Russia Wants To Censor Americans. Why Are U.S. Tech Companies Helping?

When Russia designated the Human Rights Foundation as "undesirable" earlier this year, the New York City–based nonprofit knew what was coming next. In September, the HRF received a notice demanding it block Russians from accessing its signature Tyranny Tracker. But the notice did not come from Russia; it came from WP Engine, a web hosting company headquartered in Austin, Texas. 

"What troubled us was that an American company passed that demand on to us nonchalantly as if it created a legal obligation," says Javier El-Hage, chief legal and policy officer at HRF. The Kremlin's censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, contacted WP Engine with a demand to block Tyranny Tracker from Russia. WP Engine complied, telling the HRF that if it did not geo-block Tyranny Tracker, the web hosting company would "geo-block the site on [the HRF's] behalf." An American company censoring an American nonprofit at the behest of a foreign government—dutifully passing the order along as if it were an overdue library book notice. 

The Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion (GRANITE) Act aims to stop this. Introduced in the House by Rep. Michael Rulli (R–Ohio) in August and currently sitting in the Judiciary Committee, the bill would confirm in statute that U.S. courts will not enforce foreign censorship orders, and would allow individuals to sue foreign censors for attempting to restrict the protected speech of American citizens. The former is the shield; the latter is the sword. 

"Foreign governments threaten Americans with all these penalties including arrests and fines, sending correspondence directly to U.S. citizens," says Preston Byrne, the technology lawyer who first conceived of the GRANITE Act last year. What the GRANITE Act does is "invert the cost-exchange ratio in favor of the American defendant vs. the foreign censor," he says. 

In practice, the GRANITE Act allows Americans to seek a declaration from a U.S. judge declaring a particular foreign censorship order unenforceable. The foreign censor, dragged into an American courtroom, would rack up expensive legal fees and subject itself to arduous court procedures like discovery and appeals processes. Those burdens cut both ways, but Byrne says the American would likely be represented pro bono by a free speech lawyer, a pledge Byrne has himself upheld in similar free speech cases. 

The GRANITE Act would also take some pressure off tech companies, who may often decide, as WP Engine did, that the effort to fight foreign censorship demands just isn't worth it. Compliance teams at tech platforms largely decide what you see on the internet—and are in many cases obeying foreign censors. As Byrne put it, "What goes on inside the compliance departments of tech companies heavily impacts the internet we all experience."

Russia is not the only country exporting its censorship. Between February 2025 and April 2026, the British government's communications regulator, Ofcom, sent at least 197 notices to U.S. companies under its internet censorship law. "When a nuclear-armed G7 member state says it wants to arrest you for exercising your free speech rights, generally speaking you cave," Byrne says. The GRANITE Act does not outlaw caving, but it would grant legal protections to American firms that refuse to. 

Some opposed to the GRANITE Act argue that it would incentivize other countries to retaliate with harsher censorship. But the bill would only govern what happens in U.S. courts, leaving foreign governments little to retaliate against. And foreign governments from Britain to Russia are ramping up their censorship efforts even without GRANITE's passage. 

If a foreign country wishes to unilaterally block its citizens from accessing a certain website, Americans are not obliged to help. U.S. companies should concern themselves with U.S. laws and should not be in the business of doing dirty work for foreign censors. 

"The American public deserves clear standards that ensure U.S. companies do not become conduits for authoritarian censorship, and that situations like this are not repeated," El-Hage says. The GRANITE Act would be a start.

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