthanasia is not favoured by the religious right in the US (I assume here for sake of argument) it would be filtered by VPN / DNS anyway in the VPN

diego_moita2• 5 months ago

Can it be used to help people in the Bible Belt watch porn?

nomilk4• 5 months ago

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?)

reconnecting2• 5 months ago

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...

nomilk4• 5 months 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).

reconnecting2• 5 months ago

Gov't Not Ready For Y2K!

https://web.archive.org/web/19990423190847/http://www.freedo...

jadenPete• 5 months ago

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.

nickorlow3• 5 months ago

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.

ohyoutravel• 5 months ago

Well, maybe USAID could have helped here. Or a robust State Dept.

copperx• 5 months ago

Which soft power are you talking about?

crossroadsguy4• 5 months ago

At this point US has close to zero (if not negative) "soft" power.

ascorbic3• 5 months ago

No government can stand up to the might of La Liga

shaky-carrousel2• 5 months ago

In the same way they used their soft power to influence them not to block twitter and facebook? Because that power is slowly going from soft to limp...

nickorlow3• 5 months ago

This comment generated a lot of activity. It's very interesting watching the vote count of it move with the daylight (it went down during night in US/day in EU, and went back up when the US woke back up)

zmgsabst2• 5 months ago

Sure — but the UK or EU has to accept the constant rhetoric of “you clearly don’t support free speech, you block freedom.gov” when discussing with the US.

I don’t think it’s meant to be a perfect solution; I think it’s meant to be a political tool.

Also, the US does fund Tor — originally US Navy + DARPA, now through Dept of State. Entirely possible that they’ll eventually operate a Tor onion site for freedom.gov too.

calmworm6• 5 months ago

This is grade-school level mind games. Is it really that easy?

scythe• 5 months ago

It's a propaganda maneuver. And it's obviously just as critical of China as it is of Europe. The State Department's public voices may be immersed in the culture war but there are probably a few cooler heads left who have learned to keep out of the spotlight.

carlosjobim6• 5 months ago

Maybe that's the purpose? Pushing European and global "allies" to show their cards. Some citizens will support more censorship, while some will start questioning. It's good to know where your rivals stand.

Also it is cheap, easy, non-controversial domestically in the US, and ethically coherent with American values.

sp5272• 5 months ago

ethically coherent with American values

I'm a lifelong US citizen and burst out laughing at this. What values? What coherence?

Do you mean the NSA man-in-the-middleing all that traffic and leaving a backdoor for Mossad? Imagine the most despicable possible invasion of privacy and the most reprehensible shadow oppression and manipulation of an uneducated populace you can conjure up.

Now imagine something way worse than that. This is America.

warkdarrior2• 5 months ago

Pushing European and global "allies" to show their cards. Some citizens will support more censorship, while some will start questioning. It's good to know where your rivals stand.

I don't think European countries have been shy or sneaky about their restrictions on online content.

seszett2• 5 months ago

ethically coherent with American values

Do you mean that VPN will blur the nipples when you watch pictures of classical paintings through it?

jjmarr• 5 months ago

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.

The US government is responsible for 35% of Tor's funding[1] and has been its primary sponsor since Tor was invented as a side project in the US Naval Research Lab.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tor_Project

krige2• 5 months ago

Is, or was? I vaguely recall Doge gutting this among many other things?

badgersnake2• 5 months ago

Yes. And then, if he doesn’t like the regime because they haven’t done him enough favours the orange one will rage about it on his social network.

black_puppydog2• 5 months ago

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

nradov• 5 months ago

In enlightened, civilized countries speech is protected regardless of whether anyone subjectively considers it to be "valuable".

black_puppydog2• 5 months ago

rofl, go ahead try spreading lies about someone in the US. IIUC, the slander laws are just as draconian over there. the difference is in whether you can spread the same lies about someone with or without deep pockets without retribution.

m000• 5 months ago

Does this mean we will be able to read RT from Europe again?

ceejayoz• 5 months ago

Will Texans be able to access Pornhub with it? Heh.

sensanaty4• 5 months ago

Weird, I'm in "Europe" and I can read the blatant Russian propaganda site all I want!

lbrito• 5 months ago

This is also going to debut in Saudi Arabia, right?

...Right?

Ancalagon• 5 months ago

Will this bypass the porn bans in conservative states

stubish• 5 months ago

Governments around the world could setup, in solidarity with the US, freedom.ca, freedom.eu etc. Hosting provided by Pornhub. Maybe Pornhub could even start registering the TLDs now where available.

shadowgovt• 5 months ago

Excellent. I look forward to other service providers responding by cutting traffic from the US.

If the goal is to balkanize the internet, this administration has hit upon an excellent step.

api2• 5 months ago

Screams giant honey pot to me.

And my taxes need to fund a VPN when there’s 50 cheap VPNs on the market? What happened to reducing spending?

amarant8• 5 months ago

What content bans does Europe have? /Confused European

seattle_spring4• 5 months ago

There's a hate speech / violence law in the UK that is getting some people arrested for saying things like "round up all people of race X, put them into a hotel, and burn the hotel down." People like Joe Rogan and his ilk are re-packaging those examples as "people being arrested for just sharing their opinion."

amarant8• 5 months ago

Oh, is that what y'all are on about? I'm not too worried then. About Europe.

stinkbeetle10• 5 months ago

I don't know what Joe Rogan says or who his ilk are, but this is a pretty extreme characterization of the situation that I don't think is accurate.

For example, UK police track what they consider to be undesirable "non-crime" speech, build databases of people, and intimidate them for these non crimes (knock on their doors, invite them to come to police station, advise them not to say such things, etc). This is quite a new thing, within the past ~10 years.

There have also been other high profile cases of people being arrested for posting things that were not like that burn the hotel down case. They arrested 12,000 people in 2023 and convicted 1,100 of those. For cases where the evidence is as cut and dried as posts made online, they could only secure convictions in 8% of cases, which seems staggering to me when UK's conviction rate generally is like 80%.

Even the conviction rate, even if you say yes there are laws to prohibit certain speech, how far is too far? Are these kinds of laws and convictions needed? Why don't all other countries need them? Why didn't UK need them 20 years ago when there was still internet and social media? Is it not concerning to you that we're told this kind of action is required to hold society together? I'm not saying that calls to violence don't happen or should be tolerated, but if it is not a lie that arresting thousands of people for twitter posts and things is necessary to keep society from breaking down then it seems like putting a bandaid on top of a volcano. It's certainly not developing a resilient, anti-fragile society, quite the opposite IMO.

Is nobody allowed to be concerned about any of this without being some horrible underground extremist, in your opinion?

dirasieb10• 5 months ago

lol ok https://archive.ph/bdEqK

cal_dent• 5 months ago

its wild to me how so much of online america has been radicalized into becoming nothing more that digital curtain twitchers

pembrook4• 5 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Censorship_in_Europe

amarant8• 5 months ago

Can we filter for current censorship? Hate to brake it to you but the top category in that page, "censorship in the soviet union" does not apply anymore.....

ljlolel4• 5 months ago

Russia Today is banned, for one

amarant8• 5 months ago

True! Though I can't really say I mourn the loss, it is a Russian propaganda outlet dedicated to helping their expansion war. Is this the speech the USA is going to protect? It's still weird to me that the gringoes are helping the commies now, I guess I'm stuck in the old world order!

Gustomaximus• 5 months ago

That seems crazy to me I read news there occasionally as I like to view opposite sides. Go to BBC, RT, France24 ,Al-Jazeera type sites and see what each has as their focus stories.

You're aware news sites are used to push agenda, some more than others, but that's half the interest of seeing what they push. And sometimes the more fringe have stories on what should be news but don't make it to mainstream media channels.

...anyway I'm more a believer in assuming people have a brain and can figure stuff out vs banning sites, both have danger to them but censorship seems the bigger danger to me.

Epa0954• 5 months ago

You mean the TV station lost broadcasting-rights, or you mean the website it actually banned? Cause the website is certainly accessible for me from my European country, although that does not rule out that it is banned in some European countries.

jeroenhd10• 5 months ago

rt.com loads just fine for me. If you want to do research into/get brainwashed by Russian propaganda, nothing is stopping you here.

jampekka• 5 months ago

rt.com works fine in Finland at least. I don't think we have website bans in general aside something like CSAM and copyright reasons, and even the latter at least is rare.

There seems to be a manufactured narrative from the US right how "Europe" is somehow doing large scale censorship.

carlosjobim6• 5 months ago

One is Russian media, just as Russia bans European media.

Also the world's largest library is banned in Germany.

amarant8• 5 months ago

The first one I'm ok with, the second one I'm not sure what you're saying? Google suggests the largest library in the world is the US Congress library, but I couldn't find any sources saying it's banned in Germany? (Also, it's a physical place in the US... What?)

Closest thing I could find to library banned in Germany was a collection of pirated material, which was blocked at a DNS level, meaning many users bypass the ban accidentally, and anyone who wants to can trivially use a different DNS.

I mean I'm probably more in favour of digital piracy than the next guy, but I had completely missed that were calling copyright protection censorship now?

jeroenhd10• 5 months ago

Piracy is illegal in most countries. Unless you mean the American Library of Congress, but that's an American decision, not a European one.

drnick13• 5 months ago

Porn (now requires age verification), online libraries, movies, some news websites, sports (because of obscure copyright laws) and countless other things.

josefrichter4• 5 months ago

I’m in the EU and haven’t encountered any of these, except the copyright restrictions - which is really a different matter.

jusssi• 5 months ago

List please. Surely there is a wiki page you can drop a link to, right?

warkdarrior2• 5 months ago

Ooooh, if freedom.gov helped bypass copyrights on sports and streaming websites, that would be fantastic!

viraptor• 5 months ago

This is another "in Europe" thing. There's no "in Europe". Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, etc. will all have different rules.

anthk2• 5 months ago

Spaniard here. No, we don't. Every country has different laws. The European Union share some laws but not these.

dgellow3• 5 months ago

No?

dominicrose• 5 months ago

A major porn site's reaction to France requiring age verification was quite funny, they replaced their content by complaints instead of implementing the verification. Liberty isn't always a good thing, allowing teens to simply click to say they're adults doesn't cut it.

kettlecorn• 5 months ago

I think part of this is preempting concerns that the EU could ban or limit X / Twitter.

They've already fined X heavily for lacking transparency, like not providing a database of advertisers or allowing researchers to access internal data to evaluate misinformation concerns. The EU has threatened that if they need to they may ban or limit X.

Musk and conservatives view X as a critical tool to spread their preferred ideology, and Musk has shown he's not beyond algorithmic and UX manipulation to achieve desired outcomes.

throwaway1401266• 5 months ago

In Germany there are some examples for the suppression of speech. For example popular examples are: (1) getting your house raided for calling a politician a dick (2) getting your house raided for calling a politician stupid (3) most recent, just in this week, a retiree gets into trouble with the police for asking worried questions about migration

(1) https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/hamburg-wohnungsdurch... (2) https://www.justiz.bayern.de/media/images/behoerden-und-geri... (3) https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article6996cb47fc148...

These are examples that spontaneously come to my mind. So I can not talk for whatever country you live in but Germany has a problem about being able to express opinions.

hananova2• 5 months ago

(1) Is also because it's literally vandalism. (2) Also points out that there were posts of holocaust denial, which has been illegal in most of europe for literal decades. (3) Is an article about an investigation into whether or not the cart was protected by freedom of expression or whether there would be grounds for further trial. Nobody is in trouble yet.

Isn't it convenient how all posts that say something that rhymes with "You can get in trouble in EU country X for just doing Y." The "just" is doing a lot of concealed lifting? None of your three links actually support your assertion.

NotPractical2• 5 months ago

This site claims to list them out: https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm

I cannot vouch for its accuracy but I thought it was interesting.

tachyons• 5 months ago

It's kind of ironic given how much USA is censoring content based on their interest.

andsoitis2• 5 months ago

It's kind of ironic given how much USA is censoring content based on their interest.

What’s a good example?

mjmsmith2• 5 months ago

TikTok.

_HMCB_2• 5 months ago

See yesterday’s FCC hearing before congress. It’s hypocritical for the US to be doing the exact opposite of what they’re doing at home.

petcat9• 5 months ago

Which content is being censored?

sega_sai• 5 months ago

I guess it will allow to access information unless it is about abortion or it is negative about DJT.

It is really a joke to pretend that current US cares about freedom of internet access, given all the attacks on free press it things like voice of America radio in the states.

I assume US will also provide a portal to Russian citizen if it is so eager to allow people to bypassing content bans (/s).

mjmsmith2• 5 months ago

Finally, a resource for oppressed people in backward countries to find information about abortion.

1970-01-013• 5 months ago

"The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It"

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/

comex• 5 months ago

This project is hardly some emergent property of the Internet or even Internet culture. The existence of VPNs and proxies in general is. They are easy to set up and hard to block. But this project, if it launches, will be a single well-known target which, at a technical level, countries could easily block access to. Whether blocking actually occurs will depend on the whims of geopolitics, but it’s not exactly a robust situation.

tantalor• 5 months ago

That's not very "America First"

Why are my taxes paying for benefits for Europeans?

They already killed USAID.

bdangubic2• 5 months ago

this administration is the least “america first” we’ve had … like ever!

1970-01-013• 5 months ago

They will force their users to pay for the service in Trump's crypto and call it a win for freedom.

josefrichter4• 5 months ago

For Europeans? They don’t need anything like this, zero benefit. May benefit someone in North Korea, China or the United States.

aembleton• 5 months ago

Or the UK

speedgoose• 5 months ago

The cost of running such a VPN is perhaps worth it when you consider the value of the intelligence it can collect.

tencentshill• 5 months ago

Non-monetary, indirect value (Goodwill, "soft power", leverage, future gains) is not, and has never been a consideration for President Trump [1]. All accounts must be settled immediately. Funny how he had to take out a full-page ad, because he couldn't get this opinion actually published in any newspaper.

[1] Donald Trump - Letter on Foreign Policy - September 2, 1987

sunaookami8• 5 months ago

I like that the US government finally speaks out about the rampant censorship from the EU regime but I wouldn't trust a state VPN. But they put the topic on the radar. Hope they can pressure enough to abolish the DSA. And USAID was just funding for propaganda outlets.

oblio• 5 months ago

I like that the US government finally speaks out about the rampant censorship from the EU regime

Are you a EU citizen?

eagleal3• 5 months ago

This is a valid tool for intelligence and propaganda operations, for both USA and Israel (since they have access to whatever.

In this age this is akin to funding and arming a militia in a foreign country, or what would've been on old times preemptive land operations.

1970-01-013• 5 months ago

I'm guessing China will simply block it at the firewall. It would be hilarious to witness the US Gov validating The Pirate Bay's hydra domain approach. Maybe some squatting isn't a bad idea:

freedom.live freedom.xyz freedom.space etc.

shakna• 5 months ago

I wonder of China can pay Trump with a golden limosuine to get backdoor access to it.

dfee• 5 months ago

at one point, HN was anti-censorship. this discussion shows how ideologically aligned this concept has become.

there are volleys back and forth of "what censorship" followed by links to wikipedia enumerating it. RT and Joe Rogan are thrown in the mix.

when did this experiment fail?

_HMCB_2• 5 months ago

All the while the FCC was grilled yesterday for trying to shut down free speech. Make it make sense.

Buttons840• 5 months ago

Politicians want power over people in the country, but also internet technology is one of the only things the US is best at, and so we don't want the entire world dividing into separate internet silos.

(The other things we're best at is having a huge military and having legally protected free speech, which is ironically being weakened, as you say.)

FpUser• 5 months ago

"and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked"

Until it will. Please do not make me laugh. This will probably be used to help organize converting regimes or look for potential spies. Not denying possible positive value. If they're so generous they should expose Youtube this way and some generic communication platform if they believe they can pull it off (reliable ban bypassing)

dangus• 5 months ago

Another dumb idea by our braindead administration.

The site will just be blocklisted by countries who don’t want you to use it. Duh.

You’d have to have some horrendous security instincts to use a government-hosted VPN.

Remember January 2025 when we were pitched the idea that the Trump administration was going to make the federal government efficient and cut frivolous programs?

Let me know when the budget deficit starts to decrease!

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 months ago

Text-only, no Datadome Javascript, HTTPS optional:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1WCCeV...

Simple HTML:

   { 
     x=AA1WCCeV
     ipv4=23.11.201.94 
     echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
     (printf '%s\r\n%s\r\n\r\n' \
     "GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/$x HTTP/1.0" \
     'Host: assets.msn.com') \
     |nc -vvn $ipv4 80 |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134'
   } > 1.htm
   firefox ./1.htm

nimbius• 5 months ago

Wild flex from the country that literally bought their own tiktok to control the propaganda.

crossroadsguy4• 5 months ago

Such an irony that there are two sides trying to control the Internet in their own lovely ways and in the end it's the people who will have to suffer one way or the other. But I do think countries around the world should have a hard look at how the Internet is, even today, de facto controlled by the US. Take ".com" and ".net" domains for example. Like there are efforts underway to get away from SWIFT (and hopefully one day USD as well), this should be independent. In a way, at least in the long term, this US administration might be a net positive for the world at least in the term of depolarisation. Or maybe the focal points will shift from existing ones to new ones.

IAmGraydon3• 5 months ago

You think you want US influence to weaken, but you may feel very differently should it happen. There is a lot you’re taking for granted.

seszett2• 5 months ago

These days what people receive of the US influence is mostly interference in politics to favour the far-right, military threats and economic war through tariffs. As well as just random verbal attacks on local politicians on local matters.

I'm sure there is a positive side to the US influence, but it's well hidden and they definitely don't advertise it.

jjtwixman7• 5 months ago

Since you guys voted for Trump 2 it's guaranteed and it's happening right now. But, at least you deserve it.

bastawhiz3• 5 months ago

As someone who lives in North Carolina and can't even open most mainstream porn sites, I too am waiting for the freedom

balls187• 5 months ago

Porn Sites? How about an interview with a politician on a late-nite network television show.

hdgvhicv3• 5 months ago

Is YouTube blocking that in your state?

ImJamal5• 5 months ago

North Carolina hasn't banned porn. The EU has banned RT and other sites.

bastawhiz3• 5 months ago

North Carolina has effectively banned porn by requiring porn sites to collect IDs.

rdudek• 5 months ago

What about all the age restriction stuff coming online here in the US in various states? Those are cool right?

This service is definitely a honeypot for tracking.

eviks• 5 months ago

Do they plan online portal for content banned in the U.S.?

EGreg• 5 months ago

This reminds me of "Radio Free Europe" and "Radio Liberty", which were basically bankrolled (and likely largely influenced) by the CIA. They wanted to distribute all kinds of programming into USSR that was banned there, same with Solzhenitsyn's books etc. Eventually the USSR fell apart.

Now they are treating Europe like they treated USSR. Musk and other big influencers on X have already been calling for the breakup of the EU, after the EU fined X $100M. I bet that was at least some of the reason behind this.

The irony is that the Trump admin has been deporting non-citizens for speech, his FCC has been intimidating media like ABC and CBS into firing people or canceling programs and interviews, his DOJ has been telling social networks to fork over the identities of citizens who criticized ICE online, and his CBP will begin demanding that tourists hand over 5 years of their social media history, as well as their biometrics, family's information and whatever else.

This is the administration who would lecture Europe about freedom of speech? Didn't they just get through 10 years of telling European countries to be "nationalist" and resist the influence of their own federal government in Brussels -- but I guess we can just ignore their laws and broadcast anything into their countries, tempting them to set up a "great firewall" like China.

Well, if freedom of speech means violating other countries' laws, in this case can European governments just start streaming copyrighted movies for free to US viewers, and piss off the RIAA / MPAA? Or maybe they can do what Cory Doctorow has been proposing: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-29...

It's like when USA ignores European trademarks (actually even stronger, PDOs) like Champagne or Parmesan but expects Europeans to honor US trademarks.

c420• 5 months ago

Anyone know why this would be appearing on the front page but completely absent from https://news.ycombinator.com/active

calmworm6• 5 months ago

Orwellian quotes are bandied about so much these days… does anything more need to be said?

mcs5280• 5 months ago

All content will likely be pre-approved by Larry Ellison and his other billionaire friends, so how much freedom will this really have?

viking1233• 5 months ago

Will be Pre-approved by Israel*

iamnothere4• 5 months ago

Perhaps Europe can offer its own freedom VPN, then we can finally read whatever we want by switching back and forth.

syspec• 5 months ago

Meanwhile, you can't even go on pornhub in certain states in the US, but yes let's let people go on X and engage in hate speech. In fact I'm sure bad actors will use that site FROM the us, to anonymize their hate speech from Russia/China

beej71• 5 months ago

Meanwhile, you can't even go on pornhub in certain states in the US.

Hilarious to think that freedom.gov might be the workaround.

xp84• 5 months ago

let people go on X and engage in hate speech

So interesting to see it become a popular opinion that we should "not let" people say certain things. Like, if necessary, we should jail people for speaking.

I remember learning about the ACLU[1] as a teen, 25 years ago, and how they took a lot of flak for defending people who said things we all agreed were gross, which at first glance seems disgusting. But the lesson we were taught was that the Constitutional guarantee of "freedom of expression" wasn't qualified with "as long as the opinions being expressed are cool ones."

Really, "hate speech" is defined as "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly." Right wingers think some or all porn is the "bad" kind of expression and apparently banworthy, and left wingers think saying pretty much anything about trans ideology (other than full-throated endorsement) is hate speech.

I'm aware that many who are of the "don't let people do 'hate speech'" aren't Americans and don't owe any respect for the ideas of our particular Constitution, and that's fine -- but many Americans also now feel that citizens should only be able to speak the subset of ideas that one party endorses, and that any other ideas should be punishable, as they are in the UK.[2]

[1] If I understand it correctly, I think the ACLU is under new management, and no longer defends anyone whose ideas are uncomfortable.

[2] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/uk-arrests-for-twee... This fact-check points out that "only" 10% of the 30 arrests per day for online postings end up with convictions, and that it's rare to have "long" prison sentences. Very comforting.

jeroenhd10• 5 months ago

American free speech laws are the exception, not the rule. All European free speech laws have always been balanced and weighed up against other laws. This is hardly anything new. If anything, the internet has brought forth a short time period where everything goes and the status quo is now recovering.

The legal definition of hate speech (or rather, its local equivalents) is not just "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly".

dirasieb10• 5 months ago

complaining about losing the freedom to watch porn without ID while in the same comment pushing for more people to face state action for social media posts

porn is ok, posts that hurt my fee fees and ideological bias bad :'( (both are ok in my opinion btw)

hdgvhicv3• 5 months ago

Americans is land of the free until someone shows a nipple. Or copies a floppy. Or refuses to partake in flag shagging. Or says something critical of the president.

Basically America is very good at protecting hate speech, not so good at the rest.

kjksf4• 5 months ago

I principled stance would be against government censoring nipples AND speech of any kind, including what you call "hate speech".

My educated guess is that your definition of "hate speech" doesn't include people openly calling for assassinating federal employees (i.e. ICE).

BTW: properly applied 1st amendment is what led to un-banning censorship of nipples (see. Flynt v. United States, Miller v. California) as well as unbanning "obscene" books by Henry Miller and others (Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein)

I'm against censorship of nipples and speech including what you likely consider "hate speech". To me the line is calling to kill or physically harm someone. Which leftists are currently doing in spades and yet BlueSky doesn't ban them for that.

numpad0• 5 months ago

Yeah. This effort feels perplexing. US just isn't the free-est country on Earth in terms of free speech protections, and the gap is slowly widening. IIRC there still isn't secrecy of communication baked into laws as principles.

YetAnotherNick• 5 months ago

Americans is land of the free until someone shows a nipple. Or copies a floppy. Or refuses to partake in flag shagging. Or says something critical of the president.

Can you give an example of censoring of any of these type of content? AFAIK there is only age gating.

jollyllama• 5 months ago

A popular meme, but consider that part of the discourse around the EU censorship is Grok's undressing feature.

kjksf4• 5 months ago

I'm confused about your principles.

Do you want censorship (of porn, of "hate speech") or not?

Because it seems you don't want censorship of porn but do want censorship of speech.

"hate speech" is a made up thing that politicians use to jail people who complain about government.

If you're an American you should cherish 1st amendment. You should cherish the fact that founding fathers recognized that the greatest thread to your freedom is not another person with a gun but a thousand people with a gun i.e. government.

And giving government the power to censor speech they don't like is the fastest way to tyranny.

That's why freedom of speech is 1st amendment. Not second, not fifth. It's 1st because it's that important.

larholm2• 5 months ago

Freedom of speech is not absolute anywhere, not even under the 1st amendment in the USA.

Death threats are illegal whether they happen offline or online.

Yelling "I HAVE A BOMB!" in an airport comes with consequences.

I believe we can agree on these two examples.

selfmodruntime6• 5 months ago

I agree that hate speech must have limits but I have no idea where government trust comes from, especially in the current times. It's like people forget that voting swings and sways and that at some point in time, a government you won't agree with will be able to wield all these shiny new tools for censorship.

NotPractical2• 5 months ago

I don't take issue with the idea of something like this (assuming it isn't expensive and is more of an information center than anything else), but yeah it is funny that while they evidently made this in response to the EU, if it ends up being what it sounds like it will, it's going to enable Americans to circumvent their own state's laws as well.

ImJamal5• 5 months ago

No state blocks access to PornHub. Some states have requirements requiring ID before viewing porn, but the state isn't stopping anybody from viewing it.

Requiring ID to buy alcohol isn't banning alcohol, just like requiring ID to view porn isn't banning porn.

riffraff3• 5 months ago

Can't wait for them to realize this allows sidestepping geoblocks on media and Hollywood to freak out.

astahlx• 5 months ago

In the end, facts are useless. You belief what you think your social bubble, and in particular, the group you think you belong to, is thinking. And many people do not speak up. Mostly those with strong (often selfish) interests speak up, and often in a manipulative way. Having narcissist or sociopaths as leader can indeed be a bad thing. Some sort of media control is good, to protect core values, to protect the law against mass manipulation.

DeathArrow• 5 months ago

The EU will probably build its own version of the Great Firewall of China.

mesk3• 5 months ago

Cool, so the US students will be able to read school banned books ? Or US state banned research papers ? Or US state banned historic books or photos ? Or soft banned late night shows - so Colbert will continue ? Kimmel ? Or domains of shadow book libraries banned by FBI/corporate requests ? And it will circumvent geoblocking enforced mostly by US companies ?

Cool, such a heroic effort to remove censorship from theinternet that US enforces on us :-)

Ooh, almost forgotten there also some porn and media pirating sites blocked in the EU that will surely get also unblocked. But who cares, there are thousands of theese....

Btw. did Putin and Xi allowed this ? Or their `free` internet will remain free as before.

Manuel_D2• 5 months ago

When has the US ever banned students from reading certain books or research papers? What research papers can I not legally read?

The domains of shadow libraries are banned for copyright infringement, you can still read the books legally by purchasing a copy.

mesk3• 5 months ago

Here you can find short sample of those `dangerous` books: https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/

And https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/cdc-orders-retracti...

And, I know those shadow libraries are banned because of copyright, but that's just an excuse. If someone pushes such a broad understanding of Freedom as US does, than copyright should maybe not be the one exception that's ok. People should have freedom to publish anything and other should have freedom to read/play/watch anything. If US can ban something because of so abstract as copyright, why can't EU ban something because of so abstract as `its all lies and state sponsored propaganda` ?

NOTE: just playing devils advocate here, to show the hypocrisy of it all...

randomNumber74• 5 months ago

Personally I think the EU goes too far when I'm not even allowed to access books on the internet where the author died more than 100 years ago. So I like it xD

Doxin• 5 months ago

which books?

randomNumber74• 5 months ago

Sorry I'm not allowed to tell you.

ruszki2• 5 months ago

Which book is that?

randomNumber74• 5 months ago

Gutenberg.org was DNS blocked for a very long time. Now it's not DNS blocked anymore but I think it will detect your IP and restrict access for some books if you are in the EU.

Of course very easy to circumvent if you know s.th. about tech.

jeroenhd10• 5 months ago

The Americans are just as bad when it comes to intellectual property (70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication). By American copyright standards, you can read The Silmarillion for free around 2072.

The difference in approach (American companies suing and financially ruining a select few downloaders versus European lobbyists going attempting to block the distribution points) makes piracy slightly less convenient in Europe but the basis for the copyright problem was turned into a global problem at the Berne Convention.

RupertSalt3• 5 months ago

I can read that for free, and even hang on to it for a couple of weeks, as soon as the library opens today.

Actually I don't need to wait, because it's available immediately over the Internet in eBook format, with my library card.

There are also CDs, DVDs, and on-demand audio/video available with a library card.

I visited a library across town, and many sections were given over to video games for various popular console systems.

anhner• 5 months ago

what americans think happens in the EU:

paganel• 5 months ago

As an EU citizen this is damn nice. The US might have some things to still work on/improve, but when it comes to freedom of speech it is still light years ahead of everybody else, and good for them.

Lio• 5 months ago

This comes across not as some noble to support free speech and more an attempt to exempt US firms like Grok, Meta, etc. from laws banning AI generated child porn and deliberately addicting social media.

pms2• 5 months ago

It's a waste of resources, but please do it! The entire "European Union censors" narrative is a hoax [1], so the portal will achieve nothing, but you've got to do what you've got to do!

[1] First, the EU countries have much higher World Press Freedom Index than the US. Second, once you start reading how little there is of the alleged "censorship" in the EU, you realize it's a no-brainer aiming to protect people.

Argonaut9987• 5 months ago

Press freedom !== entirety of freedom of speech

European politicians are calling every day to censor social media. People are arrested regularly for social media posts.

Censorship is absolutely an issue in Europe and it’s only getting worse. I welcome such an attitude as this.

kosinus• 5 months ago

There are so so many reasons to get arrested for social media posts that have nothing to do with censorship.

boudin• 5 months ago

This portal will just contain propaganda to serve the fascist agenda of the current US government.

Not saying that things are perfect in Europe but the US talking about freedom and freedom of speech sounds like a joke.

danlitt4• 5 months ago

The US's low press freedom index is precisely because people are being legally intimidated for wrongthink. It is not limited to the press, either. Mahmoud Khalil (the Palestinian activist detained by ICE on fake immigration charges for his political speech) is a famous example, but there are many.

The US's "commitment to free speech" is nowadays not very much more noble than Russia's principled stand against economic sanctions.

21asdffdsa12• 5 months ago

The worst part is that its "outsourced" to private organizations and NGOs - and thus the state claims its "not state driven" censorship. They want social stability- but have no grasp of the concept of that stability being only a leaky abstraction for situational stability. You can not claim the world is peaceful and utopia is at hand, sitting in a ski chalet in the alps- while the whole mountain slowly comes down with that house on it. Reality cant be reasoned away, the rain will fall, no matter how much laws there are against it.

intended9• 5 months ago

I think nations should add content moderation as part of mandatory volunteer duties.

The online commons and tasks are too complex and absurd, and we have many people who value speech, who would be the ideal people to take on these tasks. Putting their values into action so to speak.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so the moment people volunteer for this, they will themselves see whether the claims of misinformation and disinformation are overblown, and then vote accordingly.

Obviously speech is a super important part of our online lives, and should be treated as such.

mcv3• 5 months ago

I think people getting arrested for social media posts is specifically a UK thing. That and Russia are the only European countries where I've heard of that happening.

In most European countries, you'd have to go pretty far to get in legal trouble for social media posts. It's not impossible, but that's also true in the US. There are and have always been limits to speech. Everywhere. Also in the US (and not just under Trump, although he'd definitely increasing government censorship).

* Threats

* Blackmail

* Libel/slander

These are all restricted by law, because they hurt, silence or coerce people. Hate speech does the exact same thing. It's ridiculous to call hate speech protected free speech, while threats and blackmail are not.

A far worse attack on free speech is banning or restricting criticism of the government. That is the primary reason for free speech protections, and yet that's the very thing that the current US government is attacking on an unprecedented scale. See for example recent attacks on Jimmy Kimmel and Steven Colbert. That's something that would be unimaginable in many European countries.

dgxyz2• 5 months ago

It's not a hoax, it's a straight up lie.

dirasieb10• 5 months ago

https://archive.ph/bdEqK

>Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages
The police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms.
Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail.
Custody data obtained by The Times shows that officers are making about 12,000 arrests a year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

jbstack5• 5 months ago

As someone living in an EU state who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access, I can't agree with you that it's a "hoax". It's inconvenient enough for me that I'm looking into having a custom router that will switch between VPN destinations depending on what site I'm accessing.

Also "EU countries have higher press freedom than the US" is a strawman argument. We're not talking about press freedom. It's also an example of the fallacy of relative privation ("X isn't bad, because Y is worse than X"). It's like saying "It's a hoax that the US executes some prisoners, because Iran executes even more".

nolok• 5 months ago

Which country ?

RealityVoid• 5 months ago

What content are you missing? Off the top of my head, the type of content most likely to ve missing in Europe would be:

- geofenced media

- commercial sites intentionally removing eu access because of gdpr.

That's it. Those are the only cases where I could not access sites from tbe EU. At least the ones I encountered.

And do notice, both of them are not filtered by the EU or anything like this. They are enforced at the publishing website. Would you call this censorship? It kind of feels like a stretch. If not a deliberate contortion of truth.

pms2• 5 months ago

I really hope they go ahead and create the portal. I mean it.

flohofwoe• 5 months ago

who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access,

Is this because the EU or your country has blocked access, or some news site from the US blocking access from the EU because they don't want to deal with GDPR?

notrealyme123• 5 months ago

DCMA. United states censoring all around the world. So please host a VPN to get around that.

878654Tom• 5 months ago

Most access blocking is through ISP DNS servers. Just set your DNS to an open one, no need for a VPN.

littlestymaar• 5 months ago

EU state who has to regularly turn my VPN on and off to have full internet access

Because you really think this “portal” is going to let you access websites diffusing copyrighted content?

That's by far the most prevalent kind of blocking and I don't think the current admin is against that at all, they just want to to promote Nazi speech (which is barely blocked in the first place).

I wonder what they'll do about pedophile stuff though.

Gareth3215• 5 months ago

I am European and I would like to challenge you a little. Both the US and Europe have major issues with press and freedom of expression. To give you some examples from the European side. Specifically, the UK:

* Police in England and Wales recorded 12,183 arrests in 2023 for online speech. This number is growing fast, but the government isn't releasing the data anymore. A few years ago this man retweeted a meme (pretty milquetoast by internet standards) and was arrested and asked if he would undergo re-education: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11066477/Veteran-ar...

* The UK records "non-crime hate incidents," whereby if someone complains about you because they don't like you, and if the officer also doesn't like you, they record your behaviour on your permanent record, even if you haven't committed any crime. This record is accessible and used by many industries such as teaching, firefighters, and police. If you have even one non-crime hate incident on your record, you can be excluded from a job.

* The UK Online Safety Act 2023 requires websites with content which "could" harm children to age verify all users. Porn sites. Social media. Etc. This required people sending in their government ID to be permanently retained by a multitude of private companies. There are already many examples of sensitive data being leaked and hacked. Now that kid are using VPNs to access porn sites, the current ruling government is seeking to ban VPNs ("for children", of course).

* UK law criminalises “threatening,” “abusive,” or “insulting” words. The legal test is (I am not making this up), whether someone took offense. This has led to outrageous examples such as this man who is facing a longer sentence for burning a Quran than the man who stabbed him (for burning said Quran): https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8xr12yx5l4o

* In 2023–2024, the government obtained a court injunction preventing publication of details relating to a major data breach involving Afghan relocation applicants (the ARAP scheme). Parts of the reporting were restricted for national security and safety reasons.

* The Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice system allows the government to advise editors not to publish information that could harm national security. They have broad authority here.

* The Official Secrets Act 1989 criminalizes unauthorized disclosure of classified government information. Journalists themselves can potentially be prosecuted. There is no formal public interest defense written into the Act.

* The Contempt of Court Act 1981 restricts what can be published once someone is arrested or charged if publication could prejudice a trial.

* Ofcom regulates broadcast media under impartiality rules. News broadcasters must follow “due impartiality” rules. They can have their licenses revoked if they're not following some rather vague rules.

If I'm honest, I'm very envious of the First Amendment. It's clear that we do not have the same right to free expression in Europe. No doubt there are supporters of this system who prefer a society in which one may not say offensive or unkind things. But I think there are too many examples where suppression of speech inevitably leads to authoritarianism.

phatfish2• 5 months ago

Thanks for your input on UK society. FWIW, despite the coordinated attacks we are doing just fine. If you live your life through social media it might look like we are one step from North Korea though.

joe4633693• 5 months ago

This has led to outrageous examples such as this man who is facing a longer sentence for burning a Quran than the man who stabbed him (for burning said Quran): https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8xr12yx5l4o

This is a more than a bit misleading. The Quran-burner received a £240 fine, his assailant got 20 weeks suspended. Also, though he went for him with a knife, he wasn't successful - nobody was stabbed.

blell• 5 months ago

Russia Today is blocked in the EU.

Yes I know you’ll tell me it’s for my own good. Spare me.

anon291• 5 months ago

But don't worry their press freedom index is higher according to themselves!.

"We ranked ourselves and found we were number one!"

joenot4432• 5 months ago

[1] First, the EU countries have much higher World Press Freedom Index than the US

I don't think the placement of the US on the World Press Freedom Index is necessarily informative of whether there's censorship in the EU. I'd expect they both rank higher than North Korea, but that doesn't tell us much either.

shitlord• 5 months ago

The organization that publishes the WPFI also considers online harassment a major threat to press freedom and scores accordingly.

ActionHank• 5 months ago

I personally love the idea that they think people are so desperate to logon to facebook or tik tok that they will use some government vpn to access advertising laden slop.

jimnotgym3• 5 months ago

I see, there is a danger of US propaganda not getting through, so they are trying a new way.

jimnotgym3• 5 months ago

Will I be able to use this to watch Democrats get interviewed by Stephen Colbert?

GoblinSlayer11• 5 months ago

Without net neutrality it's kinda dead on arrival.

anovikov• 5 months ago

This is good. But because societies are democratic, and most voters are now economically irrelevant, something has to be done about possibility to create discontent simply to shake things and weaken countries - because there is nothing this discontent can achieve (you can't turn objectively irrelevant people, relevant again).

If top 10% of people create half of all spending and more of the spending on nonessentials, thus feeding majority of economy/creating majority of value, things will revolve around them. Something has to be done so that the other 90% won't be trying to break things down just for the sake of it. It's also that top 3% pay half of all federal taxes. Can we expect that the government will really care about others? It's also that same top 3% have a net worth of $5-6M and up - in the "never have to work again unless it's real fun" range.

If the majority of government funding and good half of corporate value comes from people who don't care anymore because they have arrived, can we expect anyone to be a responsible voter? We are firmly in 'bread and circuses' area.

mcintyre1994• 5 months ago

So instead of using a VPN that might have weird relationships with spy agencies, you just use one run by the US government? Clever idea to spy on the stupidest people in the world I guess.

Also I’m guessing they won’t allow this to be used to get around the sorts of content blocking project 2025 calls for in the US.

blumtyoty• 5 months ago

Ah yes the 'freedom' USA is giving other people 'freedom'.

Has nothing to do with propaganda or with just reading all the traffic for the cia/fbi/whatever snowden told us.

USA became so fast an enemy, its crazy :(

They should start again funding services like https://nsidc.org/ice-sheets-today instead of 'freedom'.gov

zombot• 5 months ago

This is so very strange. I don't trust the motivations behind this.

sschueller2• 5 months ago

So can this be used to loop back to US age restricted content?

sschueller2• 5 months ago

So I will finally be able to access those US news websites that block EU access because of the cookie banner?

Ylpertnodi• 5 months ago

I will finally be able to access those US news websites that block EU access because of the cookie banner?

They block the EU not because of cookie banners, but because they don't understand GDPR. Or vpn's.

duckerduck• 5 months ago

Maybe the EU can open a book portal for the US.

https://pen.org/report/the-normalization-of-book-banning/

BSDobelix2• 5 months ago

Banned in public schools...

k3vinw3• 5 months ago

So not books banned from the general public? Got it!

BSDobelix2• 5 months ago

If you compare that list of "really banned" books, it sounds like creating a European portal would be a net negative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...

The US list one (1) banned book in a earlier version (Operation Dark Heart) because of national security.

The first, uncensored printing of 9,500 copies was purchased for $47,300 in early September and destroyed by the publisher at the request of the Pentagon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dark_Heart

joenot4432• 5 months ago

The whole book banning thing is a little weird in 2026, IMO. It's exciting to think about, we all liked Fahrenheit 451, but a book not being bought for elementary schools doesn't really make it "banned" IMO.

There are a lot of books which probably shouldn't be in schools. I don't think children should be given copies of Mein Kampf or Camp of Saints, nor the random dark fantasy novels which are so popular today.

It feels disingenuous to pretend that school-book-choice is anything comparable to government level "book banning" when literally any of the books written about in that article can be freely checked out from any public library in the country.

subpixel5• 5 months ago

As a parent, I believe there is no book that should be banned from being used by a teacher for instruction. I have the responsibility of ensuring that the school my child attends employs teachers who I trust to make effective and age-appropriate curriculum decisions.

464931682• 5 months ago

I don't think children should be given copies

Disingenuous framing. Book bans remove books from school libraries. A book sitting on a shelf is not giving a book to someone.

of Mein Kampf or Camp of Saints

Why not? Genuinely, why not? What will happen if children have access to words on a printed page? Most of them have access to a supercomputer in their pocket.

To make my stance clear in case it’s not: there is no such thing as “age appropriate literature.” A free society depends on intellectual freedom. Restricting school libraries from holding certain books is a tactic to raise children to be closed minded adults.

squigz4• 5 months ago

What's wrong with "dark fantasy novels"?

guelo2• 5 months ago

How about letting the professional educators figure it out instead of emotionally-charged propaganda-fueled activists and their cynical politicians?

gadders2• 5 months ago

Banned in the same way you don't show certificate 18 films to 6 year olds.

xdennis• 5 months ago

The banned books are things like "All Boys Aren't Blue", a book which describes incestuous child rape and provides step by step instructions for anal sex.

If you think that book belongs in public schools the FBI should have a look at your computer.

Eezee• 5 months ago

It describes incestuous child rape, because the author describes his experience of being raped. Victims speaking about their abuse, now that is one step too far and needs to be censored.

guelo2• 5 months ago

What is wrong with teens learning about anal sex? It's not like not having the information is going to stop them from doing it, if that's your goal.

k3vinw3• 5 months ago

Good. I’m bypassing the UK altogether since they can throw you in jail for thought crimes.

https://www.newsweek.com/policing-thought-crime-should-have-...

koonsolo• 5 months ago

Ah yes, freedom of speech for the Europeans!

And when we travel to US, they need to check our social media to see if our opinions align with the US government.

d--b• 5 months ago

This is just weird.

I mean… Spending tax dollars so that foreigners can watch porn without age verification sounds like a bad use of budget.

ramon156• 5 months ago

Anything but help your citizens I guess. Go capitalism

jonny-puma• 5 months ago

As a retaliation the EU should set up a barge in international waters right outside the US east coast where Americans can get unpasteurized cheese, kinder surprise and cheap insulin

objektif• 5 months ago

When can we get our kinder egg portal?

LetsGetTechnicl• 5 months ago

added that user activity on the site will not be tracked.

Oh I'm sure

kingnothing• 5 months ago

Won't they simply blacklist freedom.gov?

rbanffy• 5 months ago

To best destroy the idea of an objective truth, you need to control it first.

hsuduebc24• 5 months ago

I suppose it works for banned websites and pornsites banned in US some states right? Other wise it would be pretty hypocritical.

lunatuna• 5 months ago

Anyone check out the site? Wild that freedom right now is basically a gif of a cowboy riding a horse with a gun pointed out front. Just shooting our way to freedom seems reasonable 'in these times'.

What's the meaning of this? Is it just theatre? And what is the message of the show? Is it a real fear that people have of lack of information that will set them free and they need to cowboy up and get there no matter what? Struggling to get this.

joe4633693• 5 months ago

It is undemocratic that European countries insist on making laws that Americans don't like.

moogly• 5 months ago

I'm looking forward to going there to find out what's happening in Palestine.

mcv3• 5 months ago

Will it also bypass content bans in the US? Or should Europe create its own freedom.eu for that?

I'm sure I don't have to point out the irony of the current censorship-happy government in the US pretending to be a champion of free speech in other countries. I mean, there are plenty of countries with far worse censorship of course, but for the US to attack the EU specifically on this, is pure propaganda.

agnishom• 5 months ago

I don't think that Europe has a censorship problem, but a US government funded VPN sounds great!

US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

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