Press Freedom

In a Times Radio interview, Wales criticized President Trump's repeated 'fake news' claims, saying they mirror tactics used by strongmen around the world. He noted it was 'an astonishing situation' when a President 'clearly contradicts himself, or denies that he said things that we can all play tapes of him saying.'

In 2024-2025, Alex Karp made extremely strong statements against pro-Palestinian campus protesters, calling them 'unwitting products of an evil force, Hamas' and describing their views as a 'pagan religion' and 'an infection inside of our society.' He confronted a protester during an earnings call, saying 'she believes I'm evil, and I believe she's an unwitting product of an evil force.' He strongly supported Israel post-October 7, criticizing American companies for not speaking out.

In April 2025, acting US Attorney Edward R. Martin Jr. sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation alleging Wikipedia 'allows foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda,' demanding documents to assess compliance with tax-exempt status requirements under Section 501(c)(3). The letter requested materials from January 2021 onward covering content moderation practices, editor misconduct handling, and interactions with search engines and AI companies. Separately, in May 2025, a bipartisan group of 23 US Representatives led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Don Bacon sent a letter expressing concern about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia. These actions represented escalating political pressure on the Foundation's editorial independence.

On February 26, 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that The Washington Post's opinion section would only publish columns 'in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,' and that viewpoints opposing those pillars would not be published. Opinion editor David Shipley resigned following the announcement. Former executive editor Marty Baron wrote that Bezos was doing this 'out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests.' Over 75,000 subscribers cancelled within two days. Senator Bernie Sanders called it 'what Oligarch ownership of the media looks like.' The move followed Bezos's October 2024 decision to block the paper's Harris endorsement.

Amnesty International documented Serbian authorities using Cellebrite tools alongside spyware to target journalists and activists. A student activist's phone was hacked using a Cellebrite zero-day exploit (CVE-2024-53104) affecting millions of Android devices. Cellebrite only suspended sales to Serbia's security services in February 2025 after the public Amnesty report—despite ongoing abuse documented since 2024.

In the Meta/WhatsApp lawsuit against NSO Group, a U.S. federal court found NSO liable for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing WhatsApp servers to install Pegasus spyware on over 1,400 devices in 2019. In May 2025, the court ordered NSO to pay $167 million in damages. During the lawsuit proceedings, court documents revealed Saudi Arabia as one of NSO's Pegasus customers. Evidence showed the spyware was used against Princess Haya of Dubai and associates of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. NSO admitted it had cut off 10 government customers for abusing Pegasus.

On October 25, 2024, Jeff Bezos killed The Washington Post's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, overruling the editorial board. The decision led to 200,000+ subscriber cancellations and two columnist resignations. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago the same day. Bezos defended it as 'principled' but critics called it capitulation to Trump.

In July 2024, European Parliament member Daniel Freund reported a spyware attack attempt assessed as likely emanating from Candiru. The attack masqueraded as a legitimate email link. Freund, a vocal critic of Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, believes Hungary's authoritarian administration was responsible. Active Candiru infrastructure was identified in Hungary and Saudi Arabia through late 2024.

Jack Dorsey's philanthropic initiative #startsmall donated $10 million to Freedom of the Press Foundation in January 2024 to support press freedom and transparency efforts.

A December 2023 HRW report found Meta's content moderation systematically silenced pro-Palestine voices. Of 1,050 cases reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful pro-Palestine content being censored while only 1 case involved pro-Israel content. Documented issues included content removals, account suspensions, shadow banning, and broken appeal mechanisms affecting users in 60+ countries.

In June 2023, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told employees that Apollo developer Christian Selig was blackmailing the company for $10 million. Selig publicly refuted the claim with audio recordings of his conversation with a Reddit employee that disproved the extortion allegation. In a June 9, 2023 AMA, Huffman doubled down, criticizing Selig for 'recording and leaking a private phone call' and saying he didn't know how Reddit could do business with him. The false accusation appeared to be retaliation against Selig for publicly disclosing Reddit's prohibitive API pricing that would force Apollo to shut down.

Wales criticized Musk for Twitter censoring posts at Turkey's request during elections, contrasting it with Wikipedia's successful legal battle in Turkey. He stated 'We do not bend to the will of governments, anywhere' and questioned whether Musk was saying 'we don't care about freedom of expression if it interferes with making money.'

Despite Musk's free speech positioning, data showed X complied at least partially with 98.8% of government takedown requests from October 2022 to April 2023. Government requests more than doubled from 348 to 971 compared to the same period a year earlier, with Turkey responsible for half of all requests, followed by Germany and India. The company blocked content in Turkey prior to the May 2023 presidential election. Musk stated 'Twitter doesn't have a choice but to obey local governments' when confronted with the data, though X took the opposite stance in Brazil, refusing a court order and being temporarily banned.

In April 2023, Citizen Lab and Microsoft published research identifying at least five civil society victims of QuaDream's REIGN spyware across North America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Victims included journalists, political opposition figures, and an NGO worker. The spyware exploited a zero-click iOS vulnerability. Five days after the exposé, QuaDream shut down after failing to receive Israeli Defense Ministry authorization to sell to new clients. The company fired all employees. The closure followed Israel blocking a potential sale to Morocco.

The Wikimedia Foundation pursued a years-long legal challenge against the NSA's Upstream surveillance program, arguing it violated the First and Fourth Amendment rights of Wikipedia users and editors. Research had documented a measurable chilling effect on Wikipedia traffic to sensitive topics following the 2013 Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on February 21, 2023, ending the legal challenge. Despite the loss, the Foundation's sustained effort demonstrated commitment to defending user privacy against government surveillance.

In December 2022, ByteDance confirmed employees used TikTok to track the location of journalists reporting critically on the company through their IP addresses. ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo said the misconduct 'significantly undermined' public trust. The company fired four employees including chief internal auditor Chris Lepitak, while executive Song Ye resigned. The DOJ opened a criminal investigation led by the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Starting December 2, 2022, X under Musk released a series of internal documents known as the 'Twitter Files' through selected journalists. The releases detailed how Twitter had received and sometimes complied with content moderation requests from U.S. government agencies. While Musk framed these as exposing government censorship, Twitter's own attorneys stated in a June 2023 court filing that the files did not show government coercion, and media analysts noted the documents largely showed typical content moderation challenges. Former employees noted Republican officials also made frequent takedown requests.

Within weeks of acquiring Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk dramatically restructured the company. He fired approximately 3,750 employees (50% of workforce) within days, triggering a WARN Act lawsuit. He gutted content moderation by firing 80% of moderation staff and reinstating banned accounts including white nationalists and conspiracy theorists. On December 15, he suspended accounts of journalists from CNN, NYT, Washington Post, and others who had reported critically on him. The mass layoffs affected around 1,000 employees in California and 418 in New York, with employees given no advance notice.

In 2022, PayPal permanently suspended the accounts of antiwar publications Consortium News and MintPress News without warning or clear explanation. PayPal froze funds including $9,348 in Consortium News' account and threatened to seize the money as 'damages.' Neither outlet was given a specific reason for the ban. The suspensions occurred during the Russia-Ukraine war period and were criticized as financial censorship of independent journalism.

The Wikimedia Foundation refused Roskomnadzor's demands to remove articles about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, accepting cumulative fines of 8.4 million rubles (approximately $100,000 USD) rather than complying with censorship requests.