If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Senator Marsha Blackburn wants video platform Kik to verify the age of everyone who signs up and there is no way to do that without first identifying everyone who signs up. Kik runs on usernames instead of phone numbers, so confirming that a user is over 18 risks attaching that account to a real person. The Tennessee Republican sent the demand to MediaLab CEO Michael Heyward on June 12 and gave the company until June 19 to answer a list of questions about how it screens its users. We obtained a copy of the letter for you here. Blackburn’s letter follows a report from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which created a fake test account posing as a 12-year-old girl under the username “Im12BeNice.” The group alleges the account drew sexually explicit messages and nude images from adult strangers “within seconds,” even with Kik’s explicit-content filter switched on. NCOSE Executive Director Haley McNamara said the test “indicates that the platform fails to protect children and remains a ‘predator’s paradise.'” Blackburn’s letter points to recent prosecutions, including a repeat offender sentenced on May 20 to 15 years for sharing child sexual abuse material on Kik, a man who pleaded guilty the same day to forcing a child to produce such material, and a former teacher arrested in March for uploading it. Blackburn accused Kik of running the same script as other platforms, advertising safety while ignoring or enabling abuse. “Children are being abused on your platform, and it appears you are doing little to stop it,” she wrote. If the abuse the report documents is real, a system that ignored an account openly labeled as a child is an issue. The fix Blackburn is reaching for though does something the original problem does not. It forces every adult on Kik to identify themselves in order to keep talking and fits right into Blackburn’s overall agenda. Blackburn’s legislative record is a growing stack of bills that use child safety and copyright protection to build surveillance and censorship tools. Her TRUMP AMERICA AI Act, a 291-page draft introduced in March, would repeal Section 230 entirely, expose platforms and AI developers to open-ended liability for “reasonably foreseeable harms,” and fold KOSA’s age-verification mandates into a single federal framework enforced by the FTC, DOJ, and state attorneys general. Without Section 230’s protections, platforms face lawsuits for hosting user speech and the rational business response is to remove anything that might attract one. She also co-sponsored the Block BEARD Act, which would give federal courts the power to order ISPs, search engines, and potentially VPNs to block entire foreign websites accused of piracy, a site-blocking authority the US government has never held at that scale. The child-safety framing on Kik is one piece of a broader push toward an internet where users carry digital IDs, platforms pre-screen speech to avoid liability, and the government can make websites disappear by court order. Blackburn signs the letter as chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. She is also leading negotiations with the White House over a package that would trade limits on state regulation of artificial intelligence for a set of kids-safety bills, among them her Kids Online Safety Act and a federal age-verification requirement that lawmakers and the technology industry have fought over for years. KOSA aims at general social media, which is exactly the ground the Paxton ruling left unsettled, so the constitutional fight that decision postponed is the one this package would start. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Senator Blackburn Demands Kik Verify the Age of Every User appeared first on Reclaim The Net.