When the government wants an online post removed, end informal requests and require a court order
In short
- When the government wants an internet company to take down a post, it must first get a court order.
- Government offices must stop quietly asking companies by phone or email to remove posts.
- Only when a life is in immediate danger can a post be removed first, and a court must check it right away.
- The power to decide whether a post is removed moves from government offices to the courts.
If this comes true
A high school newspaper club's article about wrongdoing at the town office stays online instead of vanishing after a single phone call from the office, and residents fill the seats at the town council meeting.
Perhaps
During the few days spent waiting for the court process, a vicious lie naming a certain person might keep spreading.
Water so far 💧 0
The proposal in detail
This covers every act in which the government, local governments, the police, or any other body with public authority asks a company that runs an internet service to delete a post, article, video, or account, to restrict how it is displayed, or to remove it from search results. Such a request can be made only after applying to a court, showing that the expression falls under something the law prohibits, and obtaining an order. The order must state specifically the expression it covers, the law it rests on, and its scope and duration, and the person who made the expression must be told that the order was issued and why, and be given a chance to object. Public bodies are barred from asking for removal without an order, from making what is really a removal demand by disguising it as a report of a violation of the company's terms, and from hinting at regulation or licensing to push a company to remove something. Besides having no duty to comply with requests that lack an order, companies must keep a record of such requests they receive and regularly publish the number and the sources. However, where there is an immediate danger to a person's life or body, or in cases such as images of child sexual abuse, public bodies may ask for removal first. They must then have a court confirm it within a short deadline, and if the court does not approve, the content is restored.
BenefitsThe power to erase expression gets a check from law and the courts
The core of this proposal is to move the power to decide whether expression is removed from the judgment of a government official to the judgment of an independent court. If removal cannot be requested without a court order, the government must explain which law the expression breaks, and it can no longer remove something just because it is inconvenient. Criticism and satire that do not break the law, and reporting that exposes the wrongdoing of those in power, are protected by this alone. The person who made the expression is told that an order was issued and gets a chance to respond, so no one has their voice taken away without knowing. For internet companies too, there is now a legal basis for refusing government pressure, and they can deal with the governments of every country by the same standard. By banning informal requests, closed relationships between governments and companies become less likely to form, and society can know what expression is being removed and can discuss it. While an emergency exception remains, a court must always check it afterward, so truly dangerous information can be handled quickly while abuse is held in check.
DrawbacksHarmful information is handled more slowly, and courts bear a heavy load
Court procedures take time. In the meantime, vicious lies naming a particular person, false information right before an election, and calls that stir up violence might spread beyond any chance of repair. Because the emergency exception is limited to immediate danger to life or body, quick action to protect people whose reputations are being damaged, or people who are about to be deceived, becomes difficult. On the internet, where an enormous number of posts appear every day, there are far too few judges and too little capacity to have courts rule on them one by one, and the courts' own core work may pile up. This system also assumes that courts are independent of the government. In a society where courts follow the government's wishes, an order becomes instead a tool that gives censorship an official stamp of approval, and the path for people whose posts were removed to fight back is closed even further. Moreover, even if the government is barred from informal requests, this cannot stop companies from reading the government's wishes ahead of time on their own judgment and removing posts under their terms. The pressure might simply take a less visible form, and the sense of reassurance from having built the system could even hide the reality.
Learn the background
In many societies, laws protecting freedom of expression have forbidden governments from stopping books or newspapers before they are published. But in the age of the internet, governments have found another route. Instead of banning something by law, they ask internet companies directly, saying, "Isn't this post a problem?" Even with no legal duty, companies often comply, because they do not want to hurt their relationship with the government, do not want stricter regulation, or do not want to lose their license to operate. In this way, with the government staying out of sight, criticism and inconvenient reporting are quietly erased. The person whose post is removed does not know who had it removed and has no one to challenge. The company says it removed the post under its own terms, so from the outside the government's involvement cannot be seen. At the same time, the demand to quickly remove dangerous information is real, and in the face of terrorism, fraud, and images that hurt children, many strongly say that asking the government to follow a procedure is too slow. Caught in this bind, informal contact between governments and companies has spread, convenient, and with no one taking responsibility. Because it happens out of sight, calls for restraint or public appeals alone cannot stop it.
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This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-23b) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes