In February, the Trump administration unveiled plans for Freedom.gov, a proposed online portal which officials had discussed equipping with VPN-like functionality.
It was presented as a kind of digital escape hatch for users in the UK and Europe who wanted to circumvent internet restrictions in their own countries – including measures such as the UK’s Online Safety Act – and, in the words of its proponents, “regain their online freedom”.
Commenting on the launch, the US State Department declared that “digital freedom is a priority for the State Department” and described the technology as a form of “censorship-circumvention”.
It fed into a much wider series of attacks that MAGA figures like JD Vance and Elon Musk have been making on the UK and EU, particularly around the claim that freedom of speech is under serious threat.
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On the US right, European attempts to regulate social media, protect children online or impose responsibilities on large technology platforms are routinely presented as evidence of an increasingly authoritarian approach to free speech. Britain has become a particular target, with the Online Safety Act frequently held up as an example of government censorship.
This argument has been enthusiastically adopted by various right wing free-speech groups in Britain. Tory peer Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, for example, gleefully reported in June comments from Sarah Rogers, US under-secretary of state for public diplomacy, claiming that “British citizens are flocking to [Freedom.gov] more than any other nationality” because they are living under a government “hostile to freedom of speech”.
GB News also picked up the story, with an article in May headlined “Britons flood to US Government’s ‘free speech portal’ in bid to flee ‘censorship’ at home.”
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And what do the supposed “flood” of Britons “flocking” the site actually find? Very little indeed. Six months after it was announced, the website remains little more than a basic landing page bearing the message: “Freedom is coming.”
The idea that this was nothing more than a publicity stunt cooked up by the Trump administration to score political points against Britain and Europe – and then enthusiastically lapped up by gullible British groups eager to believe that their own country has become some kind of authoritarian nightmare – is, of course, entirely untrue.
Unrelated news: Since returning to power in 2025, the Trump administration has eliminated roughly $150 million a year in US government support for global journalism and the wider information ecosystem, including programmes that supported internet freedom and anti-censorship technologies.
These include a number of programmes which helped local groups in countries such as China, Iran and the Philippines develop technology allowing journalists and campaigners to evade internet controls in their own countries.
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