Internet Censorship Archive

Texas state representative Stan Gerdes bought into some years-old viral disinformation with the new Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying In Education or FURRIES Act, which — among numerous other bans on things that could give children “a belief that non-human behaviors are societally acceptable” — would penalize Texas kids for making animal noises or wearing cat ear headbands in school, notes Chron’s Gwen Howerton. And no, I don’t know what the ‘S’ stands for, either.

Associate editor and columnist Ruth Marcus has left the Post after it refused to publish a column “respectfully dissenting” from owner Jeff Bezos’ new limits on opinion coverage, reports The New York Times’ Ben Mullin and Semafor’s Max Tani. Marcus writes that the new policy “threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable.” It’s also reportedly lost the Post at least 75,000 subscribers.

The new State Department program, called “Catch and Revoke,” will use AI to review the social media accounts of tens of thousands of students who are in the US on visas, Axios reports. State Department sources tell Axios that officials plan on combing through internal databases to see if any international students were arrested in pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023 — and that the department is working with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure a “whole of government and whole of authority approach.”