Andrew Lowenthal is CEO of Liber-net and an Australian digital civil liberties researcher with over 25 years in human rights and technology. He led Engaged Media, worked with Matt Taibbi on the Twitter Files, and mapped the censorship industrial complex for Racket News. Andrew writes about digital authoritarianism, surveillance, and free expression. Recently he testified before the EU Parliament and continues exposing how legacy institutions bleeding trust respond with censorship rather than transparency.
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Takeaways:
Censorship doesn’t happen when things are going well. It happens when legacy institutions are losing authority and bleeding trust very quickly. The response should be radical transparency, but instead they choose control.
Australia loves paternalism. The COVID response proved it. Australians actively want the state regulating every aspect of their lives, until it hurts them personally. Then they suddenly ask why the state intervened, but by then they’ve already empowered authoritarianism.
The center-left and center-right unite to censor populism on both the left and right. It’s not left versus right, it’s the establishment center crushing anyone who threatens their power. The hate speech bill passed because center-left Labor and center-right Liberals joined forces, while One Nation and the Greens opposed it.
One Nation went from 6% to 26% in the polls in months, higher than the main opposition for the first time in decades. Consistency matters. While every other party flip-flopped, One Nation held the line for 30 years. Australians finally rewarded that.
The hate speech law enables precrime: banning someone not because they committed a crime, but because authorities think they might commit one in the future. The degree to which this can be abused is obscene, and there’s almost zero oversight.
Age verification for social media is not about protecting kids, it’s about censoring adults. A kid can access hardcore porn in seconds but can’t use Instagram. If you actually wanted kids off phones, you wouldn’t require surveillance infrastructure that monitors every adult.
330 organizations in Germany alone contribute to content controls, not all explicitly censoring, but creating the architecture. This isn’t one conspiracy, it’s thousands of groups funded by governments, NGOs, and intelligence services building the infrastructure to regulate speech.
The economic situation determines how much government overreach people tolerate. When life is affordable and people feel secure, they forgive the government. When housing is impossible, wages stagnant, and inflation crushing them, they stop tolerating censorship and control.
Telegram isn’t the free speech platform it claims to be. Centralized platforms can always be captured. Bitcoin and Nostr are the only real hope because of their censorship resistant traits, including the fact that no government can arrest their CEOs.
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I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
