Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - This Is How The Internet Dies: Governments are Scrubbing the Web

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

The Internet Is Being Deleted. Support my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/taylorlorenz      🗞️ Buy a paid subscription to my Substack: https://www.usermag.co     We are witnessing a massive, systematic erasure of digital history. From war crime investigations to grassroots activism and historical archives, the "permanent" web is vanishing. In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I break down the escalating censorship from Big Tech and governments that is burning our collective digital archive. Documentation of major historical events, war crimes, police violence, videos documenting things like ICE abductions, but also thousands of photos, websites, and archives that play a crucial role in documenting our cultural and political history are being systematically erased from the web. This sort of mass censorship is escalating, especially as governments and tech platforms seek to remove any content that challenges mainstream media or government approved narratives. In This Episode:The Deletion of Human Rights Data: How YouTube erased 700+ videos from human rights organizations overnight.The "Safety" Smokescreen: How laws like KOSA and the "child safety" narrative are being used to deputize platforms as government censors.The Fall of the Archive: Why Reddit is blocking the Internet Archive and what it means for the future of information.The Shadowban Economy: A look at how Meta and X (formerly Twitter) use algorithmic demotion to make dissent invisible.ICE & Surveillance: The removal of apps like ICEBlock and the crackdown on community-sourced safety data.The Global Free Speech Recession: Arrests for social media posts in the UK and internet shutdowns worldwide.

Right now, we're all witnessing the internet get deleted in real time. Or maybe I shouldn't even say witnessing, because most people don't even realize this is happening. Documentation of major historical events, war crimes, police violence videos, documentation of things like ice abductions, but also thousands of photos, websites, and archives that play a crucial role in documenting our shared cultural and political history are being systematically erased from the web. Often, thanks to the government. Welcome back to Free Speech Friday, my series on the fight to protect free speech, free expression, and civil liberties online. As you can probably imagine, covering these topics is not lucrative.

Many of my videos get effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues, so my work is almost entirely directly funded by you. If you get any value out of this series and you want me to be able to continue, please support my Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's at usermag.com. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon, where I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A, live streams, and more. Every dollar makes such a difference. Now back to today's topic. When the internet first blossomed throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, it was positioned as this limitless bastion of knowledge. The internet was supposed to democratize access to information and

allow anyone to access knowledge at any time in any place. The idea was that once information was uploaded to the web, it would exist forever in the digital ether, accessible to anyone pretty much for all time. This promise formed the foundation of our modern information ecosystem. It was a democratic and liberatory vision for the internet, where knowledge couldn't be controlled, suppressed, or destroyed by governments, corporations, and powerful interests. But that promise is dying. It has been for a while, to be clear, but things are accelerating in a really bad way. Right now, massive portions of the internet are being systematically erasing, censored and made inaccessible.

The collective digital archive that we all rely on is essentially being burned. And many people have not and probably will never notice. This sort of under the radar censorship is escalating, especially as governments and tech platforms seek to remove any content that challenges mainstream media or government-approved narratives. Just a few months ago, YouTube quietly erased more than 700 videos from three prominent human rights organizations off YouTube. The deleted videos included investigations into Israeli air strikes,

testimonies from survivors, and documentation of the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shereen Abu Akla. YouTube deleted crucial video investigations into war crimes and erased firsthand testimonies from torture survivors and families whose loved ones were killed by the IDF. The documentary, The Beach, which was about innocent Palestinian children playing on a beach who were murdered by an Israeli air strike, was also deleted. All of this happened overnight completely without warning. Some of these videos were preserved in backups on other platforms like the Internet Archive, but most are gone forever. There is no cumulative database of videos deleted by YouTube,

and the majority of videos were never available anywhere else online to begin with. Google confirmed to The Intercept, which broke this story, that it intentionally deleted these videos at the hest of the American government because of sanctions. Basically, the Trump administration sanctioned these three human, rights organizations simply for cooperating with the international criminal courts investigation into Israeli war crimes. Literally, these human rights organizations are just being sanctioned for helping the ICC investigate war crimes. I hope that tells you a lot about the priorities of the American government. The Trump administration has been targeting any and all organizations

and activists that have worked with or helped the ICC's investigation. And this means getting their YouTube channels deleted. Basil Al-Sarani, an international advocacy. officer and legal advisor for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights told the intercept that YouTube claimed the organization, quote, violated community guidelines. But here we can see in action how when we give the government control over online speech, the government de facto controls what the community guidelines are on different platforms. I've talked about this before, but the government is effectively deputizing these big tech companies as mass government sensors. And they're doing all of this under the guise of making the internet safer for kids' mental health and other moral panic nonsense.

Catherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that it was, quote, outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration's agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view. But the mass deletion of content that the government doesn't like is not limited to YouTube. Mailchimp, an email marketing service, has also deleted the accounts of human rights organizations at the behest of the U.S. government. Top U.S. tech companies from Google to other email providers are consistently and systematically cutting off human rights organizations

and activists from their platforms based on government pressure. Again, I just think that this case shows how private companies will readily delete vast archives of information when governments demand it, even without any sort of legitimate legal basis. It also shows how fragile our information ecosystem really is. The consolidation of power among just a few major social social social media. social media platforms means that when content is wiped from one or several of those platforms, it essentially vanishes completely from the web.

There is no comprehensive backup system or alternative social media platform landscape that actually values free speech. And of course, this mass deletion of content is all happening without any judicial review or public debate because the tech companies aren't accountable to the public. They're only accountable to shareholders who serve capital and have absolutely no interest in protecting the free speech. of millions of Americans or human rights organizations abroad. American citizens and everyone in the world, to be honest,

cannot make informed decisions about foreign policy or any politics, frankly, when crucial information that challenges people in power is withheld from them. And let's be very clear, that is the goal with all of this. Like, that is the explicit goal. This is what people in power and the government want. They want to control speech online

and have admin power essentially over the whole internet so they can control it, and exert power over it the way they exert power over mainstream media. This is why there has been so much of a focus placed on owning and controlling the platforms. Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, for instance, or pro-Israel billionaire Larry Ellison's takeover of TikTok have also resulted in the mass deletion of content. Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, explicitly claiming that his acquisition was about protecting free speech and reducing censorship.

But within weeks of his purchase, he was banning journalists for reporting critically on him. I was one of those journalists that he banned. Thankfully, I'm back on, but my account is under heavy restrictions, and I had to delete a slew of posts in order to get reinstated. Musk suspended 5.3 million Twitter accounts in the first half of 2024, a 307% increase in bans compared to Twitter's 1.3 million suspensions in the second half of 2021. Many of these accounts belong to journalists, activists, and people who spoke out about LGBTQ rights.

Government compliance with censorship requests has also, increased significantly under Elon Musk. X's global compliance with government content removal demands jumped 71% in early 2024, up from approximately 51% in 2021. The platform continues to remove significantly more content at government request than before Elon Musk's acquisition, despite him constantly spouting this BS about free speech and fighting censorship. Just earlier this year, many X users began reporting that their accounts were suspended suddenly

without any possibility of reinstatement and zero recourse. Musk has also aggressively expanded the shadow banning of accounts over their political views. He claimed that this is all freedom of speech and not reach, which was a policy that ironically he hated and railed against before he took over. But essentially now it just seems to mean that if you express leftist ideas on X, your content will be downranked into oblivion so that people don't see it, making it functionally invisible. If you've watched this series before or followed me for long enough,

you know that when it comes to online censorship, meta is one of the worst platforms. In December 2023, Human Rights Watch released a 51 page report titled Meta's Broken Promises, systematic censorship of Palestine content on Instagram and Facebook. The study examined more than a thousand reported

incidents of content moderation, targeting peaceful discussion of Palestinian human rights issues, including the deletion of thousands of posts by users in the United States. In over a thousand documents, cases of content deletion, only a single case concerned pro-Israel content, and that it continually removed or obscured lawful political expression, commentary on human rights violations, and reporting

on civilian suffering. The censorship that META has enacted is a mix of algorithmic demotion, automated keyword flagging, and an overly broad application of META's dangerous organizations and individuals' policy. U.S.-based journalists, academics, and human rights advocates described having posts taken down within minutes of publication, sometimes for just displaying the Palestinian flag or quoting official newswire reports about Gaza. Others had their entire accounts temporarily suspended without any explanation. For U.S. users, some of these takedowns were over posts that were not even related to foreign policy issues. They were discussing social justice issues or fighting for things like trans rights, racial equality, or trying to educate the public about the danger of the

ongoing COVID pandemic and the government's consistent lives. about how dangerous the disease really is. The way meta, mass deletes, or downranks almost any content that challenges the U.S. government shows, again, how these top-down content moderation policies affect our access to information. Content literally posted by Americans discussing human rights laws in America or domestic policy issues

or fact-checking government officials is being demoted or erased by U.S.-based platforms. Like X, meta also regularly engages in the shadow removal of content. Human Rights Watch documented that posts including controversial content that challenged US foreign policy often remained technically visible on a user's profile, but that content was basically hidden from all non-followers and in search results. Just last month, I myself got a notification on my own account showing that my own content was under this type of restriction. Unlike newspapers or broadcast archives, there is no external repository that preserves this

censored material. Once Meta's algorithm hides a piece of content, especially from search, it is effectively removed from the public record. This problem has been widespread for years, and it's exacerbated by the mainstream media, which continues to push for this type of overly censorious, top-down speech regulation. Again, if you've followed me for a while, you probably know my views on misinformation and how this word has come to basically mean anything that the government doesn't like. In 2021 and 2022, when the Biden administration, was lying rampantly to the public about COVID-19, lying and telling them that it was impossible to get COVID if you were vaccinated

and telling them that infections with the virus weren't dangerous. Twitter and other platforms quite literally mass-censored factual information about COVID and labeled it as misinformation. Top doctors, scientists, and disability justice advocates attempting to warn the public about the dangers of the virus who called out the Biden administration for lying had their tweets flagged and their accounts deleted. And let me be super clear, since a lot of you actually fell for this misinformation. The COVID pandemic is ongoing.

It never ended. The World Health Organization literally never declared the pandemic over. And we are definitionally still in a pandemic. COVID is just as dangerous today as it was in 2020 and 2021. Nothing changed. The government just lied to you and told you to shut up and get back to work and sacrifice your body because they don't want to invest in basic health care and airborne disease mitigation. Our current vaccines are shit.

And while they do a decent job of protecting against death as long as you're not elderly, so let me be clear, you should get them. The current ones are not even variant matched, and they don't meaningfully protect against long COVID or permanent disability or prevent transmission and infection. The reality is what the government won't tell you is that every single COVID infection permanently damages your body, whether you're vaccinated or not.

It's better to be vaccinated, but vaccines are not remotely enough. They don't make it harmless to be repeatedly infected with a biosafety hazard level three pathogen. So please, wear an N95 mask and protect yourself against airborne diseases. I think COVID is such a good example of how many people, even on the left, have fallen for government misinformation to the point that they truly believe this dangerous virus and pathogen is somehow harmless to re-infect yourself with if you got vaccinated a couple times. Once again, vaccines are not a silver bullet. It doesn't make it okay to get infected

with a dangerous pathogen. But COVID and foreign policy issues aside, we're also seeing the mass deletion of other large swaths of content under the guise of child safety. Meta is already removing and hiding thousands of posts and profiles related to LGBTQ rights, feminism, reproductive justice, and even democracy itself. According to Repro Uncensored, a nonprofit that tracks censorship and researches patterns of suppression, in June 2025, Instagram began actively suppressing all things democracy, an account with over 330,000 followers that regularly shared accurate political and social justice content. At its peak, the account reached more than 25 million people per month.

But since June 16th, over 50 original videos posted by All Things Democcurals, have been falsely flagged for duplicate content and deleted by Instagram. The account remains in a do not recommend status, making it effectively invisible in explore, search, and reels. Again, all content on this page was original and policy compliant and accurate information about democracy itself. But meta's automated and opaque content moderation systems focused on child online safety and started blocking access to fact-based civic information at scale, harming communities that rely on trusted independent media. As Repro uncensored noted, quote, this is part of a broader pattern. Big tech platforms increasingly silence voices that challenge disinformation and uplift democratic engagement. In April, over a dozen Instagram posts from pages like Plan C or Shout Your Abortion

were deleted by meta arbitrarily. The content focused on abortion pills by mail. The information in the post was medically accurate, legally compliant, completely normal legal speech. But again, Again, Instagram flagged and deleted the posts without explanation and offered no way to appeal. All in the name of children's safety and protecting people's mental health. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or by a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power.

As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover and talks about the things that I talk about. These videos I make are entirely funded by you and I can't continue to make them without your support. So if you get any value out of the videos that I create and you want me to be able to create more, please support me on Patreon or Substack via the links below. On Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A live streams, and post frequent updates about my work. My Substack newsletter gives you a bi-weekly roundup of everything that I'm saying, seeing and reading and paying attention to online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon.

Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. Censorship is also escalating, especially on TikTok, which is basically going to be under effectively government control once full ownership is transferred to a cadre of pro-Trump pro-Israel billionaires. But even before that happens, the intensity of censorship on TikTok has increased dramatically following Trump's return to office. TikTok users reported that comments containing the phrase, free Palestine, or being flagged as hate speech. Screenshots and videos shared on social media show comments advocating for human rights and social justice being removed for allegedly breaching TikTok's hate speech rules.

And let's be clear, the TikTok ban itself was about censoring speech. It had nothing to do with China or data privacy. That was literally always a lie. China can buy just as much data on Americans today as it could before, as many journalists have reported. because we have zero comprehensive data privacy protections in this country. As representatives Warner and Gallagher, the two co-sponsors of the bill banning TikTok admitted on stage at the Munich Security Conference last year, the ban was all about controlling the narrative on Palestine.

Both Democrat and Republican lawmakers have been obsessed with policing pro-Palestinian speech on the app, accusing TikTok of influencing young Americans' minds. The platform's new ownership structure is clear evidence of this agenda. A consortium of right-wing investors, including oracles Larry Ellison, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, who own Fox News, and Michael Dell, all pro-Israel billionaires and millionaires are set to assume full control of TikTok's operations and algorithm. Ellison has a well-documented history of collaboration with Israel on military and intelligence

projects, including in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Rupert Murdoch's media empire, including Fox News and the New York Post, have continually advocated for government crackdowns on free speech. Before the mass bans, TikTok was one of the few major platforms where Palestinians could document their experience under bombardment and where activists could share information that mainstream media often ignored. TikTok creator Bison Adwa, a 25-year-old Emmy award-winning filmmaker and journalist, has documented her real-time experiences throughout Israel's assault on Gaza. But now many of those videos from Palestinian activists themselves and journalists like Besson in Gaza have been arbitrarily deleted. As ice raids escalade and the Department of Homeland, security ushers in more authoritarianism, the mass deletion of content is also extending to non-social

media apps, especially those that exist to track ICE and document their abuses. Beginning several months ago, the government began forcing the deletion of digital tools and websites that allowed people to track ICE operations and forcing these platforms and websites to delete vast archives of community gathered information. Recently, following a request from the Department of Justice, Apple completely removed the Ice Block app and other apps that allowed people to alert others nearby about ICE agent sightings in their area. Apple told Joshua Aaron, the creator of the Ice Block app, that the app does not comply with App Store guidelines around objectionable and discriminatory and mean-spirited content. But of course, major big tech platforms like X and others have no mean-spirited content at all. The Ice Block app essentially functioned as ways but for ice sightings and served as an early warning system in form.

performing people when ICE agents were in their area. It had been downloaded more than a million times since its introduction in April 2025 and hit a high of nearly 114,000 downloads in a single day on July 1st. But of course, when Attorney General Pam Bondi contacted Apple demanding that they remove the app from their app store, the company happily complied. Joshua Aaron, the app's creator, tried to argue that the app service was engaged in a type of protected speech and argued to at least keep the content that people had already uploaded to app live. But so far, his efforts have failed. Meanwhile, Apple's own apps like the company's

mapping app that allows users to crowdsource documentation of things like accidents, hazards, and police speed traps along roadways function the exact same way, but are totally legal. So if it's legal to report a police speed trap or upload videos of alleged criminals to apps like Citizen, why would it be illegal to report an ice rate in your area? The difference is, of course, that the government doesn't care about that sort of user-generated content. And Google has also removed all similar ICE documentation apps from the App Store. People initially tried to work around these government removals. They started uploading videos and posts about ICE officers to social media. But immediately, their content was removed under online safety provisions.

The Department of Justice worked with Facebook to delete a large group page with about 76,000 members that was being used to share information and videos about ICE agents in Chicago. Again, all under the guise of online safety and protecting people's mental health. All the information contained in these apps and these deleted groups disappeared. The million plus users who downloaded the Ice Block app lost access to all of that crowdsourced data about ICE operations in their communities. Tens of thousands of members of these Facebook groups lost their archives of reported ICE sightings and community safety information. As the creator of the Ice Block app said, quote, capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move.

Our fundamental constitutional rights in this country are being stripped away by this administration. and the powers that be, aka the big tech companies who are capitulating to their requests. On top of government pressure to remove content, you also have these big platforms deliberating blocking tools designed to preserve digital history and crowdsourced information. In August 2025, Reddit announced that it would block the Internet Archive from indexing most of its content. A Reddit spokesperson said that, quote, until the Internet Archive is able to defend their site and comply with platform policies, we're limiting their access to Reddit data to participate.

Redditors. Their justification was basically user privacy and respecting content deletion. So if somebody wanted to delete a comment on Reddit, for instance, it wouldn't automatically be deleted on the internet archive. But the practical effect is that without backup services, Reddit content is then totally unrecoverable if it's deleted. And by the way, Reddit's whole argument is so stupid because you can literally request that any of your social media content be permanently removed from the internet archive if you wanted to actually scrub your comment history. According to a 24 Pew study, one in four web pages that were online at some point between 2013 and

20203 are now no longer accessible. For sites from before 2013, 38% of web pages that were accessible in 2013 are no longer available. And now we're seeing these platforms mass block any archiving services from preserving the content on their sites. Reddit users, to their credit, did recognize the implications of this bad policy. On Reddit's R-Sash-technology subreddit, a threat about this news, quickly accumulated over 30,000 upvotes, with users lamenting the death of a free and open internet.

One user posted, quote, outrageous, especially with how often posts, threads and users get deleted. Another declared that we are, quote, entering a new age of internet censorship. And that's true, by the way. We are undeniably all entering into this age of mass online censorship. But that means we all need to start fighting back. And to do that, we have to understand the real root issues at play. Yes, the government wants to censor all speech that challenges power, but the for-profit business models of big tech are also a problem.

Look at some of the recent changes that Reddit has made in the past few years to try to squeeze more profit out of the platform. In 2023, Reddit announced that it would begin charging companies for developer access to its API. The next year, it began to actually charge search engines to index its content. Then it struck deals with both OpenAI and Google to allow their LLMs to be trained on its data. So much for all of that user privacy stuff that they were saying, right? The Internet Archive, which is a nonprofit focused on public good, is not allowed to scrape Reddit to preserve online history,

but paying customers like Google and OpenAI can, of course, access an endless amount of Reddit's data to train their AI models, because it's more profitable that way. Basically, a company like Reddit has no incentive to allow non-paying archive services to keep a public record of their content when they can instead make millions by restricting access and then charging AI companies to use it. Reddit's internal content removal practices

have also gone downhill. A University of Michigan study examining more than 600 million comments across a range of subreddits found that comments with opposing political views were significantly more likely to be censored and deleted by moderators. Amidst all of this happening, we're also witnessing a sharp escalation in direct attacks on archiving infrastructure. As the platforms are being censored and the tools

to preserve content are being blocked, attacks on internet archive systems are the final stage of this mass digital erasure that we're witnessing across the web. For instance, in October 24, the Internet Archive suffered a catastrophic series of cyber attacks. The site also faced DDoS attacks and was hit with an email hack while working to restore services from the initial attacks. The Internet Archive is the single most important digital preservation platform that we have. And because of these attacks, it was rendered fully offline for weeks. That meant that millions of users were unable to access or add any archived content throughout that time. Internet Archive founder, Brewster Kale, noted that libraries and archives are being

systematically targeted by bad actors and governments. Libraries with online archives, including the British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and Calgary Public Library, have also suffered these similar cyber attacks. Attackers recognize correctly that destroying Archive Systems means destroying the ability to verify historical claims or destroying the ability to fact-check government statements against past reality. And it really harms people's ability to hold powerful entities accountable by presenting firsthand documentation of events. Federal law enforcement has also begun targeting alternative archiving services. On October 30th last year, the FBI subpoenaed Archive. Today's domain registrar with the goal of

identifying the owner of Archive Today's domain name as part of a criminal investigation. The nature of that investigation was of course never disclosed. Archive Today, which operates under multiple domain names, including Archive.is or Archive.ph. PH has been a crucial tool for preserving web content, particularly for bypassing paywalls and documenting content that might be deleted. The service has built up a massive user base over more than 10 years who use it to access previous snapshots of web pages. But according to a subpoena, published by Archive Today itself, the FBI requested that their domain registrar provide, quote, extensive information about the website's owner, including the person's personal name, address, billing information, phone records, credit card and banking details, and internet session logs. The FBI also instructed the registrar not to disclose the subpoena publicly, warning that doing so could compromise the investigation.

Thankfully, Archive.comvented that order by just posting the document online, which is very brave of them. But just imagine what they're doing when we don't have brave activists willing to stand up to censors and make this type of stuff public. All of this is also happening in the context of what the foundation for individual rights and freedom has called a global free speech recession. Online censorship has accelerated dramatically throughout 2024 and 2025. It's even becoming harder and harder to access the web itself. 2024 was a record year for internet shutdowns with 296 shutdowns across 54 countries. This is a sharp increase from just 283 shutdowns in 39 countries the year before. Myanmar recorded 85 internet shutdowns in the past year and India had 84.

And just to be clear, I'm not talking about technical failures and glitches and service outages. I'm talking about deliberate government actions to block citizens from accessing the internet. This is almost always because citizens were using social media to organize protests or document government wrongdoing or post about factual events that challenged mainstream media narratives. By 2024, at least 25 countries had restricted access to entire social media and messaging platforms to quell dissent. Russia continued blocking Facebook and X as part of its information controls surrounding the Ukraine invasion.

China's great firewall has kept Western social media completely blocked, and Turkey, among other countries, frequently throttled or blocked platforms during politically sensitive times. Countries like the UK, Ireland, and Australia have. sought to enact strict censorship laws under the guise of online safety, while identity verification efforts are sweeping America. This level of online censorship was previously only associated with extremely authoritarian regimes. But now we see how eager Western countries are to emulate these authoritarian practices online, as long as it benefits them.

And the volume of government demands for content removal has also exploded globally. The Twitter received 46,600 content removal requests from Japan and over 9,000 from Turkey in the first half of 2024 alone. The company complied with almost 80% of these requests, which is obviously the vast majority. Reddit received 160 government take down requests from 26 countries in the first half of 2024 alone. I just want you guys to understand what I'm saying, which is basically that governments on a global scale are getting more and more comfortable pressuring platforms to delete content. and those platforms are increasingly complying. There's been a significant human cost to these mass global online censorship efforts as well. Freedom House reported that in at least 56 of 72 countries that they studied,

people were arrested or imprisoned for online speech and expression. The punishments were often draconian. In Thailand, a pro-democracy activist received 25 years in prison for 18 tweets that they posted criticizing the monarchy. Cuba sentenced a woman to 15 years behind bars for enemy propaganda. after she shared protest footage on Facebook. In Pakistan, courts imposed the death penalty on a 22-year-old and life in prison for a 17-year-old for blasphemous content that they shared on WhatsApp. In the UK, police arrested over 12,000 people over social media posts last year alone.

That's more than 30 people arrested per day over online speech. And the real number of arrests in the UK for social media posts is likely even higher because eight police forces either failed to respond to FOIA requests or provided inadequate data, including Police Scotland, the second largest police force in the UK. And pro-censorship, people will push back on this and be like, well, some of those arrests

are for speech that falls into the legal definition of harassment or threats. But the government intentionally doesn't distinguish between these categories or share a breakdown of the types of speech that they're arresting people over because they want to obscure it. Many arrests are simply over offensive content or content that's deemed to be harmful.

And even the arrests over threatening content can be somebody posting something that's just pro-Palestine. For instance, David Wooten, a 40-year-old in the UK, was arrested for posting a photo of himself, wearing a kofia on his head, and an I love Ariana Grande shirt. Obviously, this is in reference to the Manchester Arena Bomber, but it was in the context of a Halloween party.

Like, is this an offensive costume? Yes, it's in bad taste. Should he be arrested because he posted a photo of himself online wearing this costume? No, that is absolutely insane. Jake Herford, the head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties group, told the times of London that the staggering rate at which the UK is arresting people over online content is seriously

concerning. He said, quote, police look to be wasting countless hours on arresting people for posting things online that, while offensive, are not illegal. Heavy-handed use of vague communications offenses is a threat to everyone's freedom to express themselves online. All of these things together that I've been talking about in this video represent this fundamental assault on free speech principles across the internet and around the world. Free speech also includes the right to freely access information and to preserve that information freely too. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that, quote, everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. This includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive,

and impart information and ideas through any media, regardless of frontiers. The right to seek and receive information is just as fundamental as the right to impart it. But this right is being systematically violated through the mass deletion of content online and just this broad-based censorship in the name of online safety. Just go back to the YouTube incident that took place that I talked about in the beginning of this video. American citizens who want to understand what's happening in Gaza or the West Bank, who want to evaluate claims about war crimes, who want to make informed opinions about U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. All of them have been deprived of access to over 700 videos of documentation

that would directly inform those views. Their right to receive information, I would argue, has been violated, all so that the U.S. government and the mainstream media can control public opinion. And this idea that free speech requires access to information is not new. The First Amendment gives everyone in the United States the right to hear all sides of every issue and to make their own judgments about those issues without government interference. This even, and I think a lot of people don't know this, I fight with a lot of people about this constantly, but this also means receiving propaganda. There was this really famous Supreme Court case that ruled that we have the freedom to consume information, even that our government doesn't like. This means that if you, an American

citizen, want to sit on the internet all day long and just consume Chinese propaganda or Russian disinformation all day long, that's the only thing you want to read all day long, you absolutely have the right to do that. That is what freedom to consume information means. You have the right to receive that information. That's what bothered me so much when they were arguing that like TikTok was 100% Chinese propaganda. Even if that was true and it's completely not, we as Americans have the right to receive

unlimited amounts of Chinese propaganda. That's the whole thing. Like we are supposed to have freedom of access to information. The First Amendment allows anyone to speak, publish and read and view whatever they want. They can also worship or not worship religions that they would. They can associate with whoever they want online. They can gather in public as well to exercise their speech rights. The right to speak freely and the right to publish under the First Amendment has been interpreted pretty widely, to be honest,

to protect individuals and society from government attempts to suppress ideas and information. The First Amendment is also supposed to protect against government censorship of books, magazines, newspapers, art, film, and music. Somehow we understand, you know, government incursions on all of these, but we don't seem to understand government censorship. of online speech. This is why, like, when all the Jimmy Kimmel stuff happened and you had, like, all these celebrities suddenly signing, you know, the ACLU's letter and like how we support free speech and all of this. And there was like, all this media outcried. It's like, okay, so you understand that the government shouldn't have the power to censor media. But somehow you only care when the government's censoring like the mainstream media, which usually aligns with the

government. You don't care when the government is censoring online media, which challenges the government. Like, I wish any of those celebrities would literally care or sign any petition about online speech. Instead, if you watch my video on my live stream channel, you'll see that a lot of these same celebrities that sign that letter are out promoting online censorship. Because again, these people in power are trying to argue that these core First Amendment principles don't apply to the internet, even though the Supreme Court and other courts have actually repeatedly and conclusively held that we have a First Amendment right to receive information and to speak freely online, theoretically. it's being chipped away. And just to back up to what I was saying before about this famous Supreme

Court case that held that we have the right to receive propaganda information or disinformation if we want, I'd been thinking a lot about that court case. It's called Lamont v. Postmaster. Because that case held that a federal law requiring recipients of communist political propaganda or being forced to identify themselves and affirmatively request delivery of the propaganda violated the First Amendment. Basically, like, they were like, you shouldn't have to identify yourself, you know, if you want to receive this propaganda. The Supreme Court ruled that requiring someone to identify themselves to get controversial information, discouraged free speech and the free flow of ideas. And yet look at what people in power are trying to do to the internet today,

literally. This is also why it's so dangerous that just a handful of private companies wields such unilateral control over our information ecosystem. In the United States, meta, Google, and X are essentially the primary vehicles for civic communication for millions of people online. These companies' decisions to systematically delete basically any and all content that promotes specific narratives that, you know, challenges the government or challenges mainstream powers means that entire strands of public discourse or documentation of things that really anything that the government doesn't like can just be erased from history. There's also a massive ripple effect with these government censorship and,

de-platforming campaigns. When content creators, journalists, and activists see that documenting certain types of events or reporting on certain types of issues can get your entire account deleted, or when they see that running and archiving service can result in a costly FBI investigation, or when they see entire platforms and apps shut down by the government for allowing users to post things like videos of ICE agents, they self-censor. They avoid discussing sensitive. topics. They avoid building those ice tracking apps. They avoid starting an archiving service or participating in digital archiving efforts. There's this broad-based chilling effect and crucial information that challenges power or government narratives is just never documented or talked about in the first place.

I've dealt with this myself. Candidly, it's been extremely hard to grow my channel when my videos are consistently getting downranked or shadow banned. I know that this very very, video will likely never perform as well as my content about just like, you know, uncontroversial things or pop culture or Taylor Swift or Sydney Sweeney. There's literally zero benefit to speaking out about these censorship issues. Like you're only punished for speaking out. You can't get brand deals. You're viewed as controversial.

Platforms stigmatize you. You're not getting invited to these beta testing groups. And you can even just lose access to your account overnight. This is why my work is entirely funded by viewers like you. So again, I'll just say it. If you get any value out of this series and you want me to be able to continue to report on these issues and fight back against mass censorship,

please support my Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my bi-weekly substack newsletter. Like I said before, on my Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A live streams, and more. Every dollar on my Patreon or subsack allows me to continue to produce this work. The internet was supposed to be this very, vast, sprawling, decentralized web of information.

But the modern internet, thanks to capitalism, is extremely centralized. Just a very small handful of multi-billion dollar tech platforms hosts the vast majority of content and speech online. This centralization is so dangerous because it creates these single points of failure. So when YouTube deletes these videos, they're basically gone forever because no one else has them. or when Reddit blocks the internet archive, good luck ever finding that content ever again.

You literally won't because it's permanently unrecoverable. The monopolistic control that these tech companies have over our internet landscape makes censorship far, far more effective and widespread than it should be. Censorship in one country also creates a lot of pressure for censorship in other countries, especially in the West. When the UK, Australia, or South Korea enact some draconian mass censorship or surveillance law in the name of mental health, kids' online

safety, cracking down on disinformation, cracking down on big tech, whatever BS thing they came up with. It basically pushes platforms to implement similar censorship measures globally to maintain access to European or Asian markets. Or when the U.S. government pressures platforms to delete large swaths of content, it legitimizes other countries' mass take down requests as well. I talked about this in my recent video about China, but our whole global internet is increasingly fragmented into nationalized internets, each subject to their own censorship regimes. We're losing this global open web and this truly borderless, accessible information ecosystem, which is what gave the internet its power and made it such a democratizing force. And again, capitalism and profit

incentives are what's making all of this worse, because it's cheaper for platforms to just default their content policies to the most restrictive regimes. So we end up with this global internet with draconian censorship policies and community guidelines with no oversight and no appeal systems, by the way, if you lose your account or if something gets taken down, because again, they're defaulting to the most restrictive regime.

All of this is so devastating. Like, it's so sad. We're watching the entire internet disappear. That dream from the 1990s of the internet serving as this permanent digital archive of all of human knowledge and discipline. course is dying. And instead, we're getting this really fragmented, broken, censored, kind of like ephemeral internet where content only exists to serve the business interests of billionaires or the

political interests of powerful governments. This sucks. This is a horrible vision for the web. You should care about this no matter what your political ideology. I think so many people on the left, like for years have spent so much time arguing in favor of censorship for some reason and allowing the right to act like there some party of free speech, journalists at mainstream media outlets continue in 2025 to call for the mass top-down censorship of whatever they deem as misinformation. But freedom of expression and the right to speak freely and consume information freely should not be a left or right issue. And if you are on the left, you should especially care about this because the primary people enacting these horrible censorship and surveillance laws and policies are far-right authoritarians

and billionaires. Big tech does not need free speech to profit. I can't stress that enough. They can deny all of us, all of our civil liberties and work hand in hand with the government to silence all criticism of U.S. imperialism and power, and they will still turn massive profits, probably even bigger profits because the government will be less and less likely to regulate them. But when we lose the right to dissent and organize online and share information that challenges power, we lose like everything. Like literally we lose our voices, our ability to dissent. This is why we have to fight for a pro-technology future. We need to preserve and to build an internet that supports human connection and knowledge that is not centered around profits.

And you're probably like, okay, but in the meantime, all this speech is being silenced and all these apps and websites are being taken down. Should we just like print the entire internet? No, although that is a noble effort. Somebody maybe should do that. But most importantly, it means building technological alternative ways to distribute information directly to people, whether that's through new texting platforms, new email clients, or just more neutral open protocols, things like RSS. For instance, you're probably watching this video on YouTube, but on YouTube, the platform controls the algorithm and distribution. If you subscribe to my show on RSS via the link below

or search power user by Taylor Lorenz on any podcasting app, that ensures that my content can't be shadow banned by any algorithm. So please subscribe. If you like me, subscribe. I post everything I post on YouTube to all the podcasting platforms. So subscribe to me there. It helps me opt out of these horrible hypercapitalist algorithms that shadow ban all my content.

We also just desperately need people. on the left to build alternative technologies. We should, again, be embracing a tech forward future where we build ways to communicate and organize at scale on platforms that aren't owned or controlled by billionaires. And most importantly, in the meantime, we have to do everything to kill these mass censorship laws at home. So that means calling your representatives, telling them to kill dangerous surveillance laws like the Kids Online Safety Act, the Screen Act, the App Store Accountability Act, the Parents Over Platforms Act, all of these BS laws. It means fighting to protect Section 230 and rejecting this BS propaganda that falsely claims that these censorship and mass surveillance laws, you know, crack down on Big Tech rather than reward it.

That is just such BS. We're not falling for that in 2026, okay? Because if these people in power and lawmakers really wanted to crack down on Big Tech and leftists as well, they would be fighting to break up these big tech monopolies and pass comprehensive data privacy protections and transparency laws, forcing companies to disclose the behind. the scene censorship and surveillance schemes that they're enforcing on users. But they're not doing any of that, of course. Overall, we just need to build a less profit-driven online world. So this just means fighting for public interest technology, open protocols, decentralized platforms, and global access to information that is not controlled by U.S. billionaires or authoritarian governments.

None of this is possible if we allow governments to regulate the internet by stoking fear and moral panic BS. This bend towards censorship and authoritarian control over all online speech and information is not like the natural evolution of technology. These are very specific political and economic choices that we are collectively making and that we collectively have the power to fight against. A lot of this is happening very quietly without any debate or oversight, but we can challenge these laws and fight for free speech online. To help me do this, please subscribe to my work on Patreon via the link below.

you can also buy a paid subscription to my sub-sac newsletter, UserMag at Usermag.com, or via the link below. As I said, I post bonus episodes, a biweekly newsletter roundup of everything I'm reading and seeing online, a monthly Q&A, and more. Talking about these topics makes it extremely hard to get any sort of advertising support or distribution. And I'm 100% independent. I'm not financed by any outside nonprofits, political propaganda organizations, dark money groups, the stuff that a lot of these other liberal content creators are taking. The only reason I can continue to make these videos and do my Free Speech Friday series

is due to the support of people like you. So truly, any small amount makes such a difference. And if you can even just, if you don't have any money, if you listen on a podcasting platform, you listen on Spotify specifically, that will actually like help me earn revenue as opposed to YouTube. You also ensure that I'm not getting shadow ban. So just subscribe to me on Spotify if you can.

And that is really helpful too. I'll be back next week. with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.