3 Sep 2025 | News and features, United Kingdom
There have been two stories this past week which could be read as incitement to hitting men in the bollocks. One of the perpetrators was met with five armed officers at Heathrow Airport, the other was lauded as a have-a-go hero. One involved the comedian Graham Linehan, and the other involved the Queen. Only one of them actually carried out the act (admittedly several decades ago), but she wasn’t the one who found herself in a police cell.
The story about a teenage Camilla Shand who, in her own words “whacked a man in the nuts” when he groped her on a train, is told in a new biography of the Queen. It has been used to explain why the Queen became an advocate for women’s rights in later life. Linehan, the creator of the acclaimed series Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books is also a campaigner. As the introduction to his articles on the blogging platform Substack states: “I write about the current all-out assault on woman’s rights.” While Camilla’s campaigning has only served to burnish her reputation, Linehan was cancelled after his gender-critical views brought him into direct conflict with the trans rights movement.
In December he announced he was moving to Arizona as a result of this cancellation. But on Sunday he returned to the UK, only to be arrested, held in a prison cell for hours and questioned about his posts, as he documents in his Substack. While the Met police have not named Linehan, they have confirmed his account of events.
Which brings us to the offending posts. According to Linehan, they are as follows. One, posted on 19 April, shows an image of a trans-rights protest with the comment “A photo you can smell”. This is followed up with “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em”. These are indeed offensive and intended to be so. But it is difficult to see how they could be interpreted as incitement to violence. The third tweet posted the next day is more problematic. But only the second half has been quoted in most of the media coverage of the arrest. The whole tweet reads: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Whether or not you agree with his definition of an abusive act he is making precisely the same argument as the cheerleaders for the young Camilla, although she whacked her groper in the nuts before she called the cops.
This is not Graham Linehan’s first run-in with the police over his anti-trans stance. On Thursday he will appear at Westminster magistrates court accused of the online harassment of 18-year-old transgender activist Sophia Brooks and damaging her phone at a public event last year. He denies all charges.
Linehan’s arrest is further evidence of a faultline in the free speech landscape where the trans debate is concerned. As Helen Lewis writes in The Atlantic, there have been several instances of trans allies calling openly for violence against those whose views they disagree with and who have not been dealt with in this way. A genuinely pluralistic society cannot have two-tier justice in this area.
Linehan’s case raises serious questions about how we police speech online. We know there are consequences when posts go viral and incitement to violence is a reality. But in many cases there are no consequences except to the author of the posts. We may not approve of Linehan’s call to vigilante action against abuse of women’s spaces, if that is what it was. But the suppression of his free expression rights may be more damaging in the long run.
Index on Censorship was founded as a response to the repression of writers and academics behind the Iron Curtain. Advocacy for dissidents remains the priority of the organisation. Some would argue that Linehan is a dissident. It is questionable whether it is ever possible to be a dissident in a country where freedom of speech has genuine legal protections – it is a strange kind of police state where ministers intervene to suggest officers have been too heavy-handed. The real concern is whether Linehan’s arrest is evidence of the erosion of those protections. JK Rowling condemned the action as “totalitarian”, while commentator Piers Morgan said “Britain’s turning into North Korea.” Although this is perhaps overstating it, what happened to Linehan at Heathrow airport this week certainly looks like police overreach. It also seems odd that Linehan has been instructed not to post on X while on bail, surely an unnecessary restriction of his rights.
It is tempting to see this as a comedy arrest by bumbling cops. But a genuinely open society does not police speech with the tactics of an authoritarian state.
3 Sep 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
In late April, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt decided to do things differently by holding a new type of press briefing. Instead of fielding questions from credentialled journalists, she held separate briefings specifically for social media news influencers.
“Tens of millions of Americans are now turning to social media and independent media outlets to consume their news, and we are embracing that change, not ignoring it,” Leavitt said at the beginning of the first such briefing on 28 April.
Jackson Gosnell – a college student who runs a popular TikTok news account and sometimes appears on the pro-Donald Trump broadcaster One America News – attended that briefing. He asked about Russia’s war in Ukraine given Trump’s promise to end it quickly.
“I thought it was important to ask questions that people at home wanted to know,” Gosnell told Index. “Not the fluff that others might have given.”
Unsurprisingly, nearly all the 25 people identified by NBC as having attended that week’s briefings at the White House have a history of clear support for Trump. The “fluff” from the other news influencers – dubbed “newsfluencers” or “news brokers” by various academics – included a combination of softball questions, overt praise for Trump, false information and conspiracy theories.
But how did these people make their way into the heart of the federal government? In January, Leavitt announced that “new media” – such as podcasters and social media influencers – would be permitted to apply for credentials to cover the White House. She began reserving a rotating “new media” seat at regular press briefings and giving its occupant the first question. Analysis by The New York Times found that the seat often went to either right-wing media or newer outlets such as digital start-ups Semafor and Axios.
The White House then took over the press pool in February, giving it control for the first time in a century over which reporters were permitted close access to cover the president. It announced it would start inviting “new media” to join the press pool, with most of the invited outlets being conservative or right-wing, according to analysis by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
Historically organised by the independent White House Correspondents’ Association, the press pool is a group of rotating journalists, who cover the president up close every day for a wider group of media, who are known as the press corps.
The rise of citizen journalism in the USA has been a long time coming. But in the months since Trump returned to the Oval Office, the phenomenon has quickly reached a crescendo as the White House embraces pro-Trump newsfluencers in a way that has never been done before.
Former president Joe Biden invited social media influencers to the White House, too. But the current administration openly welcomes, champions and legitimises pro-Trump newsfluencers and other members of the “new media” cohort – many of whom tend to disseminate falsehoods and conspiracies.
The White House has simultaneously used other mechanisms – such as co-opting the press pool – to box out traditional media and make it more difficult for mainstream journalists to cover the current administration.
Multiple academics said that, taken together, these phenomena are concerning for US democracy because they make holding the president accountable a taller order. They also send the message to the rest of the world that the USA doesn’t care as much about championing global press freedom as it once did.
“This is about trying to eliminate criticism and dissent,” Kathy Kiely, chair of free press studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, said. “[It’s] lapdogs versus watchdogs.”
The White House’s spokesperson Anna Kelly told Index over email that the media has enjoyed “an unprecedented level of access to President Trump, who is the most transparent and accessible president in history.”
“Under the president’s leadership, the press office has been more inclusive of new media, whose audiences often dwarf those of legacy media outlets, and local syndicates – ensuring that the president’s message reaches as many Americans as possible,” she added.
The concept of a newsfluencer is relatively new. In the USA, they were once on the fringes of the media ecosystem. But the 2020 election and the subsequent “big lie” narrative – that the election was stolen from Trump – was a major inflection point that accelerated the rise of far-right newsfluencers. False narratives about the Covid-19 pandemic and the 6 January insurrection in 2021 also helped facilitate their ascent.
Many rose to prominence by deliberately differentiating themselves from the mainstream media. But now some of them are on the verge of entering the mainstream themselves, if they haven’t already.
“These Maga [Make America Great Again] influencers see their role not as sceptical journalists but as boosters of the president and his administration,” said Aidan McLaughlin, editor-in-chief of the media news site Mediaite.
The months leading up to the 2024 presidential election crystallised the vast reach that newsfluencers now wield. Trump appeared on an array of podcasts and online shows popular with male audiences, including the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Former vice-president Kamala Harris also turned to “new media” in her campaign.
It’s difficult to measure the extent that newsfluencers impact how people vote or think about societal issues, said Roxana Muenster, a graduate in communications at Cornell University in New York who studies far-right lifestyle movements online. She said the outsized role they played around the 2024 election was undeniable.
Shortly after the election, a Pew Research Centre report confirmed the growing power that newsfluencers hold. Roughly one in five Americans regularly get news from influencers on social media, the report found, and about two-thirds of that group say this helps them better understand current events and civic issues.
No longer on the outskirts of the US media sphere, right-wing TikTokers and podcasters are now welcomed into the White House. Some, such as Laura Loomer, influence Trump himself (her sway has allegedly led to the sacking of several government officials, including former national security adviser Mike Waltz).
Others – including Robert F Kennedy Jr, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino – have even become members of the administration.
To a certain extent, these newsfluencers don’t really need the White House, says Muenster, because they already have significant followings of their own. But they do get something else out of it.
“It bestows them with a certain legitimacy,” she said. “It says that these are reliable sources to get your news from.”
This can pose problems when the newsfluencers aren’t actually reliable or accurate, as is often the case. “They are not as strict with the truth as people in the actual news industry,” Muenster said.
That means false information and conspiracy theories can run rampant, which doesn’t bode well for the health of US democracy.
Disinformation and misinformation can erode trust in institutions and make authoritarianism seem more appealing, according to Mert Bayar, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Centre For an Informed Public.
“In a normal democracy, you want credible sources of information,” he said.
For instance, while in the “new media” seat during an official briefing in late April, Tim Pool – the prominent host of several conservative podcasts, which last year were found to have links to Russian state media – lambasted “legacy media” for “hoaxes” about Trump and asked Leavitt to comment on their “unprofessional behaviour”. (“We want to welcome all viewpoints into this room,” Leavitt replied.)
And at one of the influencer briefings, Dominick McGee – a highly-followed conspiracy theorist on X who operates under the pseudonym Dom Lucre – asked Leavitt whether Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would ever be investigated for election integrity. Forbes reported that McGee was briefly suspended from X (then Twitter) in 2023 for posting a video of child sexual abuse.
Leavitt said McGee’s question was “refreshing” and that “the legacy media would never ask” it.
In a phone interview, McGee told Index he thought US media was “broken” and had “betrayed the American people”.
He said he considers himself a journalist; but he also said he was more concerned with being “freaking entertaining”.
Like McGee, Gosnell thinks mainstream media is dead and influencers are the future of the media industry.
But compared with other “new media” in the Trump orbit, Gosnell is relatively balanced in how he delivers the news. Even though he welcomes the rise of the newsfluencer, he knows it comes with risks. “It’s a little scary, too, because people on the internet can lie just as much as news hosts – if not [more],” Gosnell said.
Still, he is sometimes tempted to produce more opinionated content, adding: “It seems way more profitable.”
The White House gets something out of its new arrangement, too, according to Bayar. Speaking directly to Maga newsfluencers gives the White House a sympathetic ear to peddle its messages to. Meanwhile, prioritising these voices also limits the ability of journalists from mainstream outlets to ask hard questions that can hold the administration accountable.
To Bayar, the situation in the USA reminds him of his home country, Turkey, where the government picks and chooses which journalists are and aren’t allowed at press conferences with president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“It is part of this authoritarian playbook,” said Bayar. “If you don’t get asked tough questions, you can actually control public opinion better because you control your answers.”
While the White House’s embrace of Maga newsfluencers appears to be bad news for democracy in the “land of liberty” and the home of the First Amendment, it also has implications for the rest of the world.
The USA has historically championed press freedom globally. But the administration’s simultaneous embrace of pro-Trump influencers and attacks on critical media signal that Washington doesn’t really care about independent journalism anywhere in the world, according to Kiely. “It sends a very strong signal to dictators elsewhere,” she said.
Some authoritarian countries appear to have already been emboldened by Trump’s actions. As part of the Azerbaijani government’s crackdown on independent media, authorities in May imprisoned Voice of America contributor Ulviyya Guliyeva. Press freedom experts and her colleagues believe the Trump administration’s campaign to gut VOA emboldened Baku to target the reporter.
As McLaughlin says, “this has a bad ripple effect on the rest of the world”.
2 Sep 2025 | About Index, Asia and Pacific, China, Hong Kong, News and features, Newsletters
The Jimmy Lai trial wrapped up last week, without a verdict. When this will come is anyone’s guess. One of the three judges, Esther Toh, said it would be announced “in good time”.
For a man who has been wrongly imprisoned for more than 1,700 days, is in his late 70s, and has serious health conditions, “in good time” is gratingly noncommittal. Of course it’s likely intentional, a way to further punish him and his family. But there’s more to it. When it comes to Lai language has always been used to obfuscate, frustrate and discredit. Hong Kong authorities, the CCP and their allies frequently twist words, calling him and his supporters traitors and other slurs. They can be bold in their denigrations – and they can be seemingly subtle.
“I’ve lost count of the number of times the Chinese / Hong Kong authorities or CCP State media have called me a “so-called human rights lawyer” leading a “so-called legal team.”,” said one of Lai’s lawyers, Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, this week on X. Gallagher made this comment following the release of a new report, titled “The Use of ‘So-called’ as a Propaganda Device in China”. By academics Linette Lim and Alexander Dukalsis (the latter an Index contributor), it looks at how China’s state-run media increasingly use inverted commas and the words so-called when talking about an idea or person that they wish to discredit.
It’s not a new trend nor is it unique to China, as the authors note (Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used these linguistic tools too). Still, it’s growing in use there. Articles on Taiwan and Hong Kong will typically employ such language, as do ones on the USA. In fact the authors were struck by how many articles tried to delegitimise the USA and believe it’s “partly in response to more hawkish US policy towards China in recent years and partly accelerated by Xi Jinping’s increased domestic control and repression”.
The report is a helpful addition when considering how information is controlled under Xi Jinping, as was James Palmer’s piece in Foreign Policy last week labelled “A guide to Censorship in China”, which was based on his many years living and working there. In it Palmer describes the censorship machine as “messy”. While people can cover most sensitive topics in China, and Palmer says it’s relatively uncommon for authorities to outright refuse to publish something, the process is unpredictable, exhausting, artistically damaging and at times high stakes, putting many off. “In better times, publishers are willing to take risks, but those better times are a long way away,” wrote Palmer.
Better times do sadly feel very distant, though I’d imagine if pressed the CCP would say they’ll arrive “in good time”.
29 Aug 2025 | Americas, Europe and Central Asia, Iran, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, United Kingdom, United States
Bombarded with news from all angles every day, important stories can easily pass us by. To help you cut through the noise, every Friday Index publishes a weekly news roundup of some of the key stories covering censorship and free expression. This week, we look at the Israeli “double-tap” strike on a hospital that killed 20 people, and the sexual misconduct libel case of actor Noel Clarke.
In public interest: Actor Noel Clarke loses libel case against The Guardian
Prominent English actor Noel Clarke has lost a lengthy sexual misconduct libel case in High Court against The Guardian in which 26 witnesses testified against him.
The landmark case was based on a series of articles and a podcast published by the Guardian between April 2021 and March 2022 in which more than 20 women accused Clarke of sexual misconduct, with allegations ranging from unwanted sexual contact to taking and sharing explicit pictures without consent. The actor claimed that these allegations were false, bringing libel charges against the Guardian over what he believed was an unlawful conspiracy, reportedly seeking £70 million in damages if his case was successful.
Mrs Justice Steyn, ruling on the case, gave the verdict that the Guardian succeeded in defending themselves against the legal action on truth and public interest grounds, with Steyn stating that Clarke “was not a credible or reliable witness”, and that his claims of conspiracy were “born of necessity” due to the sheer number of witnesses testifying against him. In a summary of the findings, she ruled that the allegations made were “substantially true.”
The UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition, headed by Index on Censorship, have stated that while this is a crucial ruling, the case “exerted a significant toll on The Guardian and its journalists”, and that a universal anti-SLAPP law is necessary to avoid similar situations from occurring. Index also stated that “public interest journalism needs greater protections”. Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, wrote this was a landmark ruling for investigative journalism and for the women involved. During proceedings, the court heard that one woman had been threatened with prosecution by Clarke’s lawyers in what was described by the lawyer acting for the Guardian as an attempt at witness intimidation.
Back–to–back strikes: more journalists killed in “double tap” attack on Gaza hospital
An Israeli attack in which two missiles hit back-to-back on the same Gaza hospital has killed at least 20 people, including four health workers and five journalists.
The attack struck Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, at approximately 10am on Monday 26 August. An initial missile hit the hospital, killing at least one person – then approximately ten minutes later, when rescue workers and journalists had flooded the scene, a second strike hit the hospital. This second attack was broadcast live on Al Ghad TV, and showed a direct hit on aid workers and reporters,. The nature of the attack has led to it being dubbed a “double-tap”, a military tactic in which an initial strike on a target is followed up shortly after with a second strike, which targets those who rush to the scene.. The IDF have released an initial inquiry into the attack, and are further investigating “several gaps” in how this incident came to pass.
The five media workers killed were Reuters journalist Hussam al-Masri who died in the initial strike, and Mohammad Salama of Al-Jazeera, Mariam Dagga of Associated Press, Ahmed Abu Aziz of Middle East Eye, and independent journalist Moaz Abu Taha killed subsequently. The attack follows a targeted Israeli strike on 10 August that left four Al-Jazeera journalists and three media workers dead. The Committee to Protect Journalists have documented that at least 189 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since the start of the war.
Putting out fires: Trump attempts to ban the burning of American flags
Donald Trump is moving to ban the burning of United States flags – an act that has been protected under a Supreme Court ruling since 1989.
Stating that burning the flag “incites riots at levels we’ve never seen before,” Trump signed an executive order that calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to challenge a court ruling that categorises flag burning as legitimate political expression under the constitution. He outlined how anyone caught committing the offence would be subject to one year in jail – a statement that will be tested soo. Mere hours after signing the order a 20-year-old man was arrested for burning an American flag just outside the White House.
The White House published a fact sheet that described desecrating the American flag as “uniquely and inherently offensive and provocative”, and referenced the burning of the flag at the 2025 Los Angeles protests alongside conduct “threatening public safety”. They argue that despite the 1989 ruling, the Supreme Court did not intend for flag burning that is “likely to incite imminent lawless action” or serve as a form of “fighting words’” to be constitutionally protected.
The crime of online activism: Iranian activist sentenced to prison over social media activism
Iranian student activist Hasti Amiri has been sentenced in absentia to three years in prison for her social media advocacy for women’s rights and against the death penalty.
Amiri, who previously served 7 months in a Tehran prison in 2022 over her anti-death penalty stance, has been sentenced by a Revolutionary Court in Iran to three years imprisonment and a 500 million Iranian rial fine for “spreading falsehoods” and “propaganda against the state”, as well as a 30.3 million rial fine for appearing without a hijab in public.
Amiri reported all of the charges against her in a post on Instagram, writing that “When simply opposing the death penalty is considered propaganda against the state, then execution itself is a political tool of intimidation”. She is the latest human rights activist to face criminal charges in Iran – Sharifeh Mohammadi was recently sentenced to death for “rebelling against the just Islamic ruler(s)”, and student activist Motahareh Goonei was this week sentenced to 21 months in prison for the same crime of “propaganda against the state”.
Reforming local government: Reform UK bans local press access in Nottinghamshire
Journalists from the Nottingham Post have been banned from speaking to Reform UK members of Nottinghamshire County Council in what has been called a “massive attack on local democracy.”
Mick Barton, Reform’s council leader in Nottinghamshire reportedly took issue with the paper following an alleged dispute over an article covering a disagreement between councillors. The decision has been condemned by three former county council leaders, and has drawn scrutiny from national groups such as the National Union of Journalists and the Society of Editors.
The ban also covers reporters at the Nottingham Post from the BBC-funded Local Democracy Reporting Service which shares stories with media outlets across the country. The newspaper has also found out that press officers at the council have been told to take reporters off media distribution lists, meaning they won’t get press releases or be invited to council events. Leader of the opposition and former council leader Sam Smith criticised the ban: “The free press play a key role in keeping residents informed of actions being taken by decision makers and in return the press express the views of residents to the politicians and public in publishing balanced articles.”
Reform MP for Ashfield Lee Anderson, who has a history of disagreements with the Nottingham Post, has announced that he will also be joining the boycott. This follows social media posts from the MP accusing journalists of having a negative bias towards the party.
