You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Why Censorship Is A Panic Response - Andrew Lowenthal | Ep. 126

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Andrew Lowenthal is CEO of Liber-net and an Australian digital civil liberties researcher with over 25 years in human rights and technology. He led Engaged Media, worked with Matt Taibbi on the Twitter Files, and mapped the censorship industrial complex for Racket News. Andrew writes about digital authoritarianism, surveillance, and free expression. Recently he testified before the EU Parliament and continues exposing how legacy institutions bleeding trust respond with censorship rather than transparency.→ Please like, comment, share & follow — to help me beat the suppressing algo's. Thank you!– SPONSORS –→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat    → Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines: https://AbundantMines.com/Efrat - Claim your free month of hosting via this link– AFFILIATES –→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox Spike protein, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (Note, this is not medical advice, please consult your MD)→ Join me at Europe’s largest bitcoin conference - BTC Prague, June 11-13, 2026. Code EFRAT for 10% off: http://btcprg.me/EFRAT→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero blue light & flicker. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight → Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat→ Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events– LINKS –Andrew on X: https://x.com/naffectsLiber-net’s Website: https://liber-net.org/ Andrew’s Substack: https://networkaffects.substack.com/ Efrat’s X: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat’s Channels: https://linktr.ee/efenigsonWatch on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat’s work: ⁠https://bit.ly/zap_efrat– CHAPTERS – 00:00 - Coming Up... 01:17 - Intro  to Andrew Lowenthal 03:30 - Censorship Status in USA, Australia, UK, Europe 08:50 - The Political Shift in Australia & “One Nation” Party13:05 - Ad-Break: Ledn & Trezor 19:05 - Australia's Age Verification Law & Substack's Voluntary Compliance 23:11 - The New Hate Speech Law, Bondi Attack & Gov. Overreach 33:00 - Australia’s Hate Speech Laws History36:55 - Ad-Break: Abundant Mines & New Totalitarian Order Conference 39:14 - Mapping the Censorship Industrial Complex 45:20 - Speech Police Via NGOs & Government Funding50:10 - Australia’s e-Safety Office: Policing Speech & Node In Global Censorship Industrial Complex59:40 - Australia’s Economical Downturn & Recession1:01:50 - Censorship As Part of UN’s Agenda 20301:04:49 - 2017 Council of Europe Document & Germany Censorship Analysis1:11:11 - Are Speech Crimes Now Treated On Par With Violent Crimes?1:17:23 - Bitcoin & Nostr: Decentralized, Censorship Resistant Protocols 1:22:54 - The End Game: Keeping Legacy Parties in Power 1:28:30 - Follow Andrew's Work

Mean tweets is going to get you a police visit. You do censorship when things are going badly for you. Being a member of a hate group can now carry prison terms for 15 years. They decide what is a threat to democracy and it's basically anything with it they don't like. A kid can get on the internet and within a few seconds be watching hardcore porn, but they can't get on Instagram. So, you know, apparently that's making them safe. Anyone who's thinking of doing something horrible and violent is sitting there kind of going,

hmm, we can't say anything bad about these people. I guess we'll just give up then, shall we? The degree to which this can be abused is obviously obscene. The only thing that can give a good fight to that real problem that we have today in the world are decentralized protocols like Bitcoin, like Nostrad. In the wake of kind of chaos, people like certainty, and they like leaders who can bring them certainty. Australians are very trusting of the government, I would say, a little bit too much.

Hello and welcome to another episode of You Are The Voice. Thanks for being here with me. I'm Afrat, this time from Melbourne, Australia. And I have the honor of being here with Andrew. So Andrew is also in Australia, but we're not in the same state. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation to come on the podcast. Thank you for the invitation. My pleasure.

A friend connected us, Rebecca Burnett, who's doing awesome work. For years, I've been following her and I love what she does. We haven't met in real life yet, but we're in contact. So I'm very grateful she connected us. And then once I started researching about you, I was like, how did I not know you before? Because we swim in the same pond, more or less. So let me do a quick intro and then I'll jump straight to my questions because I have so many. So Andrew is a digital civil liberties researcher and CEO of LiberNet.

With over 25 years in human rights and technology, he led Engage Media for nearly 18 years, worked with Matt Taibbi on the Twitter files. map the censorship industrial complex for racket news and rights network effects on digital authoritarianism surveillance and free expression and you have a sub stack we're both signed on the westminster declaration i mean you lit it thank you so much for doing that i let it i worked with michael schellenberger on producing it so thank you for doing that with about 138 journalists artists, authors, activists, and public intellectuals were all signed on this declaration to end censorship in 2023. Unfortunately, since then, it just became worse.

But we've all signed on it. Some were some bits better, actually, I would say. So let's start there. It's a mixed bag. Yeah. Tell me, how do you see the world of censorship since 2023 till now? um well yeah on some levels it's worse on some levels better the trump administration obviously is doing a whole bunch of stuff that uh is not good on the free speech space but i mostly see it as being offline so for me in the u.s it looks like offline is worse in terms of free speech but

online is better than pre-trump this isn't to say that like there's no censorship at all now on on the internet in the u.s but they did obviously take a lot of the restrictions off which is why people now more complain about the fact that there are there's all this horrible content on spaces like x etc which there is and i think that you take a you know you whether or not you like it there is a lot of i think there is more space on x at the same time x is clearly still playing favorites uh so to speak uh and i don't think it's a kind of uh neutral platform in any way shape or form as was the original promise and i would have thought that spaces like australia or the uk or europe would have kind of looked at the u.s backlash around the censorship that was

happening under biden and gone wow that seems to really generate a lot of anger um maybe we shouldn't do that and we should find a better way of like hosting and managing conversations with our people so that we don't generate a similar backlash in our own domestic spheres they seem to have gone in the exact opposite direction and gone let's double down on hate speech legislation let's double down on countering disinformation and i'm a little bit shocked as to why because again i actually think it's a losing strategy for them like i think if they wanted to win they would find a different kind of approach to this stuff because all it seems to do is generate an or you might kind of kind of suppress things in a kind of short-term uh way but in the

long term it seems to come back and bite you so i don't know who's advising them but it's bad advice as far as i'm concerned even just from the perspectives of their own success which not that i'm particularly invested in that well it's very interesting what you're saying because it really depends how you look at it if you're looking at short-term win they are winning they're getting what they're what they want and they're progressing their agendas and they basically just want to control the space in a time where they're losing control long-term yes it's stupid i agree with you but short-term they are suppressing and people are not people are kind of living in in glass cages they don't know what's happening outside their media bubble like

i come from israel and throughout the war the israeli population is highly propagandized because all they can see is what the israeli media is feeding them and they're very little fed from global independent journalism and other outlets and there is a crackdown on free speech as well At the same time, I don't know if you know, but international journalism outlets like Al Jazeera and others have been closed down in Israel because of the war, because of the spread of so-called lies, propaganda, etc. And, you know, it's a matter of national security. So they do that and they justify everything under emergency. And so similar phenomena in each territory, this is my view, is happening under the guise of different excuses. So in Israel, conveniently, you have a war, you will justify that same playbook because of the war. In Australia, so you had terrorism, whatever the attack that happened in Bondi, I mean, not whatever, it was horrible.

But under the guise of that, you will put in legislation to then follow the same playbook. And in Europe, you'll have, you know, other things. So they'll all find their excuse to do the exact same thing. They're all progressing in the same direction. So it's kind of they're winning short term. They're losing, I agree with you, long term. They're losing trust. Yeah, I'm not even sure sometimes if they're winning short term.

But maybe that kind of doesn't exactly kind of matter to kind of weigh the scales on a daily basis. That's right. Although, actually, some of the stuff Australians are quite happy, it seems, with things like, at least according to polls, which, you know, are probably reasonably trustworthy, in terms of the teen social media ban, in terms of the kind of hardline approach, at least from the New South Wales government, which is where Sydney is for international. That's the name of the state. It's quite a weird name for a state in Australia, I know. And I guess in the wake of kind of chaos, people like certainty and they like leaders who can bring them certainty. And on the most part, they still trust the state. Ever find yourself needing cash but refusing to sell your Bitcoin?

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and experts to easily and securely hold their coins i find my treasure super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family enjoy my five percent discount on treasure product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code FLAT. Australians are very trusting of the government, I would say, a little bit too much. Although things are moving around radically at the moment in Australia in a way that they have not for a very, very long time. I don't know if you want to get to that.

I do. I'd love to hear your take on it. Why? Well, yeah. Or in what way? Just to explain to your listeners, which I imagine is quite an international audience. Very international, yes. And not so much of an Australian audience. Oh, you'd be surprised. In the top five, Australia is there.

But yes, US, UK, and then Australia, and then Canada, Germany, etc. But very international. So please educate us. Yeah, no, absolutely. And actually, it's fine, because this is easy, because I was writing an article for an outlet this morning about this that hopefully will be out tomorrow uh so you know we've essentially had a duopoly like many kind of western countries what has been peculiar about australia is that they have been declining the two major parties have been declining very very slowly uh you know

in comparison and it's only really been in the last six months that things have really started that our kind of bright populist party has started to really gain a lot of popularity in the in the may 2025 election they only got six percent of the vote they're now polling in some polls as high as 26 percent so that's in seven eight months that they've managed to do that and they were kind of going up before bondi and then after bondi attack they've just gone through the roof and And then they've gone up again since this hate speech legislation went through a week or so ago because the Liberal Party or the kind of what we call the Coalition, which is one main party called the Liberal Party, which is actually a conservative party.

Australia is quite, we're upside down. That's why everything's very confusing here in so many different ways. They have a kind of junior partner and that which mostly represents kind of the regional or country Australia and they split off because the Liberal Party said they weren't going to support the hate speech bill and then suddenly changed their minds and they supported the hate speech bill because the government needed their votes in the Senate in order to get it through. the greens the greens opposed it as did the kind of right-wing one nation party and in the end this the country party called the nationals so that's caused all manner of chaos in australian politics that you haven't kind of seen for decades in a way because there's this massive split in on the right between kind of the neoliberal traditional center-right party uh which is which actually started mass migration into Australia,

kind of started the neoliberalization process of privatizing. It wouldn't start actually, so that was an earlier Labor Party, but really extended and expanded the privatization of public services and et cetera, et cetera. So they're largely responsible for it, but as are the Labor Party. And so you now have this growing backlash, particularly around migration, I would say, but also around cost of living because, you know,

to get a house in australia which is kind of like one of the main things australians aspire to for anyone under 40 is becoming like an almost impossible task unless you're if you want to live in a capital city if you're happy to live 50 kilometers from a capital city where obviously there aren't as many economic opportunities then you can still find a relatively affordable house but you might find it hard to find a job that is going to an every-year-to-fourth house and forget it in terms of cities like Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney is one of the most expensive cities in the world to buy a house in. It's absolutely out of control.

So, yeah, there's a huge amount of popular discontent brewing and it's really kind of come to a head in the last couple of weeks, really. and I just want to make sure I understood the beginning of what you were saying you were referring to One Nation yes sorry so One Nation is the right popular yes sorry so One Nation is the right populist party that got six percent in the election now polling up to 26 I knew it was going up I didn't know it was that much and well now they poll higher than the kind of main center right opposition and that's that has not ever happened that is incredible decades and decades Yeah, I was here in Australia two plus years ago and interviewed Senator Malcolm Roberts from One Nation.

And when we had the interview back then, which was one of my most viral interviews ever, you should go check it out. It's an amazing interview, two hours. That's maybe where I've seen you before. Yeah, they were not that popular at all. No, no, they had like two senators. Yeah, I know. If they had an election tomorrow, they'd probably get 20. oh my god it's incredible that's massive change and they were the only party i mean i don't

my background is is i spent two decades or more on the left so not particularly i used to protest actually in the late 90s so it's not entirely my cup of tea but like they were the only party that were good on covid all the other parties were absolutely horrendous in terms of um they were you know they were either were part of the restrictions or they were like you know in terms of the greens or the labor party they were pushing for even heavier um restrictions so you know they've been very consistent whereas everyone else hasn't been very consistent even if you disagree with their policies and ideas they are you know they have been consistent and now they're kind of reaping the rewards of 30 years of relative consistency

australians have kind of come uh to them they haven't just kind of chased votes and said well we're going to be this this week because it seems like a focus group said this is what people want and then next week will be something else so they've just kind of played it with a straight bat as they say in australia so yeah it's everything's moving around a very very interesting way they are not necessarily the most um functional political force they're not particularly well organized um it's really centered around one woman which is kind of their strength and their greatest weakness as well so whether or not it can actually be transformed into a real political force is kind of a question but a former deputy prime minister has now joined that party as well

which is one of the other factors that has turned it into kind of increases popularity so yeah we're kind of doing i mean many other places in the world have kind of had this phenomena yes many years ago and it's really arrived in australia just the last few weeks interesting well first of all thank you for that background uh good on you senator roberts i'm going to make sure it watches this this interview and um and just for my audience who is the bitcoiners in my audience which are many of them they should know that one nation has released last week a statement about their bitcoin policy saying that they support yeah that they support the self-custody of private property including bitcoin for australians you should go and check out their

statement it's on x on my profile and tyler green that has joined one nation as well so there are some yeah there is some progress um when it comes to sound money for um for one nation so that's also quite nice have you looked at the other parties in australia well yeah i've interviewed john rudik from libertarians in new south wales and they also put together a nice paper about bitcoin not many unfortunately not many uh politicians in australia are aware greens or where the labor no i haven't looked at greens um because they might be half half it would be interesting to know yeah i mean i know good bitcoiners australians that are pushing through and really trying to raise awareness uh in in politics i know it's hard it's hard for them but

I try to help with whatever I can so okay so um Andrew let me start by saying when I was researching you and doing a lot of work since I'm in Australia now I'm you know browsing the web and going to Substack and then I get this pop-up saying we need to validate your age because you're over we need to make sure you're over 16 because of the e-safety yeah well the problem with that no but substack was not required to do that they did it voluntarily why substack is not in the original list so a lot of people myself included are very disappointed in substack because they seem to have volunteered to do this we've seen the same phenomena during covid yep yeah so i have no idea why you might want to reach out to them and say why have you you guys seemingly volunteered

to do this when you haven't actually been required to do it. It's ridiculous. Because the list of platforms is quite arbitrary. And so it's also like a sub-stack of risk for a 15-year-old. I guess they might see this interview. Nothing is a risk because if you know why this legislation is in place, it's not really because it's protecting kids. It's because it's trying to censor the internet.

And then it makes sense. Yes, then it does. this is my opinion my radical i don't know it's my opinion as well unfortunately it's very popular in australia parents love it the uh it's ridiculous people that seem to think that it works um i don't well just like they thought it's safe and effective to take a genetic product but you could have done you know i'm all for people spending much less time on the internet particularly kids but it didn't need to be done um in this way in terms of the surveillance that you have just outlined, that there were other ways to kind of reduce phone use of

like teenagers that did not require the surveillance of adults. And as a mother to a 16-year-old who was actually 15 and a half when this went through, I'm always on the side, I'm libertarian. It's like, let the parents do the parent's job and monitor what their kids are doing. I don't need the state to interfere in my parenting yeah well Australians love paternalism I know we're extremely paternalistic country we love the state kind of regulating every aspect of our lives and so that's why you saw this I know COVID response is that we actually we love it until it gets to you until they do something that really hurts you and you go why does the

state intervene in that for me and then i say you get what you deserve you allow them to overstep and to violate your your human rights and then you get that you get an authoritarian regime again to go back to the kind of earlier conversation i think something has kind of snapped in a certain amount of people in the past six months and again particularly post bondi and around this hate speech legislation where it feels to a lot of people that they're being punished for something they weren't responsible for that actually it's a very it's very particular group of people who are have have high probability of taking guns and shooting people on a beach and it's not your average citizen totally agree with you let me

frame my next question properly because this is sensitive as you may or may not know i am jewish I am of Israeli descent. I'm half Jewish. Right. I care very much about people hurting, quote unquote, my people, my tribe, although I am all against tribalism. I very much feel bad when any act of terror happens, especially to, you know, my kin. It was horrible what happened in Bondi.

and my very good friend was actually there and he survived miraculously. His friend died. I went through a lot of shit in my life, including rockets landing right near my house and many, many things. It doesn't matter. I served the IDF. I've seen and been through a lot. Having said all that, I do not support any, again, state intervention and legislation

that will just deem free speech as hate speech and allow for pre-crime and allow to confiscate guns and things like that because the state is the big brother and they know best what's best for us. So I totally oppose the new bill that has passed here in Australia. And what I would like to ask you is to explain, if you may, to my audience, what is this new bill that passed called combating anti-semitism hate and extremism act 2026 yeah i had to frame this because otherwise you know they start calling me self-hating jew and all these you know they can't call me an anti-semite so they call me a self-hating jew and and i'm sick of it

it's ridiculous but i am against all this bullshit even if the bill is called anti-semitism anti anti-semitism yes i can i will go through it for you to the degree that i mean it's extremely well in some ways it's complicated in some ways it's not but firstly i think the problem with it is that it confuses what happened at bondi because it assumes that the the reason these two guys this father and son went and shut up this haneka event was because of hate speech that that the whole cause was the kind of environment itself that people were kind of swimming in which i imagine has some level of impact but the there's no kind of indication that they were radicalized online it's not even necessarily clear yes they were going to some more radical mosques at some

point at least the sun was but they also seem to have kind of kept to themselves um in a way and kind of like may obviously made these plans uh very secretively as you would and hate speech was not kind of the cause of this issue it was kind of a certain form of uh violent jihadism i would argue um but that's also kind of considered quite politically incorrect in australia to kind of speak about that and so that's why for me it didn't require a kind of broad brush approach to the whole of the country it just required a kind of quite specific focused approach on where kind of jihadism in particular might be emerging from yeah and also this has already been used against sections of the jewish community because there's a jewish there's an

israeli speaker that just got banned from entering australia who was due to speak at a number of synagogues under these new laws so the people who were backing them or the sections of the Jewish community that were backing them the kind of thing was like no no no like this might come back to like on you this is already free speech and already within a matter of a week it's already kind of come back so I'm hoping karma works fast this these days so I'm hoping this might be a bit of a wake-up call in terms of like this is not the way to combat this stuff and one of the things that we've been riddled with in australia is kind of this dueling cancellation war where there are kind of pro-palestine and pro-israel kind of groups kind of trying to cancel each other from

festivals all the time and i mean i don't know who's doing it more but the whole thing is like really bad and wrong and we had this very big incident where uh australian palestinian uh woman was cancelled from the major festival not someone that i would have invited but i think having been invited she should have been allowed to speak and i think she was very easy to debate and show what i think actually quite violent um sentiments uh that she had but you know people obviously went out of their way to try and get her banned and the whole festival collapsed as a result and then in some ways one of the bad things is then people go and blame tennis

well a lot of people blame the Jews as a whole when really it's not just its particular sections and it's also not just Jews it's a whole variety of different people kind of weaponizing this stuff for kind of various political gain again across the board I don't know who's doing it more but like the whole everyone's playing that kind of stop that whole game just needs to stop because also everyone claims they're for free speech and this was particularly after the the cancellation

uh the festival director came out you know say said how awful it was and how we've got to protect speech and blah but then it turns out a few days later that she cancelled thomas friedman from speaking at a previous festival so this and actually this person who got cancelled was part of writing a letter to the festival director that got thomas friedman cancelled from the event so everyone's cancelled each other and then claiming to be for free speech and it's all a bunch of total hypocrisy anyway i haven't answered your question in any way shape or form yet but i promise you i'm going to start doing it now um thank you for the context it's great there's actually a lot happening in australia normally normally we'd just be having a nice quiet summer

we'd be talking about the cat on the tree you know hanging out in the park and anyway so yeah so this hate speech tour was was brought in ostensibly that there is an anti-semitism problem in australia like there's no doubt that there actually is a real problem how much it contributed to that event itself i think is debatable and i think those two things again should not have been kind of mixed up and they certainly shouldn't have been rushed in in a matter of weeks to get this legislation through essentially i mean the previous legislation had legislation had more more in it in terms of specifically around speech a lot of it got reduced to kind of hate groups and basically empowered uh this uh minister of

affairs to bet to very easily ban hate groups well he designated hate groups on the basis of kind of recommendation from the head of our intelligence main intelligence agency and in consultation i believe with the attorney general doesn't require any court right you can just kind of do it and he can do it even not even if the group or no one in the group has committed a hate crime right just because he thinks they might in the future commit one so that's why you used the word pre-crime before because it's just like i think you might do something wrong in the future therefore you're banned so the level degree to which this can be abused is obviously obscene and i mean there's only just the start of the provisions there's so many different things

that are um terrifying about this bill but for me that's probably the the main one that it just gives so much power and to to a very small group of people and there's so little oversight i mean And part of the oversight that was added was that he has to brief the leader of the opposition, doesn't have to consult, doesn't have to get sign off, just has to say, I'm about to ban this group. We're doing that. Just so you know, we're doing that. And so, yeah, and one of the big things I think I mentioned earlier was that the dissenter right party, the liberals, had said the bill was unsalvageable and had basically said we're not going to support it. And then two days later, they basically voted for it. And so that was one of the other reasons that they had absolutely been smashed in the polls

because they're, you know, a complete and utter bunch of hypocrites. And they're now getting, now getting what, they're now reaping what they sowed, essentially. And actually one of the main people who is trying to now get the leadership of that party, Andrew Hastie, came out very early saying, you know, put on his phone and said, i'm not going to be voting i'm voting no and then two days later recorded another video saying i've just voted for the bill because it's like anyway this integrity goes a long way corrupt yeah so that's basically where we're at so now you know it looks like and it went correct me if i'm wrong they they opened it just for 48 hours for the comments of the public is that correct

yeah i mean it might it might have been 72 but you know we're probably quibbling over over 24 extra hours so there was almost no time to comment on it gee i wonder why yeah it was done incredibly quickly again partly because the center-right opposition like demanded that this center-left governor come back and immediately put some kind of laws into force uh no the reason is because they have to because they get orders from above because the the united nations director is telling them that part of agenda 2030 is hate speech laws and every country have to do it and now it's australia's time they just have to we had a lot of them this is also the thing we have a massive number of hate speech laws across federal and state jurisdictions so we had absolutely no

shortage of of laws already there were they had a had at least two different rounds since october 7 uh that have come in um they just kind of kept extending and extending things and you know and this terrorist attack happened regardless and yeah again i don't think anyone who's thinking of doing something horrible and violent is sitting there kind of going hmm well we can't say anything bad about these people so you know i guess we'll just give up then shall we like you know just completely completely misunderstands or misdiagnose what leads people to do these heinous things but you know again you might say that's not the point the point is in any case to try and control the debate and control the online domain and the any pretext will um i also think

in an Australian context, I mean, politicians just need to be seen to do something. Like they have to, they can't just do nothing when there's a crisis on, even if actually nothing is sometimes the best thing they could do. They've got to be out there kind of coming up with big bills and big laws and showing people that they're in charge.

Yeah, sure, that's their job. But, you know, but they get all these... No, I don't think that's necessarily their job. I think their job is to lead, not necessarily to write legislation. Well, their job is supposed to be public servants, right? They're supposed to represent the public and do what's good for the public. But most of them just forget that and work for other interests or lobbies. If you follow the money, you see what their influence is.

I think the fact that I had chosen a few politicians in Australia to interview them is because out of thousands of politicians in Australia, There are a handful of decent ones that I could put my, yeah, my finger on and just say. Yeah, we have had very, very few consistent. Very few. So Alex Antic is one of them, which I'm going to interview soon. So Alex Antic would be the only Liberal Party member who I think voted against that bill. I know.

He also voted against the teen social media ban. And the COVID bullshit. Yeah, and all the COVID stuff. Matt Canavan from the National Party would be one of the other people who's consistent on free speech. The Green Party goes back and forth. They're actually not. Sometimes I think this free speech debate ends up being very cartoonish and people go, oh, the left is censoring the right. It's like, no, no. The center left and the center right are censoring populism on whether it's on the left and the right. And you saw that exactly here in this

case where the how this bill got passed was essentially the center left and the center right coming together to pass it and actually the right and the left opposed the bill the greens opposed this bill as well so it's kind of uniparty um stuff not surprising to me anyway um not surprising to me either right although for for like 24 hours i had my hopes up and i said oh wow look you know the our liberal party is actually being liberal um incredible this is this is impressive and then i don't know who whispered in whose ear but you know there was someone's obviously came and told them and said, no, this is not happening at the cost of crashing their own party.

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showing the different facets of power that are related to this industrial complex. can you try and you know explain to people just so they understand that this thing actually exists i know the work you have done was about australia sorry it was about the united states but you know we are looking at a global phenomena in which the uk is participating heavily right now and other western countries and now australia is joining the the crowd can you say a few words about that And while you speak, I may even share your map to show people. And also, we just completed about two months ago a big report on Germany as well, where we did a similar mapping exercise and actually bigger mapping exercise where we mapped 330 organizations in Germany that in one form or another contribute to what we kind of more broadly call content controls.

Because they're not always necessarily doing explicit censorship. Right. So, yeah, we essentially did a German version of that map. It's also on your website here? It is if you go to initiatives. Yes. And then go the top left one there, censorship network. Yes, there we go.

This is the Germany. And then go down, you'll see the, oops, sorry, the map of Germany. It's a bit of a big map, so it's just loading. Yep. So we basically kind of repeated this process for Germany because when we, I'll go back, so let me go back to the beginning and tell you about the first one and then before i'll tell you about this second one i'll leave this one so the first one emerges out of the twitter files which as you noted i work with matt taibbi on and he i mean

i came to kind of work with him because he was going through the files and was seeing all these ngos everyone foundations uh university departments and it's like what is this i don't know like who are all these groups are all these people i need some help here you basically put out a subtext both saying you know help help wanted because of my background at the base engaged media that you mentioned earlier was an NGO that I founded and ran for more than 17 years that worked on digital free expression issues in Asia and it was a kind of liberal progressive organization but in the kind of older school non-woke variety for the most part until the kind of woke walls kind of slowly kind of closed in around me over a series of years but it was genuinely committed to kind

of free expression on online but that means i kind of have got money from these kind of liberal foundations i'd spent time at u.s universities um i kind of knew this a lot of lots of these different ngos from all the kind of events and networking and collaborations that we'd done so essentially you know explain that to to matt he's like great come on and help me with with this work and basically went through a lot of files helped write some of the stories and then ultimately worked with him and the team to produce this matt matt which in hindsight now is a very naive sketch because we've actually probably now catalogued seven or eight hundred nine hundred oh my god organizations i mean these vary from you know some of the worst examples say like a stanford

internet observatory or university of washington there were you know had government connections had had connections to the kind of twitter c-suite and c-suites of facebook tech and we're getting content taken off um or pushing for content to get taken off social media platforms you know And others are just kind of doing very naive curriculum for schools saying, you know, be careful of mis- and disinformation. For example, someone who, you know, doesn't want to take a COVID vaccine, watch out for them kind of thing. So it's kind of, that's why sometimes, I mean, here it's called the censorship industrial complex. And for the German one, we also say censorship network. But these are the ones that we feel really are doing censorship.

but more broadly we talk about content controls because not everything is actually about you know getting a piece of content removed or suppressed which i think is more direct what you can more directly claim as censorship so the whole point was essentially to try and try to illuminate how you know i guess information management narrative management uh public relations you could even say works in a kind of networked environment you know because if you know people who are old enough to have been around when the iraq war uh was going on that was still kind of this industrial system where it's like it's mostly broadcast on tv it wasn't that much that many people on the internet in 2003 you know significant numbers but not not that many and so you know if

If you didn't like something, you kind of just put pressure on a TV station or a newspaper and they wouldn't publish it. And you'd have to kind of worry about all of this information flowing out. Whereas in a network environment, obviously, it's much, much harder to control. So a lot of these groups essentially operate as intermediaries, particularly in the US, where there are kind of real legal constitutional constraints of putting pressure on social media companies to take content down. um this is essentially these are kind of a set of proxies that essentially enable the government to do some of that that work but also a lot of it is funded by private foundations who for whom it's politically expedient because it's a way of reducing the influence of their political competitors having kind of looked at the work we've done around the twitter files and mapping

the censorship industrial complex you know at some point we went you know this is really just a u.s map. It's not really looking that much at the rest of the world. If you look at the US map, 90% at a guess would be US foundations, NGOs, think tanks, et cetera, et cetera. But this same playbook essentially works not just in the US, but works around the world. In fact, the playbook now doesn't work so much in the US because the Trump administration has canceled a huge amount of the funding to a lot of these NGOs and academic labs and essentially turned big tech to be pro-Trump instead of to be pro-Democrat. Now, are they doing like other bad things? Certainly, yes. But as I kind of say to people, the Trump system is not complex. It's not sophisticated.

It's kind of like, I don't like it, you know, get rid of this kind of thing. Whereas the the Biden people and the Democrats were much more, you know, they created a very sophisticated and elaborate schema for doing all of this work. So it works quite differently now in the US, I would say. But in the EU, in Germany, in Australia, this is still very much part of the model, although it's very different everywhere.

So German model was quite similar to the US one. So for Germany, what we did was basically cataloged those 330 organizations uh we wrote essentially kind of entries about every single one of them so you can actually look them all up they've all got kind of three or four hundred words about each and what each and every single one of them we kind of created a flagging a red flag system so the worst ones that rated five red flags um and then the ones who maybe you know might just be a city council doing a kind of anti-online hate speech initiative through some educational materials It's like, well, it might have the same kind of problematic ideology around that stuff, but it's not kind of outright going and censoring people.

So we would give something like that one flag. But so you kind of understand that there's this whole kind of massive field out there. The difference with the kind of German to the U.S. is that in the U.S., because of the First Amendment, they have to hide the relationship between big tech and government. and so they would use these kind of NGO proxies and they would very much try to kind of do it in this surreptitious way. In Germany, whilst there is theoretically protections for free speech, they don't need to pretend that they're not working together very, very directly with all these NGOs

who use finally these out-and-out relationships with groups like hate aid that you'll see. a lot of groups they just get millions of euros uh to do content flagging work and to work very directly with the government including the kind of security services to get content taken off the internet some of which i believe is really bad content that i'm not like a complete absolutist i think there is a certain amount of work that there's always a bit of truth where it's illegal kind of stuff anything is illegal sure it should come down but um they really work kind of hand hand in glove uh and in fact it's built into the the european digital services act where these

trusted flaggers are basically ngos who are paid by uh the eu and by their governments to flag content for takedown and so really a lot of these ngos they're not ngos they're not government organizations they're government contractors yes um and they're essentially an extension of the government and they masquerade as part of civil society and that's one of the big problems and what is very effective at getting people on side with a lot of this stuff is they kind of see it as separate to the government that they're therefore a kind of a little bit more neutral but that is off quite often not the case at all right so and that has people continue to believe in so-called democracy because they think that governments continue to operate the same way

they did before not understanding that this is just the evolution of modern control of like modern propaganda this is what it looks like today when you can control information flow and speech and opinions and views, this is how you basically do propaganda in the digital age. Okay, wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. In your recent substack, you describe Australia as becoming a key offshore node in the global censorship industrial complex. Why do you think Australia has emerged now as a testing ground for speech and surveillance expansion? So primarily that has been through something called the eSafety Commission. So again, this was something set up by the centre-right government in 2015, the very first kind of eSafety or digital safety, you could say, office anywhere in the world.

It's tasked, you know, in many respects with things that people would think is very legitimate, you know, dealing with revenge porn, harassment online and things like this. Children's stuff, yeah. Children's safety online. But that slowly kind of expanded and expanded its remit into policing political debate and most recently in this teen social media ban where, again, we're world first leaders here, Australia, in bringing in a ban on under-16s using social media platforms or specifically 10 social media platforms. so the big ones the big ones yeah but a kid can get on the internet and within a few seconds be watching hardcore porn but they can't get on instagram so you know apparently that's that's making them safe um so and again i think we're kind of saying at the start like i'm not a fan of a lot of what's on the internet yeah sure me neither i try to stay off it as much as possible

Unfortunately, my work means I'm staring at a screen far too much, but I do not think they're good for you. And I would love to see everyone on the internet and a lot less off their screens, a lot more, and especially young people. But the point is that this is a very authoritarian way of doing that. That essentially turns the state yet again into the kind of mega parent, which is a kind of thing that Australians seem to really quite love. Unfortunately, we're very kind of parental or kind of society where we really look to the state to intervene very directly

in our lives, as was evidenced through COVID. i mean that one of the worst things about this uh what this bill does is essentially makes everyone whether they're 14 or they're 40 or they're 80 id themselves to get on these social media platforms and so it's essentially a way of it completely de-anonymizes um these social media platforms it gives governments a huge amount of control it's a huge security risk both internally in terms of governments or political parties weaponizing that information and control for their own ends, but also I would argue in terms of foreign actors

because now this data is collected by these social media companies that you're more at risk whether that's a kind of foreign actor or that's a foreign or domestic hacker who can get control of these very, very sensitive data. So it did not need to be done this way, but that is the way it has to be done. And also people are circumventing it all over the place in any case. Of course.

But it is quite popular because if you just sell it as kids are on the internet too much, let's get them off their phones, almost every parent is going to go, yeah, I agree, that is a problem. um but it was done with a very bad solution so we're now exporting that to the rest of the world uk is talking about it um ursula von der leyen uh has expressed excitement around it california is looking at it although it's interesting because some of the first places to introduce this stuff at a state rather than national level were very conservative places like florida and utah although they didn't have the same id requirements because you just can't americans

won't take that they will just not you try to id people in america to get on the internet like there's people aren't going to do it but this in some ways is a very kind of conservative ideology behind this which is one in some ways actually a lot of progressives in contrast to our mis and disinformation bill which thankfully failed were very much against this bill because they saw it as kind of more heavily impacting kind of minority teenagers lgbt trans teenagers etc kids who get bullied and kind of disrupted their ability to find like minds and build community digitally so again everything doesn't necessarily line up in this left right kind of schema that i think is often promoted but again at the same time a lot of those same groups when it came to

we had this mis- and disinformation legislation that thankfully got defeated. A lot of those progressive groups were like for the government essentially becoming the arbiter of truth and deciding what was and was not mis- and disinformation. I mean, they would say they weren't doing that. They were leaving it to the companies and these fact-checkers. But if they didn't like the job that they were doing,

then they would have had the powers to severely fine the companies and et cetera, et cetera. So thankfully that didn't happen. But the way that they've then in the interim found ways to exert more power over the information domain is being through these kind of various e-safety measures and in particular this social media bill. And yes, to answer your question, why are we world leaders? Because we were first in this in just in generally saying it's an e-safety office. We're now exporting it to the world. The woman who leads this office, Julianne McGrann, is an American Australian.

She's very well connected internationally, so this is not just some kind of homegrown little organic project that's happening out here in the far-flung reaches of the world. It's incredibly well connected to all manner of different global initiatives. And because we have such a compliant population when it comes to these kind of state paternalistic initiatives, we're a really good testing ground. Again, I'm hoping that something may have switched just in the last few weeks, but we will see. but yeah where we are unfortunately in this stuff world leaders what what we haven't done yet and what i hope we're not going to do but i think there's a good chance that we will we're not doing these kind of horrible door knocks that you see in the uk where they're arresting people for tweets but we could very i mean we will see again in the next few weeks and months if that's where

this latest bill is going to lead us if that mean mean tweets is going to get you a police visit is it is it theoretically possible with the new bill now i mean i think it might be possible with previous bills to be honest but they haven't gone that far being gone that far i mean this again a lot of this focuses more on hate groups yes but because it's a little bit wishy-washy in the description could easily kind of you know if you're a member of a political party that they don't like or you know and you said something mean on the internet i mean some people are saying horrible things on the internet don't get me wrong like there are some people saying horrendous things on the internet the question is like who do you trust um and do you want to give that much

power away to a government and how much and again because australia has been extremely fortunate well fortunate and and also well led in many respects we haven't had a civil war we haven't had major social conflicts in this country we've been extremely well managed we have for the most part we have an extremely high standard of living we have low murder and violence rates we have one of the, you know, rank among the highest for longevity and healthcare services and et cetera. I mean, it's why people, millions of people want to get in here. That's the reason why I came to live in Australia when I was 21

and got my Australian citizenship because of that. It was a great place, yeah. But it won't stay great like that if we continue to be very naive. That's right. And it's a commonwealth country and it's highly socialistic, or at least was in the last two decades. So I think if the pendulum swing happens and it starts changing now, maybe it will balance some of that and bring things back to where they need to be. But also, you know, we're not going to get into that, but also it's the end of a really large debt cycle. And economically, which is what's driving a lot of this, is that the country is in big debt and that the money is broken.

The fiat monetary system is broken. And so they have to do all these shenanigans to make sure they have control as they switch over to a new system. So, sorry. That's the part that I come from. Yeah, no. And have you looked much about that in terms of Australia? Because in some way we've managed to avoid a lot of the global ups and downs. No, you haven't.

No, I haven't. Well, because the story as it's told is that we've not had a recession. But that's a lie. Go check my, oh, but that's a lie. You're in a recession right now. I mean, you're, we are in a recession right now. In Australia? In Australia for the past two years.

Yeah, since 2023, more or less. But they won't tell you that until later. Go watch my episode with Peter Dunworth, who is a master in finance and economics. He's Australian. I interviewed him in Sydney. it's a wonderful episode and he will tell you the truth about the real economics of australia and there are many other great bitcoiners and people who are really good in economics and finance that will tell you the exact same thing australia is in a recession right now

the inflation is not what they tell you yeah i mean one thing that's completely clear to any australian is that they're poorer than they were five years ago exactly that's the direct result of inflation yeah well they they're because a lot of money has been injected they gave away tons of money during covid they printed this absolutely massive housing that's right the the economic hardship that australians are experiencing right now is no coincidence this is a direct result of the money printing in 2020 and before and in other times before. It's just accumulating all the time because we live in a debt-based system. So now it's just really heavy. So you're seeing a lot of other adverse reactions of a debt-based monetary

system other than just the housing bubble. You're seeing it all over the place. Anyway, I wanted to just to make one remark about what you said before about Florida. You were mentioning how, you know, surprisingly, you also see similar policies being enacted in countries or states that are more conservative, like Florida, and you mentioned another one. Utah. Utah, yeah, which I agree with you. I've spent a lot of time in Florida in the past year, and when I went there and I saw the legislation that has passed,

similarly to protect young people and to then monitor more of what's happening on the internet, I was highly surprised because I did not expect Ron DeSantis to. He's not a libertarian. Right. It was very, very strange. and I started looking at other countries or states that are doing similar things and I found many. And that's a direct, not that I needed that proof for myself

because I already don't believe politics at all and I don't believe there is a right or left. I think they're all playing the same game. And so, but that was a great proof point and it is a great proof point for people who are still living under the illusion of left and right and that it actually matters. And what I wanted to show you, going back to my point before about this being an actual globalist agenda that has to be implemented in these years as we come closer to 2030.

Are you seeing my screen now? Okay, so this is on my blog from two years ago. You see the UN Secretary General calling for a new era of censorship to prevent misinformation. He came out with that speech about two years ago. And then this document called Our Common Agenda, Information Integrity on Digital Platforms from June 2023 is a long document, about 20 or 30 pages, which I analyzed at the time, but it really shows you how you have to battle hate speech, disinformation, misinformation, how it pollutes our environment and the real next war is information war. And then the 17 sustainable development goals are being outlined on how hate speech, misinformation, disinformation are actually hurting our lives in each one of the sustainable development goals. So what I'm just trying to say is this is all planned. It's just it's time for it to be rolled down to the market, to the people, to society.

You know what I mean? this is not anyone i mean they they pretend that it's a local agenda and there's a good reason for it to happen right now right here but it happens it will happen everywhere so you're right that you are i mean australia is leading the way and then other country is going to follow and and florida will do the same in utah and you'll see it everywhere israel is working on a similar legislation and you see politicians from the very left to the very right saying parroting the same messaging about how we need to control the internet because it's so dangerous totally well in one of the earlier documents from 2017 that's very important is from um the council

of europe yes that entry actually introduces the whole concept of misdissimile information that was called uh information disorder right uh and so this i mean the council of europe is kind of operates in parallel to the eu and part receives funding from the eu but it essentially was one of the initial post-brexit post-trump kickoffs in terms of getting this whole ball rolling i mean there was some amount of stuff going on 2010 2012 2014 but if you look in one of the things we did with the the germany project that we mapped all of the funding we collected cataloged about 425 grants to miss disinformation anti-hate speech etc content and then like did so you can actually also go on the site and see a series of infographics of like per year funding what was going to who was

giving an out etc and you can see really everything starts taking off 2016 2017 essentially in the wake of brexit and and trump that would be i mean in germany there are other triggers like the migration crisis resulting from the war in syria but um generally these kind of two populist waves are i think the main trigger that essentially that the thesis being you know what this is essentially a program of half of kind of information suppression of political suppression yeah essentially yeah and it's nothing other than that obviously with everything there's some amount of pretext if you go down to infographics uh that bold last bullet point okay so yeah so obviously there's always some amount of pretext like there is some amount of problem but yeah so this is the

kind of funding yeah in germany that you basically see you know how it kind of kicks get gets going who it's going to etc what the mix is in terms of where the money come from from who the biggest funders are mostly we're kind of missing some amount of private foundations there because it's harder to kind of get that information but the i think the information in terms of the government agencies is quite very interesting yeah quite accurate i would argue so from there you can see or who are the biggest recipients of the money, who has actually the most power in the system. Because it's not that I would say there's necessarily one coordinating body.

I think there's a whole bunch of different people kind of competing for influence and some are more successful than others. Education is number one. Who's being – Well, because a lot of times it is like getting into schools. It's not all kind of, hey, take this off the internet type stuff. A lot of it is kind of a lot of work or curriculum work that says, you know, in the German context, it might be kind of an overinflated definition of anti-Semitism, for example, that basically says any criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitism. Or it might be similar things around the war in Ukraine and saying any criticism of the war in Ukraine is Russian propaganda or people who are doing it are Russian agents and that no one could naturally say anything bad about that war.

And who determines what's a threat to democracy, right? Well, the government. Yeah, of course. Basically. That's funny. they decide for what is a threat to democracy and it's basically anything that they don't like i mean that germany's is pretty scary in terms of they also have all these police raids like in the uk yeah but they go not as many as in the uk but they go in and basically arrest people and take

them to jail for crazy for tweets and things so wow you've done amazing work here so there's all If you want to read a 20,000-word report, there's also a 20,000-word report. Or you can ask AI to summarize. Of course, and it's amazing work, well done, and I hope some of my friends who are German who are watching this will bring this to the attention of some German podcasters that they can invite you

to talk about it. Yeah, I spoke with a couple, and it was actually very well received in Germany. we've got a lot of media including very large media like belt which is one of the main dailies and i think because it kind of hit a nerve where people were really getting something's wrong about how public discussion is manifesting and you can't it's hard to kind of put your finger on it like why is everything a little bit weird why can't i just say stuff why does these different things actually off because there's all these people out there like reporting content to platforms and all

these government agencies working with all these ngos in some ways it's not really a mystery like this stuff all has to be done by people in the end um and it's like it's apart from things like shadow banning and things like that you can't see if it's removing a piece of content you know the absence is conspicuous yes you know you notice it and so it's like you can't just kind of do it without you know oftentimes without people noticing that this is kind of going going on and there are processes and a lot of the processes and protocols are all that in the open i mean the the eu dsa has a big you can go to their big platform and watch a lot of the content and there is a lot of reports of the content that's being taken down so actually some of

manner is transparent in some ways it's like oh they're good they're being honest but again part of the problem is that we accept it exactly that's what i wanted to say that people just accept it oh okay it's been taken down i guess it was bad for me to see it yeah and then we forget until it comes until it comes for you exactly and then we forget that that this is this even existed and that that's how you rewrite history i mean that's one of the ways you rewrite history Okay, I wanted to ask you, are we seeing speech and association treated on par with violent crime? You know, being a member of a hate group now can now carry prison terms under the new legislation? 15 years.

Yeah, so that's worse than some violence. And hate speech related offenses can carry up to 10 or 12 years. Yeah. So, I mean, and this is actually a place where I understand there have been significant changes where a lot of the previous legislation was not in the criminal code, it was in the civil code. Yeah. And so it wasn't necessarily that you would be sent to prison. And now a lot of this stuff has basically gone into that. So you were saying that Australia is not yet following the UK when it comes to putting people in jail, but it could happen. Oh, no, no.

I'm saying that we may have just primed ourselves exactly for that. Got it. Although I think some of the previous legislation also, I believe, transitioned some of the offenses from civil to criminal as well. I mean, I'm not a lawyer, so it's all excruciatingly complicated yeah in terms of like what the and there's so many overlaps like you wouldn't believe we've just been cataloging like all the different hate speech legislation and because a lot of it operates at the state level and not at the federal level it's just overlap upon overlap upon overlap and

it's byzantine in the extreme but i think the end result is like you know we will we're going to start to see very well we're already started to see it i mean one of the first people that was banned from entering australia was a jewish speaker and so this is this is you know because he'd said you know he had said some things about islam that were not very flattering i think he basically said that it was a violent religion or something to that right that effect that said it was always very easy for governments to not let people in we didn't let candace owens in we didn't Like Kanye West. Novak Djokovic.

We kicked Novak Djokovic out. I went to see him play a few days ago. Oh, amazing. So good. To see him in Melbourne, the revenge. Yeah, well, he did get his revenge because he won at least once since then and maybe even twice. But, yeah, so there are all these provisions in there already.

In fact, there was a South African guy who was arrested and put in immigration detention at the end of last year because he attended a neo-Nazi demonstration. And I guess they monitored all the people who were there and worked out that one of them wasn't a citizen. Essentially picked him up straight away and were like, you can go through this lengthy process or you can just leave. And he was like, well, I'm just going to leave.

And that was it. And so it's like, so we have a lot of laws already. Yes. The problem was that they really weren't utilised, not that all of them should have been utilised, but it's just extended the powers even further. And one of the worrying things is that, you know, essentially this further empowers the security and intelligence services.

And in the Twitter files, one of the Twitter files that I worked on was one specifically to Australia, and we found that these security services, particular department called the counter extremism i don't know something else but essentially it was a counter extremism division it was reporting things like jokes to twitter it was reporting accounts that had 20 followers to twitter for giving medical advice actually that turned out to be true one of them was asking a question there's this doctor that was asking a question about the use of steroids in treating code steroids ended up being the standard protocol as i understand in treating covid to what they're reporting you know garbage 20 followers

they're reporting people who aren't even australian and it's like you know it's someone in texas and they're reporting his tweet to twitter in australia because the tweet was i think the term was circulating in australia's information environment or domain or something to that effect that's like this guy's in texas or there's another guy in india i remember that that was in that it had the same thing clearly ridiculous that's like you can't do this you can't like police other people's i mean unless twitter starts then geo blocking like every all these tweets which is actually in part what also julian and grant the e-safety commissioner tried to do we had this um uh stabbing attack on a bishop in sydney that was it was being live streamed

and she demanded x take the attack down not just in australia but worldwide and i was like but you you don't you're not the queen of the entire internet like you can only ask a company to take something down in your jurisdiction you don't have global jurisdiction so this is the kind of ambition of these people is that they actually want to be able to go oh maybe there's a way that we can hack this system and actually use these kind of middle power type countries that with that have high trust in government like australia to control the information domain on a global level i'm just flabbergasted by the state of the world and the these people the hubris it's just incredible and that's why again and again it reminds me of

how blessed i am for finding decentralized systems like bitcoin and like noster that where i cannot be censored because i am censored i'm censored in many platforms i'm heavily shadow banned on youtube i my telegram account has been closed with with 8 000 um people in two channels um like you know they censor me all the time and it's like thank god that freedom tick that category exists and it's getting stronger and stronger by the day how are you i've not used noster but how are you finding so first of all i think you should know that on noster for example Edward Snowden has 140,000 followers on Oster right he's there he's not active on a daily basis but he's there he's got an account I know from Gabriel Shipton that we talked about before

Julian Assange brother that Julian Assange is there lurking he doesn't have his account yet but he's he's aware he's watching he's lurking and he loves it I mean those platforms they're And that's the point. They're not platforms. They're protocols. They're protocols. They're protocols, exactly. So there are already hundreds of platforms created on those protocols.

And so I own my private key and my public key, and I can put my key in any platform that implements the protocol of Nostr. So if I get banned by one of the relays, which is a server that feeds my content into Nostr, I can take my private key and log in in another platform and have my social graph move with me. So my 5,000 followers on Nostr today, they go with me wherever I go. From whatever app of Nostr that I sign in with my private key,

I have my followers with me, which is phenomenal. And have there been any instances of anyone being shut down on Nostr so far? No, but that's the beauty about Nostr. I'm just checking if it does truly work. I mean, that's the thing, that it doesn't really matter. The philosophy of Noster is similar to Bitcoin in the sense that you start creating relays in a decentralized fashion, just like the Internet itself. So it's another layer on top of the Internet. And then you have thousands.

Today, I think there are already tens of thousands of relays around the world. And anyone can create a relay. I can create a relay on my own computer at home, which I have a node, a Bitcoin node running. I can also create a relay. And I can feed all my content through that relay. So, I mean, if anyone closes the relay I work from, I can jump back to my own relay and I can go to other relays that are out there. And that true decentralization is what keeps the network censorship resistant and secure. So that's the beauty of it.

And I think the best proof for how censorship resistant it is, is the fact that that Bitcoin in the 16 years it exists was never hacked because how strong the network is backed by energy. So and Nostra is similar. It's still early days for Nostra, super early days. And it can many things can go wrong, but many developers are working on it. There are many people experimenting with being users on the platform. I'm putting a lot of my energy on it because I used to put it on Telegram. Once they banned me, I'm like, fuck you. I'm like, I'm not going to try and rebuild my channels and the community that I had and everything.

And do you know how that happened? They don't give me the reason. I'm stuck on this AI bot loop whenever I ask them. Now I'm blanking on the Telegram guy's name. uh durov pavel durov i keep i keep trolling him on on x i mean he's on x all the time oh yeah saying free speech free speech and i you know i resist the french authorities and bullshit they you know they after they arrested him in france i believe that it was a similar thing to you know this is the chinese protocol they arrest him after he goes out of there they're

like they control him so then they they whoever it is the israeli government the australian i don't know whom they can approach him and say close this account this account is violating blah blah blah and they don't even give me a reason they just close me and then i i email them i talk to their bots on the platform i tried anyway i troll pavel durov on x i you know I made a video that became viral, and everyone's sharing this with the handles of Telegram and Durov on X, but no one's answering me. So that's the modern way of controlling information. You just switch off people's accounts, and they're gone. It's like I had 8,000 people following me on Telegram, the so-called free speech.

And again, it's a centralized entity. The only thing that can give a good fight to that real problem that we have today in the world are decentralized platforms, decentralized protocols like Bitcoin, like Nostr. Yeah. I mean, that's why I'm here. Very good. There you go. That's where the hope lies. Yes, exactly.

Okay. So to wrap up, I know we have to close in one second. Yeah. I had one question for you. So if we step back and we kind of zoom out to the state of censorship around the world at the moment and where this is heading, you said in, I think it was in your previous article, your last article, that this is another brick in growing legal architecture of like regulating speech, identity and association. What is the end game, you think, of that architecture? Is it social stability? Is it narrative control?

Is it more authoritarianism? Well, I mean, I think it's essentially keeping these legacy political parties in power is one of the main end games of, and essentially propping up this kind of old or legacy liberal order, which is kind of crumbling. And I don't think they really know what to do. I mean, I think you don't do censorship when things are going well. Right. You do censorship when things are going badly for you. I mean, or you could say you're particularly greedy, but I think in this instance it's more that these traditional authorities and institutions are losing their authority and bleeding trust very, very quickly with the people and their response to it is censorship, which I actually think is the exact opposite thing that you would want to do if that was happening to you. I think you would want to do radical transparency

if you really wanted to rebuild trust. But I don't think there's not one single plan. There are a whole bunch of people, some of them are panicking more than others who are trying to deal with a very, very different political terrain and information domain than they are used to, and a huge amount of stuff is moving around. And again, I think there's only so far you can go with this stuff until you basically empower your opposition,

which I think is what they're also largely doing. So I think in some ways, I mean, this is kind of back to the start of the conversation, they are kind of getting small wins. But I don't know, watch this space. I don't know that it's necessarily going to end well for them because it's really antagonising a huge number of people, even in placid australia now people are starting to really get a little bit fed up and i think often it happens when the economic situation yeah when things are kind of good for people

economically i think they'll kind of forgive a lot of government mistakes and overreach etc when things are really when people really feel like they're going backwards economically and their lives their day-to-day lives how much they have to work how much they have to what they can afford and not afford whether or not they can get a house or whether or not they have to move 50 kilometers out of the city to get something or all these kind of pressures that uh you're seeing kind of being heaped upon people they start to be much less tolerant of these kind of government this kind of government overreach so i don't maybe some of them are just buying time until they come up with some better better ideas um and find a way to kind of do these kind of big

economic fixes but you know as you would probably know better than me i think a lot of these economic fixes that are required in the at the global and national level can't be done without some amount of pain and some quite big transitions and you know i don't think censorship is actually going to be the way that you get that job done i think it's going to be with a very honest conversation about what has led us to this point in history what the challenge is and what the steps are to kind of move into the next era totally agree with you a hundred percent and one of the things that people can do to ease their pain and uh in this era and in the coming years is take self-custody over their property, which is, you know, it's hard to do with real estate. It's

easier to do with Bitcoin or gold, but gold has its shortcomings. So that's what I always end up on. Bitcoin self-custody would free you from some of the control of the state and protocols like Noster will help you if you're being censored. Andrew, you are doing amazing work. I would Direct people to your website, Libranet, and I will put a link on the show notes to your Substack and your website. Anywhere else you want them to go? That's probably enough. Keep it simple.

Okay. And there is a good video on your website as well of your performance in the EU parliament from last year, which I recommend people to watch. It's pretty good. And yeah, loads of information. 20,000 words of German censorship. Wow. industrial probably about 50 or 60 000 words into if you count up all the 330 organizations that we

profile so incredible work well done yeah i can't say i did all of it myself but you know it was a team effort yeah but you know it's amazing that people like you and your colleagues exist to do what you do thank you so much from the people on earth for your contribution thank you and if you make it to sydney let me know i will definitely thank you so much for your time no worries great to meet you thanks for being with us please take a minute to give this episode a like a comment and subscribe or follow and please share it with your friends so they can also get value and choose to take some positive action in their lives till next time Thanks for watching!