Content moderation and censorship issues
87 articles
York University professor Andil Gosine spent three years developing the exhibition, which was set to open at the Art Museum of the Americas on March 21
Controlling the future by controlling the past, here by censorship of narrative-busting photos.
Prominent Republicans are trying to fight "bias" online.
Trump's 2021 "censorship" suit against YouTube and Sundar Pichai has been in private settlement talks for months. The judge wants an update.
It’s always fascinating to watch supposed “free speech warriors” reveal their true colors the moment they get a tiny bit of power. We’ve been covering the ongoing saga of various COVID contrarians who spent years falsely claiming they were “censored” by the B…
Contrary to commonly-held belief, it’s not illegal to swear on cable
The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google's CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed me…
US Open Asks Broadcasters To Censor Reaction To Donald Trump
The USTA sent a memo to broadcasters asking them "to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President's attendance in any capacity." Broadcasters Asked to Censor Reaction to Trump’s Attendance at US Open Scoop Harrison
Trump is to attend the match on Sunday as a guest of Rolex, the Swiss watchmaker and major sponsor of the tournament. It's thought that Rolex has a keen interest in convincing Trump to lower tariffs on Switzerland. And because the television broadcasters in t…
For fifty years or so, U.S. media academics warned anybody who would listen about the perils of letting your media companies consolidate in the hands of a bunch of rich assholes and giant, amoral corporations. Not only did America ignore those recommendations…
UPDATED: Nexstar’s decision to pre-empt Jimmy Kimmel’s show from its ABC stations “for the foreseeable future” comes amid furor over the host’s comments...
The move follows an appearance by the FCC commissioner, who criticized Kimmel's recent monologue.
Public figures have expressed outrage after the FCC’s director threatened ABC with reprisals if it did not act on a Kimmel joke suggesting Kirk’s shooter was part of “the MAGA gang”
The American right wing has established total cultural dominance
There are multiple ways into this story, but almost all of the reporting on what’s happened claims that Disney pulled talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” over comments that Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk. But that leads most people to assume tha…
It’s fascinating how quickly the tune changes when the shoe’s on the other foot. For years, we’ve been treated to endless screaming about how any effort to identify and counter foreign manipulation on social media was “censorship” and a violation of Americans…
Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — the direct result of an FCC threat to pull the licenses of networks that aired him — has shown us how authoritarianism can come to America. I mean this literally. The specific threats that Federal Communications Commission head Bre…
The Trump administration is openly coercing media organizations into suppressing speech that it does not like. On Monday night, late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel (irresponsibly) seemed to suggest that Charlie Kirk’s killer had conservative sympathies, before …
Huawei chipped in on the censorship effort.
It's not just Donald Trump. Huge corporate power is also muzzling comedians
Jimmy Kimmel's late night show was suspended after comments he made about Charlie Kirk's murder The post Jimmy Kimmel Live! Is Back Following Disney Boycott appeared first on Kotaku.
Stone claimed that, if he really was censored, we would have heard about it by now
Trump supporters cycled through increasingly desperate explanations for why the Jimmy Kimmel situation was totally legitimate. First came the absurd “low ratings” defense—because sure, networks routinely cancel shows minutes before taping due to sudden rating…
It'll also reinstate accounts banned for spreading misinformation.
Brendan Carr is fairly typical of a far right wing zealot, in that he has absolutely no compulsion about lying, constantly, about everything. The latest case in point: Brendan Carr is trying to pretend he didn’t abuse FCC power and break the law to try and ce…
Our great national censorship nightmare is over — but only for about three-quarters of the ABC stations in America. Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air Tuesday night after Disney, the parent company of ABC, reversed its decision last week to suspend his talk sho…
It’s pretty clear what Trey Parker and Matt Stone think about television’s top censor
For years now, the MAGA crowd has been absolutely convinced that the Biden administration engaged in the most egregious censorship campaign in American history. They’ve waved around the Murthy v. Missouri case as proof that Biden officials illegally pressured…
Brendan Carr has received ample attention for his recent failed attempt to ban a comedian and trample the First Amendment, something he’s facing several fledgling investigations over. But that disaster class in shitty governance shouldn’t overshadow all the o…
Alexandra is one of many people who lost their jobs for posting about the conservative influencer's death. She described the online mob that got her fired as "state-sponsored censorship."
You may recall a year or so ago, when Mark Zuckerberg whined to Jim Jordan about how the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain… content.” Or maybe you remember when he went on Joe Rogan and whined some more about Bi…
Even Fox News is fed up with the Pentagon’s new press restrictions
At a Senate hearing Wednesday on government censorship of tech platforms, a Meta executive expressed regret to Republican lawmakers for failing to speak out more against the Biden administration's requests that it remove health and election misinformation, in…
Lawyers for Alphabet, Youtube's parent company, recently alleged that the Biden administration tried to “influence” the company. Interviews with employees don't appear to support their claim.
You might recall that right wing propaganda broadcaster Sinclair Broadcasting recently tripped over its own ass after working with the Trump administration to try and censor Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing the President. The flood of outrage at the Disney/FCC/AB…
Donald Trump and his earlobe nibbler (FCC boss Brendan Carr) are threatening to try and censor some more comedians after their efforts to cancel Jimmy Kimmel went so well (read: not well at all). Over at the right wing white propaganda website formerly known …
Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and Republican Senator John Curtis want to gut Section 230 to combat “political radicalization”—in honor of Charlie Kirk, whose entire career was built on political radicalization. Kirk styled himself as a “free speech warrior” b…
For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coord…
Rutger Bregman says he is "genuinely dismayed" after a line about the US president was edited out.
The BBC is now voluntarily suppressing criticism of Donald Trump before it airs—and the reason is obvious: Trump threatened to sue them into oblivion, and they blinked. Historian Rutger Bregman revealed this week that the BBC commissioned a public lecture fro…
The order is focused on applicants for H-1B visas, which are frequently used by tech companies and is part of a campaign by the Trump administration against online content moderation.
YouTube offered multiple explanations for deleting the account of Robert Inlakesh, who covered Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The post A Journalist Reported From Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account Claiming He’s an Iranian Agent appeared first on Th…
You want to see actual government censorship in action? And have it done by people claiming they’re doing it to stop censorship? Check out last week’s revelation (originally reported by Reuters) that the US State Department will now start denying H-1B visas f…
Users need to revolt against what will very likely be an even more widespread effort to censor voices critical of Israel. The post Anti-Palestinian Billionaires Will Now Control What TikTok Users See appeared first on The Intercept.
CBS pulled a critical story after the president complained about the network’s coverage.
Yesterday, Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, censored a segment of its newsmagazine 60 Minutes about men who had been deported to an El Salvador prison. Today, it's popping up online. 60 Minutes had already begun promoting the now-censored segm…
The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American...
The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints.
In the name of protecting free speech, the U.S. government just banned five Europeans from entering the country — because it doesn’t like their speech.
US President Donald Trump claims that Europeans are engaging in "censorship" when they require digital platforms to be transparent about their algorithms and to remove already illegal content. With the US recently barring entry to five Europeans it accuses of…
The Trump administration has spent months shrieking about EU “censorship” while actively censoring people themselves. While I’ve long been a critic of parts of the DSA, Americans—particularly MAGA officials—keep crying wolf over the DSA’s non-censorial aspect…
We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep saying it because apparently it needs repeating: Donald Trump is not a free speech president. He just plays one on TV while doing the exact opposite behind the scenes. And in front of the scenes. And basically everywhere. …
While social media rumors have suggested the errors are examples of censorship, more than a day after the issues began, TikTok USDS says the problems are the result of a power outage at a data center that it is working to resolve. Rumors of censorship targeti…
After Trump-connected investors took a controlling stake in the U.S. version of the app, users have claimed that it's suppressing political topics
The scrutiny follows a rocky first week under new U.S. ownership./
Posts have been going viral on social media accusing TikTok's new owners of suppressing content, but eight academics examined the issue and found no evidence to support the claims.
Thousands of creators are deleting TikTok and flocking elsewhere just days after a change in ownership and mounting claims of widespread censorship and shadowbanning, or reduced reach, on the app.
The government wants to make it illegal to possess literature it deems dangerous — a familiar tactic to this incarcerated writer. The post Prison-Style Free Speech Censorship Is Coming for the Rest of Us appeared first on The Intercept.
Here's the interview that CBS and the FTC don't want you to see.
For the last five years, we had to endure an endless, breathless parade of hyperbole regarding the so-called “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, repeatedly and at high volume, that the Biden administration flagging content for review by social medi…
For the 12 of us who woke up Tuesday morning wondering what we had missed on Monday’s late-night shows, CBS greeted us with a concerning development. Overnight, Stephen Colbert had laid into his network, dedicating time at the top of The Late Show to claim th…
Federal Communications Commission faces backlash after comedian Stephen Colbert blamed its rules for scuttled interview.
We’ve written a few times now about how the GOP’s “free speech warriors” have been waging an absolutely absurd campaign against NewsGuard, a company whose entire business model is… expressing opinions about the reliability of news sources. You know, speech. T…
Another weekend and it’s another dust-up between Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom — this time about media censorship or control, depending on who you ask. As the former Apprentice host’s sycophantic FCC chair threatens outlets over their Iran War coverage, a gol…
Here's the latest in the FCC's quest to keep American media on a tight leash.
Brendan Carr is once again doing Brendan Carr stuff. Carr has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of broadcasters that tell the truth about Trump’s disastrous war in Iran. In a post over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Carr insists that …
For years, certain folks on the left kept insisting they wanted to bring back the Fairness Doctrine — the old FCC policy that required broadcasters to present “both sides” of controversial issues. Many of us in the tech policy world kept explaining why that w…
The Trump admin wants to criminalize a key part of journalists doing their jobs — a broadside attack on a free press. The post Pentagon Wants It to Be Illegal for Reporters to Ask “Unauthorized” Questions appeared first on The Intercept.
Photogenic paranoia is very much top of mind with this administration.
On January 10th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Joe Rogan and put on quite a performance. He talked about how the Biden administration had pressured Meta to take down content. He detailed how the Biden administration had apparently pressured Meta to take…
Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the “Disinformation Governance Board” and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the “Ministry of Truth.” It was “government speech police.” It was the single most Orwellian thi…
Meta’s new rules let it ban users or suppress comments that include the word “antifa” alongside “content-level threat signals.” The post Facebook and Instagram Tighten Censorship Rules for Saying “Antifa” appeared first on The Intercept.
We’ve been covering the Trump administration’s escalating campaign against NewsGuard for a while now. It started with the House Oversight Committee’s absurd investigation of the company for the crime of expressing opinions about news reliability. But then the…
We’ve been covering Brendan Carr’s censorial ambitions for a long time now. When Trump first picked him to chair the FCC, we warned people that the “free speech warrior” branding was a total sham. We later dug into the letter from a massive coalition of 80+ l…
For the better part of five years, we’ve been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of “jawboning.” Jim Jordan held hearings. Missouri’s AG sued. The Supreme Court heard Murthy v. Missouri and concluded there wasn’t…
This Saturday is the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner (WHCA). And there’s been ample criticism of journalists that plan to have giggles and cocktails with overt fascists, given this helps normalize of one of the most racist, censorial, and corru…
As some members of MAGA media begin pushing back against Trump, there may be a limit to his campaign of retribution
According to MS NOW, the FBI has launched an investigation into an Atlantic reporter.
ABC/Disney, like most major media companies, has spent much of its time during America’s bout with authoritarianism being a feckless wimp. The company was quick to ditch its already fleeting embrace of civil rights to please our dim, racist president, and wer…
The Trump administration is fighting for the right to keep some social media moderation advocates out of the US. On Wednesday, US District Court Judge James Boasberg heard arguments in a lawsuit between the nonprofit Coalition for Independent Technology Resea…
As we’ve previously noted, Brendan Carr recently launched a series of phony inquiries into ABC because Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the president’s wife. Carr can’t just come out and say that, so he’s launched a series of fake (and legally laughable) “investigati…
You have less than a week to weigh in on Brendan Carr’s obviously bullshit retaliatory censorial attack on Disney. While it’s quite clear that Carr is likely to ignore the comments, they still very much matter. It needs to be in the public record that the pub…
Amazon and Goodreads “have limited or suspended reviews for Vice President JD Vance’s new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, in a move some claim was in response to a flood of negative reviews,” The Daily Beast reported Friday. Amazon owns Goodrea…
AMAZON, GOODREADS restrict reviews of Vance book after savage critiques... (Second column, 1st story, link) Drudge Report Feed needs your support! Become a Patron
Earlier this week we noted how ABC has been asking its audience to give the Trump FCC an earful about its clumsy efforts to censor journalists, comedians, and daytime talk show hosts: The ad only hints at the fact that FCC boss Brendan Carr has launched a fak…
Trump-appointed Louisiana federal judge Terry Doughty has spent years bending over backwards trying to help some MAGA faithful manufacture nonsense claims about “censorship” for some grifters getting moderated on social media. As you’ll recall, he issued a bi…