Tag: Jimmy

Repression deepens in Hong Kong with Jimmy Lai’s guilty verdict and censorship over deadly Wang Fuk Court fire
Last year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter.

For challenging the CCP, Jimmy Lai may spend the rest of his life behind bars

The result press freedom and human rights advocates feared has arrived: 78-year-old media tycoon, Chinese Communist Party critic, and Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai was found guilty in Hong Kong this week. After five years in detention, much of it in solitary confinement, a West Kowloon Magistrates’ Court found him guilty of sedition and collusion with foreign forces on Monday morning.

He will be sentenced at a later date. Lai, who has suffered deteriorating health amidst his detainment, may very well die in prison.

Authorities launch censorship campaign after Hong Kong’s tragic Wang Fuk Court fire

It’s a page straight out of the authoritarian playbook: Censorship after a crisis to protect the interests of the state from the fallout. Unfortunately, authorities in Hong Kong are not straying away from this strategy. In the aftermath of a deadly residential fire that took at least 159 lives, some of those who have spoken out about the tragedy are now themselves at risk. Hong Kong officials warned they would punish those who “exploit” the tragedy and threatened foreign media against “spreading false information, distorting and smearing the government’s disaster relief and aftermath work” or “provoking social division and opposition.”

Miles Kwan, a university student, started a petition calling for “four big demands” including more regulation, investigation, and assistance to displaced residents after the fire. His position caught the attention of authorities, but not in the way he’d hoped — Kwan was quickly arrested on sedition charges. Other arrests followed, including of a solicitor who intended to speak at a pre-emptively canceled press conference about the fire and a former district councillor. Hong Kong Baptist University suspended the campus student union and “blocked from sight by tall barriers” a union notice board featuring messages about the fire. Separately, authorities also charged a man with sedition for encouraging others on social media not to vote in the latest “patriots only” election.

Proposed Trump admin policy could make self-censorship a condition of entry for tourists

Last week, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced its intention to impose a new policy on tourists from dozens of countries that do not require visas for short visits to the country. Under the proposal, tourists will have to provide five years of social media history in their Electronic System for Travel Authorizations applications, just so they can visit Yellowstone or Disney. Tourists will no doubt worry that their travel plans could be disrupted over years-old tweets and social media commentary.

“Requiring temporary visitors here for a vacation or business to surrender five years of their social media to the U.S. will send the message that the American commitment to free speech is pretense, not practice. This is not the behavior of a country confident in its freedoms,” FIRE warned in response. Keep an eye out for a forthcoming formal comment from FIRE on the matter.

China’s censorship targets underground pastors — and the global internet

After dozens of arrests, 18 leaders of the underground Zion Church were charged with “illegally using information networks,” which can result in up to three years in prison. The church is not sanctioned by the government.

Meanwhile, Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent is reportedly abusing trademark claims to pressure U.S. based cloud hosting service Vultr to halt operations of FreeWeChat, a censorship watchdog tool run by GreatFire.org. FreeWeChat monitors censorship on WeChat, Tencent’s immensely popular social app. After months of back and forth over Tencent’s allegations, Vultr issued “a formal 30-day notification of termination of services.” FreeWeChat has moved to another hosting provider, but expects the new one to face similar threats.

Prosecutors seek to reverse important UK free speech victory

In October’s Free Speech Dispatch, I celebrated the overturning of Hamit Coskun’s conviction for burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. But that victory, a rare one in the UK these days, may be short-lived.

Late last month, the Crown Prosecution Service appealed the Southwark Crown Court’s ruling in favor of Coskun, where Justice Joel Nathan Bennathan said that free expression “must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.” The CPS asserts that Quran burning itself is not a criminal act but Coskun “demonstrated hostility towards a religious or racial group, which is a crime.”

In Quran burning conviction, UK judge uses violence against defendant as evidence of his guilt

UK judge cites violence against Quran-burning protester as proof of his guilt, Brazil sentences comedian to over eight years for telling jokes, and France targets porn.

Read More

“Our case remains that Hamit Coskun’s words, choice of location and burning of the (Quran) amounted to disorderly behaviour,” CPS said in a statement. “We have appealed the decision, and the judge has agreed to state a case for the High Court to consider.” The CPS may be claiming this doesn’t amount to a restriction on blasphemous expression, but the UK’s National Secular Society rightly worries that “CPS seems determined to establish a blasphemy law by the back door.”

Meanwhile, former Premier League player Joey Barton was found guilty of 6 out of 12 counts of sending grossly offensive electronic communications with intent to cause distress or anxiety, earning a suspended prison sentence over a series of social media posts. In them, Barton attacked commentators Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward, calling them “the Fred and Rose West of football commentary,” a comparison to a notorious serial killer couple, and photoshopped their faces onto the Wests in a photo.. In another post he said Aluko was “only there to tick boxes” and because of DEI and affirmative action. Barton also called another broadcaster a “bike nonce” and implied he had been on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

Trump minimizes Jamal Khashoggi murder, transnational prosecutions, and other press freedom news
- Last month, President Trump welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Oval Office — and berated an ABC journalist in the room who asked about MBS’s role in the gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Trump said to the journalist, and called Khashoggi “extremely controversial.” Trump also said of Khashoggi, “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen, but he [gesturing toward Mohammed] knew nothing about it and we can leave it at that.” U.S. intelligence previously confirmed MBS’s involvement in ordering the killing.
- After Trump’s repeated threats to sue the BBC in U.S. courts for its edits to his Jan. 6, 2021 speech, FCC Chair Brendan Carr announced an investigation targeting the BBC. In a letter to NPR and PBS, which sometimes broadcast BBC material, Carr said he sought “to determine whether any FCC regulations have been implicated by the BBC’s misleading and deceptive conduct.” And this week, Trump did indeed file his suit against the BBC in Florida, seeking $10 billion in damages — yet another frivolous lawsuit filed by the president.
Carr’s threats to ABC are jawboning any way you slice it

ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel hours after FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggested they could face consequences for remarks Kimmel made in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Read More
- Vietnamese police are targeting a journalist over his reporting — and he doesn’t even live in Vietnam. Authorities have issued an order to prosecute and arrest Berlin-based Le Trung Khoa for “making, storing, spreading information, materials, items for the purpose of opposing the state.”
- Malaysian authorities are also pursuing a transnational prosecution, with the assistance of Thai courts. Australian academic and Thai resident Murray Hunter will go on trial this month in Thailand on criminal defamation charges over Substack posts about Malaysia’s internet regulator. He could face a fine or up to two years imprisonment.
- American right-wing journalist Andy Ngo is suing the UK’s Guardian News and Media for libel over its description of Ngo as an “‘alt-right’ agitator” in a Mumford and Sons album review.
- Bianet editor Tuğçe Yılmaz is facing charges of “insulting the Turkish nation, the state of the Republic of Turkey, and its institutions and organs” for her reporting on Armenian youth today and their relationship to the Armenian genocide.
- Turkish police arrested a man, and the YouTuber who interviewed and broadcast him, over a poem the man read that prosecutors claim insulted President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and “incit[ed] hatred among the public.”
- British musical duo Bob Vylan are suing Irish public broadcaster RTÉ for defamation, alleging that RTÉ defamed the duo in a report calling the band’s “death, death to the IDF” chant at this summer’s Glastonbury music festival “anti-Semitic.”
American writer in Germany receives another visit from police

Berlin-based American writer CJ Hopkins, whose prosecution FIRE covered last year, is in trouble with authorities again. Hopkins says Berlin police arrived at his home on the morning of Nov. 26 and proceeded to interrogate him and his wife and seize his computer. He is apparently facing new charges over the “publication and distribution” of his book The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021). The cover art of the book, which showed a swastika and medical mask, was the root of Hopkins’ previous legal trouble. He had posted the image to social media to compare European COVID policies to Nazism and was charged with “disseminating propaganda.”

So to Speak Podcast Transcript: CJ Hopkins compared modern Germany to Nazi Germany. Now he’s standing trial.

J Hopkins is an American playwright, novelist, and political satirist. He moved to Germany in 2004.

Read More

Tech censorship news from Australia, India, Russia, and more
- Reddit is challenging Australia’s age restrictions on social media, citing the country’s free expression protections, and the application of that ban to the message forum. Australia’s government is digging in, though. Health Minister Mark Butler, who promised to “fight this action every step of the way,” said, “It is action we saw time and time again by Big Tobacco against tobacco control and we are seeing it now by some social media or big tech giants.”
- The under-16 social media bans are spreading. Following Australia’s lead, the Malaysian government is planning for a system of age verification to limit social media access to people 16 and older. Denmark and Norway are pursuing similar plans.
- Due to privacy and security concerns, Apple said it would not comply with an order from the Indian government to require its phones to automatically come with Sanchar Saathi, a cybersecurity app the government says addresses phone theft. The pushback was successful — the government shortly after announced it was rolling back its mandate to phone manufacturers.
- Claiming to combat “content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children,” particularly LGBT content, Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor cut off access to the popular online game platform Roblox.
- Italian YouTube channel Parabellum, which has covered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, also says it’s received warnings from Roskomnadzor, particularly over its map of operations within Ukraine. Parabellum analyst Mirko Campochiari shared that he received an order from a Russian court to “remove information prohibited in the Russian Federation, to block traffic from Russia to the map, and to notify the Russian authority of the censorship carried out.”
Award-winning director Jafar Panahi sentenced in absentia

Iranian director Jafar Panahi was sentenced in absentia to a year in prison by a Tehran court for “propaganda activities against the system.” Panahi is also subject to a two year travel ban. Panahi filmed It Was Just an Accident, which recently received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, “clandestinely in Iran following a seven-month stint in prison.”
Source link
December 17, 2025
Jimmy Kimmel is back, but don’t get complacent

This essay was originally published by The Dallas Observer on Sept. 26, 2025.

Last week, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel just hours after FCC Chair Brendan Carr directed a thinly veiled threat at the media giant over comments Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Carr said on Benny Johnson’s The Benny Show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr’s message was a clear example of a government pressure tactic known as “jawboning,” and though ABC reversed the suspension days later, returning Kimmel to the air with an emotional yet triumphant monologue on free speech, the damage had been done. Kimmel was off the air for three episodes, and President Donald Trump took the opportunity to encourage even more censorship, saying on Truth Social, “That leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News [sic] NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

Why our critics’ whataboutery over Jimmy Kimmel is wrong

Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t canceled by a mob — he was silenced after FCC pressure. Critics say we’re inconsistent, but we’ve opposed jawboning and cancel culture for years. This case is no different.

Read More

Consider the events that immediately followed Carr’s comments the same day. Nexstar, an Irving-based company that owns various ABC affiliate stations, suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! from its programming. Sinclair, another media company that owns ABC affiliate stations, followed suit. Then Disney, which owns ABC, announced Kimmel’s indefinite suspension, thus shutting production down entirely.

The justified backlash against Disney/ABC was swift, prompting them to switch sides. On Monday, the media giant announced that the show would return to the air. The show’s “welcome back” monologue amassed a record of over 14 million YouTube hits in 16 hours. CNN data analyst Harry Enten reported that a typical monologue on the show rakes in roughly 240,000 YouTube views. That’s over 5,000% growth, courtesy of the Streisand effect.

Still, we must not let celebration temper our vigilance. As FIRE Chief Counsel Robert Corn-Revere said recently in a Washington Post op-ed, “The law denies the [FCC] ‘the power of censorship’ as well as the ability to impose any ‘regulation or condition’ that interferes with freedom of speech.”

That Trump’s administration chilled protected speech notwithstanding the law is distressing. Jawboning is unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court unanimously held last year in NRA v. Vullo. In that case, the state of New York pressured financial institutions and insurance companies to sever ties with the gun rights organization in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the opinion, “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”

Yet that is exactly what happened here. We just witnessed the FCC attempt to coerce Disney to suppress Kimmel’s speech, just as New York attempted to coerce financial institutions to suppress the NRA’s advocacy.

Carr’s influence wasn’t the only factor. Outrage over Kimmel’s remarks was already building. A New York Times analysis of “thousands” of posts and media mentions found that criticism started “as a whisper, then eventually as a shout.” Breitbart covered it, Newsbusters’ Alex Christy wrote an X post that drew 15 million views, Fox’s The Five picked it up, The Blaze host Auron MacIntyre called for Kimmel’s firing, another viral post demanded his “career completely destroyed,” and Elon Musk weighed in: “Jimmy Kimmel is disgusting.” But it was Carr’s podcast threat that pushed the outrage into overdrive. As the Times noted, the anger “became apoplectic” after his remarks. His intervention should have carried no weight, yet instead it was a force multiplier.

Another cause for concern in this otherwise triumphant moment is that Trump made it abundantly clear his sights are still on Kimmel, according to a Truth Social post on Tuesday night.

Trump continued, “He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers!”

The First Amendment abuses do not stop there. On Sept. 15, Trump filed a shakedown lawsuit against The New York Times for $15 billion in response to unfavorable coverage. That same day, Attorney General Pam Bondi threatened to target Americans for “hate speech” — she then walked her comments back after conservative outrage.

Moments like these are why our country needs an unflinching devotion to the First Amendment. They serve as a good reminder that, eventually, the shoe always ends up on the other foot. As Sen. Ted Cruz put it, “It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”

That is no apocalyptic bluster. Under both Republican and Democratic leadership, FIRE has stood firm against First Amendment abuses regardless of which wing or team color it comes from. The tendency for power to target disfavored views or ideas transcends party lines and can only be contained with a consistent, principled application of the First Amendment. As FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote recently in a New York Times op-ed, “The weapon that you reach for today will be used against you tomorrow.”

Kimmel’s return is worth cheering, but unless we resist each attempt at government-driven censorship, the next suspension may not be so brief.

Source link

September 29, 2025
Why our critics’ whataboutery over Jimmy Kimmel is wrong

Jimmy Kimmel just got suspended for having an opinion.

Specifically, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air following backlash from the head of the Federal Communications Commission over remarks Kimmel made last week about the murder of Charlie Kirk. We have been vocal in our opposition to this, and as a result, we’ve received some criticism online. So let’s take a minute to consider some of the most common remarks and address those concerns.

We said an extraordinary amount of things. Let’s start with filing amicus briefs in two Supreme Court cases about government pressure on private companies last term, NRA v. Vullo and Murthy v. Missouri.

Vullo was about the superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services pressuring insurance companies and banks to stop providing services to the National Rifle Association. The Department didn’t quite order the companies not to work with the NRA. Instead, it met with the groups, pointed out regulatory violations that didn’t have anything to do with the NRA, and suggested the state might be less interested in pursuing those regulations if the companies “ceased providing insurance to gun groups, especially the NRA.”

As our brief explains:

The First Amendment does not permit the government to censor speech via informal or indirect means. When government officials “invok[e] legal sanctions and other means of coercion, persuasion, and intimidation” to chill disfavored speech, they impose “a scheme of state censorship” just as unlawful as direct regulation.

The Supreme Court unanimously agreed.

In Murthy, the states of Missouri and Louisiana and a handful of individual social media users sued various federal agencies and officials, arguing that content moderation private companies conducted during COVID-19 and the 2020 election was driven by “jawboning” — that is informal, coercive government pressure — from the Biden administration. Our brief argued that such informal pressure violates the First Amendment.

We wrote:

Although much attention has focused on the power of “Big Tech,” it is a bad idea for government officials to huddle in back rooms with corporate honchos to decide which social media posts are “truthful” or “good” while insisting, Wizard of Oz-style, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” No matter how concerning it may be when private decisionmakers employ opaque or unwise moderation policies, allowing government actors to surreptitiously exercise control is far worse.

There’s simply no daylight between our positions in these cases and our position in the current FCC controversy.

In terms of advocacy, we stood up for a professor accused of bias after writing that if you question the lab origin of COVID-19, you should “at least consider that you are an idiot who is swallowing a whole lot of Chinese cock swaddle.” We argued against a University of Iowa policy limiting what faculty could say about masks and the virus. We criticized NYU for telling medical faculty not to talk to the press. We stood up for RAs whose university told them they couldn’t talk about it in Virginia, and RAs told they couldn’t criticize their university’s response in Maryland.

In research, last year we wrote the Fire Report on Social Media 2024, where we expanded on the problem of jawboning, and specifically how it occurred during the Biden administration. We noted, based on a survey from FIRE and IPSOS, that:

The American public is concerned about this issue. Our polling found that 77% of Americans believe it is important for social media companies to “[be] fully transparent about any government involvement in content moderation decisions,” including 79% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans, and 81% of independents.

So, yes. We have been loud, clear, and consistent on this issue for quite some time.

In fact, we opposed cancel culture then and we oppose cancel culture now. And respectfully, with affection to our fellow co-workers, we’re not what you’d generally consider “key cultural tastemakers.”

Actually, we have taken a public stand on people’s right to protest on either side of the abortion debate. Until 2022, we were focused on college campuses, so abortion clinics generally weren’t in the mission, but we did stand up for pro-life students and their right to express themselves. Just as we stood up for pro-choice students. And pro-marijuana students. And pro-Nicki Minaj students. (There are no anti-Nicki Minaj students. That’s a scientific fact. But if there were, we’d stand up for them.)

But since we have expanded to cover freedom of expression on campus and off, Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar of global expression at FIRE, has drawn attention to cases exactly like the one you cite.

Not only did we not ban or deplatform any rights during Covid, we vehemently oppose speech bans and deplatforming. In fact, we keep a Campus Deplatforming Database to help monitor and curb such practices. And we have spoken out against government efforts to police disinformation as well as misinformation.

Yes, but we were a campus-only organization at the time, and by the time we expanded in 2022, she had already sued. (Some of us were pissed personally that they ruined The Mandalorian to do it, if that helps.) Also, there’s a difference between a company caving to a cancel-culture campaign like the one that targeted Carano, and a company making a similar decision under threats from the government. Yes, both are bad for free-speech culture. But one is prohibited by the Constitution.

Source link

September 22, 2025
FIRE statement on FCC threat to revoke ABC broadcast license over Jimmy Kimmel remarks about Charlie Kirk

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is once again abusing his position to try to assert government control over public discourse, spuriously invoking the “public interest” standard to selectively target speech the government dislikes.

President Trump has recently called for the FCC to revoke ABC’s broadcast license because he does not like the way the network — and Jimmy Kimmel in particular — speaks about him. Just yesterday, Trump suggested to a reporter that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s statement about prosecuting “hate speech” might mean she will “go after” ABC “because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate.”

Now, Carr is threatening ABC for comments about Charlie Kirk’s shooter that Kimmel made during his opening monologue on Monday, insinuating that the shooter was part of “the MAGA gang.”

The FCC has no authority to control what a late night TV host can say, and the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to speculate on current events even if those speculations later turn out to be incorrect. Subjecting broadcasters to regulatory liability when anyone on their network gets something wrong would turn the FCC into an arbiter of truth and cast an intolerable chill over the airwaves.

Source link

September 18, 2025