If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Federal Trade Commission sent letters to 17 major tech companies this week, warning them to comply with the Take It Down Act by May 19 or face fines of $53,088 per violation. Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, X, Reddit, Discord, Snapchat, Pinterest, Bumble, Match Group, Automattic, and SmugMug all got the same message from Chairman Andrew Ferguson. We obtained a copy of the letter for you here. “We stand ready to monitor compliance, investigate violations, and enforce the Take It Down Act,” Ferguson wrote. “Protecting the vulnerable, especially children, from this harmful abuse is a top priority for this agency and this administration.” The law, signed by President Trump in May 2025 with strong backing from First Lady Melania Trump, requires platforms to delete non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated deepfakes, within 48 hours of receiving a removal request. Platforms must also find and remove identical copies, provide clear notice about the removal process and let people track their requests. The FTC published a business guidance page alongside the letter spelling all of this out. The definition of “covered platform” is broad enough to capture social media, messaging apps, video sharing, gaming platforms, and essentially any site hosting user-generated content. Nobody wants revenge porn circulating online. But the law Congress passed is far broader than the problem it claims to solve. The TAKE IT DOWN Act borrows its structure from the DMCA’s already-controversial notice-and-takedown system, then strips out the safeguards. Under the DMCA, a takedown request must include a statement under penalty of perjury. False claims can result in liability. There’s a counter-notice process so the person whose content was deleted can push back. TIDA has none of this. There’s no penalty for false claims, no counter-notice, no requirement that the filer prove anything before content disappears. A platform gets a complaint, has 48 hours, and deletes. That’s the entire process and exactly why the Take it Down Act introduces a new censorship mechanism. The law defines a violation as involving an “identifiable individual” engaged in “sexually explicit conduct,” without defining that conduct narrowly. More: The Take It Down Act: A Censorship Weapon Disguised as Protection Political speech is vulnerable too. A deepfake of then-candidate Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet went viral before TIDA took effect. There was no nudity or explicit content but under the TIDA’s language, that satire could be classified as NCII and deleted. A meme recasting Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz as characters from Dumb and Dumber was already pulled from Meta for being sexual in nature. Anyone with a form and a grievance can file a request and platforms facing five-figure fines per violation will delete first. The law also applies to messaging platforms, some of which offer end-to-end encryption. If a platform can’t see message contents, it can’t scan for NCII or find “known identical copies.” Complying with the law as written means breaking encryption or scanning content before it gets encrypted. The FTC’s letter doesn’t address this and the law doesn’t carve out encrypted communications. Enforcement sits entirely with the FTC. The law passed the House 409 to 2 and the Senate unanimously. Nobody voted against protecting victims of revenge porn because that’s how the bill was sold. What Congress built is a takedown system with no safeguards against abuse, enforced by a politicized agency, applicable to encrypted communications, and designed to make platforms censor first and think later. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Days Away: The TAKE IT DOWN Act Creates a Censorship Mechanism With No Safeguards appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A nonprofit that supports online speech restrictions is suing the Trump administration for sanctioning people who pushed platforms to delete speech. The case landed in a D.C. courtroom on Wednesday and the irony runs deep. The Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) wants a federal judge to block a State Department visa policy announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May 2025. The policy allows the US to deny entry, revoke visas, or deport foreign nationals the government considers “complicit in censoring Americans.” CITR filed for a preliminary injunction, and Chief Judge James Boasberg heard oral arguments on May 13 in Coalition for Independent Technology Research v. Rubio. The five people sanctioned under this policy in December 2025 are not random academics. Thierry Breton helped build the EU’s Digital Services Act, which compels American tech companies to delete speech Europeans find objectionable. Imran Ahmed runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has campaigned to get accounts banned from platforms. Clare Melford runs the Global Disinformation Index, which compiled advertiser blacklists to financially punish news outlets it decided were spreading “disinformation.” Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg co-founded HateAid, a German group pushing legal action against speech it calls “digital violence.” Rubio accused them of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.” CITR’s attorney Carrie DeCell argued that “the government is subjecting CITR members and other non-citizens to exclusion, detention and deportation simply for reporting on speech on social media and the harms that might arise from it, and advocating for different content moderation policies and other policies that might govern internet platforms.” She called the policy “expansive and incredibly vague, and the chilling effects are correspondingly enormous.” The government’s lawyer, Zack Lindsey, told Boasberg the sanctioned individuals had worked for or with foreign governments, making their actions, not their words, the relevant factor. Boasberg called it “quite a complex case” and hasn’t ruled yet. DeCell said she hopes for a preliminary injunction within weeks. The effect CITR describes could be real. Researchers may self-censor and academics may avoid public engagement. But CITR refuses to acknowledge a basic fact about the people it’s defending. They were not sanctioned for having ideas. They were sanctioned for building systems designed to silence other people’s ideas. Some ran campaigns to get specific content banned. The Global Disinformation Index created blacklists that cut revenue to outlets based on editorial positions the organization itself judged. The Digital Services Act gave European regulators the power to force American companies to delete content that is entirely legal. The people who spent years arguing that deplatforming is not censorship now argue that being denied a visa is. The people who built blacklists are shocked to find themselves on one. Whether Rubio’s policy is constitutional is a legitimate legal question and Boasberg will answer it. But a court evaluating whether these individuals deserve protection should also consider what they did with their own power when they had it and who they silenced along the way. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Rubio Is Sued Over Visa Bans on Foreign Censors appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Access to Information records obtained by the Western Standard reveal that staff inside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Privy Council Office participated in a confidential federal meeting about which reporters should receive government accreditation and which should be shut out. The meeting focused on building a unified federal media accreditation system across departments. The closed-door talks took place one day after IRCC confirmed it would stop providing media access to outlets that failed to meet its definition of “bona fide” journalism. That definition was built around the Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization (QCJO) designation, a program the Canada Revenue Agency uses to distribute federal subsidies to approved news outlets. The 2024-25 budget estimated $65 million flowing through the program that fiscal year. The government turned a tax classification into a press credential. If your outlet takes government money, you’re legitimate. If it doesn’t, you’re not worth talking to. IRCC and Global Affairs Canada (GAC) quietly inserted QCJO-adjacent criteria into their media accreditation pages. Edmonton-based freelance journalist Jeremy Appel learned the consequences when he contacted IRCC with a routine inquiry. The response from IRCC spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald was: “As your organization doesn’t qualify for these services, you may wish to pursue other avenues to obtain information from IRCC.” The QCJO’s designers insisted from the start that it was never meant to be an accreditation system. “Our goal was to clearly identify the news outlets eligible for this particular government program and not to try to determine some kind of status as an ‘approved journalism organization,'” they wrote. Federal departments did exactly that anyway, deciding whose questions deserved answers based on whether the outlet was on Ottawa’s payroll. The Privy Council Office’s involvement, as documented in the records obtained by the Western Standard, raises the stakes. PCO reports directly to the prime minister. When Carney’s own staff sit behind closed doors with officials from multiple departments to discuss a “unified” accreditation system, that’s the prime minister’s office helping to shape who gets to ask the government questions. The CRA eventually pushed back. Spokesperson Sylvie Branch told The Hub: “The QCJO designation is administered by the CRA for the sole purpose of determining eligibility for tax measures supporting Canadian journalism…The CRA does not determine who is a journalist, nor does it provide QCJO information to other departments unless expressly authorized by law.” Both departments have since scrubbed QCJO references from their media pages. GAC denied it ever required the designation but the language on its own website before the revision tells a different story. The retraction came only after The Hill Times, The Hub, and Blacklock’s Reporter began covering the story. The departments changed course because they got caught, not because they reconsidered. Hub journalist Graeme Gordon experienced the two-tier system personally. Last July, while reporting on immigration numbers for the outlet True North, he repeatedly tried to reach IRCC and got no response. The following month, when he contacted the same department about similar numbers while working under The Hub, a QCJO-designated outlet, IRCC responded. Same reporter. Same topic. The only thing that changed was whether the outlet appeared on the government’s list. When the government signals that only subsidized outlets will receive responses, every journalist at a non-subsidized outlet absorbs that message. Some will apply for QCJO status and accept the funding, creating exactly the dependency the program’s architects claimed to be avoiding. Others will stop calling. Either way, it means fewer uncomfortable questions. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada’s Pay-to-Play Press Pass appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Trump administration has settled with journalist Alex Berenson over the Biden White House’s role in getting him banned from Twitter during the summer of 2021. The settlement includes a payment and a written admission that “the Government did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantial coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.” Not “encouraged.” Not “suggested.” The federal government put its name on a document saying it silenced a journalist because it didn’t like what he was saying about COVID-19 vaccines. Berenson’s lawyer, James Lawrence, believes this is the first time an individual American has received a cash payment to resolve a lawsuit over government coercion of social media companies. Berenson, a former New York Times reporter, had spent much of 2021 questioning the efficacy and safety of the mRNA Covid vaccines on Twitter, where he had roughly 300,000 followers. Internal documents later obtained through discovery and the Twitter Files showed that in April 2021, Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to Biden’s COVID response team, called Berenson “the epicenter of disinformation” in a meeting with Twitter staff. The administration wanted to know why Berenson was still allowed to tweet. The pressure didn’t stop with the government. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner sitting on Pfizer’s board, was running his own campaign to get inconvenient voices off the platform. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 in 2021, a year the company pulled in roughly $81 billion in revenue, nearly half from mRNA vaccines. Gottlieb had a direct line to Todd O’Boyle, Twitter’s senior policy manager and its point of contact with the White House. When a tweet from Dr. Brett Giroir noted that natural immunity appeared superior to vaccine immunity, Gottlieb emailed O’Boyle, calling it “corrosive” and warning it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage.” O’Boyle forwarded the complaint internally with the note, “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.” The tweet was labeled “misleading,” and users were blocked from sharing it. A pharmaceutical company’s board member was using the same White House lobbyist the government used to flag posts for censorship. The financial incentive is not subtle. On August 28, 2021, Berenson posted the tweet that got him permanently banned. “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.” Because of this tweet, Twitter wiped his account. According to the lawsuit, it was Gottlieb’s appeal to O’Boyle about this tweet that pushed the ban through on a Saturday night. The claim that mRNA vaccines don’t stop infection or transmission is now widely accepted, including by the CDC. The tweet that got Berenson banned turned out to be accurate. The settlement releases the federal government from the case but leaves claims against Gottlieb and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla intact. Bourla met with Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, the same week Twitter issued Berenson a third strike. Bourla has described people who spread what he called vaccine misinformation as “criminals” who “have cost literally millions of lives.” The full scope of coordination between Pfizer’s leadership and the White House remains locked in documents Berenson has not yet been able to access. But the government has now admitted, in writing, that it violated a journalist’s First Amendment rights. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Berenson Wins Settlement and First Amendment Admission Over Twitter Ban appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Reddit is testing walling off its mobile website. Visit reddit.com on your phone, and you may now hit an unmissable pop-up demanding you “get the app to keep using Reddit.” There’s no close button, no way to scroll past it, no option to just keep reading. The entire site becomes a full-screen advertisement for the Reddit app and your only choices are to install it or leave. The move targets a specific group Reddit apparently finds intolerable: people who browse without logging in. A Reddit spokesperson told Ars Technica the pop-up was “a test for a small subset of frequent logged-out mobile users that prompts them to download the app after visiting the site.” The spokesperson continued: “These users are already familiar with Reddit and we’ve seen that the experience is much better for them in the app. The app offers a more personalized experience and users can more easily find communities that match their interests.” Translate “personalized experience” and you get the real pitch: we can track you better in the app. More: Use The Website. Ditch The App. Mobile browsers give users actual defenses. Brave blocks trackers by default. Firefox supports extensions like uBlock Origin that strip out surveillance scripts. Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention limits cross-site cookies. Even requesting desktop mode or opening a private tab can cut off the data pipeline. The web, for all its problems, still lets you fight back. Apps don’t. When you install Reddit’s app, you hand over access to device identifiers, advertising IDs, location data, and a constant stream of behavioral signals that no browser extension can intercept. Each subreddit you browse, every post you linger on, every search you type feeds a profile tied to your device. A mobile browser visit gives Reddit almost none of that. The popup freezes the entire page. You cannot scroll, access menus, or read comments once it appears. Users flooded r/bugs and r/help to protest. “Are my days of anonymously browsing over?” one user asked, which may be the most concise summary of what’s actually happening here. Anonymous browsing isn’t broken but Reddit is deliberately trying to it. The company presents this as an improvement but the users being targeted are the ones who have, repeatedly and deliberately, chosen not to download the app. This fits a broader and deeply troubling trend: the retreat from the open web into walled-garden apps. X makes it painful to read threads without logging in. Instagram nags relentlessly about its app. Like other major social media platforms, this turns Reddit into a walled garden. The web was built on the principle that information should be accessible through a browser, on any device, without permission from a gatekeeper. Every platform that shoves users into a proprietary app chips away at that. Apps operate on the platform’s terms, not yours. You can’t inspect the code, you can’t block specific network requests, you can’t choose which data leaves your phone. The browser gave users leverage. The app takes it away. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Reddit Tests Blocking Mobile Web to Force App Downloads appeared first on Reclaim The Net.