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

and some of it has been under the State Department, partly pursuant to the global Internet freedom program introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2010 when she was Secretary of State.

I'm sure the political and diplomatic valence is very different here, but the concept of "the U.S. government paying to stop foreign governments from censoring the Internet" is a longstanding one.

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

Say I'm a UK citizen with advanced glioblastoma (implying loss of faculties, seizures, and pain; no cure, and things to worsen before eventually passing away, possibly some time from now). Suppose I wish to view websites on euthanasia options, but am blocked from doing so by the UK's Online Safety Act.

How does/will Freedom.gov help? (is it essentially a free VPN?)

Also, as others have pointed out, couldn't the censoring government simply block access to freedom.gov?

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

This service is definitely a honeypot for tracking.

Seriously though... we have one segment undermining foreign lockdowns while the same and other segments are literally doing the same here.

freedom.live freedom.xyz freedom.space etc.

Weird title, but worthy of discussion. From the little info available so far this appears to be little more than political posturing. If you want to fight censorship, an "online portal" to access all the censored content is the wrongest possible way to go about it. But we'll see.

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

Simple HTML:

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

Why are my taxes paying for benefits for Europeans?

They already killed USAID.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh I'm sure

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20050209024923/http://freedom.go...

2. https://web.archive.org/web/19981201060504/http://freedom.go...

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

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

when did this experiment fail?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Why don't we just make a website?

- Yes let's just do that.

visuals with the only text on screen being...

---

"Freedom is Coming"

Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.

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

USA became so fast an enemy, its crazy :(

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

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

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

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

Ok, stopped reading right there.

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

...Right?

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

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

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

Let me know when the budget deficit starts to decrease!

https://freedom.gov/

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

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

I'd rather not...

Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine (2018) directly claims the internet is “the most effective weapon the government has ever built,” tracing its roots to Pentagon counterinsurgency projects like ARPA’s efforts in Vietnam-era surveillance.

The book argues surveillance was “woven into the fabric” from the start, linking early ARPANET development to intelligence goals, and extends to modern tech giants like Google as part of a military-digital complex.

This being besides the fact that the folks crying wolf over "censorship" regularly conflate flat-out lies with valuable and protected speech.

Edit: I mean, I love tor as much as the next person, but imagine the reaction you'd get if an EU state (say, Germany) was to launch an official page with the express goal of allowing access to information censored by the Chinese government, targeting it directly to chinese citizens.

Could you make a moral case for this? Probably.

But would you be surprised or offended if the Chinese government took any measures they saw fit to strong-arm Germany into shutting that site right back down? Probably not. And the crowd here would probably go "bruh what did you expect?"

... Now waiting for examples of exactly that having happened already. :D

Do we not have better uses of our money. Also the irony considering recent moves by the US government in terms of control of the internet and free speech.

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