Drawing the speech map
A sourced record of the laws limiting what Americans can say, post, or read -- online and off -- with the enforcement actions behind them and the courts pushing back.
States with a catalogued law carry a steel-blue fill that lightens with their strongest severity; dots mark each law, including nationwide federal ones. Darker slate means no state law is catalogued yet.
Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and tap a marker for the law and its sources. Use the timeline to watch the laws appear over time. 126 state laws on record so far. This is an early dataset and grows as laws are verified.
Diamonds on the map mark individual enforcement actions, listed under the state where each happened, alongside the laws for that place.
Connecticut's Public Act 26-15, signed by Governor Lamont on June 2, 2026 and effective October 1, 2026, pairs youth social-media protections with chatbot rules requiring operators to make reasonable efforts to detect user expressions of suicidal ideation or self-harm and to respond with appropriate crisis resources.
Maine recorded 97 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Massachusetts recorded 2 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
Enforcement actions
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student, was detained on March 25, 2025 by plainclothes ICE agents in Somerville, Massachusetts and held six weeks in a Louisiana facility after the State Department quietly revoked her visa. The only evidence cited was a 2024 op-ed she co-authored in the Tufts Daily urging the university to address Gaza. A Vermont judge ordered her release in May 2025, and in January 2026, in AAUP v. Rubio, a federal court found that targeting scholars for such speech violated the First Amendment; unsealed records confirmed she was singled out solely for the op-ed. Removal proceedings were terminated and she returned to Turkey in 2026.
New Hampshire recorded 2 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 1 new in the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
Enforcement actions
In May 2018, Robert Frese of Exeter, New Hampshire posted a comment on a news article calling a retiring local officer a dirty cop and writing that the police chief had covered up for him. Exeter police arrested him under the state criminal defamation statute, a misdemeanor, but the New Hampshire Attorney General criticized the arrest and the charge was dropped; the town later paid him a settlement. Police said his claim was knowingly false; the ACLU, which sued to strike down the law, said criminal defamation statutes let police prosecute their critics, though the courts declined to overturn the statute.
New Jersey recorded 6 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
Enforcement actions
Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman and daughter of a US citizen, was detained at a New Jersey immigration check-in over what officials called pro-Hamas protest activity, tied to a 2024 demonstration outside Columbia where a disorderly-conduct citation had been dismissed. She was held for roughly a year before a judge ordered her released on bond.
New York's AI Companion Models law (General Business Law Article 47), effective November 5, 2025, requires operators of AI companion chatbots to give clear, recurring disclosures that users are interacting with AI rather than a human, to detect user expressions of suicidal ideation or self-harm, and to refer at-risk users to crisis services. Like the West Coast laws that followed, it regulates what these systems must say and how they must respond.
New York recorded 84 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
New York's SAFE for Kids Act, signed June 20, 2024, restricts algorithmic "addictive" feeds and overnight notifications for users under 18 absent verified parental consent. Two years on it still binds no one. The Act does not take effect until 180 days after the Attorney General finalizes implementing rules, and those rules are not final: the OAG proposed them Sept 15, 2025, comment closed Dec 1, 2025, and it has until roughly Dec 1, 2026 to adopt, which pushes the earliest effective date into 2027. That delay is the interesting part. Most laws in this category are enjoined within weeks of taking effect; this one has not been sued at all, because there is no operative rule to challenge. The rulemaking is doing what litigation usually does, and doing it more slowly.
New York Hateful Conduct Law (General Business Law 394-ccc) requires social-media networks to publish a policy on hateful conduct and give users a way to report it, enforced by the attorney general. A court enjoined it in 2023 as compelled speech, and the case is still working through appeal.
Enforcement actions
Two ICE agents approached a Syracuse poll worker at a polling place and handed her a written notice that they were investigating threats against ICE personnel, telling her to remove or discontinue an Instagram account. It was tied to a post that named, citing a newspaper, the agent who shot Renee Good. ICE framed it as a threat inquiry; an elections official said the agents had no legal basis to be there, and a civil-liberties lawyer called the post protected First Amendment speech.
While the Steam and itch.io delistings were unfolding, Vice Media required reporter Ana Valens to take down an article examining the role of the activist group behind the campaign. She refused to delete the story. She and several colleagues resigned. The article had done nothing more than identify who had lobbied the card networks and how -- the reporting that made the mechanism visible in the first place. Recorded here because it is the second-order effect and the one most likely to go unlogged: a censorship campaign that succeeded against two storefronts also produced the suppression of journalism about the campaign, inside a commercial newsroom, with no government involved at any stage. For a map that tracks who gets silenced and how, an outlet pulling its own accurate story under pressure is the same event class as a platform delisting a game, and it happened to the person explaining the delistings. Pinned at New York, Vice's base; the sources do not state where Valens worked from.
Columbia University suspended or expelled nearly 80 students in July 2025 over a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the Butler Library reading room and an earlier campus encampment, with sanctions including multi-year suspensions, expulsions, probation and degree revocations, as the school negotiated to restore $400 million in withheld federal funding.
Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and green-card holder, was detained by ICE in March 2025 at the State Department's direction over his prominent role in pro-Palestinian campus protests. He was charged with no crime; the government invoked a 1952 immigration provision that lets the Secretary of State deem a noncitizen's presence a foreign-policy risk, citing his speech as anti-American and pro-Hamas. He spent about three months in a Louisiana jail before a judge ordered his release, and an appeals court later reversed on jurisdictional grounds. Officials called it enforcement against support for terrorism; the ACLU and free-speech groups called it First Amendment retaliation for protected protest.
Momodou Taal, a Cornell University doctoral student, had his student visa revoked and was ordered to surrender to ICE after taking part in pro-Palestinian campus protests. He sued to block the deportation on free-speech grounds, then chose to leave the country rather than be detained.
Pennsylvania recorded 737 school book bans in recent tracking, among the highest totals outside the South, with removals concentrated in particular districts responding to organized challenges.
Enforcement actions
The Department of Homeland Security issued an administrative subpoena, one of hundreds sent to platforms such as Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord, seeking to unmask the people behind anti-ICE accounts, including a Montgomery County page that posted bilingual alerts about ICE sightings. The ACLU moved to block it as targeting protected speech, and DHS withdrew the request before a judge ruled. DHS said the subpoenas were meant to protect officers; critics noted such subpoenas need no judge and were being aimed at lawful criticism.
A 2025 Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression report documented 637 college students and student groups punished or investigated for protected speech from 2020 to 2024; 2025 set an all-time high of 273 database entries, including 72 suspensions and 55 expulsions or separations.
Rhode Island recorded 1 district-level school book ban in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. This was a single isolated district removal.
Vermont recorded 1 district-level school book ban in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. This was a single isolated district removal.
Enforcement actions
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and former Columbia protest leader, was arrested by ICE at a Vermont immigration office during what he was told was his citizenship interview. The government moved to deport him over his campus activism and writings, citing harm to US foreign policy rather than any crime. A federal judge ordered his release two weeks later, noting he had been charged with nothing.
Illinois HB 5511 would verify users' ages through the device operating system and impose default limits -- on algorithmic feeds, nighttime notifications, and profile visibility -- for minors' accounts. It passed both chambers on June 1, 2026 (Senate 57-0, House 113-0); Governor Pritzker, who proposed it, pledged to sign it. EFF, the ACLU of Illinois, and NetChoice urged a veto, warning device-level age checks would end anonymous smartphone use for every resident.
Illinois recorded 7 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
Enforcement actions
Harley DeLander, a 28-year-old Dixon, Illinois resident opposing a proposed data center, was arrested in May 2026 on intimidation and stalking charges after a series of online posts and emails aimed at a local development official, Tom Demmer. DeLander had used Facebook to organize a protest and posted Demmer's home address; prosecutors say other messages crossed into threats, citing a post about putting the fear of god in the official and an email vowing to drive him out of the community. DeLander and his attorney say he was exercising First Amendment rights to criticize development and call for peaceful protest; the state's attorney and police say the arrest was about threats to a person and his family, not protest or speech.
Indiana recorded 24 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 2 new in the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Indiana enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Indiana's HB 1447 (2023) stripped the long-standing 'educational' defense that had shielded schools from obscenity prosecution, exposing teachers and librarians who provide material deemed 'harmful to minors' to a Level 6 felony carrying up to two and a half years in prison. It also requires every public school to post its library catalog online and adopt a formal complaint process for removing books. Educators warned the loss of the defense would chill which titles they dare to stock.
Indiana's HB 1608 (2023), modeled on Florida's law, bars schools, staff, and outside vendors from any instruction on 'human sexuality' from pre-K through grade three and requires school employees to notify parents if a student asks to be called by a different name or pronoun, effectively outing transgender students. The ACLU of Indiana sued, arguing the undefined term censors discussion of LGBTQ people and violates teachers' First Amendment and due-process rights.
Enforcement actions
Indiana University pulled the print edition of its student newspaper in 2025 and drew censorship accusations after the paper's faculty adviser was terminated amid a dispute over editorial content; the adviser's lawsuit is ongoing.
Freelance photojournalist Matthew Kaplan was detained on Jan. 18, 2025 while photographing an anti-deportation protest near a deportation-flight airport in Gary, Indiana -- the first US journalist arrested covering a protest that year, at the start of a wave the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker put at 32 such detentions.
Iowa's House File 2309 would impose criminal and civil liability on librarians who let minors check out material deemed 'harmful,' and strips libraries of their longstanding exemption from state obscenity law. The American Library Association warns it would force libraries to police every minor's borrowing or restrict youth access entirely.
Iowa's 2023 Senate File 496, which bars school libraries from carrying books depicting sexual acts, triggered mass removals, with thousands of book bans reported across the state as districts pulled titles to avoid liability.
Iowa's Senate File 496 (2023) bars any 'program, curriculum, survey, promotion, or instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation' in grades K-6, and requires schools to notify parents if a student asks to use a name or pronoun that affirms their gender identity. A federal judge blocked the instruction provisions as unconstitutionally vague in May 2025, but the 8th Circuit vacated that injunction in April 2026, letting the law be enforced while litigation continues. In 2026, lawmakers advanced bills (House File 2121 and Senate File 2003) to extend the ban from K-6 to all K-12 grades.
Enforcement actions
Maria Ruhtenberg had been an Iowa public defender for 15 years. After Charlie Kirk was killed in Sept 2025 she wrote posts visible only to her Facebook friends, one of them the proverb about living by the sword and dying by the sword. One person -- a Facebook friend she barely knew -- complained to her employer. The office received that single complaint and one media inquiry. She was fired. In its federal court filings the state justified the decision on the basis that her words were weighed for whether they had created, or could likely have created, workplace disharmony, impeded her own or colleagues' performance, or otherwise harmed operations. She won reinstatement through a civil service appeal after nine weeks, which she described as one of the hardest stretches of her life, and later settled her federal lawsuit for $125,000. She says she felt targeted, hopes others will defend their rights the same way, and no longer discusses politics on Facebook -- which is the outcome the process produced regardless of who won. Placement note: the reporting does not name her office, so this record is pinned at Des Moines and marked approximate.
Melissa Crook taught at Creston Community School District in Iowa. She commented on a family member's Facebook post after Charlie Kirk's death, writing that she wished death on no one but that his absence was a blessing. She was fired. She settled with the district for $145,000 and full benefits, and left the school as a term of the settlement -- so the money is a vindication and the job is still gone. She said she sued to protect the right of public educators and other public servants to take part in public discourse, and that her priority afterwards shifted to moving on in the profession she loves. Worth noting what the comment was and was not: it was a reply on someone else's post, about a public figure, containing no threat and naming no colleague or student.
Oskaloosa, Iowa teacher Matthew Kargol was fired in September 2025 over a post reading '1 Nazi down' after Charlie Kirk's killing; he sued, arguing the comment was protected rhetorical hyperbole about a public event, and later reached a settlement of more than $200,000.
Noah Petersen repeatedly tried to address the Newton, Iowa city council in Oct 2022 about the police department, after a 19-year-old driver was pulled over for failing to dim his high beams, accused first of drunk driving and then of marijuana use, and released hours later when another officer found no sign of impairment. Petersen was also concerned that one of the officers involved had previously been the subject of a restraining order regarding a former girlfriend, though never criminally charged. His records requests and written submissions to the council were rejected. He was ordered arrested for addressing the council and charged in two separate criminal cases with disrupting a lawful assembly. A judge acquitted him on one count and the city dismissed the other. He then sued Mayor Michael Hanson and Police Chief Rob Burdess for First Amendment retaliation, prior restraint, wrongful arrest and selective enforcement. The adjacent thread is its own vein: the driver sued the city over the stop, and several officers filed defamation counterclaims against him -- police using a libel suit against a teenager who complained about them.
Kansas recorded 38 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 1 new in the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Enforcement actions
On August 11, 2023 police chief Gideon Cody led raids on the Marion County Record's newsroom, the home of publisher Eric Meyer, and the home of a city councilwoman, seizing computers and phones on the theory that a reporter committed identity theft by checking a restaurant owner's driving record through the state's own public search engine -- a record relevant to her liquor-license application. Body camera footage caught the chief rifling through files about himself. Joan Meyer, the paper's 98-year-old co-owner, stood in her home telling officers to get out; she collapsed and died the next afternoon. The raid drew condemnation from press-freedom groups across the spectrum, the warrants were withdrawn within days, and a 124-page special prosecutors' report concluded the journalists committed no crime and the searches were not legally justified, resting on an inadequate investigation. The only criminal charge to emerge fell on the chief himself: felony interference with the judicial process for asking the restaurateur to delete their text messages, with a judge ordering him to stand trial in October 2025 -- for the cover-up, as the publisher noted, not for the raid.
Michigan recorded 80 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Enforcement actions
At a Sep 6, 2022 Eastpointe, Michigan council meeting, Mayor Monique Owens repeatedly talked over residents during public comment. Video shows a councilmember interjecting to tell her she had to let a speaker finish, and a resident objecting that there was no reason for it and that the First Amendment protects the right to petition government without fear of reprisal. The back-and-forth continued through several speakers and the meeting ended when council members walked out of the room. The city attorney defended the mayor as having authority to discontinue particular remarks. FIRE sued over the silencing of citizens and won; Owens is no longer mayor. FIRE cites the case as the anchor example of its off-campus public-comment work, which it began in 2022 -- useful here because it establishes that this is a litigable pattern with a track record, not an unresolved grievance.
The Lapeer County, Michigan prosecutor threatened to file criminal charges against employees or officials of the Lapeer District Library unless it removed an LGBTQ-themed graphic novel from its shelves.
Minnesota recorded 19 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 16 new in the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Minnesota 2023 deepfake law (Statute 609.771) makes it a crime to share realistic election deepfakes within 90 days of an election with intent to injure a candidate. A First Amendment challenge failed to win an injunction: the district court declined in 2025 and the Eighth Circuit affirmed in 2026, so the law remains in force.
Enforcement actions
On April 28, 2025, Shiloh Hendrix was filmed at a Rochester playground repeatedly calling an 8-year-old Black autistic boy a racial slur after he took an applesauce pouch from her bag, telling the man who confronted her she did not care. The video drew millions of views and set off every collision this map exists to chart. She was doxxed and, she said, driven from her home; her GiveSendGo fundraiser drew more than $800,000 -- some donations carrying openly racist messages -- while the platform disabled comments over hate speech but kept the campaign, and the NAACP's fund for the boy's family raised $340,000 before the family closed it, saying they did not want the case politicized. The NAACP listed seven statutes she could be charged under; Attorney General Ellison called her conduct morally repugnant and welcomed accountability. In August the city charged her with three misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct -- 'offensive, obscene, or abusive language ... that would reasonably tend to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others' -- a category of statute the courts have repeatedly narrowed on First Amendment grounds, because it criminalizes words by their offensiveness. One count was dropped in March 2026; trial on the remaining two began July 20, 2026, with prosecutors resting on the 22nd. Ninety days in jail is the maximum, but the stakes are doctrinal: whether a slur, aimed at a child, spoken in a park, is unprotected fighting words or protected ugly speech -- and everything around the trial, from the doxxing to the $800,000, shows how little of the punishment now waits on the verdict. Trial updates: in a pretrial ruling the judge denied dismissal and held the recorded language 'may fit the definition of fighting words' -- putting the unprotected-speech question squarely to the jury. The state rested July 22 after two days; the defense presents July 23. The trial itself became a speech story: the prosecution withheld its witness list as long as possible citing safety, mostly masked supporters unfurled 'Shiloh did nothing wrong' and 'White Unity' banners outside the government center, and the court asked police to investigate a Facebook post claiming a juror had predetermined the verdict. The case went to the six-person jury at 1:04 p.m. on July 23. Late testimony sharpened both threads: the boy's father took the stand, the NAACP fund for the family was disclosed at trial to exceed $300,000, and Judge Christa Daily warned defense counsel about contempt over an attempt to introduce unverifiable fundraising evidence -- while outside, signs reading 'Defend white families' faced the courthouse. The jury came back late that same night, after about nine hours, and split it: not guilty on the count involving the child, guilty on the count involving the man who filmed her. That split is the doctrinal answer this record was waiting for. The pretrial ruling had sent the fighting-words question to the jury, and the factfinder declined to strip protection from the slur aimed at the 8-year-old while convicting on the adult-directed exchange that followed -- an outcome that tracks the actual shape of the fighting-words doctrine, which turns on a face-to-face provocation likely to draw immediate retaliation from the person addressed, not on how vile the word is or how sympathetic the target. Judge Christa Daily imposed a $1,000 fine, one year of supervised probation, 200 hours of community work service, and a 90-day jail term stayed on compliance. Rochester NAACP president Wale Elegbede called it a mixed result and said he wished the outcome had been different, while noting it was the first time in recent years that anyone in the area faced consequences for a racist incident. The city attorney's office issued a written statement acknowledging the conviction, said Hendrix had admitted the conduct and profited from it without remorse, and said it did not anticipate further comment. Defense counsel Brian Karalus said he would appeal, which keeps the fighting-words question alive on review; Daily had twice threatened him with sanctions during the trial. The arithmetic the record opened with still holds: a $1,000 fine and 200 hours of service against a fundraiser north of $800,000, with the doxxing, the move, and the banners outside the courthouse all delivered long before any jury spoke.
Independent journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon were among reporters federally charged -- some with felonies including a hate crime under a statute written to target the Ku Klux Klan -- over their coverage of a January 2026 protest at a St. Paul church during 'Operation Metro Surge'; after the arrests President Trump publicly called for a 40-year sentence for Lemon.
Mohammed Hoque, a Bangladeshi student at Minnesota State University, Mankato, was arrested outside his home and had his student visa terminated. He said he was targeted for pro-Palestinian social media posts; the government pointed to an old misdemeanor. A federal judge ordered him released on bond, finding he was not a threat.
Missouri recorded 419 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 2 new in the 2024-25 school year. Removals clustered in a small number of districts, the concentration pattern PEN America documents across most banning states. Most of Missouri's bans followed SB 775, a 2022 school-obscenity law that a state judge struck down as unconstitutionally vague in November 2025.
Missouri's SB 775 (2022), tacked onto a bill protecting sexual-assault survivors, made it a Class A misdemeanor for school librarians, teachers, or staff to provide students with 'explicit sexual material,' punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. Roughly 300 books were pulled statewide, many by or about LGBTQ and minority authors, with one district alone removing 220 titles including art and Holocaust history books. In November 2025 a Jackson County judge permanently struck the law down as unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, violating free-speech and due-process rights.
Nebraska's Conversational AI Safety Act (LB 525), signed April 14, 2026 and effective July 1, 2027, imposes safety and transparency duties on conversational-AI operators: session-start AI disclosure, periodic reminders, crisis-resource integration, and enhanced protections for minor users. It became a template other states copied.
Nebraska's Parental Rights in Social Media Act (LB 383), signed May 20, 2025, required platforms to run a reasonable age-verification method on every user and obtain express parental consent for anyone under 18 -- one of the strictest state measures of the wave. It was set to take effect July 1, 2026 and did not. On June 27, 2026, four days out, Senior Judge John Gerrard preliminarily enjoined the core provisions in NetChoice v. Hilgers (D. Neb., No. 4:26-cv-3149), holding the Act facially content-based, applying strict scrutiny, and finding it not narrowly tailored: account creation is itself expressive conduct, so conditioning it on an ID check and a parent's permission burdens the First Amendment rights of users and platforms alike. The injunction is partial. Under the Act's severability clause the parental-monitoring provisions and the remainder survive and may still be enforced by the Attorney General. Gerrard's order is preliminary rather than final, and an appeal to the Eighth Circuit is expected. Note the split it creates with the Supreme Court's 2025 Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton decision, which sustained age checks for adult content under a more forgiving standard -- the courts are drawing a line between pornography sites and social media generally.
Nebraska recorded 6 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
North Dakota recorded 27 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Enforcement actions
After a three-week trial in Morton County, North Dakota -- the county where the Dakota Access Pipeline uprising happened -- a jury sided with pipeline developer Energy Transfer and found Greenpeace liable on claims including defamation and tortious interference with business, arising from the organisation's activism against the pipeline. The initial damages demand had reached $900 million and was pleaded under racketeering statutes. This is the case that makes the SLAPP category matter: the standard pattern is that a corporation plans a pipeline, a development or an extraction project, opponents organise, and the company sues for interference, defamation or racketeering, expecting the cost and fear to do the work whether or not the claim survives. Usually it does not survive. Here it did, in front of a jury drawn from the county the protests disrupted, which is a different and larger risk to organised opposition than a suit that gets struck. The figure the jury actually returned is not recorded here and should be confirmed against the verdict before it is cited. Greenpeace International responded by suing Energy Transfer in the Netherlands under the EU anti-SLAPP directive.
Ohio's Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act (HB 33, 2023) requires verifiable parental consent before a child under 16 can hold a social-media account. A federal judge blocked it in January 2024 and struck it down in April 2025 -- and then, on June 18, 2026, a divided Sixth Circuit panel reversed and remanded with instructions to enter judgment for the state (NetChoice v. Yost, No. 25-3371). The reasoning is the part worth watching: the lead opinion held that NetChoice cannot assert minors' First Amendment rights on their behalf, because a trade association funded by platforms that profit from those minors' attention is in conflict with them. Having narrowed who could complain, the panel treated the Act as content-based, applied strict scrutiny anyway, and found the law survives it, while rejecting the vagueness challenge. The three judges split three ways on how to get there. NetChoice filed a petition for rehearing en banc on July 16, 2026; until it is resolved the Act stands. Every other entry in this cluster is a law being blocked. This is the one going the other direction, and the standing holding is the mechanism.
Ohio's SB 1 bans DEI programs at public colleges, bars full-time faculty from striking, mandates 'institutional neutrality' on 'controversial beliefs or policies,' sets rules for classroom discussion of contested topics, and creates post-tenure review that can lead to termination. Signed March 2025 and effective June 2025, it is widely described as one of the broadest state restrictions on academic freedom.
Ohio's HB 8, signed by Governor DeWine in January 2025 and effective that April, requires every public school to adopt a policy on 'sexuality content' that lets parents review and opt their children out of such instruction, and compels school staff to notify parents of changes in a student's services or well-being, which advocates say forces the outing of LGBTQ students who confide in counselors. Dubbed Ohio's 'Don't Say Gay' law by opponents, it also mandates released-time policies for off-site religious instruction.
Ohio recorded 7 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts. The removals came amid Ohio's Parents' Bill of Rights (HB 8).
Enforcement actions
Ohio State University expelled student Guy Christensen without a disciplinary hearing in 2025 over videos criticizing a congressman and commenting on the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers; the ACLU sued, alleging the university retaliated against protected speech and denied him due process.
An Ohio teacher was suspended for keeping four children's books with LGBTQ+ characters in her classroom, a case lawmakers cited while pushing a bill to strip teachers and school librarians of the educational defense against obscenity charges.
Anthony Novak created a Facebook page in 2016 that parodied the police department in Parma, Ohio. Officers raided his apartment, seized his electronics, and arrested him, and he was prosecuted for a felony of disrupting police operations before a jury acquitted him. Police said the spoof page disrupted their work because people contacted the department about fake posts; Novak and free-speech advocates, including a widely noted Supreme Court brief from the satirical site The Onion, said it was protected parody. The Sixth Circuit granted the officers immunity and the Supreme Court declined to take the case.
South Dakota recorded 7 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
Enforcement actions
The University of South Dakota moved to fire art professor Michael Hook in September 2025 over a Facebook post about the killing of activist Charlie Kirk; he deleted it within hours and apologized, then sued alleging a First Amendment violation. The state's governor celebrated the firing.
Wisconsin enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Wisconsin recorded roughly 480 school book bans in PEN America's 2024-25 tracking, among the highest totals in the Midwest, but nearly all came from a single district -- the Elkhorn Area School District -- which pulled hundreds of titles. It is a stark example of how one concentrated local campaign can drive an entire state's numbers.
Enforcement actions
The Kaukauna, Wisconsin school board voted 6-1 in May 2026 to fire high-school social-studies teacher Patrick Meyer over a social-media post referencing the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, citing 'material disruption' to school operations.
Alabama enacted an App Store Accountability Act in February 2026, joining Utah, Texas, and Louisiana. It largely tracks Utah's and Louisiana's amended frameworks, requiring app stores to verify age categories and obtain parental consent for minors before downloads or purchases.
Alabama's 2024 library law and accompanying administrative-code changes condition state funding on local libraries relocating material deemed 'sexually explicit' or otherwise 'inappropriate' away from youth sections, issuing minor-specific library cards, and getting advance approval for new materials. In November 2025 the Alabama Public Library Service board went further, ordering more than 200 libraries to purge youth sections of content on 'transgender procedures, gender ideology, or the concept of more than two biological genders.' The Fairhope library was stripped of state funding as the first enforcement action, prompting a community drive that replaced about $39,000.
Alabama enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Enforcement actions
Two community leaders, Ratchford and Smith, were arrested at an Alabama school board meeting in Nov 2023 for silently holding letter-size pieces of paper. In Feb 2024 they were fully acquitted of all charges, with the presiding judge stating from the bench that if anyone had engaged in disorderly conduct it was the officers who arrested them. They then filed a federal civil-rights suit in the Middle District of Alabama with the ACLU of Alabama, pleading the First and Fourth Amendments, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Alabama common law, and seeking damages plus accommodations for wheelchair users to prevent a repeat. This is the cleanest example on the map of the disorderly-conduct charge being used as a general-purpose tool against silent, non-disruptive expression -- there was no speech to interrupt, no volume, no profanity, just paper. It sits deliberately alongside the Round Rock record: the same mechanism, the opposite politics, and in this instance a judge who said so out loud. Source caveat: the reporting names the federal venue but not the school district, so this record is placed at Montgomery, the district seat, rather than at the meeting itself.
Will Freeman, an Alabama software engineer, built DeFlock.me, a crowdsourced open-source map of automated licence plate readers from Flock Safety, Motorola and other vendors. In late 2024 Flock's lawyers, working through an outside firm, sent him a cease-and-desist demanding he stop all use of the name DeFlock or any variation, strip it from the website and all promotional material, and refrain from adopting anything similar in future. Note the legal theory: Flock pleaded trademark DILUTION rather than infringement. That choice is the weakness. Federal anti-dilution law contains express carve-outs for noncommercial use of a mark and for use in connection with criticising or commenting on the mark owner or its products, and Freeman's use is both -- so as EFF put it in rejecting the demand on his behalf pro bono, the claim fails at the threshold before anyone needs to argue whether dilution is even likely. EFF characterised the letter as one entry in a long list of groups using baseless intellectual-property claims to silence critics, designed to frighten under-resourced activists with an expensive letterhead. At the time DeFlock had mapped more than 16,000 individual camera locations, over a third of them Flock devices, against the 1,700-odd agencies EFF's own Atlas of Surveillance had identified. The map is still online and by mid-2026 covered tens of thousands of readers. It has driven the grassroots campaign that has ended more than 50 municipal Flock contracts, which is the context for everything else in this batch: the target was effective, and that is why it drew a letter. Pinned at Montgomery and marked approximate; Freeman's city is not stated.
Arkansas recorded 5 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
Arkansas passed the nation's first Social Media Safety Act in 2023, requiring age verification and parental consent for minors. A federal judge permanently struck it down in 2025 as a content-based speech restriction that was unconstitutionally vague.
Arkansas's Act 372 (2023) would have made it a crime for librarians or booksellers to 'furnish a harmful item to a minor' and let officials override which books libraries keep. A federal judge permanently struck down its criminal-liability and material-review sections in December 2024 as unconstitutionally vague and overbroad; the state is appealing.
Delaware enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson in January 2026 as part of a classified-information leak investigation, alarming press-freedom advocates about source protection and journalistic privacy.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented at least 32 journalists detained or charged in 2025 simply for doing their jobs -- nearly 90% while covering immigration protests -- as the US fell to a record-low press-freedom ranking and was classified as a 'difficult situation' for the first time.
After Charlie Kirk was shot on Sept 10, 2025, more than 600 people were fired, suspended or investigated over social media posts about his death. The mechanism was not employers discovering posts on their own: the wave followed a coordinated push by pro-Trump influencers, lawmakers and Vice-President JD Vance urging the public to report posts they judged unsympathetic to Kirk. Employers acted on those reports, in several documented cases on a single complaint. Resolved public-sector cases have since produced settlements between $125,000 and $500,000, including an Iowa public defender reinstated after nine weeks and paid $125,000, an Iowa teacher paid $145,000 with full benefits, a University of South Dakota art professor swiftly reinstated with no damages, and a Clemson professor whose termination was rescinded on confidential terms. READ THE PATTERN CAREFULLY: every resolved case involved a government or public-institution employee, because those are the only workers with a First Amendment claim against their employer at all. Public employees are protected only when speaking as citizens on a matter of public concern, and even then their interest is balanced against the employer's interest in an efficient workplace -- Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) and Connick v. Myers. Private-sector employees have no First Amendment claim whatsoever. So the settlements record the small protected minority of this wave and say nothing about the larger number of private employees dismissed over the same posts, who had no remedy and therefore generated no court record. The absence of private-sector cases here is a feature of the law, not evidence they did not happen.
Beginning in March 2025, the State Department launched a catch and revoke effort to cancel the visas of foreign students tied to pro-Palestinian activism, with officials saying artificial-intelligence tools would scan visa-holders' social media accounts. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said more than 300 visas had been revoked, and students including Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, and Mohammed Hoque were detained, several pointing to their posts or writing. The administration framed it as protecting national security and revoking a privilege from those who back terrorism; civil-liberties groups warned it punishes protected speech and chills dissent on campuses.
Florida's HB 3 bars children under 14 from social media and requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds. It took effect in 2025 but a federal judge enjoined it in June 2025, finding it likely failed First Amendment scrutiny.
Florida has led the nation in school book bans for three straight years, with 2,304 removals in the 2024-25 school year and more than 8,800 district-level bans recorded since 2021, driven by vaguely worded state laws and the threat of penalties on educators who keep challenged titles.
Florida's SB 1438 (2023), the 'Protection of Children Act,' lets the state pull the licenses of venues that admit minors to 'adult live performances,' a term LGBTQ advocates say is aimed at drag shows. A federal judge blocked the law in June 2023 as an unconstitutional, viewpoint-based restriction that was overly broad and vague, and the injunction has held through appeal.
Florida's Stop WOKE Act (the Individual Freedom Act) restricts how schools, universities, and employers can teach or train on race, gender, and privilege, barring promotion of a list of 'divisive concepts.' Federal courts struck its workplace provisions -- affirmed by the 11th Circuit, with a permanent injunction in July 2024 -- and blocked its higher-education provisions; the K-12 provisions remain in effect.
Florida's Parental Rights in Education Act (HB 1557), known as 'Don't Say Gay,' bars classroom instruction and discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in grades K-3, and requires any such instruction to be 'age-appropriate' in older grades. Signed in March 2022, it was expanded by the state Board of Education to all K-12 grades in 2023. Critics including Equality Florida and the ACLU said its vague terms and parental-lawsuit provision chill teachers and students from acknowledging LGBTQ people at all.
Florida Senate Bill 7072 restricts how large platforms moderate, deplatform, and prioritize content, including barring them from deplatforming political candidates. A federal court blocked it, the Eleventh Circuit largely agreed, and in 2024 the Supreme Court vacated and remanded the case, leaving it on hold.
Enforcement actions
On Jan 6, 2026 Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner posted on his official Facebook page that the city is a safe haven for everyone and among the most tolerant in the nation. Raquel Pacheco, a US Army veteran and three-time candidate for local office, replied critically, accusing him of calling for the death of all Palestinians, of trying to shut down a theatre over a film that offended him, and of refusing to stand up for the LGBTQ community. Six days later two Miami Police officers knocked on her door, saying they wanted a conversation and to confirm she had written the comments. She began recording. On the video the officers explain that they came to prevent anyone else reading the post from becoming agitated or agreeing with her, say the line about the mayor and Palestinians could probably incite somebody to do something radical, and advise her to refrain from posting things like that. Her recorded reply -- asking whether this is not freedom of speech, whether this is not America -- is the whole case in one sentence. Miami Beach police said they dispatched officers to assess whether there was a safety threat. FIRE wrote to the department, noting her statements fall well short of the legal threshold for incitement, which requires speech urging unlawful action and likely to produce it immediately, and that nothing in the post called for illegal activity. The rationale is what makes this record load-bearing: the officers were not investigating a threat to a person, they were concerned about how third parties might react to a political opinion. That reasoning has no stopping point, and it arrived with advice to stop speaking.
Journalist Dave Decker was arrested at an anti-deportation demonstration in Miami in late 2025 and held for more than 30 hours; he said he was the only journalist present, so his detention 'effectively stopped the news from getting out.'
Douglass Mackey, a pro-Trump influencer known online as Ricky Vaughn, was convicted in 2023 and sentenced to seven months over 2016 memes that told Hillary Clinton supporters they could vote by text, charged under an 1870 conspiracy-against-rights statute. Prosecutors called it a scheme to deprive people of the right to vote; critics said satirical memes were being treated as a federal crime. A federal appeals court threw out the conviction in 2025 for insufficient evidence and ordered the case dismissed.
Georgia recorded 153 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 43 new in the 2024-25 school year. Removals clustered in a small number of districts, the concentration pattern PEN America documents across most banning states. Georgia's expedited removal law (SB 226) gives districts just 10 days to rule a challenged title harmful to minors.
Georgia's 2024 Protecting Georgia's Children on Social Media Act requires age verification and parental consent for minors. A federal judge preliminarily blocked it in June 2025 over First Amendment concerns.
Georgia's SB 226 (2022) created a fast-track process that gives a school principal only days to decide whether a challenged book is 'harmful to minors' and order it pulled, bypassing the deliberative review libraries traditionally use. Critics say the short clock and vague standard invite removals of LGBTQ and race-related titles, and Georgia districts logged scores of bans in the years that followed.
Enforcement actions
The first trial in Georgia's racketeering case against training-centre opponents began in Jul 2025 against Ayla King, a Massachusetts resident who was 19 at the time of the indictment and uses they/them pronouns. King faces a single racketeering charge carrying five to twenty years. Prosecutors allege King entered the DeKalb County construction site in Mar 2023 with more than twenty other masked activists after a nearby protest concert; their attorney says they are innocent. King requested a speedy trial in late 2023 and then waited more than eighteen months while the case turned on a procedural dispute over whether the trial had begun within the required window -- so invoking the speedy-trial right produced delay rather than speed. The concert detail is the contested hinge: the majority of those charged that day were attending a protest music festival while property destruction occurred nearly a mile away, which is precisely the distance a conspiracy charge is designed to close. The outcome was expected to shape how Georgia pursues the remaining sixty-plus defendants. The training centre itself, an $118 million facility on 85 acres, has since opened; efforts to stop it by litigation and by a referendum that gathered more than 100,000 signatures failed in the courts or stalled on appeal.
Atlanta-area journalist Mario Guevara, founder of the Spanish-language outlet MG News, was arrested June 14, 2025 while covering a 'No Kings' protest in DeKalb County; the criminal charges were dropped, but ICE kept him detained -- explicitly citing his livestreaming of law-enforcement activity -- and later moved to deport him.
In Sept 2023 Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr indicted 61 people under the state's racketeering statute over opposition to Atlanta's police and fire training centre, known to its opponents as Cop City. RICO was written for organised crime and permits enhanced punishment for offences tied to a wider conspiracy, stacked on top of the penalty for the underlying act. Serious allegations sit inside this indictment and should be stated plainly: some defendants are accused of throwing Molotov cocktails and fireworks at police, firefighters and EMTs, of arson, and of damaging official vehicles, and more than three dozen already faced domestic terrorism charges. The speech objection is not that nothing happened. It is the sweep. The indictment assembles roughly 200 incidents into a single conspiracy, ranging from attempted first-degree arson down to defendants being reimbursed for food or glue supplied to protesters -- so buying materials and leafleting sit in the same count as firebombing. Three organisers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund were charged over bail-fund work. The indictment dates the conspiracy's start to 25 May 2020, the day George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, which is months before the training centre was publicly known -- the Cop City Coalition reads that as an attempt to fold the wider racial-justice movement into the case. Only 13 of the 61 defendants are Georgia residents. The ACLU argued prosecutors could have charged the specific property offences and instead escalated speech, peaceful protest and minor civil disobedience into felony racketeering, warning the indictment could become a template for other states, several of which have their own RICO and domestic-terrorism statutes. A district attorney and a judge involved in related proceedings had both indicated the underlying cases were thin.
In Apr 2023 three activists were arrested and held for almost three months on felony intimidation charges for distributing flyers about the police killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, known as Tortuguita, a 26-year-old activist shot during a police raid on a forest encampment in Jan 2023. The flyers named a state trooper involved and called him a murderer. All three were later folded into the 61-defendant racketeering indictment. This is the core speech case in the Cop City prosecutions and the one most easily lost inside the larger story: no property was damaged, nothing was thrown, nobody was touched. The conduct charged as felony intimidation was printing an accusation on paper and handing it to people, and the pre-trial detention -- nearly three months -- exceeded what many misdemeanour convictions carry. Naming a public official and accusing him of a killing is close to the centre of what political speech is for, whether or not the accusation is sustained, and it is the kind of claim that a defamation suit rather than a felony arrest is built to test.
Kentucky's House Bill 4 bans DEI offices, employees, and training at public colleges, bars affirmative action in hiring and scholarships, requires a 'viewpoint neutrality' policy, and prohibits institutions from requiring any course whose 'primary purpose is to indoctrinate' students with a 'discriminatory concept.' Passed over Governor Beshear's veto and effective June 2025.
Kentucky recorded 103 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. Removals clustered in a small number of districts, the concentration pattern PEN America documents across most banning states. Nearly all of Kentucky's bans came from a single district that pulled about 100 titles under the SB 150 gag order; the books were returned after the state clarified the law did not apply to libraries.
Louisiana's Secure Online Child Interaction and Age Limitation Act (Act 456, La. R.S. 51:1751-1756) required platforms to verify every user's age, obtain parental consent for minors, and curb data collection, targeted advertising and adult-to-minor direct messaging. On December 15, 2025 Judge John W. deGravelles struck it down in a 94-page opinion, granting NetChoice summary judgment and holding every challenged provision unconstitutional in all its applications as well as unconstitutionally vague: the state cannot claim a free-floating power to restrict the ideas children may encounter. The remedy is narrower than the holding. The permanent injunction covers ten named NetChoice members -- Meta, Nextdoor, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, X, YouTube, Automattic, Discord and Amazon's Twitch -- so the Act is dead against the platforms most people use and formally still on the books against everyone else. Attorney General Liz Murrill, who said the court had protected corporations that facilitate child exploitation over a simple age check, appealed to the Fifth Circuit (No. 26-30016) and filed her opening brief March 25, 2026, challenging NetChoice's standing and the thinness of its member-specific evidence. That is the same record-based attack that got Mississippi's injunction vacated in this circuit, which is why a win below is not yet a win.
Louisiana enacted its App Store Accountability Act on June 30, 2025, requiring app stores to verify users' ages and secure parental consent for minors, with obligations taking effect July 1, 2026. Unlike Utah's and Texas's versions, it provides no developer safe harbor and no private right of action; the state attorney general enforces it.
Louisiana recorded 1 district-level school book ban in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. This was a single isolated district removal. The lone recorded removal came as Louisiana's library minor-access law (Act 436) took effect.
Louisiana's HB 122 (2024), signed by Governor Jeff Landry after his predecessor had vetoed an identical bill, bars teachers, staff, and outside presenters from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with students in any grade from kindergarten through twelfth, including their own identity, and reaches beyond the classroom into extracurricular, athletic, and social activities. It is broader than most copycats: Louisiana is the only state besides Florida to extend the restriction into high schools. A companion law, HB 121, requires parental permission before a school uses a student's chosen name or pronouns.
Louisiana's Act 436 (2023), signed by Governor John Bel Edwards, requires every public library in the state to adopt a policy restricting minors' access to 'sexually explicit material' and to build a library-card system letting parents decide whether their child may check out such titles, on pain of losing state maintenance funding and construction financing. After it took effect, Livingston Parish emptied the young-adult shelves at five branches and ordered librarians to read every title for sexual content, part of a wave that pulled tens of thousands of books for review.
Enforcement actions
In March 2020, during the first weeks of COVID-19 lockdowns, Waylon Bailey posted a Facebook joke comparing the pandemic to a zombie apocalypse, claiming the local sheriff's office had been ordered to shoot the infected, complete with emojis and a World War Z reference. About a dozen Rapides Parish, Louisiana deputies in vests came to his garage with guns drawn, handcuffed him without a warrant, and booked him under the state terrorizing statute; prosecutors then dropped the charge. The sheriff's office argued the post was a public-safety threat, but in 2023 a federal appeals court ruled the joke was protected speech and the arrest violated his rights, and a jury awarded him 205,000 dollars in damages.
Maryland became the 30th state to regulate AI deepfakes in election communications, treating deceptive synthetic political media as a form of fraud. Such measures restrict political speech and raise First Amendment questions; California's prohibition version was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged.
Maryland recorded 71 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 6 new in the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Mississippi recorded 22 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Mississippi's Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act requires age verification and parental consent for minors. After the Supreme Court declined to block it in 2025, the law took effect, prompting at least one platform to cut off the state rather than comply.
Enforcement actions
Gabriel Olivier preached outside an amphitheatre in Brandon, Mississippi. The city restricted where he could speak and barred his signs and loudspeaker during live events, confining protest to a designated zone. In 2021 he was arrested for stepping outside it, pleaded no contest, and took a $350 fine and a year of unsupervised probation. When he sued to challenge the ordinance itself, the lower courts held he could not -- a 1994 Supreme Court precedent, Heck v. Humphrey, bars civil suits that would undermine a criminal conviction, and that reasoning left the ordinance effectively unreviewable by anyone it had already been used against. On Mar 20, 2026 the Supreme Court reversed unanimously, Justice Kagan writing, holding Olivier may bring the civil challenge notwithstanding the conviction. The Court did not rule on whether the ordinance is constitutional; that question returns to the lower courts. The city said he shouted insults over a loudspeaker, and he may have; the holding does not depend on the content being agreeable. The structural point is the one to keep: a conviction under an ordinance had been functioning as immunity for the ordinance, so the people with standing to complain were exactly the people barred from complaining. That reasoning applied to any permit scheme, protest zone or buffer rule, whoever the speaker is.
North Carolina recorded 137 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 2 new in the 2024-25 school year. Removals clustered in a small number of districts, the concentration pattern PEN America documents across most banning states. The removals came amid implementation of the Parents' Bill of Rights (SB 49).
North Carolina's SB 49, enacted in August 2023 over Governor Cooper's veto, bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through grade four and requires schools to notify parents before a student is referred to by a new name or pronoun, which advocates say forces the outing of LGBTQ students. The law has driven Title IX complaints and a wave of book removals targeting LGBTQ content.
Oklahoma recorded 45 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
South Carolina adopted a 2024 regulation creating a statewide process to remove books from all public schools, producing state-mandated removals of titles a board deems to contain sexual content.
Enforcement actions
Clemson University fired three staff members within days in September 2025 after the Clemson College Republicans circulated screenshots of their social-media posts about Charlie Kirk's killing, amid pressure from state lawmakers, the attorney general, and the president.
Tennessee schools pulled 1,622 books in 2024-25, the third-highest total nationally, and in 2024 the state created a mechanism allowing statewide no-read lists that can strip titles from every public school.
Tennessee's Adult Entertainment Act, the first state drag ban, makes it a crime to stage 'adult cabaret' -- defined to include 'male or female impersonators' deemed harmful to minors -- on public property or anywhere a minor could see it, as a misdemeanor or, for repeat offenses, a felony. A federal judge struck it down in 2023 as a vague, viewpoint-based speech restriction, but the 6th Circuit reinstated it in 2024 on the ground that the challengers lacked standing, without ruling on the First Amendment.
Enforcement actions
Larry Bushart, a retired law enforcement officer, was jailed by the Perry County, Tennessee sheriff's department for 37 days on a $2 million bond over a Facebook meme. The meme quoted President Trump reacting to a 2024 school shooting at Perry High School in IOWA -- the department claimed the post caused mass hysteria because the county name and the Iowa school name matched, in different states. A public records request later established that the school had exchanged no communication about his post at all. While in custody he lost a post-retirement job and missed both his wedding anniversary and the birth of his grandchild. On 2026-05-20 the parties announced an $835,000 settlement; Bushart said his First Amendment rights had been vindicated. FIRE, which represented him, argued that a meme does not become a true threat because a sheriff says so, and that nobody should be taken from their home at night over a harmless one. The sequence is the point and it did not change: the arrest came first, the theory of the threat afterwards, and five weeks of custody in between on a bond set at two million dollars for a social media post.
Texas SB 2420, signed May 27, 2025, requires app stores to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent for minors. A federal judge preliminarily enjoined it on Dec 23, 2025, holding it triggers and fails strict scrutiny. The Fifth Circuit administratively stayed that injunction on May 28, 2026 and granted a stay pending appeal on Jun 4, 2026, which is the date the law became enforceable. The challengers applied to the Supreme Court on Jun 10, 2026 to vacate the stay (No. 25A1389); that application's outcome is not established here.
Texas enacted the SCOPE Act (HB 18) in 2023 and it took effect Sep 1, 2024, requiring digital services to determine whether a user is a minor and obtain verified parental consent before a minor under 18 enters an agreement with the service, plus parental supervision tools. Those duties are in force. A federal judge enjoined only the content-monitoring and filtering provisions as vague and likely preempted, and a companion ruling widened that in Feb 2025 to the targeted-advertising restrictions. On Jul 24, 2026 the Fifth Circuit affirmed that injunction, holding the monitoring mandate preempted by Section 230 under Doe v. MySpace -- but it left the age-verification and parental-consent core untouched, so the operative half of the law stands.
Texas removed 1,781 books from school shelves in 2024-25, second only to Florida, after the 2023 READER Act required book vendors to rate titles for sexual content and pressured districts to pull anything flagged.
Texas Senate Bill 12 bars 'sexually oriented performances' on public property or in front of minors, a Class A misdemeanor, in a measure widely understood as a drag ban. A federal judge permanently blocked it in September 2023 as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, but in November 2025 the 5th Circuit vacated that injunction under the Supreme Court's Moody v. NetChoice framework, letting Texas enforce SB 12 while litigation continues. The appeals court noted that family-friendly drag performances remain lawful.
Texas House Bill 20 bars large social-media platforms from removing or demoting content based on a user viewpoint, a must-carry rule challenged as compelled speech. Courts blocked it before it took effect, and in 2024 the Supreme Court signaled it likely violates the First Amendment and sent it back to the lower courts.
Enforcement actions
She asked whether the tap water was safe; the town charged her with a felony. On Apr 6, 2026, Jennifer Combs of Kerens posted on her Southern Belle Watch Facebook page asking Trinidad residents (pop. ~800) to report discolored water, sediment, odor or illness so she could pass complaints to TCEQ, state health officials and the EPA -- prompted by an elderly resident who had spent $200 on bottled water. On May 8 police arrested her on a felony warrant for initiating a false emergency, a statute aimed at fake bomb threats and fires; she was held 23 hours without bail in the Navarro County Jail. The police chief publicly called it a cut-and-dry case of spreading false information. A Henderson County grand jury declined to indict in late May. THE VALIDATION: Trinidad issued a boil-water notice on Apr 21 -- after her post -- and TCEQ records show violations including failed chloramine-effectiveness sampling and dead-end distribution pipes with discolored water at the endpoints; investigations continue. Residents told reporters they have bought bottled water for years, some for decades. THE CASCADE, which is why this is a cluster and not one arrest: Winston Noles (Otto the Watchdog) was arrested for disorderly conduct over a protest sign outside city hall; water clerk Colby Reyes was fired after refusing the chief's request to file a complaint saying the sign offended her (she said it had not), and her brother was fired too; Municipal Judge Shellena Bivens dismissed the Noles charge for lack of evidence and was then fired by the city. The police chief resigned Jun 19. Federal civil-rights suits are stacked in the Eastern District of Texas (Tyler Division): Combs (retaliation, false arrest, free speech), Noles, Reyes and her brother, and an amended complaint over the judge's firing. Combs, a past Chamber of Commerce president, was removed from her veterans-group board over the mug shot. Her attorney frames it as government agents caging a citizen for protected speech about a public-safety cover-up.
Two attendees at Round Rock, Texas school board meetings said their arrests were retaliation for criticising the superintendent during public comment. Judge David Ezra allowed most of the resulting suit to proceed, rejecting motions to dismiss claims that the board violated the First Amendment by limiting seating capacity at a meeting, by retaliating for protected speech, and by barring a plaintiff from a meeting open to public participation; he also upheld Fourth Amendment claims for unreasonable seizure and false arrest, a Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection claim against the board president, and Texas Open Meetings Act claims. He rejected a number of other claims, and rejected most of those brought by a second father, Dustin Clark, who also faced arrest after speaking at board meetings. Nobody has been found liable; surviving dismissal is not winning. Recorded at that stage because the mechanism -- capacity limits, exclusion from future meetings, arrest for the tone of criticism -- is identical to the council-meeting records already on this map, and here it was aimed at conservative parents rather than at progressive activists.
Priscilla Villarreal -- La Gordiloca, a Laredo citizen journalist whose Facebook page has roughly 200,000 followers, nearly the city's population -- was arrested in 2017 under a never-before-prosecuted Texas statute making it a felony to 'misuse official information,' for texting a police officer to confirm the names of a suicide victim and a crash victim: routine source verification. She alleges police and the district attorney spent months hunting for a charge because she filmed and criticized them. A state judge threw the charges out as unconstitutional. But when she sued, the Fifth Circuit granted every official qualified immunity; the Supreme Court vacated that ruling in 2024 and ordered reconsideration, the Fifth Circuit en banc reinstated essentially the same result -- 'just in different packaging,' as a dissenting judge put it -- and on March 23, 2026 the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, with Justice Sotomayor calling the denial a grave error. Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee, had written earlier: 'Priscilla Villarreal was put in jail for asking a police officer a question. If that is not an obvious violation of the Constitution, it's hard to imagine what would be.' The arrest was unconstitutional; after nine years, no one will answer for it.
Jourdanton Independent School District's board fired high-school teacher Matthew Holland in September 2025 over a social-media post about Charlie Kirk's killing, one of roughly 180 Texas educator complaints the state education agency said it would investigate, with the commissioner threatening to pull teaching certifications.
In Granbury, Texas a chief deputy constable spent two years investigating three school librarians over books he deemed obscene -- including Toni Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye' -- issuing subpoenas for checkout records and drafting criminal complaints, in what free-speech advocates called an unprecedented attempt to prosecute librarians over library books.
Fox 7 Austin photojournalist Carlos Sanchez was pushed to the ground by police and charged with criminal trespass while covering a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Texas at Austin in April 2024, a case press-freedom groups cite as emblematic of the risks of covering protests.
Virginia recorded more than 300 school book bans in recent PEN America tracking, with nearly 100 added in the 2024-25 year. Removals clustered in districts such as Spotsylvania and Hanover, and a 2025 state legislative audit found multiple districts restricting library materials; in one case Lynchburg schools recalled donated copies of a free-speech handbook over alleged adult satire.
Enforcement actions
A federal judge has ordered the government to account for what it did with two phones CBP took from a journalist at the border. Max Blumenthal, founder of The Grayzone, was detained about two and a half hours at Dulles on Jul 10, 2026 returning from a reporting trip to Iran, where he had covered Ali Khamenei's funeral. Officers questioned him about his journalism, who funded his travel, whether he was paid for interviews and whether he would return. When he refused to give passcodes, citing his sources, an officer told him the devices would be hooked to machines for extraction. THE DETAIL THAT DRIVES THE CASE: CBP took the two phones and left his laptop and camera untouched, despite invoking a search for evidence of criminal activity. His counsel argues that selectivity shows officials wanted contacts and source communications, not contraband. Blumenthal says that while still in Tehran he saw posts by Trump ally Laura Loomer calling for his arrest on return; CBP's questions tracked those posts, and Loomer publicly celebrated the seizure days later. ADC filed a Rule 41(g) motion in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jul 16 alleging First and Fourth Amendment and Privacy Protection Act violations. The phones came back about a week after the filing, and the government argued the case was therefore moot, submitting a CBP declaration that the devices were referred for inspection but could not be accessed, no search occurred and nothing was retained. On Jul 30 Judge Leonie Brinkema declined to moot it and ORDERED DISCOVERY -- chain-of-custody records, forensic reports, audit logs, whether images or backups were made, and who was granted access -- drawing the line between a routine border phone check and an advanced forensic search, which under Fourth Circuit law requires a warrant. No warrant was produced. The Freedom of the Press Foundation's Seth Stern argues border searches are being used to target disfavored journalists. Returning the devices does not answer who ordered the seizure or why -- which is what discovery is now for.
While Staunton, Virginia was debating whether to cancel its Flock contract after resident complaints, Flock CEO Garrett Langley sent an unsolicited email to the city's police chief. In it he characterised the nationwide pushback against the company as evidence that law enforcement was under coordinated attack, and described the residents raising objections as activist groups seeking to defund police, weaken public safety and normalise lawlessness. This is the softest mechanism in the batch and worth recording precisely for that reason. Nobody was silenced and nothing was removed. A vendor with a financial interest in the outcome wrote privately to an unelected official in the middle of a live public debate, recasting the constituents taking part in it as an organised threat. Whether that is improper is a judgement for readers; what makes it a record is that residents petitioning their own council had their motives characterised to the police chief without their knowledge, by a party to the contract under discussion.
Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University researcher, was detained outside his Virginia home after DHS accused him of spreading Hamas propaganda based on Facebook posts about Gaza. An internal State Department memo conceded his statements were likely protected First Amendment speech. He was held without charge and released on bond about two months later.
Loudoun County, Virginia parents sued the school board and its chair after the chair interrupted several speakers and ended public comment early while they were raising the board's handling of a student with an arrest record and alleged MS-13 ties. They sought a temporary restraining order to be allowed to speak at the next meeting. In Nov 2024 a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia DENIED the TRO, holding their legal team had not produced enough evidence to justify that extraordinary relief; the underlying suit continued. Counsel for the parents, from America First Legal, said they disagreed and would keep litigating. This record is here because it lost. Most public-comment cases on this map ended in an anti-SLAPP strike, an acquittal or a survived motion to dismiss, and a map that only logs wins would misrepresent the odds to anyone deciding whether to go speak at their own board meeting. Cutting public comment short is also a thinner claim than arresting a speaker, and courts treat it that way -- worth knowing before relying on it.
In August 2012, FBI and Secret Service agents and Chesterfield County, Virginia police came to the home of Brandon Raub, a Marine veteran, to ask about his Facebook posts, then handcuffed him and held him in a psychiatric ward over song lyrics and anti-government political views that officials called concerning. A special justice ordered up to 30 days of confinement, but a circuit court judge dismissed the case days later, finding the petition so devoid of factual allegations that it could not give rise to a case. Authorities said the posts raised genuine concern and that he was taken for evaluation; Raub, his lawyers, and the court treated it as a First Amendment violation built on posts read out of context.
West Virginia recorded 2 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
Alaska recorded 57 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Arizona recorded 2 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 2 new in the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
Arizona enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Enforcement actions
Surprise, Arizona required anyone signing up to speak at public comment to agree in writing not to complain against any city worker -- a Council Criticism Policy embedded in the speaker form itself. Massie was arrested at a city council meeting after criticising a city employee. A free-speech legal organisation sued the city, seeking to strike the policy and recover damages, arguing the First Amendment overrides any form a resident is made to sign as the price of speaking: public meetings are not safe spaces for elected officials, and officials who cannot hear unvarnished constituent criticism should not hold office. At the next regular council meeting every single public-comment speaker addressed the arrest, several calling it an embarrassment to the city. The council did not respond to the suit at that meeting. The mechanism is what makes this record worth keeping -- not a heckler ejected mid-sentence, but a written precondition on the right to speak at all.
California's SB 243, signed October 13, 2025 and effective January 1, 2026, was the first comprehensive state law regulating 'companion' AI chatbots. It compels operators to disclose that users are interacting with AI (and to warn that companion bots may be unsuitable for some minors), maintain protocols to detect and respond to expressions of suicidal ideation or self-harm, block sexual content for minors, and enforce periodic break reminders. It creates a private right of action with damages of at least $1,000 per violation. Critics note that mandating what AI systems must and must not say raises compelled- and restricted-speech questions.
California's AB 1043, enacted in October 2025, takes an operating-system approach to age checks: device makers must offer an age-signal at setup and pass an age bracket to apps, rather than each site collecting IDs. It is scheduled to become operative January 1, 2027 and is widely seen as a lighter-touch alternative to app-store verification mandates.
California recorded 3 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
California AB 2655, part of the Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act, required large platforms to block or label materially deceptive election deepfakes and build reporting systems. A federal judge struck it down in 2025, holding it preempted by Section 230.
California AB 2839 let candidates and others sue over materially deceptive election deepfakes during an election window. A judge enjoined it within weeks in 2024 and struck it down in 2025 as a content-based restriction that hinders satire and protected political speech.
California AB 587 requires large social-media companies to publish their content-moderation policies and file semiannual reports on how they handle categories like hate speech and disinformation. In 2024 the Ninth Circuit blocked the contested reporting provisions as compelled speech, and California dropped them in a 2025 settlement.
Enforcement actions
On Jul 30, 2025 the Los Angeles City Council adopted Council Rule 7, barring members of the public from saying either of two specific words -- a racial slur and an obscene term for a woman -- or any variation of them during public comment, regardless of context and regardless of whether the speaker disrupts anything. One warning, then removal. Months later the council amended a second rule so that anyone removed is automatically barred from attending further council and committee meetings for up to six business days depending on their removal history. Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger, a resident who regularly speaks at public comment, criticized the rule itself on Oct 31, 2025, saying the council was afraid of the word and adding that it was insane they were more offended by bad words than by police brutalising citizens and journalists. She stayed within her time, addressed a matter squarely within the council's jurisdiction and disrupted nothing; the presiding officer warned her anyway. On Dec 3, 2025 the rule was enforced against her a second time and she was removed and barred from attending other meetings that day. In Jul 2026 the First Amendment Coalition and FIRE sent the council a demand letter threatening suit unless it repealed the word ban and the exclusion provisions, arguing the rule discriminates by viewpoint, is unreasonable in a public-comment period, and unlawfully authorises removal without any actual disruption. The motion was introduced by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson; the council has defended the rule as a response to persistent abusive speakers.
Sebastian Rucci -- developer, engineer and attorney for a proposed Imperial County data center that would be the largest in California -- sued four separate sets of critics for defamation through his company Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing. The targets: KPBS and reporter Kori Suzuki, plus San Diego State University, which owns the station, sued in Feb 2026 over articles published in Dec 2025 and Jan 2026, alleging defamation, false light and intentional interference with prospective economic advantage; Comite Civico del Valle and its executive director Luis Olmedo; and local activist Tison, who was additionally accused of harassment and of being paid to oppose the project, which he denies. The reporting that triggered it was not exotic: in Dec 2025 KPBS covered State Sen. Steve Padilla calling for public review of the project. Every case was struck under California's anti-SLAPP statute. Judge Cynthia Freeland, who granted the KPBS motion, had been sceptical from the start, telling Rucci none of the information in the articles was incorrect; on the Comite Civico motion the court found no admissible evidence connecting the organisation or Olmedo to any defamatory campaign. Rucci says he intends to keep pursuing legal action against KPBS, and separately has suits pending in Imperial County Superior Court seeking additional water sources for the facility. The detail worth carrying forward is Tison's: being sued made him speak more, not less -- more posts, more appearances at the Board of Supervisors, and a shift to talking about the money and the county rather than just the project.
Independent journalist Dexter Thomas was detained and exposed to a chemical irritant by federal officers while covering an immigration protest in Los Angeles on March 28, 2026, among more than 30 journalists detained during the city's immigration protests.
Google's transparency reporting documents a censorship method that needs no state at all: counterfeit legal process. It received four fake Indian court orders demanding removal of blog posts and entire blogs for alleged defamation, some threatening Google with punishment for failing to comply; four fake Peruvian court orders making similar demands, two of which claimed to have been issued in New York; and five fake German court orders demanding removal of allegedly defamatory search results, created by private individuals pretending to be different German courts. The point is structural. Platforms process removal demands at volume and largely have to take legal process at face value, because verifying every order against every court in every jurisdiction is not feasible. That makes a forged order a cheap and plausible route to deleting someone else's speech, and it only becomes visible when a platform bothers to check and then publishes what it found. Every forged order that is detected implies an unknown number that were not. Pinned at Mountain View, where the orders were received and identified, rather than in the countries whose courts were impersonated.
Independent journalist Nate Gowdy was thrown to the ground and held in painfully tight flex-cuffs while documenting a protest outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles on Aug. 8, 2025.
On June 9, 2025 at least ten journalists -- including CNN correspondent Jason Carroll, who reported live from inside the police cordon about his own impending detention -- were kettled and detained while covering protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles.
Colorado recorded 28 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 20 new in the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Colorado enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Hawaii enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Idaho's SB 1297, enacted in April 2026 and effective July 1, 2027, follows Nebraska's Conversational AI Safety Act model, requiring AI chatbots to disclose their non-human status, display crisis resources such as the 988 line, give periodic in-session reminders, and add protections for minor users.
Idaho's SB 1198 prohibits public colleges from requiring any 'critical theory' course for a major or minor. It is part of a 2025 wave in which 15 states enacted higher-education censorship laws restricting how race, gender, and related topics can be taught.
Idaho recorded 213 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 150 new in the 2024-25 school year. Removals clustered in a small number of districts, the concentration pattern PEN America documents across most banning states. The surge was driven in part by Idaho's library harmful-materials law (HB 710).
Idaho's HB 710, in effect since July 2024, bars schools and public libraries from letting anyone under 18 access material with 'sexual content,' regardless of the reader's age or the work's literary merit, and lets people sue libraries that fail to relocate or restrict such books, with monetary penalties. Libraries moved or pulled titles and curtailed minor access; in 2025 a coalition of major publishers, the Authors Guild, authors, parents, and a public library district sued, arguing the law violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Idaho enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Montana enacted SB 25, requiring disclosure of AI deepfakes in election communications and escalating to civil fines and, for repeat offenders, criminal referral. Such laws regulate political speech based on the government's view of truth, raising First Amendment questions; prohibition versions in California and Minnesota have faced court challenges.
Montana recorded 43 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
New Mexico enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Oregon's SB 1546, signed March 31, 2026 and effective January 1, 2027, regulates companion chatbots with AI-disclosure requirements, mandatory detection of suicidal ideation with crisis referral, and a first-of-its-kind conversation-interruption requirement that directly shapes product design, plus annual filings. It is enforced through a private right of action.
Oregon recorded 61 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 4 new in the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
Oregon enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
Enforcement actions
Toren McKnight spoke at the Sep 16, 2025 Ashland City Council meeting against the Enhanced Law Enforcement Area ordinance, an exclusion-zone measure pushed by Police Chief Tighe O'Meara. He said the country was in the middle of a fascist takeover, that the chief was backpedalling on the Medford model because it made him look like a fascist, and that funding police instead of services for vulnerable people was a choice. He was ordered silenced and removed. In Jan 2026 he filed a federal civil-rights suit against the city, Mayor Tonya Graham, O'Meara and Sgt. Robert Leonard. The complaint makes a point of the timing: an hour before ordering a citizen removed for criticising the chief's policy positions, Graham had proclaimed Sep 17 Constitution Day in honour of the 238th anniversary of the Constitution's signing. Other speakers at the same meeting, quoted in the complaint, told the council nobody present had spoken in favour of the ordinance and that the exclusion zone was a slippery slope. The defendants had not answered at the time of filing.
Utah's SB 142, signed March 26, 2025, was the nation's first App Store Accountability Act. It requires app stores to verify every user's age category at account creation and obtain parental consent before minors download apps or make purchases. Utah amended it in 2026 (HB 498) after a trade-group First Amendment challenge; developer obligations took effect May 6, 2026.
Utah was the first state to restrict minors' social media, passing a 2023 Social Media Regulation Act and a 2024 replacement, the Minor Protection in Social Media Act, mandating age checks, parental consent, and overnight curfews. A federal judge blocked the 2024 law as a First Amendment violation; an appeal is pending.
Utah enacted a law requiring disclosure or labeling of AI-generated deepfakes in election and campaign communications, part of a wave of state measures tracked by Public Citizen. States chose disclosure over outright bans to limit First Amendment exposure; California's prohibition version (AB 2839) was struck and Minnesota's is being challenged in court.
A 2024 Utah law created a state-mandated no-read list that removes specified books from every public school once they are banned in a set number of districts, one of the first statewide school book bans in the country.
Washington's HB 2225, signed in March 2026 and effective January 1, 2027, requires companion-chatbot operators to give non-human disclosures and periodic in-session reminders, protect minors, and avoid enumerated manipulative behaviors, with enforcement under the state Consumer Protection Act and Attorney General authority -- the most prescriptive of the West Coast chatbot laws.
Washington recorded 5 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year. These were isolated removals in one or two districts.
Enforcement actions
In Jul 2025 Valve added a rule to Steam's publisher guidelines prohibiting content that may violate the rules and standards set by Steam's payment processors and the related card networks and banks. Hundreds of adult and sexual-content games were removed within days. Itch.io went further, de-indexing its entire adult catalogue from browse and search -- reported at roughly 20,000 independent titles -- which for many small developers removed the only route by which their work was discovered. Neither platform could tell creators what was actually prohibited, because the processors have not published the standards being enforced: Steam's rule simply points at them. That is the mechanism. There is no order to read, no category to avoid and nothing to appeal, so the rational response for any creator near the boundary is to withdraw, and uncertainty does the work a censor would otherwise have to do. The International Game Developers Association said it was alarmed by vague enforcement delisting legal, consensual and ethically developed games, disproportionately affecting LGBTQ+ and marginalised creators, and many affected titles fell outside the categories the campaign claimed to target. As of mid-Sept 2025 none of the removed Steam titles had been relisted. A Change.org petition aimed at Visa and Mastercard went from 70,000 to more than 140,000 signatures in two days, and creators organised mass call campaigns to Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and PayPal. GOG, owned by CD Projekt, publicly took a different line and prioritised preservation. Pinned at Bellevue, where Valve wrote the rule; the effect was worldwide.
Matthew Meinecke, described in his complaint as a devout Christian who reads the Bible aloud, holds signs, hands out literature and answers questions at well-attended public events, was arrested twice by Seattle police. One arrest came at the mass protest outside the Jackson Federal Building on Jun 24, 2022, the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In Apr 2024 a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel sided with him; while it did not rule on the merits of his First Amendment claim, it signalled he is likely to prevail on that point, and the Seattle City Attorney's Office said it was reviewing the opinion. The pattern worth recording is that police removed the unpopular speaker rather than police the crowd reacting to him -- the heckler's-veto problem in its most literal form, and the same operational logic that gets a critic ejected from a council meeting for provoking a reaction. Note that the politics here run opposite to most of this map's campus and protest records: the speech being suppressed was religious and socially conservative, and the suppressing authority was a progressive city government.
Wyoming recorded 65 district-level school book bans in PEN America's tracking through the 2024-25 school year, including 8 new in the 2024-25 school year. The bans came from a small number of school districts.
In May 2025 Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a policy denying visas to foreign nationals the department judged responsible for censoring Americans. It grew into a broader campaign reaching noncitizens who work on misinformation research, fact-checking, content moderation, platform compliance, and trust and safety, and by the department's own account five people were sanctioned under it, among them former European commissioner Thierry Breton and Imran Ahmed, the lawful US resident who runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Several leaders of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research were deported before the case was heard. On 14 July 2026 Chief Judge James Boasberg of the federal district court in Washington granted a preliminary injunction in Coalition for Independent Technology Research v. Rubio, No. 1:26-cv-00815, staying the policy for the duration of the litigation. He held that the government was likely violating the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act by discriminating on viewpoint: the label of foreign censorship had been stretched to cover ordinary research, reporting, and advocacy, and the government could not tie the private researchers and nonprofit staff it targeted to the exercise of any foreign government's power. The ruling does not bar action against genuine foreign state actors; it bars treating content-moderation work as grounds for removal.
The KIDS Act (H.R. 7757) bundles a revised Kids Online Safety Act with more than a dozen internet bills. It passed the House 267-117 on June 29, 2026 and heads to the Senate. Beyond default safety settings for minors, critics including EFF warn it would push services to verify all users' ages and adopt government-directed moderation policies, chilling lawful speech.
The Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act (H.R. 2616) passed the US House 217-198 in May 2026. It would bar public elementary and middle schools that take federal funds from using them to teach or 'advance concepts related to gender ideology,' and would require schools to get parental consent before changing a student's pronouns, name, or sex-based accommodations, with no exception for student safety. Free-speech and civil-rights groups including the National Coalition Against Censorship and the ACLU call it a federal 'Don't Say Trans' law that would chill classroom speech, strip books with transgender characters, and force the outing of LGBTQ students. It awaits Senate action.
The No Political Enemies (NOPE) Act (H.R. 7060) is a proposed US federal law that would bar federal officials, including the president, from launching investigations or enforcement actions substantially motivated by a person's protected speech or political participation. It gives targets an affirmative defense, lets them sue for relief, and bars federal funds for speech-suppressing investigations. Introduced in January 2026 by Rep. Crow with a Senate companion, it is a direct response to the use of agencies like the DOJ, FBI, and IRS against critics, media outlets, universities, and nonprofits. It is pending in committee.
The ROAD Act (H.R. 4846) would create an affirmative legal defense for drivers in criminal and civil cases over 'motor vehicle incidents' involving someone convicted of 'riot.' Its sponsor said it would 'allow Americans to run over' people protesting in the street, drawing alarm that it would incentivize violence against demonstrators.
The Stop FUNDERs Act, introduced by Senator Cruz and Rep. Van Duyne, would add 'rioting' to the federal RICO law's predicate offenses, letting the Justice Department use racketeering tools -- asset forfeiture, conspiracy charges, joint liability -- against people and groups that fund or organize protests that turn into riots. Critics warn the broad federal definition of 'riot' could sweep in peaceful protest organizers and their funders, and the push intensified after Charlie Kirk's killing.
The SPONSOR Act would strip federal funding and tax-exempt status from a nonprofit if one of its officers or board members is convicted of a federal offense tied to a protest, including the broadly defined federal crimes of 'riot' and impeding a federal officer. Critics warn it could financially punish advocacy groups for the isolated acts of people connected to protests they support.
The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in May 2025, makes it a federal crime to publish nonconsensual intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes, and requires online platforms to remove flagged images within 48 hours of a valid request. Digital-rights groups warn the broad takedown system, with no counter-notice process and a tight deadline, could push platforms to over-remove lawful speech such as journalism, legal adult content, and other material.
The STOP CSAM Act (S.1829, with House companion H.R.3921) is a proposed US federal bill from Senators Durbin and Hawley that would let victims sue online platforms over child sexual abuse material and expand reporting duties. Privacy groups including EFF warn it pressures providers to scan user content and could make offering end-to-end encryption a legal liability. Reintroduced in May 2025, it was advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2025; a revised draft dropped the word 'reckless' to reduce -- but not eliminate -- the encryption risk.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act (S.558 / H.R.1007) is a proposed US federal law that would require the Department of Education to use the IHRA working definition of antisemitism when enforcing Title VI on campuses. Supporters including the ADL say it gives schools a clear standard for addressing harassment; critics including FIRE, the ACLU, and the IHRA definition author Kenneth Stern warn it would pressure schools to punish protected speech, especially criticism of Israel. It passed the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate over those concerns and was reintroduced in 2025. More than 30 states have separately adopted the IHRA definition.
The Free Speech Protection Act (S. 188), introduced by Senator Rand Paul in January 2025, would prohibit federal employees and contractors from directing online platforms to censor speech protected by the First Amendment. Aimed at government 'jawboning' after the Supreme Court's Murthy v. Missouri ruling, it covers posts, emails, texts, and direct messages, and would open agency communications with platforms to public-records requests. It was referred to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Beginning in 2025, the Department of Defense ordered the removal of hundreds of books from its K-12 schools for military families, citing diversity and gender themes, affecting schools across several states, two territories, and overseas bases.
A federal App Store Accountability Act (S. 1586 / H.R. 3149), introduced in 2025, would set a national app-store age-verification and parental-consent standard mirroring the state laws. It had not been enacted as of early 2026.
The Kids Online Safety Act is a proposed US federal law that would impose a duty of care on online platforms to prevent harms to minors such as content promoting suicide, eating disorders, and sexual exploitation. It passed the Senate 91-3 in 2024 but stalled in the House over First Amendment concerns, and critics including the ACLU and EFF warn it could push platforms to over-remove lawful speech. It remained stalled in both chambers as of 2026.
Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in 2024, requiring TikTok's owner ByteDance to divest the app or face a nationwide ban. The Supreme Court upheld it in January 2025; after a de jure ban that was never enforced, a US investor consortium took control of TikTok in January 2026.
The Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act (H.R. 140) would bar federal employees from using their position to influence online platforms to suppress lawful speech, and would add employee training and reporting requirements. The House passed it on a near party-line vote in March 2023, but it did not advance in the Senate. Backers framed it as a check on government pressure over social-media moderation; similar measures have been reintroduced since.
The EARN IT Act would amend Section 230 to strip platforms of liability protection unless they follow best practices for combating child sexual abuse material. Critics -- the Internet Society, EFF, CDT, TechFreedom -- warn that because offering end-to-end encryption could be treated as evidence of negligence, the bill effectively pressures providers to abandon E2EE. First introduced in 2020 and reintroduced in 2022 and 2023, it has repeatedly stalled but keeps returning; as of 2026 it carries less momentum than the STOP CSAM Act.
The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires telecom carriers to build interception-ready networks and to decrypt traffic only where they already hold the keys. It stops short of mandating encryption backdoors, so end-to-end encrypted content stays beyond compulsory reach -- the baseline the newer scanning and access bills seek to push past.
Enforcement actions
Reporting in Jul 2026 documented anti-Flock social media influencers manufacturing fake cease-and-desist letters and going viral with them -- in one case a former American Idol contestant and country musician who narrated an aggregated news report as though it were his own discovery, and circulated a fabricated legal threat. This record exists to keep the other four in this batch honest. Flock did send a real cease-and-desist to DeFlock, did press a hosting provider to drop HaveIBeenFlocked, and does block the Internet Archive; those are documented, with the letter itself published and EFF's response on the record. Invented threats damage exactly that documentation, because they give any company a free rebuttal to a genuine complaint and they train readers to discount the category. The reporting that surfaced the fabrications is the same outlet that obtained and published the authentic letter, which is the correct way round: whoever documents the real suppression should also be the one calling out the fake. Anyone using this map to argue a case should be able to cite the primary document, and for the four preceding records they can. National in effect; pinned at Washington and marked approximate.
Days after Jimmy Kimmel joked about the first lady in a mock correspondents-dinner sketch, Melania Trump called the joke 'hateful and violent,' the president publicly demanded ABC fire him, and on April 28, 2026 the FCC ordered Disney's ABC to file license-renewal applications for all eight of its owned stations within 30 days -- licenses not otherwise due until 2028 at the earliest, some 2031. Variety called the early-review demand unprecedented. FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who had previously threatened broadcasters over Kimmel's September 2025 remarks about the Charlie Kirk assassination, described accelerating license reviews on a podcast as one of the tools available when the agency has 'significant concerns' about a broadcaster's operations. The order was nominally tied to a discrimination probe over Disney's DEI policies, but it landed one day after the president's demand, and congressional Democrats and First Amendment groups condemned it as license-based retaliation for satire -- the second federal move against Kimmel's speech in a year, after the ACLU mobilized more than 500 entertainers in his defense in 2025.
Flock's master terms of service block the Internet Archive from capturing the page, which means a city cannot compare the agreement it signed against the agreement in force today. The consequence showed up in Feb 2026: a contract update carrying 147 individual changes was identified only because third parties diffed it by hand, not because anyone could pull an archived copy. This is censorship by prevention rather than removal, and it is the quietest mechanism in this batch. Nothing is taken down, no letter is sent and nobody is threatened -- the record simply never comes into existence, so a council that wants to know what it agreed to two years ago has no source to check against. For a public body spending public money that is an accountability problem rather than a commercial one: the terms governing a municipal surveillance contract are a public interest document, and a robots directive is doing work that no procurement rule contemplated. National in effect; pinned at Washington and marked approximate.
HaveIBeenFlocked, built by Cris van Pelt, lets a person check whether Flock cameras recorded them. Its data came from audit logs that multiple police departments released in response to public records requests without properly redacting licence plate information -- so the underlying material was disclosed by government, lawfully obtained, and published. Flock repeatedly approached the site's hosting provider seeking to have service revoked, asserting both that the site infringed its intellectual property and that it posed, in its words, "an immediate threat to public safety" and exposed officers to danger. Flock also warned police directly about the site, after which different divisions of the FBI circulated warnings about it to law enforcement. Going after the host rather than the speaker is the most effective censorship route available to a company, and the reason is structural: the host has no interest in the speech, bears no cost for dropping a customer, and there is no hearing, no filing and no ruling to appeal. A takedown achieved this way leaves no legal record at all. What is on the other side of the ledger: journalists and activists using the site have surfaced cases of police abuse and of ICE surveillance that led to firings, arrests, policy changes and cancelled contracts. National in effect; pinned at Washington and marked approximate.
In November 2023 Media Matters reported that advertisers' posts on X were appearing next to white-nationalist content; major advertisers pulled spending and Elon Musk sued. The attorneys general of Texas and Missouri then opened investigations into the group -- both blocked by federal courts as retaliation for protected newsgathering, with Missouri abandoning its probe in February 2025. In May 2025 the FTC picked up the same playbook, demanding the group's correspondence with advertisers and watchdogs as part of an 'ad boycott' investigation. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan enjoined it in August 2025: 'This case presents a straightforward First Amendment violation,' finding the agency likely acted with retaliatory animus, and the D.C. Circuit preserved the block in October. In May 2026 the FTC settled and the case was dismissed -- the third government investigation over the same article to be stopped on First Amendment grounds, in what ACLU-DC warned was part of a wider pattern of using investigative demands against ad agencies and news-rating firms to punish disfavored speech.
Trump sued Paramount for 20 billion dollars over how 60 Minutes edited a Kamala Harris interview -- a claim Paramount's own lawyers called completely without merit -- while the company needed FCC approval for its 8-billion-dollar sale to Skydance and Brendan Carr's FCC had opened a 'news distortion' probe into the same broadcast. The pressure worked through the newsroom first: 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens resigned in April 2025 saying he had lost the independence honest journalism requires, and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon followed in May. In July Paramount paid 16 million dollars to settle. Three days after Stephen Colbert called the payment 'a big fat bribe' on CBS's own air, the network cancelled The Late Show, the top-rated program in late night -- officially for financial reasons. A week later the FCC approved the merger, with Skydance committing to an ombudsman for ideological-bias complaints and 'a diversity of viewpoints' in programming. Veteran correspondent Steve Kroft called the settlement a shakedown; House Judiciary Democrats formally raised bribery concerns; and the sequence -- lawsuit, regulatory leverage, settlement, cancellation, approval -- became the template case for how licensing power can bend a newsroom without a single formal censorship order.
After the January 20, 2025 executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the 'Gulf of America,' the Associated Press kept the traditional name in its Stylebook while acknowledging the new one. On February 11 the White House stripped AP reporters of access to the Oval Office, Air Force One, and pool events until the wire service changed its style. AP sued three officials (AP v. Budowich). In April, Judge Trevor McFadden -- a Trump appointee -- granted a preliminary injunction: if the government opens its doors to some journalists it cannot shut them on others because of their viewpoints. In June a 2-1 D.C. Circuit panel stayed that ruling, holding that restricted presidential spaces are not First Amendment forums and that the White House 'retains discretion to determine, including on the basis of viewpoint, which journalists will be admitted' -- language press-freedom groups called a green light for viewpoint-based exclusion of reporters. The full circuit upheld the stay in July 2025 and the appeal was still being briefed into 2026, with the AP shut out of the pool throughout.
In August 2021 Apple announced a plan to scan iPhones on-device for known child-sexual-abuse images before iCloud upload. After cryptographers and rights groups warned the client-side-scanning system could be repurposed for broader surveillance, Apple paused it in September 2021 and formally abandoned it in December 2022, saying children can be protected 'without companies combing through personal data.'
This map tracks laws and rules that govern what people may say or publish online: censorship and site-blocking, mandates to take down or filter content, the criminalization of online speech, and laws that force or forbid how platforms moderate. Each entry is colored by where it stands, from in force to blocked by a court to struck down, and tagged by the kind of restriction it is. The map also tracks pro-speech and anti-censorship bills -- measures meant to limit the government's power to censor or retaliate against speech -- shown in teal. Every entry is tied to a primary or reputable source, including official texts and court dockets, and is verified before it goes on the map rather than added from memory. The map also logs enforcement actions -- individual cases where authorities visited, warned, arrested, charged, or sentenced someone over an online post -- shown as separate diamond markers and listed under Enforcement actions.
This is an early dataset and is being expanded. Know of a law that belongs here? Send a sourced article and it will be reviewed.
Most shared
The most-shared reporting on book bans and classroom censorship right now.
Why this map exists
A bill becomes a takedown mandate, a court blocks it, an appeal revives it. The point of this map is to keep that shifting picture in one verified, sourced place, so a fight in one state or country is easy to compare with the next.
Read the book-ban action guide →
When speech is policed, privacy is the first defense.
Laws that police what you post often begin by identifying who posted it. vp.net is a privacy network that keeps your online identity and location from being logged -- hardware-verified, not policy-promised.
Visit vp.net →
Speak freely. Write privately.
The same pressure that reaches public posts reaches private messages too. bmail is verifiably private email, so your inbox stays between you and the people you write to.
Visit bmail.ag →
