The State Department just made clear that America will no longer aid or ignore foreign censorship, calling out threats to Americans and American companies.
State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce took a subtle jab at the Biden administration when on Aug. 12 she announced that new additions to the 2024 Human Rights Report, are “addressing abuses that had not previously been covered,” including the global free speech crisis developing in places like the United Kingdom (U.K.). Bruce criticized the previous administration’s approach to human rights, saying that this year’s report “Is responsive to the legislative mandates that underpin the report rather than an expansive list of politically biased demands and assertions.”
The 2024 report specifically called out the U.K.’s anti-free speech Online Safety Act of 2023, which pushes platforms to censor and enforce age verification or face eight-figure fines. The report also exposed how the U.K. law significantly impacts American companies.
“The Online Safety Act of 2023, which came into force in 2024, defined the category of ‘online harm’ and expressly expanded Ofcom’s authority to include American media and technology firms with a substantial number of British users, regardless of whether they had a corporate presence in the UK,” the report reads. “Under the law, companies were required to engage in proactive ‘illegal content risk assessment’ to mitigate the risk of users encountering speech deemed illegal by Ofcom.”
The report also exposed how the U.K. government pressured an American publication, The New Yorker, into cooperating in censorship.
Indeed, the OSA has wreaked havoc on free speech for U.K. citizens and Americans alike. For example, in 2023, the then-U.K. culture secretary even suggested that the Online Safety Act could result in prison time for Meta CEO and American citizen Mark Zuckerberg. U.K. regulators have even tried to force their standards on Rumble, despite how few users Rumble has in their country. And chillingly, U.K. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley threatened to “throw the full force of the law” at people outside the U.K. for their online speech.
By contrast, the Biden administration’s 2023 human rights report on the U.K. devoted only five sentences to the country’s rampant abuses of free speech while ignoring the threat against American tech CEOs and the Online Safety Act passed that year.
Instead, the report found space to worry about so-called hate speech and Islamophobia following the Hamas terror attack on Israel. In fact, the report aided censorship by spreading fear about speech by U.K. citizens and the media, and even fretted about decreased government support for transgenderism and the willingness of ordinary British citizens to speak out against the ideology.
This astonishing abuse of a report purporting to describe human rights abroad is in line with the policies of former President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The Biden administration convinced governments around the world to fund pro-censorship groups and pushed tech companies to censor so-called disinformation as reported in an MRC Free Speech America report detailing 57 censorship initiatives of the Biden administration. The U.K. was one of the first two governments to sign onto Biden’s anti-speech policy.
But it’s a new day at the State Department, which recently joined the Treasury Department in imposing sanctions on infamous Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre De Moraes for human rights abuses. De Moraes has pressured American tech companies to censor and sought to censor and arrest an American citizen, to say nothing of his violations of the rights of his own people.
During her last briefing, Bruce hammered home the point that the Trump State Department will defend human rights, “The United States has long promoted respect for international universal rights, including in our own founding documents, which asserts that human beings are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Today, we reaffirm the words of those documents which have served as a beacon of hope and freedom for people around the world.”
Bruce has been nominated by President Donald Trump to be the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
