「放送ネットワーク整備支援事業費補助金（地上基幹放送ネットワーク整備等事業）」に係る提案の公募

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　ITU部会　電波伝搬委員会（第41回）開催案内

村上総務大臣閣議後記者会見の概要

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　電.波利用環境委員会　CISPR I作業班（第18回）配付資料

第732回　入札監理小委員会（会議資料）

令和7年度の地方財政の見通し・予算編成上の留意事項等

2020年基準 消費者物価指数 全国 2024年(令和6年)12月分及び2024年(令和6年)平均

第127回産業統計部会

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*

Jillian York: Welcome, let’s start here. What does free speech or free expression mean to you personally?

Lina Attalah: Being able to think without too many calculations and without fear.

York: What are the qualities that make you passionate about the work that you do, and also about telling stories and utilizing your free expression in that way? 

Well, it ties in with your first question. Free speech is basically being able to express oneself without fear and without too many calculations. These are things that are not granted, especially in the context I work in. I know that it does not exist in any absolute way anywhere, and increasingly so now, but even more so in our context, and historically it hasn't existed in our context. So this has also drawn me to try to unearth what is not being said, what is not being known, what is not being shared. I guess the passion came from that lack more than anything else. Perhaps, if I lived in a democracy, maybe I wouldn't have wanted to be a journalist. 

York: I’d like to ask you about Syria, since you just traveled there. I know that you're familiar with the context there in terms of censorship and the Internet in particular. What do you see in terms of people's hopes for more expression in Syria in the future?

I think even though we share an environment where freedom of expression has been historically stifled, there is an exception to Syria when it comes to the kind of controls there have been on people's ability to express, let alone to organize and mobilize. I think there's also a state of exception when it comes to the price that had to be paid in Syrian prisons for acts of free expression and free speech. This is extremely exceptional to the fabric of Syrian society. So going there and seeing that this condition was gone, after so much struggle, after so much loss, is a situation that is extremely palpable. From the few days I spent there, what was clear to me is that everybody is pretty much uncertain about the future, but there is an undoubted relief that this condition is gone for now, this fear. It literally felt like it's a lower sky, sort of repressing people's chests somehow, and it's just gone. This burden was just gone. It's not all flowery, it's not all rosy. Everybody is uncertain. But the very fact that this fear is gone is very palpable and cannot be taken away from the experience we're living through now in Syria.

York: I love that. Thank you. Okay, let’s go to Egypt a little bit. What can you tell us about the situation for free speech in the context of Egypt? We're coming up on fourteen years since the uprising in 2011 and eleven years since Sisi came to power. And I mean, I guess, contextualize that for our readers who don't know what's happened in Egypt in the past decade or so.

For a quick summary, the genealogy goes as follows. There was a very tight margin through which we managed to operate as journalists, as activists, as people trying to sort of enlarge the space through which we can express ourselves on matters of public concerns in the last years of Mubarak's rule. And this is the time that coincided with the opening up of the internet—back in the time when the internet was also more of a public space, before the overt privatization that we experience in that virtual space as well. Then the Egyptian revolution happened in 2011 and that space further exploded in expression and diversity of voices and people speaking to different issues that had previously been reserved to the hideouts of activist circles. 

Then you had a complete reversal of all of this with the takeover of a military appointed government. Subsequently, with the election of President Sisi in 2014, it became clear that it was a government that believed that the media's role—this is just one example focusing on the media—is to basically support the government in a very sort of 1960s nasserite understanding that there is a national project, that he's leading it, and we are his soldiers. We should basically endorse, support, not criticize, not weaken, basically not say anything differently from him. And you know this, of course, transcends the media. Everybody should be a soldier in a way and also the price of doing otherwise has been hefty, in the sense that a lot of people ended up under prosecution, serving prolonged jail sentences, or even spending prolonged times in pre-trial detention without even getting prosecuted.

So you have this total reversal from an unfolding moment of free speech that sort of exploded for a couple of years starting in 2011, and then everything closing up, closing up, closing up to the point where that margin that I started off talking about at the beginning is almost no longer even there. And, on a personal note, I always ask myself if the margin has really tightened or if one just becomes more scared as they grow older? But the margin has indeed tightened quite extensively. Personally, I'm aging and getting more scared. But another objective indicator is that almost all of my friends and comrades who have been with me on this path are no longer around because they are either in prison or in exile or have just opted out from the whole political apparatus. So that says that there isn't the kind of margin through which we managed to maneuver before the revolution.

 York: Earlier you touched on the privatization of online spaces. Having watched the way tech companies have behaved over the past decade, what do you think that these companies fail to understand about the Egyptian and the regional context?

It goes back to how we understand this ecosystem, politically, from the onset. I am someone who thinks of governments and markets, or governments and corporations, as the main actors in a market, as dialectically interchangeable. Let's say they are here to control, they are here to make gains, and we are here to contest them even though we need them. We need the state, we need the companies. But there is no reason on earth to believe that either of them want our best. I'm putting governments and companies in the same bucket, because I think it's important not to fall for the liberals’ way of thinking that the state has certain politics, but the companies are freer or are just after gains. I do think of them as formidable political edifices that are self-serving. For us, the political game is always how to preserve the space that we've created for ourselves, using some of the leverage from these edifices without being pushed over and over. 

For me, this is a very broad political thing, and I think about them as a duality, because, operating as a media organization in a country like Egypt, I have to deal with the dual repression of those two edifices. To give you a very concrete example, in 2017 the Egyptian government blocked my website, Mada Masr, alongside a few other media websites, shortly before going on and blocking hundreds of websites. All independent media websites, without exception, have been blocked in Egypt alongside sites through which you can download VPN services in order to be able to also access these blocked websites. And that's done by the government, right? So one of the things we started doing when this happened in 2017 is we started saying, “Okay, we should invest in Meta. Or back then it was still Facebook, so we should invest in Facebook more. Because the government monitors you.” And this goes back to the relation, the interchangeability of states and companies. The government would block Mada Masr, but would never block Facebook, because it's bad for business. They care about keeping Facebook up and running. 

It's not Syria back in the time of Assad. It's not Tunisia back in the time of Ben Ali. They still want some degree of openness, so they would keep social media open. So we let go of our poetic triumphalism when we said, we will try to invest in more personalized, communitarian dissemination mechanisms when building our audiences, and we'll just go on Facebook. Because what option do we have? But then what happens is that is another track of censorship in a different way that still blocks my content from being able to reach its audiences through all the algorithmic developments that happened and basically the fact that—and this is not specific to Egypt—they just want to think of themselves as the publishers. They started off by treating us as the publishers and themselves as the platforms, but at this point, they want to be everything. And what would we expect from a big company, a profitable company, besides them wanting to be everything? 

York: I don't disagree at this point. I think that there was a point in time where I would have disagreed. When you work closely with companies, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that change is possible because you know good people who work there, people who really are trying their best. But those people are rarely capable of shifting the direction of the company, and are often the ones to leave first.

Let’s shift to talking about our friend, Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah. You mentioned the impact that the past 11 years, really the past 14 years, have had on people in Egypt. And, of course, there are many political prisoners, but one of the prisoners that that EFF readers will be familiar with is Alaa. You recently accepted the English PEN Award on his behalf. Can you tell us more about what he has meant to you?

One way to start talking about Alaa is that I really hope that 2025 is the year when he will get released. It's just ridiculous to keep making that one single demand over and over without seeing any change there. So Alaa has been imprisoned on account of his free speech, his attempt to speak freely. And he attempted to speak, you know, extremely freely in the sense that a lot of his expression is his witty sort of engagement with surrounding political events that came through his personal accounts on social media, in additional to the writing that he's been doing for different media platforms, including ours and yours and so on. And in that sense, he's so unmediated, he’s just free. A truly free spot. He has become the icon of the Egyptian revolution, the symbol of revolutionary spirit who you know is fighting for people's right to free speech and, more broadly, their dignity. I guess I'm trying to make a comment, a very basic comment, on abolition and, basically, the lack of utility of prisons, and specifically political prisons. Because the idea is to mute that voice. But what has happened throughout all these years of Alaa’s incarceration is that his voice has only gotten amplified by this very lack, by this very absence, right? I always lament about the fact that I do not know if I would have otherwise become very close to Alaa. Perhaps if he was free and up and running, we wouldn't have gotten this close. I have no idea. Maybe he would have just gone working on his tech projects and me on my journalism projects. Maybe we would have tried to intersect, and we had tried to intersect, but maybe we would have gone on without interacting much. But then his imprisonment created this tethering where I learned so much through his absence. 

Somehow I've become much more who I am in terms of the journalism, in terms of the thinking, in terms of the politics, through his absence, through that lack. So there is something that gets created with this aggressive muting of a voice that should be taken note of. That being said, I don't mean to romanticize absence, because he needs to be free. You know it's, it's becoming ridiculous at this point. His incarceration is becoming ridiculous at this point. 

York: I guess I also have to ask, what would your message be to the UK Government at this point?

Again, it's a test case for what so-called democratic governments can still do to their citizens. There needs to be something more forceful when it comes to demanding Alaa’s release, especially in view of the condition of his mother, who has been on a hunger strike for over 105 days as of the day of this interview. So I can't accept that this cannot be a forceful demand, or this has to go through other considerations pertaining to more abstract bilateral relations and whatnot. You know, just free the man. He's your citizen. You know, this is what's left of what it means to be a democratic government.

York: Who is your free speech hero? 

It’s Alaa. He always warns us of over-symbolizing him or the others. Because he always says, when we over symbolize heroes, they become abstract. And we stop being able to concretize the fights and the resistance. We stop being able to see that this is a universal battle where there are so many others fighting it, albeit a lot more invisible, but at the same time. Alaa, in his person and in what he represents, reminds me of so much courage. A lot of times I am ashamed of my fear. I'm ashamed of not wanting to pay the price, and I still don't want to pay the price. I don't want to be in prison. But at the same time, I look up at someone like Alaa, fearlessly saying what he wants to say, and I’m just always in awe of him. 

As age verification bills pass across the world under the guise of “keeping children safe online,” governments are increasingly giving themselves the authority to decide what topics are deemed “safe” for young people to access, and forcing online services to remove and block anything that may be deemed “unsafe.” This growing legislative trend has sparked significant concerns and numerous First Amendment challenges, including a case currently pending before the Supreme Court–Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The Court is now considering how government-mandated age verification impacts adults’ free speech rights online.

These challenges keep arising because this isn’t just about safety—it’s censorship. Age verification laws target a slew of broadly-defined topics. Some block access to websites that contain some "sexual material harmful to minors," but define the term so loosely that “sexual material” could encompass anything from sex education to R-rated movies; others simply list a variety of vaguely-defined harms. In either instance, lawmakers and regulators could use the laws to target LGBTQ+ content online.

This risk is especially clear given what we already know about platform content policies. These policies, which claim to "protect children" or keep sites “family-friendly,” often label LGBTQ+ content as “adult” or “harmful,” while similar content that doesn't involve the LGBTQ+ community is left untouched. Sometimes, this impact—the censorship of LGBTQ+ content—is implicit, and only becomes clear when the policies (and/or laws) are actually implemented. Other times, this intended impact is explicitly spelled out in the text of the policies and bills.

In either case, it is critical to recognize that age verification bills could block far more than just pornography.

Take Oklahoma’s bill, SB 1959, for example. This state age verification law aims to prevent young people from accessing content that is “harmful to minors” and went into effect last November 1st. It incorporates definitions from another Oklahoma statute, Statute 21-1040, which defines material “harmful to minors” as any description or exhibition, in whatever form, of nudity and “sexual conduct.” That same statute then defines “sexual conduct” as including acts of “homosexuality.” Explicitly, then, SB 1959 requires a site to verify someone’s age before showing them content about homosexuality—a vague enough term that it could potentially apply to content from organizations like GLAAD and Planned Parenthood.

This vague definition will undoubtedly cause platforms to over-censor content relating to LGBTQ+ life, health, or rights out of fear of liability. Separately, bills such as SB 1959 might also cause users to self-police their own speech for the same reasons, fearing de-platforming. The law leaves platforms unsure and unable to precisely exclude the minimum amount of content that fits the bill's definition, leading them to over censorship of content that may just also include this very blog post. 

Beyond Individual States: Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)

Laws like the proposed federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) make government officials the arbiters of what young people can see online and will lead platforms to implement invasive age verification measures to avoid the threat of liability. If KOSA passes, it will lead to people who make online content about sex education, and LGBTQ+ identity and health, being persecuted and shut down as well. All it will take is one member of the Federal Trade Commission seeking to score political points, or a state attorney general seeking to ensure re-election, to start going after the online speech they don’t like. These speech burdens will also affect regular users as platforms mass-delete content in the name of avoiding lawsuits and investigations under KOSA. 

Senator Marsha Blackburn, co-sponsor of KOSA, has expressed a priority in “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.” KOSA, to Senator Blackburn, would address this problem by limiting content in the places “where children are being indoctrinated.” Yet these efforts all fail to protect children from the actual harms of the online world, and instead deny vulnerable young people a crucial avenue of communication and access to information. 

LGBTQ+ Platform Censorship by Design

While the censorship of LGBTQ+ content through age verification laws can be represented as an “unintended consequence” in certain instances, barring access to LGBTQ+ content is part of the platforms' design. One of the more pervasive examples is Meta suppressing LGBTQ+ content across its platforms under the guise of protecting younger users from "sexually suggestive content.” According to a recent report, Meta has been hiding posts that reference LGBTQ+ hashtags like #lesbian, #bisexual, #gay, #trans, and #queer for users that turned the sensitive content filter on, as well as showing users a blank page when they attempt to search for LGBTQ+ terms. This leaves teenage users with no choice in what content they see, since the sensitive content filter is turned on for them by default. 

This policy change came on the back of a protracted effort by Meta to allegedly protect teens online. In January last year, the corporation announced a new set of “sensitive content” restrictions across its platforms (Instagram, Facebook, and Threads), including hiding content which the platform no longer considered age-appropriate. This was followed later by the introduction of Instagram For Teens to further limit the content users under the age of 18 could see. This feature sets minors’ accounts to the most restrictive levels by default, and teens under 16 can only reverse those settings through a parent or guardian. 

Meta has apparently now reversed the restrictions on LGBTQ+ content after calling the issue a “mistake.” This is not good enough. In allowing pro-LGBTQ+ content to be integrated into the sensitive content filter, Meta has aligned itself with those that are actively facilitating a violent and harmful removal of rights for LGBTQ+ people—all under the guise of keeping children and teens safe. Not only is this a deeply flawed strategy, it harms everyone who wishes to express themselves on the internet. These policies are written and enforced discriminatorily and at the expense of transgender, gender-fluid, and nonbinary speakers. They also often convince or require platforms to implement tools that, using the laws' vague and subjective definitions, end up blocking access to LGBTQ+ and reproductive health content. 

The censorship of this content prevents individuals from being able to engage with such material online to explore their identities, advocate for broader societal acceptance and against hate, build communities, and discover new interests. With corporations like Meta intervening to decide how people create, speak, and connect, a crucial form of engagement for all kinds of users has been removed and the voices of people with less power are regularly shut down. 

And at a time when LGBTQ+ individuals are already under vast pressure from violent homophobic threats offline, these online restrictions have an amplified impact. 

LGBTQ+ youth are at a higher risk of experiencing bullying and rejection, often turning to online spaces as outlets for self-expression. For those without family support or who face the threat of physical or emotional abuse at home because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, the internet becomes an essential resource. A report from the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) highlights that LGBTQ+ youth engage with the internet at higher rates than their peers, often showing greater levels of civic engagement online compared to offline. Access to digital communities and resources is critical for LGBTQ+ youth, and restricting access to them poses unique dangers.

Call to Action: Digital Rights Are LGBTQ+ Rights

These laws have the potential to harm us all—including the children they are designed to protect. 

As more U.S. states and countries pass age verification laws, it is crucial to recognize the broader implications these measures have on privacy, free speech, and access to information. This conglomeration of laws poses significant challenges for users trying to maintain anonymity online and access critical content—whether it’s LGBTQ+ resources, reproductive health information, or otherwise. These policies threaten the very freedoms they purport to protect, stifling conversations about identity, health, and social justice, and creating an environment of fear and repression. 

The fight against these laws is not just about defending online spaces; it’s about safeguarding the fundamental rights of all individuals to express themselves and access life-saving information.

We need to stand up against these age verification laws—not only to protect users’ free expression rights, but also to safeguard the free flow of information that is vital to a democratic society. Reach out to your state and federal legislators, raise awareness about the consequences of these policies, and support organizations like the LGBT Tech, ACLU, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and others that are fighting for digital rights of young people alongside EFF.

The fight for the safety and rights of LGBTQ+ youth is not just a fight for visibility—it’s a fight for their very survival. Now more than ever, it’s essential for allies, advocates, and marginalized communities to push back against these dangerous laws and ensure that the internet remains a space where all voices can be heard, free from discrimination and censorship.

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