Tracy Turner

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law in 1998 and praised as a long-awaited move to help safeguard intellectual property in the new digital age. However, what was meant to protect creators has been increasingly employed as an instrument to stifle opposition, manage information, and enforce conformity, typically in the interest of protecting copyrights. This misuse of the DMCA is a stark injustice that should invoke a sense of indignation in all who value free speech. It also underscores the urgent need for resistance against such misuse, a determination to uphold the principles of free speech.

Influential players, including governments, business leaders, and political elites, have employed the DMCA's 'notice-and-takedown' regime to censor unwanted speech and cut off access to valuable information. The 'notice-and-takedown' regime allows copyright holders to request the removal of infringing content from online platforms. However, this process has been increasingly used to stifle opposition, manage information, and enforce conformity, typically to protect copyrights. 

The impact has been oppressive, and the stories of real people and situations are a sobering reminder of how far-reaching the abuse has become. This underscores the urgent need to protect and amplify independent voices in the digital sphere.

The Overuse and Abuse of DMCA Takedowns

The DMCA was designed to protect copyright owners from unauthorized work use. However, governments and powerful interests have started using it to remove content that is inconvenient to them. This misuse of the DMCA violates its intended purpose and should be condemned. By doing this, they have found a tool for eliminating inconvenient content that muzzles the lips of voices that disrupt the status quo.

Censorship of Political Speech: The most dissonant case of DMCA misuse in 2020 was against Russia's leading opposition politician, Alexei Navalny. Navalny's YouTube investigative pieces revealing the corruption of the Russian authorities became an instant political cause célèbre. The response was to hit back using DMCA takedown notices against Putin-critical videos. 

For example, among Navalny's most-watched videos, revealing suspected corruption, including the Russian president, was pulled from YouTube following a DMCA notice issued by a Russian entity. While no valid complaint was present for copyright violation, the video was removed by a platform whose use was imperative in disseminating opposition messages. These takedowns were one aspect of a broader campaign by the Russian government to limit the spread of any media that could challenge the official narrative.

Chilling Whistleblowers and Journalists: The DMCA has also silenced whistleblowers and journalists. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been a headache for government and corporate interests for years because his platform has been so successful at releasing sensitive information. In 2010, when WikiLeaks released thousands of leaked U.S. classified diplomatic cables, access to the site was blocked aggressively. The U.S. government joined forces with technology leaders in applying DMCA takedown notices to remove links to content on WikiLeaks from web search results and close access to the site. Other than legitimate copyright objections, these measures effectively removed WikiLeaks from the Internet. 

The Amazon Web Services cloud hosting platform shut down WikiLeaks' domain in December 2010 under heavy political pressure, even though no intellectual property was violated. Assange and WikiLeaks were gagged on the most powerful platforms, showing the way enforcement of copyrights has become mired in political agendas.

Misinformation Control: Increased reliance on DMCA takedowns for silencing voices during high political tension has also significantly affected elections. In the lead-up to the 2020 United States presidential election, election fraud claims dominated social media platforms. However, even this substantive charge of the legitimacy of the election was also standardly erased or censored as "misinformation" as well. A particularly blatant instance was Twitter's and Facebook's October 2020 erasure of a New York Post exposé that broke Hunter Biden's claimed Ukrainian shakedowns for business. 

The article, published on October 14, 2020, included explosive allegations of Bidens' dealings with foreign entities. Both Twitter and Facebook, in their turn, cited "violations of their policies," but closer examination revealed that those websites were removing the article as political, not for a violation of copyright law. The action was taken generally as an attempt to stifle opposition voices amid a hot campaign of elections. Here, DMCA-style actions were used to suppress content, with corporate tech titans opining for political reasons.

State-Sponsored Misuse of DMCA and the Gavotte of Governmental Conformity

While the DMCA was never intended to be a tool of state policy, it has increasingly been employed to advance state agendas. Governments, especially in authoritarian regimes, have used their leverage to pressure technology firms to use the DMCA to silence content critical of their authority or challenge their control over public discourse.

Authoritarian Regimes and Censorship of Content: The Chinese regime has been notorious for decades for censoring content on the Internet. In the early 2000s, China closely censored information that was seen to be politically sensitive, including the Tiananmen Square massacre and the treatment of Uyghur Muslims. When, in 2019, the Hong Kong protests broke out, the Chinese regime quickly set about silencing the flow of information about the protests. 

The Chinese government forced Apple and Google to remove apps that helped Hong Kong protesters organize protests and pass information. They were requested for intellectual property rights, but they were a move toward more considerable narrative control of demonstrations. In 2020, the Chinese government further forced YouTube and Twitter, which were already censored in the country, to do the same. These takedowns had nothing to do with DMCA notices, but the copyright removal tool was leveraged as a handy tool to further China's agenda of web censorship.

Mass Censorship Campaigns: The coordination between technology oligopolies and governments in censorship has increased over recent years in the United States and Europe as internet platforms are increasingly being pushed to remove content against officially approved narratives. After the January 2021 Capitol riots, Parler, a right-wing populist social media platform, was banned from Apple's App Store and Google Play. The platforms referred to 'violations of their content policies' for allowing violent rhetoric and hate speech to flow. 

Most critics do, though, assert that the timing of the suspension—mere days after the Capitol insurrection—did indicate political coercion, as opposed to good-faith copyright or policy enforcement, was the real motive for deplatforming Parler. DMCA takedown notices were technically not at issue. Still, in tandem with DMCA, abuse was erected: both attempted to prohibit disfavored opinion, coordinating technology companies' interests with the interests of the political class.

Beyond the DMCA: The Deployment of Surveillance and Section 230

Though the DMCA is the primary mechanism of internet censorship, it is one of many instruments through which governments and corporate giants manage the distribution of information. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has enabled sites to be granted immunity from legal responsibility for user-generated content. However, that immunity has also accorded platforms virtual carte blanche discretion to police content, usually subject to the vagaries of government whim.

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Patriot Act and FISA have extended more power to the United States government to surveil its citizens en masse quietly. These consist of monitoring electronic communications, which include social media. For instance, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a whistleblower, revealed that the American government had been collecting vast quantities of data about individuals, including metadata, content of emails, and social media posts, using Section 702 of FISA. Snowden's disclosure resulted in his deplatforming when social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter were the government's agents, and his accounts were suspended. This is one of the most egregious examples of how government surveillance and private technology platforms conspire to censor critics and limit access to critical information.

The Algorithmic Weapon: A New Era of Digital Censorship

The technology platforms have used legal weapons like the DMCA to knock down content and have also built the algorithms that determine what content is viewed. Web search engines like Google and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter increasingly prefer content that aligns with government-sanctioned, mainstream discourses. Google, for example, has been accused of politically skewing its search results in favor of politically convenient content. It was revealed in 2018 that, in the run-up to the U.S. midterm elections, political language had been censored from Google search results, a surreptitious mode of algorithmic censorship that seemed intended to silence minority views.

The Weaponization of Information

Abuse of the DMCA, surveillance activities, and algorithm manipulation have created an information environment where governments and the powerful can aim for information at their leisure. The Alexei Navalny, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Parler cases are not singular events—they are manifestations of a sinister trend wherein digital censorship is a growing force of conformity. Whether through DMCA takedown, content moderation, or state surveillance, the Internet is ever more a sphere where speech is contained, monitored, and repressed. 

Arming the DMCA and similar tools has made platforms that now advocate for free speech into digital gatekeepers, ensuring governments and corporate giants dictate what we hear and do about it. Free expression in this new normal today is not just about resisting censorship by corporate giants; it is about resisting an online system complicit with muzzling dissenters.

Amidst the sweeping digital universe of the 21st century, the struggle to control information has taken on an entirely new, sinister form—that of corporate-governmental interests synergizing to overlay one totalitarian narrative. Welcome to the age of digital deplatforming, an era wherein viewpoints that find themselves outside of the dominant paradigm are silenced with a ferocity previously reserved only for the very most totalitarian systems. Among the most notable victims of this nascent digital censorship is TheHealthRanger.com owner Mike Adams, whose website and several thousand others have been ensnared in the ever-tying tendrils of engines like Google and Bing. Those sites, giants of the modern Internet, have become gatekeepers of the public square, deciding what ideas are permitted and what is erased from the electronic public square.

Adams' website, a portal for alternative medicine and news, was included under Google and Bing's scheme for radical domain suppression. Adams remains alone only officially. Hundreds of domains, with considerable numbers of them concentrated with anti-establishment reportage, alternative news, and independent media, have been cavalierly swept from the Internet. These websites range from tiny individual weblogs to gigantic news websites defying the establishment story, particularly those defying the state and corporate agendas. These sites, frequently in defiance of big pharma, corporate greed, and state intrusion, are disappearing by the hundreds from the search engines on which billions are increasingly relying for their news. Erasure of such content has been marketed to protect users from "misinformation" or "hate speech." Still, the actual reason is more and more evident—the sites are dedicated to controlling the flow of information to quell protest voices that disrupt the status quo.

The atmosphere has taken on a decidedly Orwellian flavor. The companies that once struggled to democratize information now control who speaks and who does not. They are the new Thought Police, exacting conformity to the era of the digital that eerily echoes the dystopian futures prophesied by George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell's totalitarian future in which domination of thought is enforced by surveillance and censorship is now coming true, not through governmental decree, but through corporate directives that serve as de facto state tools. 

The boundaries between the private sector and government domination have been dissolved into virtual invisibility. Google, Bing, YouTube, and other censoring of establishment propaganda is an actual Ministry of Truth, revising history, purifying discourse, and silencing those brave enough to challenge the establishment.
It is not an isolated incident but part of a more significant, systemic effort to dictate information. Censorship by politicians like YouTube has also sped along this tide. 

YouTube, where previously unencumbered free speech was the norm, is now arguably as famous for silencing material non-compliant with the prevailing political orthodoxy. Political pundits, alternative journalists, and even liberal citizens with commentary outside the mainstream have had channels demonetized or canceled on a wholesale basis. This type of digital scrubbing has less to do with removing "false" or "harmful" content and more with ensuring only one message prevails on the Internet. Much like Orwell cautioned about a state proclaiming to make what it desires to be so, now we have come to a society where what becomes truth is dictated by whoever masters the means through which we are served our news.

Google, Bing, and YouTube Censorship

What efforts Google, Bing, and YouTube have made to date have substantially quelled diverse views with far-reaching repercussions. Alternative media websites, which previously provided a platform for varied opinions and critical evaluation of world events, have been successfully driven to the darker recesses of the Internet, where they have no jurisdiction to connect with the vast population base previously drawn to their websites. Such cyber oppression of oppositional perspectives constitutes a blatant assault on the freedom of circulation of ideas. The Internet, which was once hailed as the great leveler, now is a tool of mass conformity run by corporations that offer favored chances for elites to have a voice.

There is no longer room for ideological pluralism in a censored world run by the company. Anyone who defies the line—of politics, science, health, or social realities—is bound to be deplatformed. The authority held by these technology monoliths is unprecedented in the annals of human history. They control who will have a say and who will not through their reign over the Internet, the very instrument of information. It is not a matter of blocking disinformation, as they claim, but of maintaining the ability to shape our reality. 

It is an instrument employed to silence those who challenge the dominance of wealth and power in the hands of the privileged few and silence those who express themselves against the unchecked power of states and corporations.

This foul digital totalitarianism is not relegated to a sector or platform. It is institutional throughout the expanse of the Internet and one that threatens democratic discourse. As more independent voices are pushed off the web, the public is exposed to fewer alternative perspectives. The result is a political culture where opposition is criminalized, and those in power can distort the narrative in their image. Censorship is the reality of existence in a world where governments and corporate entities control information as to what is allowed to make it through and where the voices of resistance are no longer being given the podium to be heard.
We exist in a world where technology that was built to empower is now used to enslave. The era of free speech on the Internet is rapidly disappearing, replaced by an age of corporate censorship. In this, critics of the prevailing orthodoxy can no longer voice their opinion. Instead, they are censored from the digital public sphere, silenced by the platforms that claim to provide them with a megaphone. Looking forward, no one doubts that the war over free expression on the net is far from over. But with each deleted domain, each silenced channel, the censors gain strength, and the vision of a complimentary, democratic net slips further away.

Legislators of Duct-Tape Over Your Mouth, Ears and Eyes

The battle for online free speech has been driven not only by oligarch corporate leaders and autocratic regimes but also by U.S. politicians, who have introduced legislation enabling online censorship. Since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law in 1998, senators and representatives have introduced and co-sponsored legislation that has allowed the government and corporations to censor dissenting voices on the Internet.

High-profile politicians like Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Dick Durbin, and Representative Lamar Smith have long supported legislation to expand control of online content. Feinstein and Durbin advocated for hotly contested bills like SOPA and PIPA in 2011 that would have granted sweeping censorship powers to the U.S. government and corporations. While massive protests on the Internet halted these bills, the authority of these legislators has persisted in the recent attempts to control the Internet further.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, a long-time patron of copyright bills, also spearheaded SOPA, PIPA, and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). His efforts to tighten intellectual property protection have been attacked as opening the gates to possible overregulation of web content, creating an environment where censorship can thrive under the guise of enforcing intellectual property rights.

Aside from these lawmakers, Virginia Representative Bob Goodlatte, a strong supporter of SOPA, has been key in advancing more forceful controls on Internet content through copyright infringement and web piracy. His bill and Smith's co-sponsorship of SOPA have been at the forefront of suggesting restrictions on online free speech.

Furthermore, Senator Orrin Hatch, a long-time friend of more stringent intellectual property enforcement, has sided with Hollywood lobbyists and other industries in advocating for greater control over the Internet. Hatch's involvement in several bills, such as the Digital Trade Act, has raised fears that lawmakers are prioritizing the interests of entertainment industries over people's internet freedom.

These senators and members of Congress have been at the forefront of the writing and defending of bills that, in their attempts to protect intellectual property, have also censored the virtual world and restricted free speech. Whether their motivations are driven by lobbying organizations or ideological sympathy, these legislators have been among the growing atmosphere of corporate and governmental control of the virtual world.

In the future, the battle for an open and free internet will be a battle not only with the tech oligarchs but also with such political leaders whose policy has enabled the dismantling of digital freedoms. So long as such legislators do not see the dangerous consequences that their support of censorship bills results in, the battle for free online speech will be a battle with government overreach and corporate monopolies that dominate the digital conversation.

The DMCA Weaponized: The Dark Face of Web Censorship

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