It is a random Tuesday night, and you are relaxing on your living room couch scrolling through your social media feed. You read an article about foreign corruption and decide to make a post criticizing the government responsible for it. You make fun of a politician you don’t like, share a clip from an interview with your favorite political talking head, crack a joke about a pressing social issue, or make a plug for the blog post that you just finished writing. Then, you head to bed without giving it a second thought. This is America, after all, and the First Amendment is always there to protect you from the government.

Well, to protect you from our government.

Under the First Amendment, the United States cannot retaliate against you for constitutionally protected speech and expression. But the First Amendment does not necessarily protect you from a bureaucrat in Brussels, a judge in Brazil, or a police force in Hong Kong. Consider the case of Saad Ibrahim Almadi.

Almadi was a retired engineer living in Boca Raton, Florida. A dual U.S.-Saudi citizen, Almadi had lived in America since the 1970s and, over the past several years, had made around 14 posts criticizing the Saudi Arabian government. Those posts raised concerns about the destruction of older sections of Mecca and Jeddah, issues surrounding poverty in Saudi Arabia, and a few mentioned the assassination of the U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi while he was visiting a Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. He voiced the same kinds of political grievances that millions of Americans talk and post about every day. And for years, nothing happened.

Then, in November 2021, Almadi took a trip to Riyadh to visit his family. He was arrested almost immediately after he landed and accused of “harboring a terrorist ideology.” In October 2022, a Saudi Arabian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison, followed by a 16-year travel ban preventing Almadi from leaving the country. An appeals court later increased his sentence to 19 years with a 19-year travel ban. Since Almadi was already in his 70s at the time, this meant that he would likely never return to the United States. He was eventually released after the charges against him were dropped in March 2023, but his travel ban remained in place.

Almadi did not make it back to the United States until November 2025, four years after he had left, and only after the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally visited the White House. His crime? Criticizing a foreign government from American soil.

It’s easy to write this off as an example of the repressive nature of an authoritarian monarchy. Surely a fellow liberal democracy, especially one that claims to have a proud tradition of free speech and expression, would never treat someone like that, right?

Unfortunately, Graham Linehan serves as an example of how even democratically elected governments regularly try to punish politically disfavored speech that occurs outside their borders. Linehan is an Irish comedy writer responsible for shows like Father Ted and The IT Crowd. He has been living in Arizona while he works on his next project. In April 2025, Linehan made a handful of posts about transgender activists. In several different posts, he advised women encountering a transwoman “in a female-only space” to “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Later that year, Linehan took a flight from Arizona to Heathrow. When he stepped off the plane, five armed police officers arrested him for his comments, seized his bag and devices, and told him he could only post bail if he promised to stay off X.

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Thankfully, in May 2026, the Metropolitan Police apologized after an internal review found that “at times, both the investigation and arrest phases lacked the diligence one would expect.” But the message had already been conveyed loud and clear: Even comments you make outside the country have the potential to land you in jail.

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Human beings possess many wonderful qualities but one widespread, and less laudable, trait is this: We’re often pretty damn lazy, too. We seek easy fixes for complex problems, reaching for Band-Aids for wounds that need stitches or a fresh coat of paint to conceal a crack in a house’s foundation.

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Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.

Today’s Dispatch covers a wide range of censorship efforts, from government takedown demands to social media platforms to a shocking death sentence in Saudi Arabia. But the lead-off story will look at what is, on its face, an absurd story of overpolicing in the United Kingdom. A politically active teen posted some comments mocking a local politician on Facebook — and then the police appeared at his home. It’s a story that has become all too common in the country. But behind it looms another threat to online speech. In a few months time, new rules will go into effect banning young people from using social media and requiring adults to verify their age with a passport or license.

The question now won’t just be whether police will come knocking at your door over what you said online, but under what conditions you can speak online in the first place.

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‘Rent boy’ and bunny ears jokes bring police to teen’s door

Fraser, a 15 year old boy from the UK’s West Midlands, is a vocal teenager. He campaigns for Reform UK and posts about politics on social media. And that’s where the trouble started. Four officers showed up at Fraser’s door one morning this August and told him he was under arrest — but didn’t explain exactly why, other than that it was “to do with social media.” Fraser was then fingerprinted, photographed for a mugshot, and questioned for a short time about his social media use and his knowledge of Tory councillor Simon Bennett from the Wolverhampton city council. Fraser’s Facebook posts about Bennett, it turns out, are presumably the reason why he was arrested in the first place, in what police said could be a potential “hate crime offence.”

Fraser had posted some insults about Bennett on Facebook, including an edited photo of Bennett wearing bunny ears with the caption: “Nibble… nibble… crunch… crunch Can you hear it? That’s the sound of a rabbit devouring the last remaining shreds of Wolverhampton Conservatives’ credibility.” Fraser also complained about how Bennett dressed at meetings, and when he wore a suit instead of casual clothing Fraser posted that he was glad Bennett was “not looking like a rent boy.”

The “rent boy” dig is apparently what may have tipped the scales from wisecrack to crime. Bennett reported the posts to police, believing Fraser had potentially engaged in harassment and malicious communications against him.

“It was unpleasant and I was targeted by a child I had no way of dealing with,” Bennett said.

Fraser is now represented by the Free Speech Union but is still waiting to learn whether police intend to charge him with a crime.

The UK’s problems with free expression on the internet, particularly where young people are involved, is about to get even more complicated. The government remains intent on ensuring its upcoming under-16 social media ban — one that would keep teens like Fraser from engaging on social media entirely — isn’t flouted like Australia’s landmark legislation. So officials have now acknowledged that they may require “hard checks” in the form of passport or license verification to age-gate social media platforms. UK social media users concerned about a police knock at the door may soon have even more to worry about.

Speaking of long-running censorship issues: Police in the UK are still arresting peaceful protesters under anti-terror legislation for holding up signs in support of Palestine Action, a group currently fighting its government ban in court. Dozens were arrested late last month for holding signs expressing support for the group, including Massive Attack musician Robert Del Naja for his “I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION” placard.

Once again, Turkey ramps up internet censorship

Social media censorship is a favorite tool of the Turkish government, and they are wielding it once again. In recent weeks, government officials have ordered X to block at least 1,270 accounts, primarily from LGBTQ advocates, journalists, and academics. Meta has also blocked a number of accounts. T24, one of the oldest independent media outlets in the country with 1.9 million followers on X, earned a block order because it was “aimed at disrupting and weakening the Turkish family structure” and “would adversely affect the developmental process of young and underage individuals concerning sexual orientation and gender identity.” Human Rights Watch reports “[n]either X nor Meta have provided public explanations about their responses to the September-October censorship waves,” and that users are not even receiving explanations about the legal basis under which their accounts are being targeted.

The repression extends offline, too. Ali Tarakçı, one of the journalists censored on X, was also arrested for publicly spreading misleading information after speculating that an unnamed government minister would resign.

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More tech censorship in the news:

• The Philippine government temporarily banned Discord but lifted the restriction after the platform agreed to implement stricter measures on child safety and extremist content.

• Russian authorities recently enacted another crackdown on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which are used to evade internet censorship, through methods including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, IP address blocks, phishing scams to employees at VPN service providers, and removal orders to app stores.

• Political cartoonist Satish Acharya’s Instagram account was temporarily blocked in India over years-old cartoons about the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

• The Indian government demanded app stores take down Bitchat, the Bluetooth-based messaging app co-founded by Jack Dorsey, for allowing “illegal” content and because the app’s decentralized nature would make it harder for government officials to target material and users.

New charges loom after French ‘public insult’ conviction

French writer and activist Dora Moutot was convicted for “public insult” and fined €4,754 earlier this year after stating in a 2022 talk show debate that she believed Marie Cau, a former French mayor and trans woman, is male. Moutot also said that “as women, we have no choice but to be wary of people with penises.” Finding her guilty, the judge said her words were an “abuse of freedom of expression warranting the imposition of a criminal penalty commensurate with the harm thus caused to the values protected by our democratic society.”

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls Reem Alsalem expressed concerns this month about Moutot’s prosecution and threats of violence against her, saying in statement, “Simply expressing views on sex, gender or the specific needs of women based on their sex should not constitute grounds for harassment, intimidation or sanction.”

Moutot is appealing, but says she is again facing allegations of “insult” charges, with another organization filing new complaints over Moutot and her colleague Marguerite Stern’s social media posts, blog, and YouTube channel.

Journalist’s views questioned at Israeli border

British journalist Secunder Kermani was temporarily denied entry and taken to an immigration detention facility after landing in Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport to cover the country’s election season. Kermani was later granted entry after his employer, Channel 4, intervened, but he says that when he first landed border officials questioned him about his views, specifically asking if he believed Israel was “committing genocide.”

“Is this a new government policy to only allow certain journalists into the country? Even when they work for mainstream news organizations?,” Kermani said. He joins a group of reporters who have faced entry issues or had their travel credentials revoked.

Sedition, book bans, and…Tom Cruise?

If you’re seeking to understand how repressive Hong Kong has grown in recent years, this about sums it up: Outgoing national security police chief Andrew Kan said that just questioning the government’s lack of clarity on which books are banned is itself a “form of soft resistance.”

Even asking the government to spell out what you can’t say and read could itself be seditious.

And the sedition arrests have continued. Independent journalist Tang Ho-wing was arrested, and then released earlier this month, on sedition charges after sharing a video showing protesters marking the anniversary of a police crackdown on a 2019 protest. Then two people were arrested for “operating pages on various social media platforms and publishing seditious posts that incite hatred against the constitutional order of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.”

Meanwhile, Tom Cruise’s new film Digger was yanked from Hong Kong theaters ahead of its release, without an official reason given. Reports suggest that government censors pulled the film due to “sensitive dialogue” about a potential nuclear attack on China.

Migrant worker’s death sentence overturned

Blasphemy laws are still on the books in dozens of countries. A handful of those countries threaten the death penalty for blasphemers, and some do indeed sentence blasphemers to death. Thankfully, Sri Lankan migrant worker Sivarasa Anojan now will avoid that fate. Anojan made a Facebook comment critical of Islam in June after a video of a man kicking a dog set off a religious debate on social media. He soon apologized and deleted the comment, but the damage was done.

Anojan was initially sentenced to five years in prison and fined three million Saudi Riyals for blasphemy but prosecutors appealed the judgment, seeking a harsher punishment. They got their wish: A Saudi appeals court upgraded the sentence to death. Sri Lanka engaged in diplomatic appeals for mercy, and succeeded this week when Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court overturned Anojan’s death sentence.

Whether he will remain imprisoned or receive a different sentence, however, remains unclear.

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“We shouldn’t accept that this is the end,” Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said this week of the UK’s looming under-16 social media ban. “This is a staging post to what must be a very active interventionist state, policing and regulating the online space so that people are safe.” Next March, the initial rollout will begin to keep teens under 16 from using “high-risk” social media apps, and further algorithmic restrictions will later hit those under 18.

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After that, more restrictions will apparently follow. What new “policing and regulating” powers will officials seek?

FIRE has warned for some time now that the rapidly advancing era of age-gating teens from the internet would bring with it a lot more baggage than just restrictions on kids. For one, it will force adults to participate in a vast identity verification scheme, threatening both privacy and anonymous speech. As I explained earlier, we’re moving toward a “papers, please” online landscape, where vital venues of public discussion might now only be open to those who are willing to trust tech companies and the third-party verification apps they use with information that can eliminate their anonymity online, and the governments responsible for mandating the collection of that information.

But there comes with it another threat, exactly the one Nandy now proudly advocates: The door was never going to just open to under-16 bans. Once legislators and regulatory authorities get their foot in that door, they’re going to see exactly how far they can force it open.

“If we were in a situation where we were saying our town centres are now so unsafe that we’ve decided that every child is going to have to stay in their bedrooms, people would rightly be up in arms,” Nandy said. “How have we got to a point where we’re saying these social media sites are so harmful and dangerous that we cannot conceive of any way of protecting our children except to remove them altogether? This ends now.”

It’s quite bizarre that Nandy is speaking as if the UK does not already enforce a very “active” policing of the internet, both via regulatory powers and criminal law. Thousands are arrested annually by police for their social media posts under broad laws targeting “grossly offensive” or “indecent” communications.

Alongside this aggressive policing of speech, British regulators have recently amassed increasing power to target speech and platforms under the Online Safety Act, which “protects children and adults online.” Platforms that fail to take appropriate action under the Act face fines up to £18 million or 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. And platforms are not only required to take down illegal content when flagged, but must “think about how they design their sites to reduce the likelihood of them being used” to host such illegal content. The kind of “illegal content” the regulator Ofcom polices doesn’t just include fraud or drug sales, but “hate” and “terrorism” too — two concepts which the UK interprets very, very broadly.

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Earlier this summer, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport also released plans to potentially require social media platforms to augment their algorithms to ensure government-approved sources like the BBC are “more likely to be at the top of people’s social media feeds when they search for news.” Nandy said of the proposal, “It is vital that we make sure that people have better access to trusted and accurate news and that our regulated public service media is seen and heard in the fierce battle against mis and disinformation.”

If this level of input and power over online speech, along with a new under-16 ban, is only the beginning of the UK’s “active interventionist state,” it’s hard to imagine where it will go next.

Alarmingly, it’s not just in the UK where officials are making clear that they aren’t content to employ existing speech laws against online expression or regulate only how children interact with social media. Just look at Turkey, where officials are threatening new requirements that people link a national ID number to their social media accounts so the government can easily identify speakers. Or Germany, where Chancellor Friedrich Merz is once again pushing for a “real name” rule for social media users and swatting down objections that it would pose a threat to free speech.

We are in a new era of regulating who can speak online, and how. And it was never just going to end with kids.

What, exactly, counts as an insult? For Montrealers, this is not just a hypothetical question about the limits of civility and good taste. In Canada’s second-most populous metropolis, the city council just banned insults to municipal employees — police officers included — and offending parties could now pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for saying the wrong thing to the wrong city worker.

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If that wasn’t bad enough, the new rules don’t even bother to define what is an “insult” or what speech is “offensive.”

A ‘half-baked’ proposal to ban insult

Yves Francoeur, head of Montreal’s police brotherhood, and his union have been pushing for years for the city council to better protect police against disrespect. This week, he got his wish when the Montreal city council voted 35-25, despite the objections of civil liberties groups, to pass a bylaw protecting municipal employees from insult and offensive behavior. Opponents called the proposal “half-baked,” and councillor Marie Plourde said members were “asked to vote now and consult later.”

The bylaws, which will be implemented at a later date, leave a lot to be desired — specifically, some important definitions for the speech the city council now intends to ban and punish with fines.

The rules reasonably prohibit things like threats made against municipal employees in the course of their duties. No arguments there. But it also bans “insults” made toward employees, as well as “offensive” or “humiliating” behavior. A savvy reader might now be asking: Well, what counts as an insult? Can’t plain old criticism be insulting or humiliating for the recipient?

But don’t look to Montreal’s city council for an explanation for these subjective terms, because the new bylaws don’t offer one. Perhaps even more absurdly, under the bylaws it’s also prohibited to “encourage” or “advise” another person to insult a municipal employee.

In addition to fines from $350 to $1,000 for a first offense and more for repeat offenders, the bylaws also permit employees to refuse services to people who have engaged in insulting or offensive behavior.

“Giving the middle finger, it’s not what will give you a ticket,” the mayor said about the bylaws. “Let’s just be honest. There’s bigger issues in terms of the attitude of some citizens.” (To be clear, if a cop determines that your middle finger is insulting, he can indeed issue you a ticket. Because the bylaws don’t say otherwise.)

But if city officials think this kind of restriction on citizens’ speech will create a more respectful relationship between people and cops or city workers, they may be in for a rude awakening. Threatening people with fines or lack of access to city services if they “insult” a cop, which the cops themselves get to define as they issue the ticket, is very unlikely to do anything but encourage more discontent — and frankly, may just make more people want to insult cops.

“Shut up or pay up” isn’t exactly persuasive. And it certainly is not respectful of free speech rights.

Is Montreal an outlier?

Unfortunately, this campaign against insult isn’t unheard of in either Canada or the world more broadly. In recent years, officers in the province of Quebec have issued thousands of fines under similar bylaws banning insults. Quebec City police alone have issued 11,092 fines since 2020. According to Global News, “the staggering number of fines for foul language coincides with a series of high-profile cases about police misconduct in Quebec.” Curious indeed.

Politicians and public employees elsewhere have also recently tried their hand at limiting critical speech. Just look at two stories I wrote about in this month alone, like Australia where the country’s top bureaucratic body is pushing for limits on “harmful” social media clips mocking public officials’ testimony. Or Germany, where the Alternative for Germany party wants the country’s chancellor criminally prosecuted for his criticism of AfD’s immigration policy.

Even in the United States, our ability to speak about government employees is under attack. This week, FIRE announced its lawsuit against the Kingsport, Tennessee, police department, which orchestrated a pre-dawn raid against a local critic who had posted negative videos about the police on YouTube.

Whether in the U.S. or Canada or Australia or beyond, the lesson is clear: You will not eliminate insults or criticism against government officials or employees by punishing those who voice them. Instead, you might just inspire a whole new class of critics.

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Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.

In recent editions of the Free Speech Dispatch, I’ve discussed the use of borders as a censorship mechanism, and how governments try to use immigration rules and procedures specifically to target speakers and speech they dislike. The underlying notion is that if you can deport the speaker, you can deport the idea, too. (Results may vary.) Today’s edition covers a similar issue, but with a remarkable difference: It’s not just tourists or visa holders facing threats of censorship via immigration restrictions, but citizens too. We’re not just talking about deportation, but denaturalization.

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Documentary kicks off denaturalization campaign in Israel

The creators behind the documentary NAZA were named winners of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival this month. And then they quickly earned a very different announcement: An Israeli cabinet minister called for revoking their citizenship.

NAZA, which just secured its U.S. release date, features interviews with 24 purported Israeli military and intelligence whistleblowers and accuses the Israel Defense Forces of determining an acceptable number of civilian deaths in its military campaigns in Gaza. Those allegations are provoking immense controversy in Israel — and backlash.

Israeli Minister of Culture and Sports Miki Zohar called the documentary a “betrayal of the state” and said he would “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Zohar added that he contacted both the director general of the Population Authority and the director general of the Ministry of Interior to ask them to consider denaturalizing the filmmakers “for breach of trust for the country and cooperation with the enemy, and to examine how the materials were obtained, who is behind them and whether in the framework of their attainment or publication, actions have been carried out that can help the enemy in time of war.”

But the denaturalization threats didn’t stop there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last week that he intends to introduce a bill to more broadly revoke the citizenship of those who “slander” the IDF. “Their place isn’t here,” Netanyahu said. He also promised a bill that would increase the financial penalties for those found guilty of such slander.

EU unveils age-gating KIDS Act

One of the ascendant speech stories of the year has been age verification on the internet: how it’s spreading rapidly around the world, how it doesn’t actually work at keeping kids offline, and how it diminishes adults’ privacy and speech rights. And that story is about to get much bigger. Last week, the European Commission announced the EU Kids Act, which would ban children under 13 from social media, set 15 as the minimum age across the EU for minors to open their own social media accounts, and prohibit “toxic or addictive features” for users under 18. The rules apply beyond traditional social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram and reach AI chatbots and online games, too. Fines for noncompliance could reach up to 6% of a company’s global sales.

Age will be “verified through certified solutions independent of the platforms, including a free EU age verification app and, in time, the European Digital Identity Wallet.” The bill now goes to the European Parliament and Council as it starts off the legislative process.

A busy time for media censorship

• Left-wing UK news outlet The Canary has now had accounts frozen by a second bank, once again raising concerns about free speech and debanking. Earlier this summer, Lloyds closed the outlet’s accounts and now The Canary says Metro Bank has followed suit. Unable to operate, the site has since paused operations.

• Reform UK is fielding criticism after the party banned some journalists from its events, including a Guardian editor who had reported on a £5 million personal gift Reform leader Nigel Farage accepted.

• Authorities arrested Ugandan journalist Remmy Asiteza on “fake news” charges after Asiteza covered corruption allegations against the Minister for the Presidency Milly Babalanda.

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he is suing the newspaper Haaretz for libel over its report alleging that he was warned ahead of time about the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks on Israel.

• The director of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department reportedly led the effort to arrest American-Jordanian investigative journalist Ali Younes over “his alleged reposting of an article by Aaron Magid, published in The American Conservative, questioning U.S. aid to Jordan.”

• Remember when I warned this summer about the threats to free speech posed by the United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime, and the spate of new “cybercrime” bills that are actually about free speech? Well, here’s another one. Bangladesh is considering amendments to its Cyber Protection Act that would create a new criminal offense for sharing “rumor” and “misinformation” online, punishable by up to a decade in prison. The risks to a free press are immense.

Canadian city council considers limits on abortion imagery

The council of Saskatoon, the largest city in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, is debating new regulations after anti-abortion flyers provoked controversy in the region. In August, the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform distributed pamphlets showing graphic imagery depicting abortions. Some residents complained, called police, and filed a petition with the city council that advocated a ban on displaying the imagery. Now Councillor Bev Dubois is calling for limits on the materials and a council study on how they could be regulated.

“I totally support free speech,” Dubois said. “But I also support, you know, our residents not being exposed to something like this as well. So there’s got to be that happy medium that we can look at.”

Japanese legislators call for lese-majeste restrictions

“The Group to Protect Japan’s Dignity and National Interests,” a group of legislators that includes members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, says more must be done to combat negative speech about the Imperial Family. The legislators are pushing for a revision to the criminal code so that alleged defamation and insult against the ruling family can be prosecuted even if no complaint is filed by targets of the speech as well as continuous reviews of the criminal code to find ways to protect the family from insult.

Rules punishing insults to the monarchy — lese-majeste laws — still exist in the world today and are a perennial source of censorship in certain countries, Thailand particularly. Weeks ago, a Thai court sentenced a 25-year-old activist to two years in prison on lese-majeste charges after she hosted a livestream in which she criticized police for breaking up a protest against the king’s motorcade.

U.S.-based web hosting company blocks human rights report in Russia

The Human Rights Foundation is criticizing Austin-based hosting company WP Engine for blocking the website for the organization’s Tyranny Tracker in Russia. Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor contacted WP Engine earlier this month to demand the block, which the company granted, despite HRF’s objections. HRF writes:

In doing so, WP Engine has departed from its own commitments. On Mar. 22, 2022, the company published a statement on its website, since deleted, condemning the Russian regime for its aggression against Ukraine and for “stifling free speech, curbing internet access, and censoring independent media,” and declaring that WP Engine “cannot allow the perpetrators of these attacks to also stifle access to information.” Four years later, WP Engine has done precisely that.

Similar blocks are hitting Hong Kong, too. The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation’s website is apparently now inaccessible within Hong Kong, joining other human rights and democracy sites that have been blocked in response to ramped-up (and oppressive) national security laws.

David Green, head of UK communications for CFHK, said of the block:

If left uncontested, it’s only a matter of time before such blockages — of which there are already more than a few — multiply. Can we seriously expect the CCP to allow Hong Kongers continued access to the truth, now that they’ve criminalised remembrance of 4 June?

Stringent criticism of other parties’ and politicians’ platforms is the bread and butter of politics. No political table can be set without it. Sure, the target of that criticism often thinks it exaggerated, unfair, or flat-out wrong, and will usually respond in kind. But are such critiques in the political realm criminal? That’s the claim that Alternative for Germany, fresh off its electoral victory in the German state Saxony-Anhalt, is making against the chancellor of Germany — and they want him to pay. Maybe literally.

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In a speech before the Bundestag last week, Chancellor Friedrich Merz criticized AfD’s policies, especially its position on immigration. “If what is being advocated here, namely ‘remigration,’ were to become reality, it would be nothing other than a synonym for ethnic cleansing based on origin and skin color,” Merz said.

Politicians regularly castigate their opponents’ positions as extremist, racist, sexist, communist, socialist, far left, far right, anti-Christian, anti-immigrant, pro-open border — the list goes on. It’s then up to voters to decide if that criticism is accurate or whether those policies actually appeal to them instead. But AfD wants this matter before a court of law, not the court of public opinion.

Shortly after Merz’s comments, AfD officials announced they had filed a criminal defamation complaint against him, specifically his accusation that the party seeks “ethnic cleansing.” Senior party member Stephan Brandner said Merz’s “insinuation” that AfD “is committed to ethnic cleansing, i.e. ultimately to expulsions and murders, is so clear that the judiciary must take action here.”

Normally, statements made by members in Parliament are protected against legal action. But Article 46 of Germany’s Basic Law includes exceptions to that protection — specifically in cases of “defamatory insult.” And that’s what AfD claims Merz’s “ethnic cleansing” statement constitutes. The comments “crossed the line,” Brandner said, making them “criminally relevant.” The complaint does not appear to be public yet, but criminal code provisions under which they may be pursuing legal action could include insult, defamation, or insult, slander and defamation directed against persons in political life — all of which are punishable with fines and/or prison time.

It is unclear whether the criminal case — and the AfD’s associated effort to use the legal system to police political criticism — will even lead to investigation let alone prosecution. But German prosecutors have certainly been busy in the past pursuing criminal charges against Germans who criticize or insult politicians — which can, indeed, be a criminal offense in the country.

Police have hunted down and investigated social media users who have called politicians names like “Schwachkopf” (weak-head) or “pimmel” (penis), and online insults can legally be treated even more harshly than verbal ones. One commenter was even briefly investigated for calling Chancellor Merz “Pinocchio” on Facebook. One man was prosecuted and fined for calling him “Lying Fritz.” And another was fined for calling him “Lackaffe” (“show off,” essentially.)

People should be free to criticize or insult AfD, Merz, and any other political figure or party in Germany. It’s that simple. And some German politicians have recognized that this crusade against insults has, indeed, gone too far.

But it’s not just German groups advocating that work in government bestows some kind of special protection against insult. As I wrote last week, Australia’s top bureaucrat body the Secretaries Board is asking Parliament to set new policies limiting social media clips of public testimony by bureaucrats because politicians and the general public are “ridiculing” them. Mocking clips can cause “reputational harm and personal abuse” to officials, the board claims, as well as “risk undermining political debate more generally.”

Even in the United States, with our First Amendment and long tradition of knock-down-drag-out political commentary, our ability to speak critically about the most powerful official in the country is under attack. Just ask The Des Moines Register, its parent company Gannett, and veteran Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer, who FIRE is representing in the case, who were sued by President Donald Trump, in his personal capacity, simply for publishing a poll that predicted presidential candidate Kamala Harris leading in Iowa. Or ask the many targets of FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who treats his position as head speech police for the Trump administration. There’s a long list of these threats and retaliations.

Criticism, even when it looks more like insult than critique, should be treated as a core component of political debate rather than an aberration of it. It’s disturbing that democratic states, the United States included, are faltering on protecting it. In democracies, voters decide which political parties and candidates deserve power. Those politicians shouldn’t get to decide what can be said about them.

Many of the free speech fights today rest on the question: How do we protect kids online? But some of the battles over what can be said or shared on the internet are about protecting a remarkably less vulnerable — and significantly more powerful — group from so-called harm: public officials. One such case is in Australia, where top bureaucrat body the Secretaries Board is asking Parliament to cap politicians’ and parties’ ability to share and criticize clips of testimony from the very officials the board represents.

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‘Ridicule’ directed at public officials

In a recent submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Parliamentary Standards’ inquiry into workplace behavior codes, the Secretaries Board raised concerns about challenges facing public servants and officials, including members of the military and heads of government agencies, when acting as witnesses before Parliament.

One of the Board’s “emerging concerns” is that politicians, political parties, and “third parties” can excerpt “short segments of committee broadcasts and distribute them to large audiences via social media.” In doing so, the Board notes, they can present “incomplete” clips of exchanges, remove segments from their “broader context,” add “captions with highlights or additional commentary,” and “invite ridicule, hostility or abuse directed at individual officials.”

The Board shared a long list of some “highly offensive” comments posted beneath videos of officials’ testimony, including “despicable,” “political puppet,” “bigot,” “pig,” “KKK member,” “clown,” “fraud,” “demonic,” “shill,” “criminal,” and “scumbag.”

The Board acknowledges that committee proceedings are public, but it argues that witnesses did not consent to having their testimony shared on social media, where clips can cause “reputational harm and personal abuse” to officials as well as “risk undermining political debate more generally.”

“When officials are publicly criticised, mocked, berated, or portrayed as personally responsible for policy decisions, the resulting effect can be significantly broader than the experience of the witness alone,” the Board writes. “Such conduct may contribute to a perception that appearing before parliamentary committees carries an unreasonable personal or reputational risk, potentially discouraging capable public servants undertaking public-facing responsibilities.”

Board seeks limits on ‘harmful’ social media clips

The Board is calling on Parliament to provide “guidance,” or more accurately, censorship. In short, it’s clear they want Parliament to consider banning politicians’ use of “harmful” clips from parliamentary hearings on social media — and, in their view, mockery and ridicule are a form of harm.

But, if “Parliament were not inclined to prevent the use of this evidence on social media,” then the Board would like it to consider guidance pressing members of Parliament to share video in full rather than in excerpts, as well as “refrain from content and commentary that targets individual officials for ridicule or harassment,” and disable comments so the general public cannot reply.

Bureaucrats shouldn’t set limits on criticism of bureaucrats

The Secretaries Board does express concerns about threats to public officials after they testified.

But it’s striking how much of the Board’s focus is on ordinary insults, criticism, and mockery by politicians and members of the public responding to videos of hearings. And because the Board is proposing disabling comments, its intent is to limit not just what politicians say about testimony but how ordinary Australians can respond to it.

Sure, ridicule is not a pleasant experience, and it can be miserable and hurtful. There’s no denying that. But satire, parody, mockery, and insult have also long been used by citizens to challenge state power. Treating those methods as harms in themselves in order to justify censorship is itself a threat to a free and open society.

Politicians from a range of parties, including the Greens, Liberals, and One Nation, are objecting to the Board’s proposal. “Bureaucrats shouldn’t get to decide where to draw the line on parliamentary scrutiny, particularly when they’re the ones being scrutinised,” Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May told The Guardian.

Ridiculing bureaucrats who make and enforce public policy, and are often well-paid in the process, is not a subversion of the democratic process. It is a component of it. If we allow public officials to limit permitted political speech to only what is perceived as “respectful” by those officials, we may find that the real limit is that nothing critical can be said at all.

Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.

What’s past is prologue — and talking about it might be a crime. Many of the stories I discuss in the Free Speech Dispatch address fresh cases of censorship of speech about things that are happening now: dissenters opposing a new government policy, reporters investigating uncovered corruption, protest movements suddenly flourishing, etc. But governments are sometimes just as sensitive about the past as they are the present. Today’s edition leads off with a look at Hong Kong and China, where activists and an artist were recently prosecuted for their retrospection and discussion of China’s past — warts and all. And be warned: this repression leaks outside the borders of China and Hong Kong and into freer nations.

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Tiananmen memorial activists and Mao artist convicted

Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, who led the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China and organized annual Tiananmen massacre memorials in Hong Kong, could now face a decade in prison. They were found guilty in court late last month and convicted under Hong Kong’s national security law. The alliance’s call to “end one-party dictatorship,” the panel of three judges asserted, constituted an attempt to unlawfully overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.

Politicians and civil society groups around the world condemned the decision, and Hong Kong authorities are now objecting to what they deem “baseless slander and smearing” from anti-China critics. “Members of the public should not be misled by the external forces’ attempts to smear, but must be able to distinguish between right and wrong, and clearly understand the difference between this case and the normal situation regarding the exercise of freedoms of association, assembly and speech,” a spokesman for the government said.

In mainland China, the situation is also grim. Gao Zhen, a Chinese artist and U.S. permanent resident, will spend three years in prison for “infringing upon the reputation of heroes.” The criminal conduct? Satirical works of art, including “Mao’s Guilt,” a sculpture of Mao Zedong kneeling in repentance. The law against insulting heroes was passed after Gao created these works. Gao’s wife had prepared his clothes, hoping and expecting that he would be released. But now she must return to the United States, and their family, alone. Comedian Guo Degang joins Gao in similar trouble. The popular comedian is facing show cancellations — and police investigation — after revising the lyrics to revolutionary song “Playing My Beloved Pipa” in a performance.

And there are, yet again, accusations that Chinese officials are attempting to chill speech outside the country, too. This summer, protesters held a vigil for Lobga Rangzen, the Tibetan activist who self immolated by the UN’s New York headquarters, outside the Chinese embassy in London. Footage from the vigil shows guards inside the embassy brandishing stun weapons — which are illegal in the UK — at protesters yelling outside the gates. Four years ago, staff at Manchester’s Chinese consulate dragged and beat a protester who held a sign mocking Xi Jinping.

It’s even in the United States. As I wrote about earlier this week, Chinese officials pressured a U.S.-based Catholic group to disinvite a speaker who studies state regulation of religion from a conference in Texas this summer. And they agreed to do so.

Will Palestine Action’s terrorist designation import UK censorship?

Last week, the Trump administration designated the UK-based Palestine Action as a terror organization, meaning it will face financial and other sanctions from the U.S. government. Reporting from The Telegraph and The Times suggests that pro-Palestine Action demonstrators who were arrested in the UK in recent months under Section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 — which bars expressing “opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” — may be denied entry to the United States. Unlike British law, the First Amendment draws a distinction between materially supporting groups proscribed by the government and simply expressing words and ideas about those groups.

If the designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization results in the United States denying entry to British grandmothers who were arrested for peacefully holding signs in a public park, America will be bringing the UK’s censorship onto our shores. At a time when the United States rightfully criticizes the UK for its immense failures on freedom of expression, we must reject that censorship — not import it.

New Zealand joins the social media ban campaign

Another domino threatens to fall. This time it’s in New Zealand, where Parliament is set to consider a bill forcing social media platforms to take steps to keep kids offline. The proposed ban would require platforms including Facebook and TikTok to enact measures to ensure teens under 16 are walled out or face major fines, potentially “substantially higher” than in Australia. As FIRE has explained before, Australia’s landmark ban has effectively been a failure. Not only are kids still using social media, but the tools governments have used to try to keep them out have created massive new privacy and censorship risks — including for adults.

Mexico weighs new demands on TV and radio broadcasts

A new proposal put forth by President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration is raising fresh concerns about media censorship in Mexico. Under the proposed guidelines from the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, TV and radio broadcasters would be required to make a number of changes to respect “audience rights.” Among those changes, which would be enforced by the commission, are that broadcasters would need to put up tags clarifying what content is news and what is opinion, the installation of ombudsmen to address audience complaints, and a guaranteed right of reply to audiences in response to coverage they deem false.

Sydney library returns ‘How to Sell a Genocide’ to shelves

A library in the same council area as Bondi Beach in Sydney took Adam Johnson’s 2026 book How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza from shelves after a survivor of last year’s Bondi Beach terror attack said the book’s presence was upsetting to victims and the bereaved. But the book is now back after the State Library of New South Wales wrote to remind Waverly Library that it can retain controversial material on its shelves. “The library acknowledges that some books and materials may not align with everyone’s personal views, experiences or beliefs, but supports the right of individuals to make their own choices about what they read, view and access,” the State Library said in a statement.

The danger of online expression in Pakistan

TikTok creator Shamso Bibi was murdered last month, shot dead by two men as she traveled in a car with her family. Bibi had 1.3 million followers on TikTok. Her family suspects she was killed by men with whom she had a financial dispute and who wanted “to silence her and take her money.” She apparently joins at least nine other women content creators killed in the past year or so in Pakistan, often by men offended at content they posted online. One man reportedly murdered four relatives for posting “indecent” on TikTok. Activists warn that the killings expose the heightened risks women in Pakistan face when using the internet to express themselves to broader audiences.

There’s another risk to online speech, too: “cyber-blasphemy.” Families of the accused are pushing the government to look into their allegations that a network is intentionally entrapping people into blasphemy cases online to extort them, given the risk of long prison sentences and even mob violence against accused blasphemers. The existence of “cyber-blasphemy” is a disturbing, if fascinating, insight into how much things change but how much they stay the same when it comes to free speech. Modern technology meets perhaps the most ancient of speech restrictions.

Tourist jailed for insulting sacred holiday in Bali

It’s an ugly reality tourists occasionally learn from time to time: Being on vacation in another country does not mean you are also on vacation from that country’s laws. Such was the case for Luzian Andrin Zgraggen, a Swiss tourist sentenced to prison late last month in Bali. Zgraggen was arrested in March after posting an Instagram video of himself using expletives to complain about Nyepi, the Day of Silence, a sacred Balinese Hindu observance during which businesses and events shut down on the island and residents usually stay at home.

Zgraggen apologized at his trial, expressing that he did not intend to insult the Balinese people, but was nevertheless sentenced to one year in prison. The presiding judge said he “offended the Balinese people, hurt their faith and provoked public outrage.”

‘Discredit’ the military, spend over a decade in prison

Russia continues to enact harsh punishments on critics of the war in Ukraine, particularly under laws banning “discrediting” or spreading misinformation about the armed forces. Last month, a Pskov court sentenced war critic and politician Lev Shlosberg to 11 years and one month in prison for comments about the war in a YouTube debate and a Telegram repost. In a separate case, his party, Yabloko, was also banned from participating in upcoming elections. “A single person is imprisoned, yet fear seeps into the hearts of millions,” Shlosberg said in closing remarks at his trial.

Europe’s top human rights court calls for political prisoner’s release

In a 15-2 ruling, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights issued a clear statement: Activist, businessman, and philanthropist Mehmet Osman Kavala must be freed. Part of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdown on dissent in the aftermath of the 2016 failed coup, Kavala was first arrested by Turkish authorities in 2017, acquitted in 2020, but then prosecuted again and sentenced to life in prison. The Grand Chamber found that the Turkish government’s actions against Kavala were “predominantly motivated” by a desire to punish him “for expressing his opinions as a human-rights defender, and to silence him,” and constituted violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In the United States, campus speakers, online expression, blockbuster movies, and printed books are all, of course, protected by the First Amendment. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re protected against influence and censorship by foreign powers, particularly the Chinese government. This censorship may go under the radar for many Americans, but make no mistake: It can influence not just what you encounter in the secular world, but maybe the spiritual one, too.

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A report this week from the National Catholic Register paints a disturbing picture: A U.S.-based Catholic organization chose to disinvite a speaker from its conference at the University of St. Thomas in Houston after facing direct pressure from Chinese officials. Apparently even the speaker lists at religious events in the U.S. cannot escape pressure from foreign officials who vest in themselves the authority to censor the world.

How a small Texas conference became a target

This time last year, the U.S.-China Catholic Association (USCCA) invited Purdue University professor and director of the Center on Religion and the Global East Fenggang Yang to speak at USCCA’s summer 2026 conference in Houston. Yang agreed to deliver what he called a “very non-political” speech, “Transforming Guanxi: Chinese Christian Transnational Ties and the Making of Social and Spiritual Capital.”

Yang, who was born in China, says his academic work on state regulation of religion — a long-brewing issue between the Vatican and the Chinese government — at one point was well received by Chinese officials. But, with the rise of Xi Jinping and growing repression within the country, state authorities have increasingly censored Yang’s work in the past decade. Enough so, it seems, that they sought to limit his ability to speak not just in China, but in the United States.

That brings us to May of this year, when chair of the USCCA board Peter Tan contacted Yang out of the blue to tell him that the two needed to talk, as Tan “just returned from China,” where he “was confronted by two government officials regarding your participation in our conference.” The two spoke over Zoom, where Tan asked Yang to step down but gave little detail.

Yang declined to self-censor, so Tan made the decision for him: To “protect the future of the USCCA,” Yang was no longer welcome to speak.

Why did a U.S. Catholic group bend the knee?

Tan offered a number of reasons.

The University of St. Thomas and the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston would “most likely ask us to cancel the conference,” Tan said, because he had to ensure that “we will not be in conflict with the Vatican’s position on the PRC or jeopardize the Vatican.” (The Register reports that, in a comment, the university said it did not make any requests regarding the conference and the archdiocese did not respond in time for publication.) Tan also worried that board members feared retaliation from Yang’s participation. “The bottom line is no one can predict what the government can and will do. There is too much risk,” Tan wrote.

In a June 29 letter, chair of the 2026 USCCA conference Father Rob Carbonneau and Tan wrote to Yang offering further explanation: Two officials from the State Administration for Religious Affairs called for Yang’s removal due to his “past public criticism of the Chinese government.”

The board deemed it necessary to “preserve the USCCA’s fragile, long-term presence and mission in China.” One board member, University of California, San Diego professor Richard Madsen, did not agree and resigned, objecting to this “violation of the freedom of speech that is essential to academic integrity.”

Yang, too, objected, including to the USCCA’s request that he keep this matter quiet. “I cannot promise to be silent about this whole thing,” Yang wrote. “The egregious violation of religious freedom and academic freedom, and your organization’s willing cooperation in it, need to be exposed.” He also called the group’s “willingness” to assist in transnational repression “disappointing and hurtful.”

In a comment to The Register, Tan said critics need to understand that his group is not a “human rights organization.”

Sometimes, it takes two to censor

“I think it really represents an escalation,” Yang told The Register about his cancellation by USCCA. “They are trying to censor me on American soil.” He’s right — and he’s not alone. As I chronicled in my book Authoritarians in the Academy, critics of the Chinese government face censorship, threats, and fear in U.S. higher education and beyond.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is those who are willing to assist with that censorship and comply with orders from officials seeking to exert power beyond their own jurisdiction. People who find themselves in that situation, where they are pressured to consent to censorship abroad on behalf of an authoritarian power, no doubt often face a difficult choice. But it is, nevertheless, a choice.

Americans must ask themselves uncomfortable questions about what else foreign powers quietly censor on our shores without our notice, and why it’s so difficult for tech companies, civil society institutions, universities, and even religious groups to clearly and resolutely say “no” to those efforts.

How can we fight for a more just and free world if we aren’t even willing to embrace, defend, and employ our own freedoms in the process?

How many times can you prosecute blasphemous speech under other laws until you effectively have a blasphemy law?

This isn’t just a hypothetical. It’s a question the United Kingdom is posing again and again as police and the judiciary crack down on offensive speech about faith. In the aftermath of the Hamit Coskun saga — in which Coskun was violently attacked after burning a Quran and initially convicted by a judge who cited the attack as evidence for Coskun’s misconduct — more cases now suggest Britain has resurrected the concept of blasphemy under other names.

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One such case involves retired police officer Stephen Gray, who is in the process of appealing after being found guilty of offensive communications under Section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003. Gray went on trial at Newton Aycliffe magistrates’ court earlier this year after facing charges for reposting two images on Facebook.

The first showed “an image of a Middle Eastern man, who was in his late 20s or 30s, and the words ‘Children in Need,’” as well as the words “time for mass deportation” and a caption calling for donations “to help him move from a three-star to a five-star hotel.” The second meme showed bacon, a man in a turban, and the message: “Fun facts about Bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

The Telegraph reports that the complainant was Gray’s non-Muslim neighbour, with whom he had previously had an unrelated dispute.

The judge found the first image was not grossly offensive, reasoning that it dealt with a matter of public concern being debated in Parliament. But he reached the opposite conclusion about the bacon meme, saying that it concerned religion rather than politics and was grossly offensive. Gray was ordered to pay more than £1,000 in fines and costs. His appeal is scheduled for November. He fears a conviction could affect his family’s ability to foster children.

“I was initially quite worried because obviously we have to have enhanced DBS checks to foster children,” Gray told The Telegraph. “These kids have enough to put up with without the fear they may be moving again hanging over their heads.”

A second case raises similar concerns, but under a different statute. Two protesters were arrested after holding signs reading “fuck Islam” at the May 16 Unite the Kingdom rally in London, organized by activist Tommy Robinson, and are being investigated for possible offenses under the Public Order Act 1986. The Free Speech Union and Big Brother Watch have asked police and prosecutors to drop the matter.

British law doesn’t protect speech as broadly as the First Amendment does in the United States and permits investigation and prosecution based on the perceived offensiveness of speech.

That brings us back to Hamit Coskun.

As FIRE readers may remember, Coskun, a Turkish-born Kurdish-Armenian asylum seeker, burned a Quran and yelled “Fuck Islam” outside London’s Turkish consulate in 2025. A man named Moussa Kadri chased Coskun with a knife, attacked him, then kicked and spat on him. A passing delivery cyclist also stopped and kicked and spat on him. Coskun was charged with, and soon convicted, of a religiously aggravated public-order offense and fined. (Kadri was handed a suspended sentence for assault, and did not serve any time in prison.)

The trial judge’s reasoning produced one especially disturbing passage. In finding Coskun’s conduct disorderly, District Judge John McGarva cited the fact that Coskun was attacked as evidence of Coskun’s guilt, writing that his disorderly conduct was “no better illustrated” than by the fact that it led to two people assaulting him — even though the judge admitted neither attacker was justified.

Coskun appealed. In October, Southwark Crown Court acquitted him, saying that burning a Quran may offend others, but “the right to freedom of expression, if it is a right worth having, must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.” The Director of Public Prosecutions then challenged that appeal, and Coskun was forced once again to defend his case at the High Court. The court chose not to reverse the lower court’s ruling.

But the damage was done: his victory only came after arrest, prosecution, conviction, appeal, and another appeal by the state. Prosecutors, though they objected to critics’ claims of a return to blasphemy law, made clear they would vigorously pursue Coskun and similar cases of subjectively offensive speech about religion.

A destroyed Quran, “Fuck Islam,” and a meme mocking religious tenets may indeed offend some. The same would be true if you swapped out Islam, and swapped in Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism. But free people should be able to speak critically of the religions that sometimes influence or even directly determine political policy and social power today.

Offense is simply the price we sometimes pay to live in a free society, and free societies must not allow government officials the dangerous authority of deciding when the state can limit speech about the sacred. That will not magically do away with discord and hate — but it just might create another avenue to silence dissent.

Following a spike in reporting and public scrutiny into plagiarism allegations and his personal history, Jason Arday died, presumably by suicide, last week after resigning from his professorial position at Cambridge. His memoir about his story also hit bookshelves this month. And, as I explained in a piece earlier last week, Arday also apparently engaged in censorship tactics — reporting a journalist to the police, contracting with a libel law firm — to try to stop coverage of the plagiarism allegations from surfacing last summer.

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Understandably, many people, from supporters of Arday to those who questioned his scholarship or wrote about his life story, are now seeking to make sense of the chain of events that led to Arday’s death. Much of the public conversation now centers on the role played by the press, whether Arday was treated harshly because of his race, and to what extent media outlets and the people who engaged with their reporting are responsible for his tragic death.

People are free to criticize journalists, outlets, and the reporting they produce if they believe the coverage is insensitive, incorrect, or disproportionate. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, though we are unlikely to reach any social consensus on where those moral boundaries lie. I remember growing up as a pre-teen in the early 2000s, baffled as I watched celebrities grace tabloid covers alongside senseless mockery about how fat a musician’s thighs were, or how disgusting a star’s body looked as she stepped out of a car. I understand anger at perceived cruelty and bullying from the media.

No one can reasonably deny that photographers, writers, and the media can treat their subjects with shocking venom — or that the market to buy, read, and share that material exists. Too often we ignore that second piece of the puzzle, perhaps out of our discomfort at grappling with why so many of us are drawn to those stories.

Critics are also free to call for censorship and limits on the press to restrict the kind of reporting that flourished in recent weeks about Arday. They have that right, just as Arday’s critics do. And that is, indeed, exactly what some are doing — including politicians.

UK nonprofit the Good Law Project is pushing an open letter, currently with over 122,000 signatures, calling for Prime Minister Andy Burnham “to commission an immediate public inquiry into how to ensure a responsible press given its contribution to Dr Arday’s tragic death.” Several members of Parliament signed on. “Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed,” the letter adds. So the government must then regulate it.

Another petition calls for Arday’s Law, “legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame” to “work towards creating a framework that balances the public’s right to information with an individual’s right to privacy and mental well-being.” Activist groups housed under Amnesty UK also issued a statement supporting the creation of Arday’s Law and for the media to “be held accountable for failing to honour” his family’s wishes for privacy.

How would this prior restraint work? The more time one spends thinking about it, the more rapidly the concept falls apart. What number of articles reaches the tipping point from reasonable to “hounding”? From how many authors and outlets? Are lengthy articles treated the same as short blurbs? Do bigger outlets with more authors get more articles? Would outlets be incentivized to produce shoddier journalism as they race to beat some kind of government-imposed limitation? Are some targets of inquiry exempt from such limits or would even the worst abusers, criminals, and offenders be able to benefit from this muzzle placed upon the press? What about the people who aren’t working for official media outlets, but just expressing themselves online, and their impact on a target’s mental health?

The short answer is: You cannot come up with a principled way to mete out who is permitted to speak about a matter of public concern, and how much they can say. One of the greatest strengths of the First Amendment that we enjoy in the United States is that it understands, and accounts for, the inherent danger of giving anyone that kind of authority over speech or press. What looks like a simple fix may very well be the lid to Pandora’s box.

It would be one thing just for commentators or members of the public to demand this. But it’s a whole different issue when politicians pick up the mantle. In addition to the group of MPs petitioning for a government investigation into the press, London Assembly Member and Green Party leader Zack Polanski is demanding further action. (I wrote about Polanski earlier this summer when the UK’s Reform Party absurdly called for his arrest over an Instagram repost.)

Over the weekend, Polanski said: “It’s time we sorted out the press. Constant misinformation to protect their donors and fossil fuels is destroying lives and our planet. The Government must step up and stop being cowardly.” Eighty-nine members of the Green Party also backed a motion, “Justice for Jason Arday: Stopping Racist Smear Campaigns and Reforming Media Power,” ahead of their fall conference. Their motion calls for much vaster state regulation of media outlets to police their printing of alleged racism and ableism, as well as broader powers for media regulator Ofcom to compel the removal of online material deemed hateful or discriminatory. The motion also pushes for a statutory right of reply for individuals or communities subjected to “allegedly defamatory, misleading, racially motivated, or otherwise discriminatory publication” with a response broadcast at similar prominence. The UK has not magically solved social ills with its ever-growing efforts to police and regulate speech online and off. It is baffling, at this point, to imagine that yet more limits on speech would finally do the trick.

An undeniable truth about censorship that few of its adherents are willing to address is that it is not a precision tool, it cannot carefully cut and extract. It’s a buzzsaw, and you cannot confidently predict who will be operating the blade, and what damage will be left in the wreckage.

So, criticize reporting you find unfair. Challenge commentators you think are cruel or wrong, whether about Arday or anything else. But Arday’s Law, or similar restrictions on press freedom, will not end cruelty or public speculation. They might, though, just give the powerful yet another tool to shut down much-needed inquiry into their conduct or even their crimes.

The implosion of the magnificent tales of Jason Arday, a professor who recently resigned from the University of Cambridge, is currently playing out across social media and headlines. Anyone reading this has no doubt heard at least some of the messy details by now. But because of some of the United Kingdom’s most notorious censorship problems, this story took a long time to see sunlight.

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Arday is a British academic and, until last week, taught sociology at the University of Cambridge, the youngest Black person ever appointed as professor at the prestigious institution. That was hardly the most interesting thing about Arday, though, according to accounts he gave of his own life story. Arday was diagnosed with autism at three, nonverbal until 11, unable to read until 18, but then overcame these obstacles to obtain his PhD, not to mention his herculean long-distance running achievements and the millions he raised in charity. All of these inspiring tales — like Arday running 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine while injured — and more are set to appear in Arday’s forthcoming memoir with Simon & Schuster.

But, as we now know, there’s a bit of a problem: He made a bunch of it up. In the midst of snowballing reports questioning his life story, Arday resigned from Cambridge last week. “This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me,” Arday wrote. “It is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.”

There have also been accusations that Arday engaged in plagiarism in his PhD thesis and other publications, but they did not spring into widespread view until this summer. And Arday’s apparent efforts to quash those plagiarism investigations are where the UK’s long-simmering free speech problems come into play.

Last week, Times Higher Education’s Jack Grove shared a shocking account: Earlier this year, London’s Metropolitan Police contacted him and explained that Grove, without his knowledge, had been the target of a now-closed complaint over his contact with Arday. Grove hadn’t been in touch with Arday for months. He last emailed Arday in September 2025, offering him an opportunity to respond to plagiarism allegations Grove was investigating. But even though months had passed since the last email, Grove shared that when police contacted him in February, an officer warned Grove to “not contact him again, because it was affecting his mental health.”

In all, Grove had sent only a few emails to Arday in the course of his investigation. But that was enough for police to insert themselves into a matter of journalism, then temporarily investigate a journalist, and even when acknowledging the matter was closed, issue a warning not to contact Arday for the sake of his mental health.

It’s a story that has played out ad nauseam in recent years in the UK: Police are knowingly inserting themselves into non-criminal activity, further blurring the already fuzzy line between protected expression and crime. Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has since admitted officers “dropped the ball” and erred in contacting Grove, but how many times can police make a mistake before it starts to look like standard practice?

That wasn’t even the only censorship threat that hindered Grove’s investigation, or the one that stopped him from publishing his investigation in the first place. This week, a letter Arday’s legal team sent to Times Higher Education last September finally leaked. The British firm Carter-Ruck, which specializes in libel law, detailed Grove’s interactions with Arday, challenged Grove’s questions, and criticized his “aggressive approach.” They wrote further:

As an academic, our client is not averse to criticism, nor does he wish to stifle the legitimate voicing of opinions of those who may disagree with his work. However, the fact that our client’s published work spanning the last decade is being called into question, and that his 2015 PhD thesis is now the subject of a complaint made by your journalist to our client’s doctoral awarding university (Liverpool John Moores University), and current employer (University of Cambridge), appears to suggest that there is an axe to grind against our client, personally. Our client feels that these repeated enquiries are a campaign of harassment against him, many of which have no bearing on his academic career and seem to be raised solely with the aim of sullying his reputation.

So the outlet chose to drop the story rather than risk a protracted and costly legal battle with Arday and Carter-Ruck. As Grove explains, “Arday’s solicitors had been in touch with THE and it was clear that the story could tie the publication up in months of expensive litigation. Even if we were right — and I stand by my reporting — it would have been ruinously expensive.”

What Grove is referring to here is the UK’s notorious libel law, which has been so friendly to plaintiffs over the years that targets of investigation or criticism used England as a home base for “libel tourism” against their critics. Despite some efforts to reform it, “London is still the libel capital of the world, thanks to our punitive costs system and a SLAPP culture that hasn’t been properly checked.”

The absurdity of Arday’s misdeeds should not lull us into ignoring the seriousness of a legal environment that makes reporting on it so challenging.

In the grand scheme of things, an academic fabulist’s tall tales may seem to some like small potatoes, but these same tactics could be used against whistleblowers, reporters, and critics seeking to uncover the truth about government malfeasance, illegal conduct by the wealthy and the well-off, and the worst forms of abuse and harm. If a journalist has to fear a ruinous legal battle, and perhaps even police warnings, just to report on plagiarism allegations, what else can he not safely investigate?

Late last year, the United Kingdom, France, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and dozens more nations signed the United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime, a treaty ostensibly intended to improve global cooperation to fight crimes taking place over computer systems. Canada joined them this summer. The United States remains a notable exception and says it is still reviewing the treaty.

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Three nations have since ratified it, and the treaty will enter into force 90 days after 40 states do so. As FIRE has long warned, the treaty opens the door to greater violations of free expression online — and new cybercrime bills popping up around the world show why.

What does the cybercrime treaty say?

The treaty purports to improve international cooperation in addressing crimes taking place using computer systems — but cooperation is not limited to specific online criminal acts like fraud or phishing. Instead, the treaty pushes nations to share personal data that other nations request about individuals accused of committing “serious” crimes.

But there’s an important question here. What constitutes a “serious” crime? The treaty does little to define it other than clarifying that it’s a crime carrying at least a four-year prison sentence as a punishment. For billions of people around the world, speech is a crime that warrants a long prison term.

The treaty also would command nations to adopt legislation and measures “as may be necessary to oblige a service provider to keep confidential” the execution of government searches for user data. Even more concerning, a nation seeking data from other countries can request that the user under surveillance not be notified and “may require that the requested State Party keep confidential the fact and substance of the request.”

As I wrote previously about the treaty:

The likely outcome here is obvious: The treaty will streamline unfree countries’ involvement with other unfree countries’ repression and pressure freer ones into helping, too. And it can all take place confidentially, without the knowledge of the public or even those being targeted . . .

And as though existing national laws punishing political expression aren’t enough, the treaty could even incentivize governments to enact harsher penalties on expressive acts. After all, if you’d like other nations to assist you in punishing your critics on the internet, you’ll want to ensure their expression qualifies for inclusion under the treaty’s definition of “serious crimes.”

How is ‘cybercrime’ legislation evolving?

A review of cybercrime legislation that has emerged in the wake of the treaty suggests that the free speech problems surrounding online “crime” and the UN treaty are just beginning. Take three bills, one of which has been passed by the Malaysian Parliament, under review by legislators this year in countries which signed on to the treaty. When reading the below, keep in mind that the UN treaty defines “serious” crime as that which is punishable by four or more years in prison.

First, Malaysia’s Cybercrimes Bill 2026. Article 19 criticized a number of the bill’s problems, including a lack of procedural safeguards for privacy and other issues, and some provisions that directly target content. The bill criminalizes content “generated or manipulated” by computer systems and “resembling an existing person, object, place, entity or event that falsely appears to a person to be authentic or truthful” with the intent to violate any other existing laws. This new offense is punishable by up to seven years in prison and, as Article 19 points out, runs the risk of targeting “satire, artistic works, journalism, or comments critical of the government.” The group also warns that the bill’s section on “intimate” imagery is written so broadly as to essentially punish any pornographic imagery made or transmitted using computer systems with up to five years in prison.

Next, let’s look at Namibia’s Cybercrime Bill 2026, the draft of which is still being finalized. In its current form, the bill threatens the vague offense of “cyberbullying” with 10 years’ imprisonment. “Failure to moderate undesirable content” — which includes material that “promotes racism” or is “inaccurate” and intended to “mislead the public” — is punishable with up to five years. Use of computer systems to publish pornography deemed “lascivious or obscene” can net up to 15 years.

And then there’s China’s Draft Law on Cybercrime Prevention and Control, which was published for comment earlier this year but is not yet enacted. Readers are unlikely to be surprised that it seeks to further entrench China’s authoritarianism online. Read Human Rights Watch’s analysis for a full breakdown, but here’s just a glimpse: The bill targets so-called offenses like “disrupting online order,” harming “national security” and “public interest,” “disrupting the real-name management system,” and “disseminating false information.”

While South Sudan and Iraq have not yet signed the treaty, they may yet in the future — and they, too, just unveiled troubling new cybercrime laws.

South Sudan’s newly enacted Cybercrimes and Computer Misuse Act, 2026 punishes publication of “false or misleading” information that damages a person’s reputation with up to five years in prison, and a similar sentence can be doled out to administrators or intermediaries who don’t take “reasonable steps to restrict or remove access to unlawful content.” And Iraq is reviewing a cybercrime bill that would, among other things, dole out harsh punishments to those who publish what authorities deem “misinformation.”

What does this mean for the future of online expression?

There are, no doubt, serious transnational crimes taking place on the internet that require international cooperation. And there are ways we can improve cross-border collaboration to fight actual crime. But this treaty risks emboldening states that already seek to crush out online dissent, giving them more tools to do so, and enlisting freer states in this campaign.

And, perhaps most concerningly, this treaty may exacerbate what is already a uniquely dangerous era for free speech online. Every day it seems nations are pursuing new limitations on people’s ability to express themselves online, passing privacy-threatening age-gating restrictions, and seeking to gut government critics’ ability to speak anonymously. It’s more urgent than ever that democratic nations seek to reverse this corrosive trend rather than deepen it.

Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.

What do the internet and national borders have in common? As today’s Free Speech Dispatch illustrates, both are currently hotbeds for government action regulating what information and material people can access, and how. When it comes to the internet, authorities are targeting not just what individuals say online, but the tools and platforms they use to express themselves, as readers will see in stories from Australia, Russia, France, India, and more. And while regulations of internet tools are a somewhat nebulous concept, governments are meanwhile seeking to use borders in a much more literal way — as a corporeal barrier between their nations and people expressing ideas they hope to exclude, as I explain below.

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Telegram is on the hot seat again

Pavel Durov and Telegram, the immensely popular messaging app he founded, have faced legal trouble before. Russia has repeatedly clashed with the platform, while French authorities arrested Durov in 2024 over allegations that Telegram enabled criminal activity. Now the company and its founder face a new set of allegations on opposite sides of the world.

In Australia, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant announced last week that the agency is taking legal action against Telegram over its failure to remove content deemed extremist, including videos of mass shootings and Islamic State beheadings, in violation of a law requiring the removal of terrorist content. The regulator says some material remained accessible on the service long after Telegram had been put on notice.” In a statement, Telegram replied, “We reject these allegations and will contest them in court.”

Durov’s legal troubles are continuing in Russia, too. Last week, the Federal Security Service claimed Telegram did not take down “numerous channels, chats and bots” allegedly operated by “Ukrainian intelligence agencies, terrorist and extremist organizations to prepare and coordinate acts of sabotage and terrorism, mass murder, and cyberfraud” in Russia, which resulted in “numerous human casualties.” Authorities charged Durov, who lives in Dubai, with aiding terrorism and placed him on an international wanted list.

Where borders and speech collide

Should foreigners be expelled from a country over views they express while visiting, working, or living there?

In the United States, FIRE is currently suing over Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s use of two federal immigration law provisions that grant him vast power to revoke legal immigrants’ visas and deport them for protected speech. Similar conflicts are unfolding abroad, as governments turn borders into ideological checkpoints.

In Argentina, President Javier Milei just signed an emergency decree establishing that the government can deport or bar entry to foreigners who “incite or disseminate messages of hatred, discrimination and/or violence against the Argentine people” or “insult national symbols.” Much is left up in the air by this decree, but one thing is clear: It offers authorities much greater power to target foreigners for deportation if they have engaged in government criticism deemed “hateful” or “insulting” by officials.

Two European nations also just removed controversial figures for their speech. Pascal Robinson-Foster, frontman for British punk-rap duo Bob Vylan, was recently denied entry at Berlin’s airport and deported to the UK. The Intercept obtained police files addressing the entry ban on Robinson-Foster. Police wrote that his presence would cause “considerable reputational damage” by suggesting Germany is making “no effort to prevent the spread of the propagated antisemitism and the associated calls to violence.” Concerns about Robinson-Foster’s entry no doubt in part rested on his controversial “Death, death to the IDF” chant at Glastonbury Festival last year. German authorities reportedly later lifted the entry ban.

France’s Interior Ministry also just expelled Russian commentator Xenia Fedorova, a commentator in French and European media and former chief of RT France. Officials’ expulsion order against Fedorova alleges she acts “as a conduit for disinformation campaigns orchestrated by the Russian authorities.” President Emmanuel Macron has long sparred with Fedorova, whose lawyer intends to file an appeal on free speech grounds.

France approves internet age-gating

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced last month that an EU-wide youth social media ban is coming this fall, though specifics of the ban are not yet known. France, though, isn’t waiting any longer. French lawmakers, the first in the European Union to do so, officially approved an under-15 ban last month, with Macron proclaiming that “France is leading the way in Europe in protecting our children and our teenagers.” As FIRE has frequently warned in recent months, age-gating teens off the internet raises a lot of privacy and censorship concerns for adults.

More free speech news from Europe

As I wrote last week, the United Kingdom experienced yet another social-media censorship controversy after Nigel Farage and Reform UK called on police to arrest Green Party leader Zack Polanski. Polanski had accepted a tag on an Instagram carousel that included a photo of a man wearing a shirt with a guillotine and the words “We’re only making plans for Nigel.” He said he removed the tag after learning about it. Police later said they were not looking into Polanski but were pursuing the man pictured wearing the shirt.

London’s Metropolitan Police also confirmed dozens more arrests of activists holding signs in support of Palestine Action outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court. They join hundreds of others facing terror charges after the government proscribed the group.

There are new judicial developments in Europe, too. In a troubling ruling, an Italian appeals court reaffirmed journalist Fabio Butera’s civil liability for third parties’ comments on his Facebook page. A lower court ordered Butera to pay damages for defamatory comments other users had posted on his page about a fellow journalist Butera criticized.

And Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish member of Parliament found guilty of hate speech earlier this year by Finland’s Supreme Court, is taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights. Räsänen is appealing to the ECHR over the ruling that she committed incitement against a group for reposting a religious pamphlet she co-wrote in 2004, “Male and Female He Created Them.” Räsänen’s conviction also resulted in her being denied an Electronic Travel Authorisation for the United Kingdom this summer.

As ’s and , also a FIRE senior fellow, argue in a new article at the Journal of Free Speech Law, it’s possible that hate speech laws may become even more entrenched across the European Union. EU member states individually already wield hate speech laws, but since 2020, von der Leyen has advocated making hate speech an EU-level crime. While some measures have stalled, they write, “the Commission has signaled a narrower, ‘online‑only’ route: a legislative initiative under existing Article 83(1) crime categories (e.g., computer crime) to harmonize definitions of online hate offences. In practice, this would still embed criminal prohibitions more deeply into national criminal law and EU digital enforcement frameworks.”

There are a number of serious concerns this maneuver would raise. Among them? “Speech that is lawful when delivered offline could trigger criminal liability once posted online.” Read the full article, A Cure Worse than the Disease: Why the EU’s Proposal to Criminalize Hate Speech Violates Freedom of Expression — and Won’t Reduce Intolerance or Extremism, to learn more.

More political arrests, complaints, and prosecutions — some with severe sentences

• Two lawyers and two activists are facing criminal libel charges in the Philippines for their involvement in advocacy against a mining company.

• Vietnamese authorities arrested five people on “anti-state propaganda” charges for publishing a book about former President Ho Chi Minh. They could face decades in prison if convicted.

• Russian activist Ilya Remeslo — best known for his support of the Kremlin and antagonism toward the late opposition figure Alexei Navalny — was arrested for spreading false information after publishing a surprise manifesto critical of President Putin.

• A Thai appeals court upheld a two-year prison sentence handed down to human rights lawyer Anon Nampa in one of the 14 lese-majeste cases against him for his criticism of the monarchy.

• An Azerbaijani court sentenced a group of journalists and media workers to a whopping 12 to 15 years in prison for financial crimes, allegations which the accused say are trumped up and politically motivated.

Censorship amid protest and turmoil in India

It’s been a busy summer in Indian politics, as the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (named after the country’s chief justice called the young activists “cockroaches”) snowballed from an online movement complaining about a voided exam to mass protests across the country. The movement found success, with Prime Minister Modi’s government acceding to protesters’ demands including the ousting of the education minister. But protesters are paying the price, too — hundreds are facing charges, including for “abusive slogans” about Modi. The censorship has extended online, with authorities directing social media platforms to “remove content they considered abusive, objectionable or in violation of Indian law.”

At the same time, India’s Cyber Crime Coordination Centre ordered GitHub to remove, within three hours, three repositories hosting Bitchat, a messenger app from Jack Dorsey that operates using Bluetooth-mesh technology rather than accounts or phone numbers. Authorities targeted the source code on GitHub because Bitchat’s decentralized technology cannot be targeted the same way as other apps. The Centre’s order alleged that “anonymous communication without registration, phone numbers or centralized logging,” could “significantly” hinder “lawful interception, attribution, and investigation by law enforcement agencies.” It also warned that the app could be used to coordinate “unlawful assemblies” and “dissemination of misinformation.” It marks yet another notable effort by authorities not just to unmask anonymous speakers, but to crack down on the tools that could aid in anonymity.

And last week, both houses of Parliament approved the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, which would grant Vande Mataram the same protections as the national anthem. Under the bill, insults to the Vande Mataram, a poem adapted as the national song of India, can be punished with fines or up to three years in prison. Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi, a member of the lower house of Parliament and an opponent of the bill, said during debates, “We respect the national song… we can even stand for it… but you cannot force us to say it with you.”

There are some things you can always count on in life: The sun rising and setting, the tide advancing and retreating, and UK police announcing new investigations of social media posts.

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This time, it’s over an Instagram post from London Assembly member and Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who initially accepted a collaboration request on an Instagram carousel of images from a recent Green Party event. Polanski was tagged as a co-author on the post by another account and approved the tag, bringing the post onto his account and into his followers’ newsfeeds.

What was in the post? How did police respond?

The fifth image in the carousel showed a man at the event wearing a T-shirt depicting artwork of a person operating a guillotine and the text “We’re only making plans for Nigel.” The BBC reports that the words on the shirt “are the same as the lyrics of a 1979 song by band XTC.” A party spokesman said of Polanski’s post, “Once this image was brought to his attention he immediately unshared the post. He unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message.”

The UK’s Reform Party, and its leader Nigel Farage, made the case that the shirt is referencing Farage — and they’ve asked police to intervene. Reform Spokesperson for Home Affairs Zia Yusuf, who argued the image shows “the beheading of Nigel Farage,” said: “This is incitement to murder. It should be treated as such by the police.” He also wrote earlier this week, “If Zack Polanski is not in police custody by this time tomorrow, the Police will have declared open season on Members of Parliament.”

Farage, too, weighed in calling for arrest: “If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski.”

In a statement, Metropolitan Police confirmed they’re looking into it: “Earlier today we received a third-party report relating to an image shared on social media. We take reports of this nature extremely seriously, and officers are conducting inquiries into the matter.”

It’s not clear, though, whether police are looking into Polanski, the Instagram account that originally uploaded the photo, the man pictured wearing the shirt, or some combination of those involved. A freelance photojournalist who took and uploaded the photo said Polanski was not responsible for the image, and that he had reported himself to police to explain the context.

The UK’s uneasy political environment

Tensions around charged political expression are particularly high in the UK right now, given the recent gruesome murder of Ann Widdecombe, a politician and member of the Conservative, Brexit, and Reform Parties over her career. Widdecombe was found in her home earlier this month, bludgeoned to death with a hammer. Prosecutors have since charged a 28-year-old man with murder and terror offenses, and police are still investigating the suspect’s motives.

Politicians and commentators like Reform’s Zia Yusuf have connected the two cases, arguing that the guillotine image is particularly dangerous “just two weeks after our friend Ann was murdered.”

It’s not the only free speech question that has arisen in the aftermath of Widdecombe’s murder. Despite originally saying her posts were not criminal, police arrested University of Aberdeen web developer Heather Herbert for Bluesky posts celebrating Widdecombe’s death. “And some good news for once. I hope it was an extremely painful death. And I hope she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony,” Herbert wrote in a post. And in response to a critic of her comment, she said: “I’m done with being nice to pieces of human garbage like her.”

What does this mean for free speech?

Both these posts — the image of the guillotine and the comments celebrating Widdecombe’s murder — would be protected in the U.S., and the First Amendment has answered these questions before, some quite recently. They remain deeply contentious socially, though.

On the question of the first, the guillotine shirt that says “We’re only making plans for Nigel,” the Supreme Court’s definitive cases addressing true threats and incitement are instructive.

In Watts v. United States (1969), the case centered on an 18-year-old who said at a Vietnam War protest, “If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ . . . They are not going to make me kill my black brothers.” The Court, finding that Watts’ speech was protected political hyperbole, explained that advocacy in the political arena “is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact.” True threats require that the speaker convey a serious intent to commit violence, not just engage in rough and tumble expression around politics.

Similarly, the Court’s reasoning in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), a First Amendment challenge to a Ku Klux Klan leader’s conviction under an Ohio criminal syndicalism law, lays out its approach to incitement to imminent lawless action. The Court ruled that simply advocating or celebrating violence is protected as long as it’s not intended and likely to provoke immediate unlawful action.

Without more, this T-shirt, whether a reference to Farage is intended or not, would not meet the high bar required for either the true threat or incitement tests in the U.S. — not for Polanski, the person who posted the image, nor the man who wore the shirt.

And regarding the legality of posts commenting on a political figure’s death, the United States is still dealing with the fallout of censorship after the murder of Charlie Kirk last fall, but it’s not a crime to speak ill of the dead. And for good reason. Guidelines around how we discuss the dead are matters we must map out socially, not legally.

Government bodies, including public universities that fired faculty members who posted controversial or critical tweets about Kirk after his killing, are now paying out steep settlements to those same faculty members who sued and raised First Amendment claims. FIRE has also brought two First Amendment lawsuits over protected speech about Kirk, both in Tennessee. FIRE recently secured an $835,000 settlement for retired law enforcement officer Larry Bushart, who was jailed for 37 days after posting a meme on Facebook that quoted President Trump saying, “We have to get over it.” And FIRE’s case on behalf of an Iraq War veteran, fired by a state agency for criticizing Kirk in a Facebook comment, is still ongoing.

But ultimately we’re talking about the censorship battles taking place in the UK, where there is certainly no First Amendment or neutral speech principles to be found. And that’s exactly the problem. The UK has created a turnkey censorship system so expansive and reflexive that officers are encouraged to act as speech police in part because they already have done so, thousands and thousands of times.

Farage said he believes he would be investigated over a similar post, so he wanted to see Polanski receive the speech police treatment. The solution, however, is not a race to the bottom, where police are asked and expected to run a magnifying glass over every X, TikTok, and Instagram post. All that will do is further entrench an already disturbing practice granting officials the power to narrow the boundaries of expression. Indeed, in testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee last year, Farage lamented that on “the question of civil liberties, Britain has, unfortunately, now lost her way,” and rightly advocated First Amendment-style protections in the UK.

After dropping the case over comedian Graham Linehan’s tweets last year, Metropolitan Police admitted that officers should not be “policing toxic culture war debates” and that the agency must move away from investigating non-criminal online speech. That’s right. The UK needs to turn away from speech police and toward speech protections. You can’t fix a free speech problem by digging deeper into censorship.

Last month, Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs (the country, not the American state) established the Division for Combating Hate Speech. The department’s role is to identify offenders and their identities, draft reports of the alleged offense, and pass them along for prosecution. State Minister for Coordination of Law Enforcement Bodies Mamuka Mdinaradze said the group is needed to address “any type of public communication that contains hate speech, incitement of enmity, violation of dignity, and other similar acts.”

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Revisions to the criminal code pushed through by the ruling Georgian Dream party last year, which punish insults to public officials with fines and short prison terms, have given this new division a vast range of political speech to target. And the department has been busy indeed.

In just one month of hunting down alleged “hate speech,” staff forwarded 150 cases to courts for prosecution, even when the target of the speech hadn’t filed a complaint. In yet another victory for the department, presumably one of many more to come, a journalist who insulted politicians on social media was sentenced to prison last week.

Vakho Sanaia, a journalist with Formula TV, wrote a Facebook post in June sarcastically encouraging others not to call Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili and Member of Parliament Lado Bozhadze “dicks.” On July 10, the Tbilisi City Court fined Sanaia around $2,300 for the post. Sanaia responded to the ruling with two more comments: “I wrote a post, saying ‘don’t call Papuashvili and Bozhadze d*cks’ [sic] and they fined me ₾6,000. Well, go ahead and call them that, then,” and a joke that the decision meant the court was therefore declaring Papuashvili and Bozhadze “dicks.”

Sanaia soon learned the Division for Combating Hate Speech was pursuing an investigation of these two new posts, and last week he was sentenced to 14 days in prison on top of his original fine.

“After becoming aware of the previous court decision, he published a post that also contained insulting language,” a lawyer representing the Ministry of Internal Affairs said of the decision. “Accordingly, we considered this to be a disregard for the court’s decision and an indication of a willingness to continue engaging in unlawful conduct.”

There are many lessons to learn from Georgia’s continuing descent into censorship, but an especially important one is that this is simply an inherent risk of giving government officials a wider mandate to crack down on “hateful” expression: Authorities may very well take it as an opportunity to punish speech they deem hateful toward . . . authority.

Just remember last year, when President Donald Trump, responding to questions about then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s threat to target “hate speech” for prosecution, suggested Bondi would “go after” journalists because they treat Trump “unfairly” and “hate” him. (“Hate speech,” of course, is quite famously protected under the First Amendment, and Bondi later attempted to walk back her statement.)

Sanaia’s arrest isn’t an outlier in Georgia, and it isn’t even the first time he has personally been charged under this law against insulting politicians. Nor, unfortunately, is his case an outlier globally. In Germany, for example, politicians receive heightened protection against insults under the country’s criminal code, and social media users regularly face prosecution and investigation for online jokes and insults about political figures. One man’s home was even raided after he — and I’m sensing a broader theme here — called a Hamburg minister a “penis.”

In France, a woman was prosecuted for calling President Emmanuel Macron “filth” on Facebook, and in Italy a journalist was fined over tweets joking about Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s height. Around the world, it’s the same: A mocking tweet can land you in hot water, and maybe even behind bars.

Even in the United States, where insulting political figures stands second only to baseball as a national pastime, this right is under attack. That’s why FIRE sued leaders of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement this month after federal agents issued a “WARNING NOTICE” to a man simply for likening the head of ICE to a Nazi over email.

Authorities should not exempt themselves from criticism by the very people whose lives they affect, sometimes in profound ways. Restrictions on insults to public officials fundamentally invert the way free societies should function — and government “hate speech” bodies like the one Georgia just rolled out only deepen authorities’ power to narrow the boundaries of political speech.

If we’re not careful about making free expression non-negotiable in emerging technology, it will be the authoritarians’ world — and the rest of us will just be living in it.

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That much is clear in a new report from Meta’s Oversight Board, which found that “some of the world’s most-used models from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta and OpenAI are significantly less likely to criticize political regimes that restrict free expression.” Users in free countries are experiencing “free speech infringements by proxy,” meaning that censorial foreign powers may be shaping the material LLMs produce to people outside of their borders. That is incredibly dangerous for how we discuss, research, and understand the world around us.

Why is it happening? And what does it mean for AI users? Let’s dive in.

The findings on political content about repressive regimes

They’re troubling.

Conducted using an IP address in Australia, the Board’s survey found that models “were more than twice as likely to refuse to criticize repressive regimes” compared to freer nations. When prompted to produce “politically critical materials,” on average the models refused a shocking 45% requests about China, nearly matched at 43% for Thailand, then followed by Cambodia and Saudi Arabia hovering just over 30%. Compare that to the U.S. and UK, where denial rates averaged just under 10%.

The ways that LLMs refused to answer were notable, too. In some cases, no meaningful response is provided. But in others, the models suggested that they were not willing to expose users — or even the models themselves — to breaches of censorship laws. One of the justifications Claude Opus 4 provided was that it didn’t want to “put individuals at risk.” Gemini 3 Pro flat out said it would not “generate content that critiques the King of Thailand or violates lèse-majesté laws,” Thai laws that aggressively punish insults and critiques of the monarchy. (Thailand has targeted government critics for speech they have posted freely in other nations.)

The Board’s report cautioned that the reasons for these findings could be complex. Results “could be shaped at various points throughout the model development process, including latent biases in training data, the complex interaction of many different approaches to align model behavior, deliberate restrictions or any combination of these factors.”

The broader speech environment tech is swimming in

While the factors behind these results are complex, one thing is clear-cut: People are using LLMs around the world, and some countries have deeply restrictive censorship laws that will inevitably create a burden on speech abroad. Even companies much further removed from expressive content, like hotel chains and airlines, are under pressure to abide by authoritarian nations’ preferences and politics.

That burden may come from overt demands, like a court order or a government official’s retaliatory threats. Look at Reuters, for example, which complied with a 2023 Indian court order demanding an investigative piece be removed from “public domain” by temporarily taking down the article globally, not just for Indian readers.

But it can also come from a place of cowardice or profit-seeking, either in the administration and leadership of these companies or in the way their models are directed to operate. Here is the ugly truth about authoritarian censorship seeping across borders: It often takes place with no explicit threat at all. Executives see the writing on the wall and simply presume self-censorship is a precondition for market access and voluntarily decide to play ball.

I discuss this incentive in higher education at length in my recent book Authoritarians in the Academy, which documents how American universities have chipped away at their core values of academic freedom and free expression in pursuit of the financial and expansion opportunities offered by oppressive governments.

But there was also a direct admission from a tech company when Midjourney’s CEO openly admitted the AI image-generating tool’s policies would hew to China’s censorship laws and prohibit satirical images of Xi Jinping. The reason? Market access, of course. “Political satire in china [sic] is pretty not-okay,” CEO David Holz said, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.” Because China limits what its people can say, Midjourney chose to pass that restriction along to the rest of the world.

Be wary of corporations that claim to censor for users’ own good when that censorship may be good for the corporation, too.

Why this matters for what we see and say

We no longer live in the days when a person who wants to say something just needs to know what local or national laws are on the books. What you can say online, and sometimes even offline, may be influenced and determined by a panoply of overlapping foreign speech laws. The same goes for what you can read, learn, and generate on the internet, from an online classroom to a social media platform to the LLM you use for work or study.

These manipulated results affect the millions, and perhaps billions, of people who are growing increasingly reliant on AI in their work, research, and play. But it will subtly affect many more people than just the direct users of LLMs. As writers, creators, companies, educators, and researchers generate content for broader audiences, it will influence political and historical material at scale — whether shared in books, movies, social media content, or more — for consumers unaware of the bias incorporated into the models producing it.

What a victory it represents for authoritarians to see their repression ripple far beyond their own police and prisons into technology that shapes what people say and understand about them and the world.

If we’re not careful to guard against the willful or unintentional influence of foreign censorship laws or practices, the intelligence these models provide may prove artificial indeed.

Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.

Free speech is in a curious place today. We’re facing challenges that, in many ways, feel fresh and new while at the same time fighting battles that feel ancient. Take two of the issues we discuss in this week’s Free Speech Dispatch: age-gating and blasphemy. While restrictions on young people’s speech is nothing new, what is new — and remarkable — is that governments in different countries now seem to be pursuing the same aggressive approach to tech regulation. On the other hand, even today the right to commit “blasphemy” is far from settled. People can still be put to death for it. Restrictions on insults to the gods may be as old as humanity itself.

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EU bans loom as Australia hardens its own

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing on teen social media bans. The bans are everywhere, and more are coming. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced this week that the EU will seek some form of a youth social media ban across Europe.

“It is clear we need age-appropriate restrictions to platforms,” von der Leyen said. Though she did not offer exact details on what restrictions would apply to which ages, she advocated “a phased and gradual access for different age ranges.” An expert panel convened by von der Leyen pushed for policies across the EU that restrict “social media plus” — including platforms with video games and chatbots — for children under 13, but added that member states could consider applying the rules to older ages too. Irish officials, for example, have signaled their intent to move forward with an under-16 ban.

Check back for more details this autumn, when the European Commission plans to roll out its draft policy.

Over in Australia, the landmark under-16 ban has been missing the mark. It simply has not worked to keep kids off of social media. So officials are doubling down. Parliament will now consider legislation that would double the maximum fine for platforms that don’t take enough steps to keep kids offline, bringing the fine up to nearly 70 million USD.

We’ve also discussed at length the problems with the UK’s incoming under-16 ban — we know too little about how it will operate, but we do know that officials have threatened it will be more expansive and extreme than Australia’s rules. With Keir Starmer’s exit as British prime minister, Labour Member of Parliament Andy Burnham is on track to fill the role. And Burnham has confirmed that the change in leadership will not signal a change in policy.

“He knows this ban is a critical first step to keeping kids safe online and preventing further tragedies for families,” a spokesperson said. “The task now is to build on the consensus across political parties to make sure it’s enforced in full, and delivered with the urgency this issue demands.”

New ‘trusted’ media policy and more from the UK

There, as always, is more free speech news out of the UK. Last month, government officials unveiled a new “trusted” media strategy to combat disinformation. Measures under discussion include requirements that social media and video sharing platforms “make sure that news content from public service media . . . and other trustworthy providers, is prominent and easy to find on their platforms.” Platforms may be required to augment their algorithms to ensure government-approved sources are “more likely to be at the top of people’s social media feeds when they search for news.”

Meanwhile, Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice is pushing an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill, introduced into Parliament earlier this year. The amendment would require that all election materials be in either English or Welsh — with a penalty of fines or up to six months in prison for violations.

And the UK’s track record with censorial defamation threats continues: JK Rowling, author and founder of sexual violence support center Beira’s Place, is offering to fund legal action over an Amnesty International UK report — “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK” — that accused Beira’s Place, For Women Scotland, the LGB Alliance, and similar groups of being “anti-rights.”

Amnesty quickly took down the report, saying its “use of language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK which is why it was promptly removed.” Rowling has not dropped the matter — her organization Beria’s place is still threatening legal action, and Rowling is encouraging others listed in the report to apply to her fund to target Amnesty UK with lawsuits over its criticism.

Hong Kong police targets booksellers

If Hong Kong authorities are to be believed, the city is in the midst of a dangerous crime wave — from bookshops. Independent bookshops and their employees have been the target of police raids, tax investigations, and arrests. This week, police raided two more shops, Have a Nice Stay and Greenfield Bookstore, and arrested five employees on sedition charges. The Hong Kong Free Press reports that police “found that the five had displayed and sold items carrying seditious intent” that “could stir hatred for the Hong Kong government, the Judiciary and law enforcement bodies.”

After the raid, Secretary for Security Chris Tang said he would not create a “banned books” list, as that would “let criminals off the hook.” He added that booksellers have a “responsibility” to ensure their material “won’t endanger national security,” just as restaurants have a duty not to sell poison.

Author CJ Hopkins faces prosecution, again

Readers may remember FIRE covering the case of CJ Hopkins, an American writer living in Germany, who faced prosecution for violating Germany’s law against disseminating propaganda. The charges centered on two tweets Hopkins posted that showed a swastika and medical mask on the cover art for his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021).

Hopkins was initially acquitted, but the prosecutor appealed the verdict and he’ll be sentenced later this year. Last November, Hopkins received yet another visit from police, who interrogated him and seized his devices. But Hopkins says that, while he waits to be sentenced in the case over the cover art for his book, he is now facing separate charges for the “authoring, publishing, and advertising” of the very same book. Hopkins says he had even cancelled the distribution of his book after his previous prosecution, but is nevertheless facing new charges.

A blasphemy accusation can be a death sentence

Seven nations still keep the death penalty for blasphemy on the books, though outside of Iran actual government-run executions are rare. Mob executions, however, are a different story and simply being accused of blasphemy in Nigeria or Pakistan can result in vigilante violence. This month, an armed mob of men and even children surrounded a courthouse where a blasphemy suspect was being held and demanded they be allowed to execute the accused.

And in Pakistan, Amir Peter, a 61-year-old man awaiting trial for blasphemy, died after suffering deteriorating health in custody. A shopkeeper accused him of insulting the prophet Muhammad and Peter was held until his death, even though he suffered from advanced dementia. An investigation this month found that in Punjab, the province in which Peter was arrested, most of the blasphemy cases registered over the past five years were found to be totally fabricated by accusers who use the law to settle personal fights and disputes.

In less lethal, but still disturbing, news, Turkish authorities detained comedian Deniz Goktas upon when he landed in Istanbul and questioned him for “publicly insulting religious values.” Goktas’ recent set in Istanbul earned millions of views on YouTube — and apparently dozens of complaints from viewers for his jokes about religion.

EU court affirms Russian propaganda sanctions

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled this month that EU sanctions against broadcasting or transmitting Russian state propaganda from RT or Sputnik extend to websites that are free to access and operate without a profit motive. The case centered on a German state’s 2023 prosecution and seizure of the Traugott Ickeroth blog. That year, the blog reposted three videos from RT. Reason reports that it’s a site run by reader donations where one of the bloggers “uses the ‘Traugott Ickerroth’ pseudonym to publish tracts about interdimensional aliens and the Illuminati.” The Court confirmed that German prosecutors should pursue action even against non-commercial entities that broadcast sanctioned content.

Even Spongebob can’t evade Russia’s LGBT ban

A highly memed clip of Spongebob Squarepants casting a rainbow over his head looks a little different to Russian viewers. Instead, there’s just a yellow arc over his head. A likely reason? The station may very well be trying to avoid Russia’s oppressive LGBT propaganda laws, which dole out harsh penalties for symbols and material — rainbows included — deemed to be advancing sexual themes or identities banned by the state.

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Where exactly are the lines drawn around speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It’s one of the most pressing free speech questions today, given both how contested the subject matter is and how rapidly the legal environment is shifting. European nations like France and the United Kingdom have pursued new protest restrictions and, in Australia, the state of Queensland continues to arrest activists under a new ban on the phrase “from the river to the sea.”

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Germany has stood at the center of these debates, too. And now the German parliament is pressing for more radical legal changes: a bill criminalizing speech that denies Israel’s right to exist and punishing offenders with fines or up to five years in prison. If passed, Germany would be the first European nation to legislate on this specific type of expression.

Germany has banned Holocaust denial for decades, but German legislators say more action is needed to fight rising antisemitism. Boris Rhein, head of the German state Hesse, said, “Those who deny Israel’s right to exist are attacking Jewish life. Those who attack Jewish life are attacking our free and democratic order.”

This bill would expand Section 130 of the Criminal Code, which addresses incitement to hatred and Holocaust denial, to also cover public denials of Israel’s right to exist and calls for its elimination that promote “a willingness to commit acts of antisemitic violence or arbitrary acts.”

The Bundesrat, the upper house of Parliament, advanced the bill last week and now it heads to the lower house, the Bundestag. Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, celebrated the bill’s progress, saying, “The German parliament today drew a bright red line, according to which denying the existence of the State of Israel is no longer legal in Germany.”

Similar expression has drawn attention in the United States, too, especially in the context of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) definition of antisemitism. FIRE takes no position on the working definition itself, but has repeatedly expressed serious concerns about the censorship threats posed by incorporation of the IHRA definition into criminal law and antidiscrimination enforcement, including on campus.

Of particular concern are some of the IHRA’s examples of contemporary antisemitism, including one which directly addresses denial of Israel’s right to exist, the speech Germany’s new bill seeks to govern:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Some or many readers will no doubt find this kind of speech to be antisemitic, but it is nevertheless protected political expression in the United States. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that the government does not get to decide what political speech is unreasonable or unjust, and which countries or conflicts Americans cannot fully and freely discuss.

Whether the German parliament will ultimately finalize the bill is not yet certain but one thing is clear: Democracies around the world are fighting many of the same battles around the limits of speech, whether it’s hateful expression or under-16 bans, and we can expect similar bills and regulations to pop up across borders. That’s why the First Amendment is so vital — it can act as a bulwark against speech restrictions that have advanced in other nations from doing the same here.

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