'Absolute censorship': Someone doesn't want you to know about Michael Carbonara's data center ties
By Daniel Rivero
August 5, 2026 at 12:40 PM EDT
Michael Carbonara, a Republican candidate for Florida’s 22nd Congressional District, is connected to the data center industry. At a recent candidate forum, the candidate admitted as much, saying “I have built a data center.”
As WLRN reported, a data center Carbonara helped build in rural Michigan — right across the street from an outdoors-focused elementary school — is at the center of a lawsuit alleging that noise created by it caused a public nuisance.
But as early voting begins ahead of the Aug. 18 primary election, there has been a shadowy concerted effort that likely prevents most would-be voters from accessing this information before they head to the polls.
A string of bogus copyright infringement claims have been filed to Google over the course of several weeks, demanding that the search engine giant de-list articles about Carbonara’s data center connections from search results. The complaints, filed by different entities with little information online, fraudulently claim that the articles are using copyrighted material.
WLRN has found that the effort largely paid off, making it nearly impossible for the public to find information about Carbonara’s data center connections or other critical coverage of the candidate through a basic Google search.
Google accounts for nearly 85% of web searches in the U.S.
Three shipping-containerized sized data centers hum in Dafter Township, across the street from Lake Superior Academy, on June 19, 2025. Michael Carbonara was heavily involved in building the controversial data centers, which mine bitcoin. (1181x704, AR: 1.6775568181818181)
Carbonara is running in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District, a newly redrawn sprawling district that runs from western Palm Beach and Broward counties, across the Everglades to Naples, and includes parts of Collier and Hendry counties. Six other Republican candidates are competing for the Aug. 18 primary.
Prior to running for Congress, Carbonara has been heavily involved in financial technology companies and cryptocurrency markets.
Corey Silverstein, a Michigan-based first amendment attorney, has for years dealt with copyright takedown notices on behalf of clients like social media companies, web hosting companies and message boards.
The takedown efforts are allowed through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed by Congress in 1998. Social media companies, search engines and web hosts simply comply with all complaints as soon as they are filed, out of fear of being held liable for legitimate copyright violations.
Silverstein told WLRN the effort to suppress articles critical of Carbonara are a novel kind of direct attack on the democratic process.
“ This is absolute censorship, because this is information that the press has certainly a right to publish. It's protected under the First Amendment, and someone out there is abusing a law that was meant to protect genuine copyright holders,” said Silverstein.
It is not clear who exactly sent the requests for pulling the content out of Google search results, although Silverstein noted that people can make their own conclusions about where they came from, directly or indirectly.
WLRN asked the Carbonara campaign if it had any knowledge of the fraudulent takedown requests, or if it financed anyone to submit the requests, but got no response.
“ As an attorney and as a voter, on both levels here, I find this disturbing,” added Silverstein. “It's not a question of whether I agree or don't agree with what this particular political candidate's position is. It's the fact that you, as a journalist protected by the First Amendment, are, in essence, being blocked from bringing up a story to the public that you found that you believe is important for the public to be aware of. That – that's terrifying.”
Shadowy companies, fraudulent complaints
Two days after WLRN published an article last month entitled "Candidate running for Project Tango district is embroiled in Michigan data center controversy," a company allegedly called Reynolds Media Group, based in the United Kingdom, sent a complaint to Google falsely claiming that the article was stolen from the Times of India. No information about the UK-based Reynolds Media Group can be found online, but it alleged that it represented the Indian newspaper in the complaint sent to Google. The company that owns the Times of India is The Times Group.
“We demand the immediate removal of this infringing material from Google search results to safeguard our intellectual property,” reads the complaint.
The article was immediately removed from Google search results, WLRN found.
A few weeks later, on July 31, a company allegedly called Davenport Enterprises submitted a similar request to Google to remove search results for an article posted by WCMU Public Radio in Central Michigan titled: ‘Man tied to eastern UP bitcoin mine defends data centers at Florida campaign event.’ The allegation was that it stole work from a Tallahassee Democrat article. WCMU’s article was published the previous day.
The article was removed from Google search results.
Then on Aug. 1 another fraudulent complaint, this time purporting to be from a UK-based company called Pedrick Enterprises, was filed against a Florida Politics article entitled: ‘Michael Carbonara says he opposes local data center, but his actions say otherwise.’
Furthering the fraudulent complaint, “Pedrick Enterprises” claimed that the Florida Politics article had stolen material from WLRN’s article on Carbonara’s data center connections, which was published on July 15.
The claim is not true, and no one from WLRN authorized the complaint to be made on its behalf.
Example of a Google DMCA takedown request that appears at the bottom of a Google search that has had material removed due to an alleged copyright violation. (1462x218, AR: 6.706422018348624)
Google honored the takedown request based on the fraudulent complaint, and the Florida Politics article was immediately suppressed from search results.
Copyright takedown complaints filed under the DMCA can be found under the Lumen database, an online transparency tool created by digital rights activist Wendy Seltzer and maintained by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
The takedown complaints are not limited to articles that mention data centers. On July 29, a UK-based company allegedly called Juvers Media Corporation filed a complaint alleging that a Florida Politics article entitled ‘New site slams Casey Askar, Michael Carbonara business dealings in Dubai’ violated the copyright of an obscure, largely nonsensical text-only page found on the Stanford University website. Amid the thousands of words, the words “carbonara”, “data” and “center” appear.
The boilerplate language was identical to the other requests allegedly made by different parties: “We demand the immediate removal of this infringing material from Google search results to safeguard our intellectual property.”
“When we're in election time, that is just – it's legally wrong, it's ethically wrong, it's morally wrong."
WLRN could not find a digital footprint for any of the companies filing these complaints, and Google does not require evidence that they own copyright in these cases or even of their actual existence before complying.
Google did not return a request for comment about how it handles fraudulent copyright complaints.
Hours after WLRN sent the search engine giant notice of the activity, many of the articles returned to Google search results.
And then, mere hours after the articles had been returned to Google search results, on Aug. 4, WLRN and Florida Politics received yet more fraudulent notices of supposed copyright violation complaints, this time from companies that call themselves "Isper Enterprises" and "Palker Enterprises." The search results for articles critical of Carbonara have once again been suppressed.
Evidence of scrubbed search results can be found at the bottom of a Google search, where the company links to complaints that led to search results being removed.
A weapon of authoritarian governments
Authoritarian governments and malicious actors have been known to use spurious copyright violations in order to suppress prominent dissidents and critical media outlets.
Critics of then-Ecuadorian President Raphael Correa frequently had content pulled offline in the mid-2010s after allies close to Correa filed fraudulent copyright violation claims, as documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The group also documented Nigerian authorities using questionable copyright infringement claims to suppress opposition media outlets ahead of elections.
In Nicaragua, dictator Daniel Ortega succeeded in getting YouTube to shut down channels linked to opposition media after issuing dubious copyright infringement complaints. Taking the entire channels down resulted in the loss of video evidence of the violent crackdown on widespread anti-regime protests in 2018 and 2019.
Nicaraguan riot police set up a shield wall as a group of doctors, nurses and medical students protest against the government of President Daniel Ortega, in Managua, Nicaragua, Saturday, Aug. 3, 2019. The Central American nation has been in crisis since April 2018, when protests erupted demanding Ortega's exit from office and early elections, with demonstrators accusing him of consolidating power and ruling in an authoritarian manner. (AP Photo/Alfredo Zuniga) (5482x3840, AR: 1.4276041666666666)
More recently, an exposé of a network of illegal gambling websites in Europe was largely scrubbed from the internet after a sophisticated series of fraudulent copyright violation reports were made to Google. And an exposé on a questionable SEO firm in the UK was removed from Google search results after “a bogus copyright claim” was filed.
Since much of the technical infrastructure of theiInternet runs through U.S.-based companies like Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, the DMCA law provides an avenue for foreign governments and bad actors to successfully file the questionable complaints from anywhere in the world.
Inside the U.S., copyright takedown complaints have often crossed paths with politics in the realm of political ads. Famously, a 2008 campaign ad for Republican presidential candidate John McCain was removed from YouTube after media outlets filed copyright notices against it, arguing that use of their footage did not fall under “fair use” and amounted to theft. The campaign said the use of short video clips clearly fell under the “fair use” doctrine, and that honoring the questionable takedown requests amounted to “silencing political speech.”
The 2008 Obama campaign also had ads pulled down under questionable DMCA claims, and since then the issue has cropped up periodically in U.S. politics.
'An absolute shame'
For the most part, residents of the U.S. come across DMCA takedowns for things like posting a video on YouTube that uses copyrighted music without authorization. YouTube will often simply remove the sound on the video in response, or sometimes take the entire video down.
The DMCA law allows for people who file fraudulent copyright complaints to be sued in federal court, but in the case of requests filed on pieces that are critical of Carbonara in Florida, it is difficult to tell who filed the fraudulent notices.
Silverstein said the DMCA law has been broadly “abused” over the years, simply because there are services that will file fraudulent notices on behalf of clients that “want content removed.” Congress has made attempts over the decades to amend the DMCA but they have not been successful.
The use of fraudulent DMCA requests to shield voters from accessing critical coverage of a candidate in a Republican Congressional primary mere weeks before election day seems unprecedented, said attorney Silverstein, calling it “an absolute shame.”
“When we're in election time, that is just – it's legally wrong, it's ethically wrong, it's morally wrong,” he said.
Silverstein suggested that media outlets that have had their material scrubbed from search results due to fraudulent copyright claims related to coverage of Carbonara should consider filing a lawsuit in order to get to the bottom of the matter.
“ If this is a candidate or someone associated with a candidate that is doing this to get removal, the public should be made aware,” he said. “That is not the sort of person that I would be picking or choosing as my political choice when I'm at the voter poll. I would not be voting for someone that is potentially attempting to utilize a law to get things taken down about them that's a matter of public interest.”
As WLRN reported, a data center Carbonara helped build in rural Michigan — right across the street from an outdoors-focused elementary school — is at the center of a lawsuit alleging that noise created by it caused a public nuisance.
But as early voting begins ahead of the Aug. 18 primary election, there has been a shadowy concerted effort that likely prevents most would-be voters from accessing this information before they head to the polls.
A string of bogus copyright infringement claims have been filed to Google over the course of several weeks, demanding that the search engine giant de-list articles about Carbonara’s data center connections from search results. The complaints, filed by different entities with little information online, fraudulently claim that the articles are using copyrighted material.
WLRN has found that the effort largely paid off, making it nearly impossible for the public to find information about Carbonara’s data center connections or other critical coverage of the candidate through a basic Google search.
Google accounts for nearly 85% of web searches in the U.S.
Three shipping-containerized sized data centers hum in Dafter Township, across the street from Lake Superior Academy, on June 19, 2025. Michael Carbonara was heavily involved in building the controversial data centers, which mine bitcoin. (1181x704, AR: 1.6775568181818181)
Carbonara is running in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District, a newly redrawn sprawling district that runs from western Palm Beach and Broward counties, across the Everglades to Naples, and includes parts of Collier and Hendry counties. Six other Republican candidates are competing for the Aug. 18 primary.
Prior to running for Congress, Carbonara has been heavily involved in financial technology companies and cryptocurrency markets.
Corey Silverstein, a Michigan-based first amendment attorney, has for years dealt with copyright takedown notices on behalf of clients like social media companies, web hosting companies and message boards.
The takedown efforts are allowed through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed by Congress in 1998. Social media companies, search engines and web hosts simply comply with all complaints as soon as they are filed, out of fear of being held liable for legitimate copyright violations.
Silverstein told WLRN the effort to suppress articles critical of Carbonara are a novel kind of direct attack on the democratic process.
“ This is absolute censorship, because this is information that the press has certainly a right to publish. It's protected under the First Amendment, and someone out there is abusing a law that was meant to protect genuine copyright holders,” said Silverstein.
It is not clear who exactly sent the requests for pulling the content out of Google search results, although Silverstein noted that people can make their own conclusions about where they came from, directly or indirectly.
WLRN asked the Carbonara campaign if it had any knowledge of the fraudulent takedown requests, or if it financed anyone to submit the requests, but got no response.
“ As an attorney and as a voter, on both levels here, I find this disturbing,” added Silverstein. “It's not a question of whether I agree or don't agree with what this particular political candidate's position is. It's the fact that you, as a journalist protected by the First Amendment, are, in essence, being blocked from bringing up a story to the public that you found that you believe is important for the public to be aware of. That – that's terrifying.”
Shadowy companies, fraudulent complaints
Two days after WLRN published an article last month entitled "Candidate running for Project Tango district is embroiled in Michigan data center controversy," a company allegedly called Reynolds Media Group, based in the United Kingdom, sent a complaint to Google falsely claiming that the article was stolen from the Times of India. No information about the UK-based Reynolds Media Group can be found online, but it alleged that it represented the Indian newspaper in the complaint sent to Google. The company that owns the Times of India is The Times Group.
“We demand the immediate removal of this infringing material from Google search results to safeguard our intellectual property,” reads the complaint.
The article was immediately removed from Google search results, WLRN found.
A few weeks later, on July 31, a company allegedly called Davenport Enterprises submitted a similar request to Google to remove search results for an article posted by WCMU Public Radio in Central Michigan titled: ‘Man tied to eastern UP bitcoin mine defends data centers at Florida campaign event.’ The allegation was that it stole work from a Tallahassee Democrat article. WCMU’s article was published the previous day.
The article was removed from Google search results.
Then on Aug. 1 another fraudulent complaint, this time purporting to be from a UK-based company called Pedrick Enterprises, was filed against a Florida Politics article entitled: ‘Michael Carbonara says he opposes local data center, but his actions say otherwise.’
Furthering the fraudulent complaint, “Pedrick Enterprises” claimed that the Florida Politics article had stolen material from WLRN’s article on Carbonara’s data center connections, which was published on July 15.
The claim is not true, and no one from WLRN authorized the complaint to be made on its behalf.
Example of a Google DMCA takedown request that appears at the bottom of a Google search that has had material removed due to an alleged copyright violation. (1462x218, AR: 6.706422018348624)
Google honored the takedown request based on the fraudulent complaint, and the Florida Politics article was immediately suppressed from search results.
Copyright takedown complaints filed under the DMCA can be found under the Lumen database, an online transparency tool created by digital rights activist Wendy Seltzer and maintained by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
The takedown complaints are not limited to articles that mention data centers. On July 29, a UK-based company allegedly called Juvers Media Corporation filed a complaint alleging that a Florida Politics article entitled ‘New site slams Casey Askar, Michael Carbonara business dealings in Dubai’ violated the copyright of an obscure, largely nonsensical text-only page found on the Stanford University website. Amid the thousands of words, the words “carbonara”, “data” and “center” appear.
The boilerplate language was identical to the other requests allegedly made by different parties: “We demand the immediate removal of this infringing material from Google search results to safeguard our intellectual property.”
“When we're in election time, that is just – it's legally wrong, it's ethically wrong, it's morally wrong."
WLRN could not find a digital footprint for any of the companies filing these complaints, and Google does not require evidence that they own copyright in these cases or even of their actual existence before complying.
Google did not return a request for comment about how it handles fraudulent copyright complaints.
Hours after WLRN sent the search engine giant notice of the activity, many of the articles returned to Google search results.
And then, mere hours after the articles had been returned to Google search results, on Aug. 4, WLRN and Florida Politics received yet more fraudulent notices of supposed copyright violation complaints, this time from companies that call themselves "Isper Enterprises" and "Palker Enterprises." The search results for articles critical of Carbonara have once again been suppressed.
Evidence of scrubbed search results can be found at the bottom of a Google search, where the company links to complaints that led to search results being removed.
A weapon of authoritarian governments
Authoritarian governments and malicious actors have been known to use spurious copyright violations in order to suppress prominent dissidents and critical media outlets.
Critics of then-Ecuadorian President Raphael Correa frequently had content pulled offline in the mid-2010s after allies close to Correa filed fraudulent copyright violation claims, as documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The group also documented Nigerian authorities using questionable copyright infringement claims to suppress opposition media outlets ahead of elections.
In Nicaragua, dictator Daniel Ortega succeeded in getting YouTube to shut down channels linked to opposition media after issuing dubious copyright infringement complaints. Taking the entire channels down resulted in the loss of video evidence of the violent crackdown on widespread anti-regime protests in 2018 and 2019.
Nicaraguan riot police set up a shield wall as a group of doctors, nurses and medical students protest against the government of President Daniel Ortega, in Managua, Nicaragua, Saturday, Aug. 3, 2019. The Central American nation has been in crisis since April 2018, when protests erupted demanding Ortega's exit from office and early elections, with demonstrators accusing him of consolidating power and ruling in an authoritarian manner. (AP Photo/Alfredo Zuniga) (5482x3840, AR: 1.4276041666666666)
More recently, an exposé of a network of illegal gambling websites in Europe was largely scrubbed from the internet after a sophisticated series of fraudulent copyright violation reports were made to Google. And an exposé on a questionable SEO firm in the UK was removed from Google search results after “a bogus copyright claim” was filed.
Since much of the technical infrastructure of theiInternet runs through U.S.-based companies like Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, the DMCA law provides an avenue for foreign governments and bad actors to successfully file the questionable complaints from anywhere in the world.
Inside the U.S., copyright takedown complaints have often crossed paths with politics in the realm of political ads. Famously, a 2008 campaign ad for Republican presidential candidate John McCain was removed from YouTube after media outlets filed copyright notices against it, arguing that use of their footage did not fall under “fair use” and amounted to theft. The campaign said the use of short video clips clearly fell under the “fair use” doctrine, and that honoring the questionable takedown requests amounted to “silencing political speech.”
The 2008 Obama campaign also had ads pulled down under questionable DMCA claims, and since then the issue has cropped up periodically in U.S. politics.
'An absolute shame'
For the most part, residents of the U.S. come across DMCA takedowns for things like posting a video on YouTube that uses copyrighted music without authorization. YouTube will often simply remove the sound on the video in response, or sometimes take the entire video down.
The DMCA law allows for people who file fraudulent copyright complaints to be sued in federal court, but in the case of requests filed on pieces that are critical of Carbonara in Florida, it is difficult to tell who filed the fraudulent notices.
Silverstein said the DMCA law has been broadly “abused” over the years, simply because there are services that will file fraudulent notices on behalf of clients that “want content removed.” Congress has made attempts over the decades to amend the DMCA but they have not been successful.
The use of fraudulent DMCA requests to shield voters from accessing critical coverage of a candidate in a Republican Congressional primary mere weeks before election day seems unprecedented, said attorney Silverstein, calling it “an absolute shame.”
“When we're in election time, that is just – it's legally wrong, it's ethically wrong, it's morally wrong,” he said.
Silverstein suggested that media outlets that have had their material scrubbed from search results due to fraudulent copyright claims related to coverage of Carbonara should consider filing a lawsuit in order to get to the bottom of the matter.
“ If this is a candidate or someone associated with a candidate that is doing this to get removal, the public should be made aware,” he said. “That is not the sort of person that I would be picking or choosing as my political choice when I'm at the voter poll. I would not be voting for someone that is potentially attempting to utilize a law to get things taken down about them that's a matter of public interest.”