24 Feb 2025 | About Index, Americas, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Newsletters, Russia, Ukraine, United States
The news this week has been dominated by the growing feud between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which has culminated in possibly irreparable relations between the presidents.
What started with a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine (from which Zelenskyy was excluded) ended in a stream of disinformation coming from the leader of the world’s largest economy. Trump made several spurious claims chiming with those regularly churned out by Putin’s propaganda machine.
Among these were that Zelenskyy is a “dictator without elections”, that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s 2022 invasion, and that Zelenskyy’s approval rating in Ukraine has plummeted to 4%, all of which closely mirror the Kremlin’s narrative. In response, Zelenskyy said that the US president is “trapped” within a Russian “disinformation bubble”.
Trump’s comments have been debunked by many world leaders, including Keir Starmer, who immediately came out in support of Zelenskyy as a democratically elected leader, and asserted that it is normal for presidential elections to be suspended during wartime (as happened in the UK during World War Two).
This exchange indicates a drastic reshaping in the geopolitical relationship between the USA and Russia, and indeed the USA and its key allies – but it also indicates a worrying affront to access to truthful information, the normalisation of false realities, and an acceptance of the suppression of free speech.
In what is often deemed Putin’s “war on truth”, the autocratic leader’s regime is notorious for crackdowns on journalism and free information. As well as blocking access to almost all social media websites and international news sites in Russia, his government has banned independent news outlets, with media now under government control. In doing so, he has been able to control the narrative of the war for his own citizens.
This is not to say that Ukraine itself has been a bastion of free expression. As reported by Amnesty International, free speech restrictions in the country have increased since 2022, with 2,000 cases of individuals being charged, prosecuted or investigated for crimes such as “justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine”, including those who class themselves as pacifists.
But what Trump’s words do signal is a terrifying new world order where intentional mistruths are prioritised over fair, free and accurate information, not only by dictators, but by leaders who are meant to be upholding the principles of democracy.
Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, former US president Barack Obama delivered a speech at Stanford University about the growing propagation of disinformation, and how it could endanger democracy. Autocratic leaders, such as Putin, have weaponised the power of the internet to obfuscate the truth and confuse the global public, he said. “You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.”
Three years later, and we’re seeing this play out in real time, with the help of the current president of the USA. The sewage is spilling across the world, muddying the waters, and it will have global ramifications on what people believe to be undisputed fact.
18 Feb 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
In the blizzard of announcements, statements and threats made by President Donald Trump’s administration over the past few weeks, those concerning public broadcasters should have a particular resonance for readers of Index on Censorship.
On 9 February, Richard Grenell, the U.S. presidential envoy for special missions, wrote on X that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America are “state-owned media” and “are a relic of the past.”
The billionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to oversee the new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), agreed: “Yes, shut them down. Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Nobody listens to them anymore. It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
These Cold War institutions have been symbolic of American soft power since their inception. Each, in its way, was designed to counter authoritarian propaganda: Voice of America was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi ideology and Radio Free Europe in 1950 as a response to the Soviet equivalent. Radio Liberty had the specific task of broadcasting inside Russia.
These barely-veiled threats to foreign-facing broadcasters mirror similar announcements on the defunding of American broadcasters, including National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). DOGE subcommittee chair Majorie Taylor Greene has called on executives from the two organisations to give evidence to DOGE, which has accused them of “systemically biased news coverage”.
This may seem like small beer compared to the geopolitical earthquake represented by the US administration’s proclamations on the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, or its sabre-rattling on Greenland or Canada. But these moves are part of the same epochal shift in American foreign policy. There is much to criticise about America’s record in the post-war period. But even the worst abuses were driven, at least rhetorically, by an opposition to authoritarianism. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump and Musk are now increasingly aligned with the authoritarian heir to Stalin in the shape of Vladimir Putin, and the heirs of Hitler in the AfD (Alternative for Germany).
The irony of Musk categorising Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America as the “radical left” will not be lost on those of the European left who traditionally saw these outlets as the ideological wing of the American government or even the CIA. Indeed, they are often credited with playing a key role in providing the propaganda underpinnings that led to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.
Index has always felt a close affinity with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty due to its origins fighting for dissidents in the former Soviet Union. The role of these twin broadcasters took on a renewed significance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, something we covered in summer 2022. At the time Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty told me: “We have 23 news rooms. They are in Afghanistan and Pakistan, up to Hungary… We have fantastic teams serving Russia. And I think it’s really one of those moments where you see our journalists living up to the task and the challenge that they face. And it’s really inspiring.” His words have a sombre resonance today.
An added poignancy to the attacks on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America is given by the fact that Musk and other American authoritarians seem to be learning from the so-called “hybrid democracies” of central Europe. As we reported in November, state broadcasters were one of the first targets of the ultra-right governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Robert Fico in Slovakia.
In 2017, my colleague Sally Gimson also looked at attacks on Radio Free Europe from the government in Georgia and asked what role it would have in the future.
She remarked that as a young actor, future US President Ronald Reagan was proud to promote the work of the broadcaster in the early 1950s, fronting up an advertisement for it. “This station daily pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth, answering the lies of the Kremlin and bringing a message of hope to millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain,” he said.
The position the present US government takes towards such a venerated institution is a sign of how far it has drifted from what was once considered patriotic. That old cold warrior Ronald Reagan will be turning in his grave.
13 Feb 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
The second Donald Trump administration isn’t even a month old, and yet it seems as though the divisive president has already produced enough headlines to get us to the next election. With sweeping executive orders, massive cuts to federal departments and sights set on the contentious purchase of foreign lands, it’s hard to currently decipher the impact of his decisions and statements on the American people, and globally.
This is particularly true when it comes to one of the foundations of the USA’s Bill of Rights – the right to free speech.
Since his inauguration, there have been accusations of censorship and free speech violations levelled at Trump and his office. His threat to deport students with VISAs who display pro-Palestine views has rung alarm bells, and after the 47th President was credited with the reinstatement of social media platform TikTok in the USA, there were user reports of censorship around criticism of Trump, or pro-Palestine sentiment. There have also been major causes for concern among the LGBTQ+ community as one of Trump’s new executive orders threatens the self determination and self expression of trans people.
But is it all bad news when it comes to free speech? The USA-based non-profit organisation Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) keeps a close watch on how each president upholds freedom of speech according to the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Speaking to Index, members of FIRE’s legislative team explained how Trump’s first few weeks in office have impacted free speech in the USA, for better and worse.
Tyler Coward, lead counsel in higher education related government affairs at FIRE, has concerns about Trump’s threat against pro-Palestine foreign students. “There are mixed signals from some courts about what speech rights people have when they’re here on a temporary status, such as [on] visas, but FIRE’s position is that it’s a bad idea to create two classes of students on campus, some that can participate fully in campus advocacy or campus protests, and those who risk fear of deportation,” he said.
“There are students that can or have engaged in actual unlawful activity, including violence against other students, engaging in sanctionable civil disobedience, actual discrimination or intimidation, things that are generally not protected by the First Amendment,” he continued. “But we think it’s a bad idea to create a system where speech that would be protected for an American student, wouldn’t be for a student on a student visa.”
However, Coward believes that if Trump abides by the precedent set in his first term, the impact on free speech could be varied. “His (first) administration did some things on the campus side, some which were helpful, some which were not. First off, on the helpful side is that we in the United States have an anti-discrimination statute called Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, in education, in any entity that receives federal education dollars.
“The Federal Department of Education was interpreting that statute in ways that threatened free expression, particularly free speech, on sex and gender issues, and the first Trump administration passed rules that were very speech protective to allow for broader discussion and debate about these issues on campus… the Obama administration and the Biden administration both adopted rules that were harmful to free speech on those issues.”
But other executive orders implemented during Trump’s first term, and being continued into this administration, could have stretching powers that impact people’s right to protest and express views freely, Coward added.
For instance, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act – which bans discrimination based on race, colour, or national origin in organisations that receive federal funding, such as universities – has now been extended to include anti-Semitism. While hate speech should rightly be tackled, the concern is that the order could be expanded beyond hate speech and used in such a way that stifles the free speech of those who oppose Israel’s policies.
“I suspect we’ll see a lot more enforcement and a lot of speech that is protected by the First Amendment, including criticisms of Israel, that will pressure educational institutions that receive federal dollars,” said Coward. “The institutions will be cracking down on this speech in ways that threaten free expression, and then the education department itself will start investigating institutions for failure to censor that speech.”
Carolyn Iodice, legislative and policy director at FIRE, also told Index about the threats that journalism in the USA could face as a result of Trump’s attitude to the media. The president has sued several media outlets and social media firms because of the way they have reported news about him, represented his opponents or moderated his speech, Iodice said.
“We would have normally expected that the entities – like CBS News, Facebook and ABC News – would fight that kind of lawsuit; because for one [Facebook], there’s no legal claim to be had against them, and two, with CBS and ABC, if you don’t defend your journalists it creates this chill about what they can and can’t say about the president.”
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is due to pay $25 million to Trump in a settlement, after Trump sued the Big Tech firm and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2021 over the suspension of his accounts following the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots. ABC has settled its defamation case for $16 million. CBS is also reportedly considering settling over a case involving an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, where Trump alleged that CBS had edited the show to unfairly cast Harris in a more favourable light.
“The concern there is that you now have, by virtue of these lawsuits, a multi-billion dollar incentive for companies to have their journalists shape their coverage in ways that won’t get them brought back to court by the president again and again,” Iodice said.
Regarding social media, despite anecdotal user reports of censorship on TikTok when it was first reintroduced in the USA, FIRE are generally positive about the steps Trump has taken towards reducing censorship on these platforms.
“The most promising thing so far,” Iodice said, “is that he issued an executive order that talked about, and was critical of, the practice of the government leaning on social media companies to coerce them to [censor] speech in ways the government couldn’t directly require them to do, because of the First Amendment. And we think that’s a very good thing, regardless of who does it.”
The second Trump Administration outwardly champions free speech for Americans, but the first weeks of government have not always represented this ethos. Those of us working against censorship around the world have looked on with trepidation at this new government, which looks set to overturn the applecart in all facets of government. One can only hope that the First Amendment isn’t flung to the wayside.
3 Feb 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
Big technology companies have enormous and outsized power. They control what information we can share and how, and demonstrate little transparency or accountability to users about what they are doing. They are too often permitted to set their own arbitrary standards, governing what we can and can’t say on social media, and how and to whom these ever-shifting rules apply. In no area is this more evident than in the battle between those who want to seek out and criminalise women for having an abortion and those who want to protect women’s right to choose.
In recent years, technology has dramatically altered the abortion landscape for women in the USA. It is now possible to order safe and effective abortion pills online and find accurate information about how to use those pills. This represents an unprecedented and world-changing expansion of women’s privacy and freedom. Thanks to improved access to medication, far fewer women will die or be traumatised, despite the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to strip the country’s women of federally guaranteed abortion rights. But women’s new-found abortion freedoms are under threat from powerful people who oppose privacy, freedom and safety for women, and corporatists who put business interests above human rights.
With President Donald Trump’s re-election things may be about to become a whole lot worse.
In March 2024, eight months before the election, I attended Visions for a Digital Future: Combating Online Suppression of Abortion Information, a panel discussion hosted by a coalition of rights and safe abortion access organisations including Amnesty International USA, Plan C, the Universal Access Project and Women on Web, along with experts from Le Centre ODAS and Fòs Feminista.
The panellists warned that tech companies were already suppressing information about reproductive health, either deliberately and as a matter of policy, or accidentally, such as when posts containing legitimate medical information trigger filters meant to block other kinds of content. Remedies have been piecemeal. Some organisations have been able to get accounts reinstated after meeting with contacts at Meta, but there is no democratic and transparent way of determining who gets access to vital medical information.
In one very recent case, Meta temporarily shut down the advertising account of Plan C, a group that provides up-to-date information on how US residents access abortion pills online, days before the US election, over claims of “inauthentic behaviour”.
European lawmakers have already taken steps to bring Big Tech companies to heel. They have done so via laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act, a 2022 law which, among other things, requires large tech companies to get users’ consent before tracking them for advertising purposes; and the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which went into effect earlier this year, preventing large online platforms such as Facebook, X and Instagram from arbitrarily restricting or deleting independent media content.
Despite growing pressure from large parts of civil society, the USA has yet to pass federal legislation to meaningfully regulate Big Tech. Under a Trump presidency, the federal government is likely to go one step further and ask tech companies to use the data they hold to assist state and local law enforcement in tracking, prosecuting and jailing women for seeking abortions.
Some of the president-elect’s most prominent supporters are anti-feminist tech executives like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and an ardent foe of government regulation (of corporations); venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has questioned the wisdom of ever allowing women to vote; and Blake Masters, failed congressional candidate and chief operations officer of Thiel Capital (Thiel’s venture capital investment firm). All three have either previously expressed personal support for at least some level of abortion restriction or given large sums of money to politicians committed to restricting it.
Knowing it was a liability for him, Trump made confusing and contradictory statements about abortion on the campaign trail: once pro-choice, he bragged about having appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v Wade.
By contrast, Vice President-elect JD Vance is an open theocrat who has pressured federal regulators to rescind a Biden administration rule that prevents police from accessing the private medical records of women who cross state lines to get reproductive health care, according to investigative news outlet The Lever.
Project 2025, the 900-plus-page handbook assembled by the right- wing Heritage Foundation and drafted in part by dozens of former Trump administration officials, indicates that a second Trump administration will seek to increase federal surveillance of pregnant people nationwide. They will most likely do this partly by requiring states to report abortion data and cutting federal funding to those that don’t comply. That data could put women and health care providers in serious danger of prosecution and/ or jail time. State law enforcement officials could pressure or compel tech companies to collect and share it.
This has already happened in the USA under a Democratic administration. Facebook’s 2022 decision to comply with a Nebraska police officer’s request for private data enabled the state to try, as an adult, a 17-year-old girl facing criminal charges for ending a pregnancy. Facebook handed over private messages the girl and her mother had exchanged in which the two discussed obtaining abortion pills, according to The Guardian.
The extent of the data Facebook handed over is unclear, but it’s apparent that companies like Facebook’s parent company Meta cannot be trusted to safeguard users’ privacy. Many of the largest tech companies in the world have refused to clarify how they will handle law enforcement requests for abortion-related data. While Meta does not allow users to gift or sell pharmaceuticals on its platform, it does, in theory, allow them to share information about how to access abortion pills, although enforcement of that policy has been inconsistent and non-transparent.
One ray of hope is that there’s a small chance that Trump will retain Lina Khan, Biden’s pick for chair of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Khan has advocated for restraining the tech industry’s power and is seen as a threat. Days before the election, Musk wrote on X that Khan “will be fired soon.” Yet Vance has defended Khan, saying in a recent television interview that “she’s been very smart about trying to go after some of these big tech companies that monopolise what we’re allowed to say in our own country.”
Best known as an anti-monopolist, Khan has brought lawsuits against data brokers trafficking in geolocation data, a crucial bulwark against efforts by anti-abortion prosecutors to obtain women’s private medical data. This is important because in 2023, 19 Republican attorneys general in states that criminalised abortion demanded access to women’s private medical records in order to determine whether they had travelled out of state for care.
Under Khan, the FTC also cracked down on companies that extracted and misused customers’ private data. Browsing and location data of the kind these companies were gathering can provide intimate details of a person’s life, from their religious and political affiliations and sexual proclivities to their private medical decisions. Companies, knowing that most people would object to having this kind of data collected and shared, often hide what they are doing or mislead users about the extent of it.
It’s not yet clear what Trump’s top priorities will be as president, or who will have his ear. On the question of Khan, it seems likelier that he’ll take his cues from an oligarch like Musk than from his own vice president. As Politico recently noted Vance will have “little agenda-setting power of his own” in the new administration. Occasional anti-Big Tech rhetoric notwithstanding, neither Trump nor Vance cares about protecting women’s privacy. If Khan is fired, it’s extremely unlikely that any member of the Trump administration will take measures to safeguard medical data. State and local authorities will have to do everything in their power to pressure or require these companies to clarify why they are suppressing abortion-related content, and push them to fight requests that violate users’ privacy in court.
Authorities should also push or force tech companies to take measures – such as not collecting certain data in the first place or making it more secure – that would make it difficult or impossible to comply with law enforcement requests designed to punish women for exercising a right recognised by most Americans and international law. Failure to do so will jeopardise women’s lives, health and freedom.
