Trump Moves to Deeply Censor the Entire Internet

[Galraedia]

The White House and Congress are working on a deal to clamp down on what US citizens are allowed to say online. According to new reporting by Axios, the Trump administration is negotiating with key senators in an effort to shoehorn a massive legislation package which would limit states’ abilities to regulate AI in exchange for placing broad federal limits on digital speech.

Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Trump administration’s push to revoke AI regulation from individual states. Though the White House and its allies frame this as a matter of “safety” and “national security,” the timing is telling, coming as progressive state governments move to restrict the building of AI data centers and hold tech companies liable for harms their AI systems cause.

What makes this deal particularly insidious is the trade-off at its core. Per Axios, congressional lawmakers lead by Republican Marsha Blackburn are essentially offering to surrender their ability to regulate AI in exchange for three federal censorship bills: the Kids Online Safety Act, the NO FAKES Act, and a federal age verification mandate.

While the language around these three measures suggests common-sense cyber regulation, activists say they really amount to a massive censorship regime that is fundamentally anti-democratic.

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The Kids Online Safety Act (KORA) for example, would force social media giants to restrict lawful speech based on Federal Trade Commission regulations. FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) complains that this would give the federal government too much power to hold platforms like Meta accountable for their harms — which, many would argue, is long overdue. But given that just a few corporations own the vast majority of web infrastructure and social media, KORA would give the Trump-controlled FTC major power to bend the internet to its will.

Source: https://futurism.com/future-society/trump-moves-to-deeply-censor-the-entire-internet