US developing site to allow Britons to see banned content

The United States Government have announced that they are working on a tool that will allow Britons, and people in other countries, to access content which is banned by their own governments. The website, Freedom.gov, is currently in development and comes after the US have publicly criticised laws such as the Online Safety Act for restricting free speech.

The United States have been vocal in their criticism about what they see as increased censorship in Europe and elsewhere. Their recent National Security Strategy warned of “the prospect of civilisational erasure” caused in part by “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition”.

At the Munich Security Conference in 2025, U. S. Vice President, J. D. Vance said that “in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat”. Speaking to The Telegraph in January, a senior State Department official said that online censorship in Britain is becoming worse than Iran.

The new tool is headed up by Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary for public democracy, who labelled the UK’s Online Safety Act in December as “tyrannical and absurd”.

The online portal is intended to allow users to access content that has been banned in their own countries, including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda. It is expected to provide a Virtual Private Network (VPN), allowing users from other countries to appear to be in the United States. A visitor’s data would not be tracked as they browse sites through the portal.

However, users’ data would be funnelled through a system controlled by a US government agency, with no clarity on how that data might be stored and used. Andrew Ford Lyons, an independent consultant on digital security, said: “What you’re now talking about is concentrating traffic through a US federal agency organised and kept closed”.

Nina Jankowicz, a former US official and disinformation expert, told The Guardian: “If the Trump administration is alleging that they’re gonna be bypassing content bans, what they’re gonna be helping users access in Europe is essentially hate speech, pornography, and child sexual abuse material,” adding that the website “is in and of itself a propaganda tool”.

A spokesperson for the State Department said that: “Digital freedom is a priority for the State Department… and that includes the proliferation of privacy and censorship-circumvention technologies like VPNs.”

The site freedom.gov currently displays a holding page with the words “Freedom is coming. Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.”