US misinformation is no different from Russian misinformation. freedom.gov is specifically meant to spread this misinfo, freedom of speech is the stated purpose, but if you believe that, you are naive.
This is obviously an influence campaign.
That is, what's blocked? Things that people consider misinformation. Some of it really is, and some of it is just stuff that's politically unpopular with the powers that be (which they're also going to label misinformation). And then some of it falls afoul of various copyright laws or other such.
But certainly real misinformation is a significant chunk of that. The proxy enables that misinformation (and disinformation) to bypass the censorship/blocking. So in that sense, yes, it spreads misinformation.
This is what this site is built for. Even the premise of the site is disinformation. Europe does not currently censor much of anything on the internet very strictly. We can still access X, 4chan, 8kun, kick, etc., and all the absolutely vile discourse on them. Not to mention our homegrown nazi breeding grounds.
But a site which will presumably be used to curate a selected list of far-right propaganda? By the US govt? That propably needs to see pushback.
The solution to disinformation is not censorship, it's education and to teach early people on how to critically think by themselves.
This does not mean people should not also be educated. That critical thinking is also what leads me to the conclusion this should be blocked.
On a side note, setting up a website deliberately designed to circumvent such laws will itself likely violate the law and might lead to criminal prosecution. While the US government will certainly be protected by diplomatic immunity, other people involved probably won't be protected.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
...
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Spoken like someone who never walked the Isar river beaches in the morning after a Saturday night in summer. Used to be full of plastic bottle caps from all the party goers, now it's just the metal beer caps that you can easily pick up with a magnet.
This was more to put on perspective that innovation and gaining market share are the main priority in US/China, whereas in Europe, priority is more on regulation.
For example, one of the priorities here in the EU is to regulate and tax AI companies, rather than to make the place attractive.
But still, this is where I slightly disagree, because I feel the more regulation, the less innovation is possible.
Here just feeling frustrated when I see that freedom.gov getting censorship of that overall tendency to regulate, rather than to actively promote freedom of entrepreneurship, of expression, of thinking out-of-the-box etc, and this freedom.gov thing is just a symptom of that whole system.
Extracting maximum profit is correct.