If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Canadian Armed Forces reprimanded soldiers who warned that an order to spy on citizens during COVID-19 could violate intelligence-gathering rules. The soldiers were right. The military punished them anyway. Internal records and emails obtained by CBC News show that on March 11, 2020, a team called Joint Operational Effects (JOE) was ordered to create anonymous social media accounts and scour the internet for information about Canadians. Under the direction of Col. Chris Henderson, the team produced dozens of reports between March 19 and June 5, tracking what the federal Conservative, NDP, and Bloc Québécois parties were saying about the pandemic. The Canadian military was monitoring opposition political parties using anonymous accounts created specifically for surveillance. At least two JOE team members pushed back. They emailed their chain of command, warning that creating anonymous accounts without authorization, while working from home on personal computers, could breach intelligence directives. One soldier wrote to Maj. John Zwicewicz on March 12, 2020: “Given the sensitivity around social media and military use I have concerns about this.” They added: “My concern is that by creating these accounts without following proper procedure would come close to, or cross the line set out in the policy.” Another asked to go into the office because they felt it “represented a serious risk” to do the work at home. Zwicewicz claimed a legal adviser had approved the activities and ordered the group to “cease barrack room lawyering” and get back to work. The team was formally reprimanded more than a week after raising concerns. A source told CBC News that within months, some members quit or were medically released. The people who raised alarms about potentially illegal surveillance of Canadian citizens got punished. The people who ordered the surveillance kept their positions. The military’s own top lawyer flagged the problem. Then-commodore Geneviève Bernatchez, the judge advocate general, warned that “this issue has a significant legal component, and…could present legal risk to the rights of Canadian citizens, but also legal risks to the institution.” She noted that, unlike overseas deployments, “the full range of domestic law” would apply, and “such operations will often directly or indirectly implicate the rights of Canadian citizens.” The command structure absorbed the warning and carried on. A compliance assessment by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, reported by CBC News in April 2026, found three separate military units violated intelligence-gathering rules during Operation Laser between March and July 2020. One unit used personal laptops to trawl Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook. Another produced over 50 reports on political discourse and was ordered to create accounts to “monitor key regional actors,” but “deliberately disregarded” that order and used personal accounts instead. Six years later, the legal gap that allowed all of this remains open. The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians urged the government in 2020 to legislate rules governing what the military can collect about Canadians. Ottawa has not acted. DND spokesperson Andrée-Anne Poulin told CBC News that “additional guidance and oversight measures were put in place to prevent a recurrence and to strengthen adherence to established rules.” Additional guidance. Oversight measures: The standard institutional language for getting caught. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada’s Military Punished Whistleblowers Who Flagged Illegal COVID Speech Monitoring appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. X has agreed to process the vast majority of content flagged as illegal “hate” under the UK’s Online Safety Act within 48 hours, giving Ofcom, Britain’s speech regulator, a significant new enforcement win. The platform committed to “review and assess UK suspected illegal terrorist and “hate” content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool on average within 24 hours of it being reported, to be calculated as a mean” and to “review and assess at least 85% of UK suspected illegal terrorist and hate content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool within a maximum of 48 hours.” The deal is a notable reversal for a platform that, less than a year ago, publicly accused Ofcom of taking a “heavy-handed approach” and warned that the Online Safety Act was “seriously infringing” on free expression. X’s August 2025 statement, titled “What Happens When Oversight Becomes Overreach,” called out regulators by name and argued that the law amounted to a “conscientious decision to increase censorship in the name of ‘online safety.'” That language is gone now. What’s left is a compliance agreement with specific performance targets and a 12-month reporting obligation. The commitments go beyond speed of review. X also agreed to block access to accounts in the UK if they are reported for “posting UK illegal terrorist content” and deemed to be “operated by or on behalf of a terrorist organisation proscribed in the UK.” The platform will share quarterly performance data with Ofcom so the regulator can audit compliance. And following complaints from organizations that couldn’t tell whether X had received or acted on their reports, X agreed to “engage with experts regarding reporting systems for illegal hate and terror content.” Who those experts are tells you something about the direction of travel. Ofcom’s own press release names the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) as one of the organizations it worked with to “gather evidence about suspected illegal terrorist content and illegal hate speech online.” The CCDH is a pro-censorship campaign group co-founded in 2018 by Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney, who went on to become UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. McSweeney stepped down from CCDH’s board two days after Starmer became Labour leader. The organization maintains close ties to the current government and has stated that its goal was to “kill Musk’s Twitter,” according to leaked internal documents reported by Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker. Ahmed himself was sanctioned by the US State Department in December 2025 over concerns that his organization had led “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints.” A federal court blocked his deportation with a temporary restraining order. This is the organization Ofcom chose to help build the evidence base for pressuring X into compliance. Ahmed, for his part, welcomed the deal. Speaking to POLITICO, he said CCDH will be “watching closely to ensure this results in meaningful action, not just words.” Oliver Griffiths, Ofcom’s Online Safety Group Director, framed the agreement as a necessary step. “We have evidence that terrorist content and illegal hate speech is persisting on some of the largest social media sites,” he said. “We are challenging them to tackle the problem and expect them to take firm action.” X’s agreement also includes the dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool, which is specifically designed for flagging content that violates Britain’s censorship law. That tool creates a direct pipeline from whoever reports the content to X’s review queue, and from there to Ofcom’s auditing process. The 24-hour average and 48-hour backstop create a system where the pressure is always toward deletion. When you have to process 85% of flagged content within two days and a regulator is auditing your speed, the incentive is to delete first and reconsider never. Every platform operating in the UK is watching this deal and calculating the cost of resistance versus compliance. The message from Ofcom is clear: agree to our terms, on our timeline, using our preferred partners as evidence sources, or face investigation, fines, and potential shutdown. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post X Agrees to Review Illegal “Hate” Within 48 Hours Under UK Online Safety Act appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Oklahoma became the latest state to sue Roblox last week, filing a 51-page complaint accusing the platform of endangering children and deceiving parents. Attorney General Gentner Drummond said Roblox “marketed itself as a safe place for children but turned a blind eye as predators targeted and exploited minors on its platform.” We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here. The lawsuit identifies the absence of age and identity verification at account creation as a “design feature that leads to child endangerment” and dismisses the facial age estimation Roblox introduced in November 2025 as “far too little, and far too late.” Oklahoma is at least the tenth state to sue. The complaint follows lawsuits from Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, Florida, and LA County, plus settlements with Alabama, Nevada, and West Virginia totaling tens of millions of dollars. The allegations across these cases are serious; documenting organized abuse rings, adults posing as children, and a company that employees say prioritized engagement metrics over safety. “Roblox’s willingness to sacrifice the well-being of children in pursuit of profit is unconscionable and indefensible,” Drummond said. But look at what every one of these lawsuits and settlements demands as the fix: more identity verification, more biometric collection, more government ID scanning. Roblox has obliged. The company now requires age verification through Persona, a third-party vendor, before users can access chat or voice features. The options are a government ID scan or a facial age estimation via selfie video. Half of Roblox’s 150-million-plus user base had completed the process by early 2026. In April, Roblox announced two new account tiers launching in June that lock unverified users out of most games and all communication features. You either submit biometric data or lose the platform. There is no third option. More: From Roblox To The IRS: The Great Biometric Data Grab Nevada’s settlement pushed even further, requiring Roblox to strip encryption from minor users’ chats. That means children’s private messages become readable by the company and available to anyone who obtains access through a subpoena, a data breach, or a policy change Roblox hasn’t written yet. This is the pattern now. A platform fails to protect children. States sue. The legal remedy is a biometric surveillance system that harvests face scans and government IDs from tens of millions of kids, funneled through a vendor caught running an identity surveillance operation far more extensive than age estimation requires. The children whose safety was supposedly the point end up with less privacy than they started with, their faces processed by systems they never consented to and can’t opt out of without losing access entirely. The standard being set is one where using a children’s gaming platform requires handing over biometric data. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Oklahoma Sues Roblox, but the “Fix” Is Biometric Checks appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

This Post is for Paid Supporters Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. SUBSCRIBE Already a supporter? Sign In. (If you’re already logged in but still seeing this, refresh this page to show the post.) The post The School Spy Boom Nobody Asked For appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The UK’s Online Safety Act has been in force for less than a year and it is again being used to censor political speech during an election. TikTok blocked and then deleted a campaign video by Reform UK’s Spokesperson for Home Affairs, Zia Yusuf, after someone reported it under the OSA’s content reporting mechanism. The video was about immigration policy and takes place during a period of campaigning for a by-election. TikTok cited its “Hate Speech and Hateful Behavior” rules. The law that gave the complainant the reporting tool and that gives TikTok every financial reason to comply without asking too many questions, is the Online Safety Act. The OSA was sold to the British public as child protection. The actual legislation requires platforms to police all content against UK law, including broadly defined “hate speech” provisions. Companies that fail to comply face fines of up to £18 million ($24m) or 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. For a platform the size of TikTok, that penalty could run into billions. The rational response to that kind of liability is to delete first and never think about it again. Under the OSA, platforms must provide UK users with tools to report content they believe is illegal under British law. TikTok confirmed this is what triggered the action against Yusuf’s video. The notification he received stated: “We have detected this policy violation based on a report that the content violated our Community Guidelines.” TikTok did not say it independently concluded the video was hateful. Someone filed a report through the OSA’s mechanism and the platform treated that report as reason enough to act. There is no requirement that reports be made in good faith, no penalty for filing frivolous ones, and no transparency about who complained or why. This is a system built for political abuse. If you want a political opponent’s video deleted during an election, you file a report. The platform, facing enormous financial penalties for under-enforcement, does the rest. TikTok also warned Yusuf that further violations could result in a permanent ban, which he called “all the more staggering given TikTok happily hosts hundreds of videos of people calling for the assassination of [Reform Party Leader] Nigel Farage.” Yusuf accused Labour of “using the ‘Online Safety Act’ to silence political opponents” and called the deletion “a chilling attempt to silence one of the biggest and fastest-growing UK political accounts on the platform. TikTok is engaging in direct political interference in the midst of the most pivotal elections in our country’s history. All under the auspice of the ‘Online Safety Act’ that the Tories and Labour claimed to be about protecting children. It is, and always will be about silencing voices the open-borders political establishment don’t like.” Nigel Farage called it “unacceptable political interference from a big tech company.” Yusuf has been warning about this exact scenario since the OSA’s provisions started taking effect last year. He told GB News the law would “create an incentive structure for social media companies to over censor, because that’s the rational thing to do if you’re trying to protect shareholder value.” The Conservative Party drafted the OSA and the current governing Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, backed it. Both parties now face a political insurgency from Reform UK and the law they built together hands platforms the tools and the financial incentive to suppress Reform’s message during an election. If elected, the Reform Party has said it will repeal the OSA. The OSA’s defenders will say this is a platform decision, not a government one. That distinction doesn’t survive contact with the law’s actual structure. The government wrote the rules, set the penalties, and required the reporting tools. A Department for Science, Innovation and Technology spokesman told GB News: “The decision to remove content is made by the platforms independently. The Online Safety Act is designed to keep children safe online – protecting them from harmful content – and not to censor political debate. It doesn’t enable platforms to arbitrarily remove content, and tech firms have a duty to uphold freedom of expression.” The government is telling platforms to uphold freedom of expression while simultaneously threatening them with fines that could run into billions if they fail to police categories of speech as subjective as “hate” and “harm.”  Those two instructions cannot coexist. When a platform has to choose between leaving up a borderline political video and risking a penalty sized to a percentage of its global revenue, it will delete the video every single time.  That is the system functioning exactly as the incentives dictate. You cannot write a law that forces platforms to make judgment calls about what counts as hateful, punish them catastrophically for getting it wrong in one direction, and then act surprised when they over-censor in the other.  The government knows this. The “duty to uphold freedom of expression” line is there so ministers can point to it when the inevitable censorship happens and say it wasn’t their fault. The threat of fines ensure it keeps happening anyway. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post TikTok Removes Reform UK Campaign Video Using Online Safety Act “Hate” Censorship Rules appeared first on Reclaim The Net.