If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The White House has asked Keir Starmer’s government to drop the part of its plan that would cut Britain’s under-16s off from social media, a measure that would have swept up roughly 13 million young people. The request arrived in a formal US submission to the UK consultation titled “Growing Up in the Online World,” published by the US Embassy in London. The pushback is narrower than the headline suggests. The administration raised concern about rules that would “impose disproportionate compliance burdens on American companies or that apply to one platform but not similar services.” Where the submission lands hardest is on identity documents. The administration wrote that it would “strongly oppose regulations that require or create conditions that compel platforms to collect government-issued IDs (e.g., driver’s licenses, passports), which create serious privacy and security risks, encourage surveillance systems vulnerable to abuse, and chill freedom of speech.” Forcing someone to hand a passport scan to a website builds the exact surveillance plumbing that gets abused later and Washington said the words “chill freedom of speech” out loud. Credit where it is due. But then the door swings back open. The same document keeps age verification on the table for adult material, backing “narrowly targeted requirements primarily with respect to pornographic and adult commercial content (e.g., online gambling, tobacco sales, alcohol sales), rather than broad social media bans.” It then frames the wider position. “The United States does not categorically oppose age assurance measures, but we urge careful consideration of their scope and implementation,” the submission reads. That means that ultimately the principle of checking your age before you can speak or read online survives. Only the bluntest version of it gets rejected. The administration also threw its weight behind a specific fix, saying it “strongly supports privacy-preserving age assurance technologies.” That phrase points at zero-knowledge proofs, the cryptographic trick that lets a site confirm you clear an age threshold without seeing your birth date or your ID. It sounds like the clean answer but it’s not. A proof that you are over 18 does nothing to stop a site from logging your IP address, fingerprinting your device, or demanding the check again every single day. It does nothing about the data-broker profiles already sitting on most people. The proof shrinks one piece of what you hand over. The checkpoint itself stays bolted to the front door of the open web and you are now showing papers to the doorman to get in. Who decides which content sits behind that door is the question nobody in either government wants pinned down. “Adult content” is the lazy example everyone reaches for. The definitions written into law rarely stop there and the people writing them are the same people who would rather you not see certain things. On usage limits and screen time, Washington pushed parents over the state. The submission “favors parental empowerment,” and spells out the reasoning. “Parents should be able to control their children’s online experiences, not prescribed one-size-fits-all government restrictions,” the White House wrote. That is the right instinct. It also sits awkwardly next to what states already signed into law at home. Here is the part the submission does not mention. While the US warns London about chilling speech, it is already running a pipe of its own. The states have spent two years assembling the exact ID checkpoint the submission tells Britain to avoid. The Supreme Court upheld Texas HB 1181 in June 2025 in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a 6-3 ruling that lets the state force adult sites to verify age before entry, by government ID or a third-party credential. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that “adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification.” That one line melted decades of precedent and read to every state legislature as a green light. They took it. Nine states had adult-content age-verification laws in effect by the end of 2025, among them Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Arizona, and Ohio, with more drafting their own. Several reach past pornography. Florida and Arkansas wrote laws pointed at social media itself, sweeping in platforms that host little or no adult material. Utah, Nebraska, and New York passed measures forcing platforms to bar younger users or collect parental consent. California went its own way with an Age-Appropriate Design Code that pushes services toward estimating the age of everyone who shows up. Courts have frozen some of these and let others stand, so the check you hit now depends on which state you log in from and which judge ruled last. A US submission can warn London that ID mandates “chill freedom of speech” while Texas already demands the ID, the Supreme Court has blessed the demand, and the states lining up behind Texas are copying the requirement rather than the caution in the letter to Britain. Whatever Washington tells a foreign government, the direction of travel at home is toward proving who you are before you read. That fight will be loud and it will be fought over commercial categories rather than the thing being lost. The thing being lost is the default that an adult, or a 15-year-old reading the news, can open a site without first proving who they are to a verifier that logs the visit. Washington pushed back on the crudest form of that and then endorsed the polished form. The British government wants the polished form badly. Two governments arguing over the gauge of the fence is not the same as a government deciding there should be no fence. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post US Opposes UK Online ID Mandate as Nine States Expand Age Checks appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The government’s broadest warrantless surveillance power is set to expire Friday after the House refused to keep it running. Lawmakers voted down a three-week extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on Thursday, 218 to 198, with 19 Republicans joining most Democrats against it and seven Democrats crossing over in support. Speaker Mike Johnson had fast-tracked the bill under a process that needed a two-thirds majority, so the lopsided count sank it. The House then left town for a scheduled weeklong recess, which removes any path to a quick fix. Congress has already punted twice since the original April deadline. The reaction from the program’s defenders followed a familiar script. They raised the same alarm at earlier deadlines and the catastrophe never showed up. When Congress last renewed the authority in 2024, the law slipped past its midnight deadline and lapsed for under an hour before the Senate restored it and the surveillance kept running through the gap. The warnings are back this week regardless. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, pressed for renewal ahead of the World Cup and backers keep noting that Section 702 feeds more than half of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. “Democrats in the Senate are playing political games right now with the lives of Americans,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. “It’s a very dangerous situation.” What actually arrives at midnight Friday is legal limbo, not a blackout. The FISA court signed off on the current collection in March and that order runs until 2027, so the machinery keeps operating on permission it already holds. The court’s authorization runs for another year and the program continues whether Congress acts or not. The honest word for the risk is uncertainty, the kind that government lawyers and company lawyers argue over, and uncertainty does not sound like an emergency. So the defenders reach for “going dark” instead. What sunsets at midnight is all of Title VII of the surveillance law, which carries separate powers the government uses to spy on Americans living abroad. The people calling this a threat to national survival are the same people who will not pair a renewal with a requirement to get a warrant before pulling up an American’s messages. A power treated as too important to pause for a week turns out to be not important enough to put under a judge. The fight has never been about keeping the program alive. It is about keeping it free of oversight. Section 702 was sold as a way to spy on foreigners. It does more than that now. Intelligence agencies use it to search Americans’ communications without a warrant, including the backdoor searches where an investigator names a foreign target who happens to know a US person and then reads the American’s messages on the strength of that link. Agencies also buy Americans’ data from private brokers, skipping the warrant process altogether. The reforms Congress keeps refusing to attach would force a warrant before those searches and close the broker loophole. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has argued for years that an unreformed program is the real danger. “Every day that Section 702 is in effect without reforms is a day that Americans’ rights are under threat,” he said in a statement Wednesday night, released after Senate Republicans blocked his proposal for a five-week extension tied to new transparency requirements. “If there is going to be an extension of these authorities, there needs to be some guardrails or at least some transparency that would allow Congress and the American people to understand the abuses that have taken place and the need for reforms.” The parts of FISA that handle genuinely urgent cases do not expire here either. Traditional electronic surveillance, physical searches, pen registers, business records, and the emergency provisions all sit outside the expiring section and keep working. Any target dangerous enough to justify the floor speeches can be surveilled through an individualized court order based on probable cause, which is the process the Fourth Amendment was built around. That leaves the program’s defenders in an awkward spot. A target is apparently important enough for days of apocalyptic warnings, yet not important enough to bring before a judge. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Section 702 Surveillance Reaches Its Friday Deadline. Why “Going Dark” Is a Myth. appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Canada’s long-anticipated and dreaded Bill C-34 arrived on June 10 with the usual fanfare about protecting children. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, tabled it. Strip off the press release and what is left is a law that lets an appointed federal body order Canadians’ posts deleted across the country, decide which platforms can give an account to a 15-year-old, and tell AI chatbots to watch what you type. It also bans Canadians under 16 from social media by charging the whole country for it, in the currency of everyone’s privacy. The government calls it the Safe Social Media Act. Safe for whom is the question it would rather you not dwell on. The law creates a Digital Safety Commission of Canada. Cabinet appoints its three to five members. The same body writes the rules, runs the inspections, hears the complaints, and hands out the fines, which is a regulator and a courtroom folded into one office that answers to no voter. Everything hangs on a phrase the bill declines to nail down, “harmful content.” There are seven categories, among them “content used to bully a child” and “content that foments hatred.” The drafters did take the trouble to say content is not hateful merely because it “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends,” which is more care than these laws usually take. It also changes very little because the people drawing the line day to day are the platforms, working from rules the Commission can rewrite whenever it wants. The edge of what a Canadian is allowed to say can shift without anyone in Parliament casting a vote. So here is how a deletion goes. A platform decides it has “reasonable grounds to suspect” your post is child sexual abuse material or an intimate image shared without consent. From that moment it has 24 hours to make the post inaccessible to every person in Canada. Down first, explained afterward. You can file representations and request a reconsideration, and your words stay gone the entire time you are waiting. Or someone skips you altogether and reports the post to the Commission, which can order it made “permanently inaccessible.” No judge appears anywhere in that sequence. The definitions get bigger the longer you look at them. “Intimate content communicated without consent” now reaches AI images “likely to be mistaken for” a real recording of a person. As a ban on revenge porn; reasonable, depending on how it’s implemented. But as written, those same words also cover a tasteless deepfake of a sitting politician, and the person sorting one from the other works for the company that gets fined either way. Companies do not agonize over that distinction. They delete and move on. Now the part that will get sold as the bill’s crown jewel, the social media ban for anyone under 16. Sections 26, 27(1) and 27(2) order affected platforms to “implement adequate age-verification or age-estimation measures designed to prevent a person under the age of 16 from being able to have an account with, or be otherwise registered with, the service.” The same sections insist those measures provide for the “protection” and eventual “destruction” of any “personal information that is collected for age-verification or age-estimation purposes.” How a company manages both at once the bill leaves blank. What it spells out, plainly, is that the measures have to be “effective.” So picture what “effective” actually demands. Canadians mostly prove their age by handing over a government ID, a driver’s license or a passport. The alternative is age estimation, where the platform studies your biometrics to guess your age from facial geometry, eye shape, skin elasticity, the retreat of your hairline. One way you surrender a document, the other way you surrender your face. Neither is optional if you want in. And the checking cannot stop at teenagers. To be confident a user is not under 16, a platform has to assess the age of every user it has, so the system built to catch one 15-year-old gets pointed at the entire adult population by design. The monitoring was never going to be limited to children. It cannot be. It also will not stop after the first look. The goal is not only to remove Canadians under 16 but to keep them off and keeping someone off means checking, then checking again, which points toward continuous age verification rather than a one-time gate at the door. Whatever method a platform settles on, the outcome is the same. Bill C-34 rewrites the terms on which all Canadians reach social media and it does so by deputizing private companies into making you give up more of yourself before you are allowed into the digital public square. A government that announced Canadians must show identification to the state before speaking online would have a brawl on its hands by the weekend. Running the identical demand through TikTok and Instagram is quieter and looks like consumer protection. It is the same demand. It raises the obvious questions about privacy and it may collide with the Charter itself, whose section 8 guards against unreasonable search and seizure. Compelling the population to submit ID or a face scan as the price of using a website is, at the very least, a hard thing to reconcile with that promise. None of the bill’s reassuring language about destroying data afterward changes the underlying trade and none of it stops a breach, a leaked database, or an employee who decides to go digging. We have all seen how that story tends to end. Chatbots get their own homework. A chat service has to build something that, the instant a user expresses “a suicidal ideation, an intention to self-harm or an intention to commit an act that could cause death or serious bodily harm to an individual,” cuts off the conversation and steers them toward “crises intervention services that are appropriate to the situation.” Nobody wants a bot encouraging a person in crisis and that part is worth stating without irony. The trouble is the method. You get there by having the service read private messages for the wrong words, and once that is mandatory for the worst case, the scanning is built for every other case too. What actually brings the platforms to heel is the money. Administrative penalties run up to the greater of $10 million or 3 percent of global revenue. Criminal fines on indictment go to the greater of $20 million or 5 percent. Run a platform and do the arithmetic. The cheap, safe move on any borderline post is to delete it, because a wrong guess about “harmful content” is the costliest mistake available, and so the companies will over-censor on reflex without the government ever issuing an order. For the record, the bill does claim to value speech. “Freedom of expression” is in the list of purposes and a few duties say platforms need not do anything that “unreasonably or disproportionately” limits users. Then ask who decides what counts as reasonable. The Commission does, the same one writing the rules and collecting the fines, with no definition of where the limit falls. A protection the censor grants itself and can revise on a quiet afternoon, is not really a protection. The most alarming clause waits near the back. Cabinet can declare a service regulated even below the user threshold, as long as it decides there is “a significant risk that harmful content is accessible on the service.” Set that next to the government’s claim that platforms must be “responsible for addressing harm before it occurs,” and the design is plain enough. Act against the speech that has not happened, on the theory that it might. Most legal systems wait for the act. This one would prefer not to. Now it goes to Parliament, where the under-16 ban will take the headlines, because banning teenagers from Instagram polls beautifully and threatens no one with power. The parts that deserve the scrutiny are duller and far more lasting. One is a standing federal body that can make speech vanish on suspicion, with no court and no clock running against it, holding a definition of harmful it gets to write for itself. The other is a verification regime that puts every adult’s ID or face on file as the toll for logging on. Protecting kids is the line on the label. The capabilities the bill actually builds will still be sitting there long after this government has gone looking for its next cause. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada’s Bill C-34 Would Require ID or Face Scan to Use Social Media appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Britain’s speech regulator has told social media companies to set numerical targets for how much content they take down during the World Cup and to treat the ability to post without a name as a risk they need to manage. Ofcom laid this out on June 8 in an open letter to every online service covered by the Online Safety Act, sent three days before the FIFA World Cup 2026 begins on June 11. The regulator describes the tournament, which runs to July 19, as a stretch of “heightened risk” and wants platforms ready to remove illegal hate, harassment, threats and abuse directed at players, officials and pundits. Tucked into the regulator’s list of expected steps is the instruction that companies should “Set performance targets for the removal of illegal material.” That turns moderation into a quota system, where a platform measures itself by how much it deletes rather than how carefully it judges what should stay up. A removal target rewards taking content down and creates no matching pressure to leave lawful speech alone. The letter also spells out what Ofcom considers dangerous and the answer reaches well past abuse itself. Alongside livestreaming, reposting and recommendation feeds, the regulator flags “Services where users can post or send content anonymously, including without an account.” Speaking without attaching your legal identity now sits on an official register of risks to be reduced. The same document lists engagement-based business models as another hazard, which tells you how broadly the regulator is willing to define the problem. Behind the requests sits the threat of enforcement. Ofcom says it is running a live compliance program into how platforms handle illegal hate content, that it will scrutinize evidence of companies falling short during the tournament, and that it stands ready to act against any that do. Oliver Griffiths, Ofcom’s Online Safety Group Director, put the pressure plainly. “Tech firms now have a legal duty to deal with illegal hate and abuse,” he said, adding that the regulator is “pushing companies hard to make their services safer, and we’ll be holding them to account if they don’t.” Since February 2026, Ofcom has run a partnership with the UK Football Policing Unit and the game’s governing bodies, including the FA, the Premier League and the anti-discrimination group Kick It Out. Chief Constable Mark Roberts, the police lead for football, described “regular collaboration with social media companies through monthly meetings, alongside investigations.” A regulator, a police unit, and a roster of football institutions now meet platforms every month to discuss which speech comes down and which users get pursued. Ofcom does offer some free speech lip service. It says it has assessed the effect on freedom of expression, that it does not rule on individual posts, and that its codes are not built to stop adults sharing legal content. The comfort is thinner than it sounds. A regulator does not need to judge individual posts once it has asked companies to hit removal quotas, logged anonymity as a risk, and scheduled monthly meetings with police in the room. The deletions happen at the platform, under pressure from the state, with the paperwork describing it as safety. The thing being lost here is ordinary and easy to miss. You used to be able to watch a tournament, argue about a penalty, and post about it without a company building a case for treating your account as a hazard. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Regulator Targets World Cup Social Media Speech appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The timing is so perfect it almost looks scripted. On June 8, 2026, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker named Hadi Alodid stabbed a man named Stephen Ogilvie on Belfast’s Shankill Road, slashing his eyes, face, and back in what witnesses and police described as an attempted beheading. Ogilvie, 44, is in hospital. By the following evening, the Northern Ireland city was on fire. Cars, houses, and a bus were torched. Masked protesters kicked in doors along the Lower Newtownards Road. Riots spread to Portadown, Antrim, and more. Protests erupted in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Southampton, and outside Parliament in London. And on that very same day, June 9, Britain’s speech regulator Ofcom published its finalized “crisis response protocol,” a new set of rules pressuring every major platform in the country to build censorship infrastructure that activates whenever someone at Ofcom or in government decides a “crisis” is happening or about to happen. The protocol was written because of the 2024 Southport riots. If you wanted a clearer illustration of how these powers will be used, you couldn’t commission one. The Official Response Tells You Everything Within hours of the Belfast stabbing, the political class was already running the Southport playbook. PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher warned: “The challenge we face with today’s online toxic nature is that people are incited by people who are faceless and know nothing about this brilliant, vibrant place. Do not be fooled or duped by people online.” First Minister Michelle O’Neill said: “of those people out there who are stoking up tensions in that social media space who are happy to raise tensions, they do not represent us. We are good people and I don’t want to see anybody living in fear.” Justice Minister Naomi Long blamed “bad faith actors” online for stoking tension. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the stabbing “sickening” and made clear there was “no tolerance” for street violence. Notice the pattern. The question of why people are angry gets replaced by the question of who shared the video. The people who are upset about the attack online become the problem and a censorship target. And the regulator that just published new tools for suppressing online speech during exactly this kind of event gets to look prescient instead of opportunistic. The script never changes. The censorship methods, though, keep growing. What the Protocol Actually Does Ofcom’s crisis response protocol, added to its Codes of Practice under the Online Safety Act (OSA), pressures social media platforms, messaging apps, forums, dating services, and essentially any website where humans can talk to other humans to build standing censorship systems for “crisis” situations. The OSA’s Codes aren’t technically mandates. Platforms can theoretically ignore them and “use other effective measures to protect users from illegal content and activity.” This is like saying you don’t have to wear a suit to court. Technically true; inadvisable if you plan on winning. Under the protocol, covered platforms must build systems to identify and respond to spikes in “illegal” content and “content harmful to children” during what Ofcom defines as an “extraordinary situation in which there is a serious threat to public safety in the United Kingdom.” They should deploy a temporary crisis response team “as soon as reasonably practicable if the provider determines that a crisis is occurring or is likely to occur.” They should run post-crisis reviews to evaluate how effective the censorship was. And large platforms should open a dedicated communication channel with law enforcement, so police can phone in their content complaints on a priority line during the crisis. A direct hotline between police and a platform’s moderation desk, activated during civil unrest, is a state-to-delete pipeline. There’s no court order, just a cop calling a content moderator and saying “this one,” and the post vanishes. “Likely to Occur” Is a Loaded Gun Pointed at Every Trending Topic The most dangerous word in the entire framework is “likely.” Platforms don’t need an actual crisis and they don’t even need burning cars. They need a feeling that trouble might be on the way. Ofcom expects them to activate the protocol when a crisis is “likely to occur,” which is a subjective, future-tense judgment call being outsourced to private companies with every financial incentive to over-comply. Think about what this means in the context of Belfast. A video of a stabbing goes viral. People start posting angry reactions. Some of those reactions call for protests. Under this protocol, a platform looking at rising engagement around the Belfast attack could decide that a crisis is “likely,” activate its response team, and start suppressing content before a single car has been set on fire. The censorship arrives before the crisis. By the time anyone asks whether the deleted posts were actually illegal, the moment has passed. And the definition of “crisis” is elastic enough to be meaningless. Ofcom says an “extraordinary situation” can include “local or regional crises” and even “an overseas event.” A protest in one neighborhood. A political incident in another country. Something trending on X that makes a regulator nervous. Ofcom gave itself a rubber stamp that reads “CRISIS” and left the ink bottle open. Who Gets Caught? Three categories of “user-to-user services” are expected to comply: large platforms rated high-risk for “terrorism, hate, harassment, stalking, threats and abuse, and foreign interference;” large platforms “likely to be accessed by children” rated medium-risk for “abuse, hate, and violent content;” and any platform of any size “likely to be accessed by children” rated high-risk for those categories. The OSA covers basically any website where one human can communicate with another. Social media, messaging apps, forums, dating apps, video and photo sharing, online marketplaces, multiplayer games, and AI services whose output can be shared. The exemptions are email, SMS, MMS, and one-to-one voice calls. So the technologies of 1995 are exempt. Everything invented since is in scope. If you wanted to design a system where the government could control what people say during the exact moments when free speech is most essential, you’d build something very close to what Ofcom just published. And you’d probably have the nerve to call it a safety measure, too. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Ofcom’s Crisis Censorship Protocol Arrives Just as Belfast Erupts appeared first on Reclaim The Net.