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If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is in Downing Street, and he has spent twenty years telling you exactly what he wants to do to the internet. He won the Makerfield by-election on June 18 2026. He then collected the backing of roughly 349 Labour MPs, more than 85 percent of the parliamentary party. By the time he walked through the black door, the job had been settled for weeks. His first big announcement was the one privacy campaigners had been hoping for. Starmer’s digital ID scheme for all adults is dead, scrapped before Burnham had finished unpacking, the money moved to the cost of living. The applause came quickly. Perhaps it should not have. This is a read on a government barely a day old. On speech and privacy, the early signals point one way, and it is not the way that loosens the state’s grip. He is not about to tear up the settlement he inherits from Keir Starmer. The open question is how much further he carries it. Burnham arrives with a long record on all this. He is one of the few senior British politicians with a documented, two-decade appetite for putting the government closer to what you can see, say and read online. His first ministerial job, at the Home Office in 2005 and 2006, was pushing Tony Blair’s Identity Cards Bill through Parliament. He told the BBC that compulsory national ID cards would be a major breakthrough. Twenty years later, asked about it again, he was unembarrassed about the principle: “I’m not kind of arguing against the principle. I was very pro, actually, I thought there was a real clear case for it.” Two decades of hindsight, and the case is still clear to him. What that case rests on is a claim about the relationship between a person and the state, and it is the same claim underneath every age check and identity gate now being built. The Identity Cards Act reached the statute book on 30 March 2006 and was repealed on 21 January 2011. Then came 2008, and Culture Secretary Burnham produced a plan that looks like a blueprint for everything running today. The organizing idea was that online content should meet the same regulatory standards as television. He wanted taste and decency rules applied to the web, cinema-style age certificates and warning signs on anything featuring sex, violence or strong language, alerts bolted onto viral content, and ISP-level “child-safe” packages. He floated making YouTube and Facebook delete offensive material within a set time once alerted, and changing libel law so suing an online publisher got easier. He even wanted to sound out the incoming Obama administration about international rules for English-language websites. Age gating, takedown clocks, regulator muscle aimed at platforms, it is all sitting there in 2008, waiting for the technology to catch up. The plans died, and the body that killed them was Ofcom, which called them undesirable and unworkable online. This was back when the speech regulator was more levelheaded. The regulator that told Burnham in 2008 that broadcast rules could not be stretched over the internet is the regulator now enforcing the Online Safety Act. The intellectual weight at Ofcom has obviously severely declined. Then 2016, and the episode that should be read before anyone celebrates this week. As Shadow Home Secretary, Burnham went after the Investigatory Powers Bill. He said Britain needed a new law in this area, then listed what was wrong with the one in front of him: thin privacy safeguards, surveillance powers that went too far, thresholds set too low, weak oversight, definitions loose enough to justify almost any intrusion. Labour abstained in March 2016. The government made amendments. In June, Burnham and Labour voted for it, and the Snoopers’ Charter received Royal Assent that November. The Act remains one of the most expansive surveillance laws in any democracy, and it exists because the opposition of the day decided its objections had been satisfied. That is the pattern worth holding onto. Burnham objects to how a power is packaged, wins changes to the packaging, and votes the power into the statute book. Ten years later the objections are a footnote and the Act is still there. The recent statements finish the picture. During an April 2025 Times interview he talked warmly about regulating social media for teenagers, saying that if it is not a ban it needs to be something. By January 2026 he agreed with much of what Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was saying about children and social media and welcomed a cross-party mood for bolder action. Earlier this month, days after winning Makerfield and while the leadership was already effectively his, he confirmed the current government’s online age verification scheme keeps running and imposes election purdah rules online. That is twenty years pointing the same way. The purdah idea has a name attached to it. Lucy Powell has argued that social media platforms should face something close to the rules that restrict broadcasters during election campaigns. Powell was elected deputy leader by the membership, which means Burnham cannot remove her, and she is close to him. The same government is separately pushing to lock legacy media outlets into people’s feeds. Put those together and the shape is familiar: the state deciding which voices get carried during an election and which get turned down. Expect the Online Safety Act to survive Burnham intact, because the pressure on him runs toward strengthening it. A coalition of charities, campaign groups and academics wrote to him before he reached No 10, asking him to toughen the law. Their specific wish is to drag it past illegal content and into “legal but harmful” territory, the exact area the Act was careful to leave alone. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee wants the same, arguing the Act is too weak on “misinformation” and that platforms should answer for how they amplify lawful content people dislike. 2024’s Southport unrest is the case they keep reaching for. That “legal but harmful” line is where the state stops chasing crime and starts refereeing opinion. The government gets to write the definition of harmful, and then the government gets to enforce it. A change of direction was always likelier on digital ID than on the Online Safety Act, and today proved the point. The enforcement machine that has already pushed platforms into restricting British users has been inherited whole and will probably be widened, while ministers keep insisting none of this touches free speech. Here is where the flattering headline about Burnham falls apart on contact. He confirmed before taking office that Starmer’s digital ID program for all adults is being scrapped, with the money redirected to the cost of living and the whole thing badged as a reset of priorities. The Office for Budget Responsibility had costed the program at £1.8 ($2.42B) billion over three years, a figure Downing Street rejected without offering one of its own. Read on its own, that sounds like a victory for anyone who values privacy. That reading collapses for two reasons. The objection was never to identity infrastructure as a principle. Asked in September 2025 whether he backed Starmer’s digital ID plans, Burnham said “not now,” and the reason he gave was tactical. He pointed back to 2005 to 2010, warning of an opportunity cost situation where something consumes a huge amount of time and does not come through, exactly as the last ID card scheme consumed a lot of air time and never materialized. That is a complaint about political return on investment, not a commitment to civil liberties. This is the same man who sold compulsory ID cards as a major breakthrough and who still says the case for them was clear. Mandatory right-to-work checks had already been softened to voluntary before he arrived, which makes the announcement partly a decision to stop paying for something that had already lost its purpose. And killing a work-linked BritCard sits a very long way from opposing ID to use the internet. Burnham’s team confirmed he intends to press ahead with plans to demand everyone pass digital ID checks to post on social media. His spokesperson said he is “committed to keeping kids safe online, and has been vocal in his support of age restrictions for kids using social media.” Follow that logic. A government can drop the digital ID card, bank the applause, build the far more consequential thing, an identity gate between you and your ability to speak online, and sell the swap as a retreat. There is no way to enforce a ban on under-16s without checking the age of everyone else, and no way to check age at that scale without checking identity. The card you were not going to carry becomes the login you cannot avoid. Age checks and social media IDs hand more of your privacy away than a right-to-work card ever would, because they bolt your name to what you say rather than to where you work. So take the win, but count it properly. What was scrapped is a £1.8 billion database. What was kept is the part that touches speech. The infrastructure of the digital ID scheme is still being built, and none of it ever depended on the card. GOV.UK One Login isn’t going away. Digital driving licenses are coming, and they’ll be used to grant access to social media. Police are getting access to driving license records with facial recognition. Mandatory Companies House identity verification stays. The NHS Logins and the Single Patient Record isnt coming. Assemble that list and you have a national identity system. It is arriving one service at a time instead of in one bill, which is precisely why it never gets a launch announcement to celebrate or a cancellation to campaign against. Then there is the hire. On 16 July, Burnham appointed Matthew McGregor as his head of political strategy in No 10, and the appointment tells you something concrete, provided you do not oversell it. Start with the facts. McGregor was Director of Campaigns and Communications at Hope Not Hate and remained a listed director there until 29 April 2022, then ran 38 Degrees as chief executive until this month. Hope Not Hate is not a neutral party in the fight over online speech. The organization has argued, out loud and often, that deplatforming works and platforms should be pressured into removing content. It has endorsed deplatforming as a tactic in its own material, which says tech companies had to be shamed into changing their moderation policies and then shamed again into enforcing them, and that the pressure to remove content comes from governments, journalists, researchers and campaigners. Install a former campaign director from that outfit at the heart of political strategy, and you learn how the people around the prime minister see the world. Content removal and pressure on platforms are treated as good governance rather than a danger to speech. One detail is hard to read as anything other than what it looks like. Within a day of the appointment being reported, McGregor deleted his X account. Here are the honest caveats, because the case gets stronger when it stops reaching. McGregor’s own public record is campaigns, communications and, lately, tax, not content policy. His job was messaging. There is no evidence in front of me that he personally ran online-censorship campaigns, and the clearest examples of Hope Not Hate pushing for removals came after he had left. But what it says is that Burnham has drawn his inner strategy team from the campaigning world, Hope Not Hate, which treats organized pressure to delete online speech as legitimate and effective. The people who see deplatforming as a feature now sit closer to power than the people who see it as a fault. So the signal from Burnham is not reassuring. He believes in regulating speech, he has the paper trail to prove it, and he inherits an enforcement machine he shows no interest in dismantling while people lean on him to extend it into lawful speech. His one privacy credential dissolves the moment you look at it, a scrapped ID card while the more speech-relevant version, ID and age checks to post, goes ahead. This isn’t a time to celebrate a perceived end to digital ID. There’s still a big fight ahead. Under this new agenda, the machinery keeps growing no matter who holds the keys. Britain’s new keyholder has spent two decades asking for exactly this machinery, and he now has it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Andy Burnham Scrapped Digital ID. His Internet Plans Say Otherwise. appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. FCC member Anna Gomez has been describing what happens when a federal regulator leans on broadcasters over programming it dislikes. This month, she endorsed the JAWBONE Act, a Ted Cruz bill that would let the broadcasters and platforms on the receiving end of that pressure haul federal officials into court and collect money from them. Punchbowl News reported the endorsement on July 14. The bill Gomez is backing, S. 4749, carries the name Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, which nobody will ever say out loud, and it was introduced on June 11 by Cruz and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden. It would make it unlawful for any federal agency, or any officer or employee acting “under color or pretense of office or employment,” to coerce or attempt to coerce a broadcaster, an online platform or an AI provider into taking what the text calls a content action, meaning adding, altering or deleting speech. Coercion is defined broadly as “to take a harmful, hostile, or unfavorable action, to imply the possibility of taking such action, or to threaten such action.” The prohibition reaches conduct undertaken “for the purpose of, or if a reasonable person would understand the coercion or attempted coercion to be for the purpose of, incentivizing the broadcaster or provider to take a content action.” The bill then lists eight factors a court should weigh in deciding whether something counts as coercion. Read them against the record built in Missouri v. Biden and the fit is almost exact. Courts are told to consider the word choice and tone of the communication, whether the official had regulatory or enforcement authority over the recipient, whether the communication referred to adverse consequences, whether it was public or private, whether it carried a disclaimer saying it lacked legal force, and whether it led the recipient to act contrary to its own policies. Two of the eight cut the government’s way, asking whether the communication carried “a factual statement without legal force that could be useful to the decision-making of the recipient” and whether it “was for the purpose of aiding compliance with existing law.” The findings concede the point: “not all government communication to a private speech platform is coercive.” The government does not need a license over Facebook to have leverage over it. It has Section 230 and it has the antitrust division. Consider what that leverage produced in the summer of 2021. Rob Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy, ran a sustained campaign of emails and meetings aimed at Facebook’s moderation of COVID content. The Fifth Circuit found he had demanded internal policy details at least twelve times, pressing the company on what content was being demoted, what interventions it was making, and what measurable impact any of it had. He told the company the White House was “gravely concerned” that Facebook was “one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” accused it of running a “shell game,” and, when an answer was slow, wrote: “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” The private pressure had a public companion. On July 16, 2021, President Biden said the platforms were “killing people.” Four days later the White House communications director said the administration was “reviewing” Section 230 and that the companies “should be held accountable.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had already described antitrust enforcement as an existential threat to his company. Internal Facebook messages produced in the litigation show executives reading the signal exactly as it was sent, one of them calling the standoff not “a great place for us to be” and asking colleagues for “creative thinking on how we can be responsive to their concerns.” The company then expanded what it removed. Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction on July 4, 2023, describing the campaign as Orwellian. The Fifth Circuit trimmed the order but agreed that the White House, the Surgeon General’s office, the CDC and the FBI had likely crossed the constitutional line, and on rehearing added CISA to the list. Under the JAWBONE Act, the doctors and posters whose accounts were throttled could sue over all of it, and so could Facebook. The bill creates a private right of action in federal district court, allows compensatory damages plus attorney fees and litigation costs, permits equitable relief, and bars punitive damages. It move the burden onto the government to prove that one of the exceptions applies, those being lawful investigations, warrants, and directions about an agency’s own official accounts. No official is “immune from liability on the basis of a finding that the agency, officer, or employee had a subjective belief that the information” at issue “was not lawful expression protected by the First Amendment.” State attorneys general can sue “as parens patriae on behalf of natural persons residing in the State.” None of that helped the plaintiffs who actually brought the case. The Supreme Court ended it on June 26, 2024, ruling 6 to 3 in Murthy v. Missouri that they lacked standing because they could not trace any particular deletion to federal pressure rather than to the platforms’ own initiative. The bill attacks that evidentiary trap. Then there is the disclosure regime, which is where the bill either works or collapses. NIST would have a year to write standards for logging government communications with broadcasters, platforms and AI providers. The Office of Science and Technology Policy would build a portal, and every agency would have to feed it new or previously unreported communications at least once every 120 days, including through employee self-reporting. OSTP would publish a “publicly accessible, searchable website” carrying a detailed description of each communication, one that “summarizes the contents” and “identifies all requests, whether implied or express, for content actions.” Congress gets more than the public does: “the full, unredacted record of all covered communications” goes to the chairs and ranking members of the two commerce committees at least once a fiscal year. Inspectors general would audit compliance every two years, and a platform that thinks it has been leaned on can file a complaint through the same website without retaliation, which OSTP must forward to the relevant inspector general and the commerce committees within 15 days. Two holes are already visible. The public gets summaries written by the government about its own conduct, not the underlying communications. And redactions run through the Freedom of Information Act exemptions, which is a wide door. The bill does require that a description carry “markings detailing the specific exemption under which such redactions were made” and that the material be “unredacted when an exemption is no longer applicable.” Whether anyone checks is a separate question. The indemnification provision is the strangest part. If a federal official loses a jawboning case, the federal government pays the judgment. The Justice Department represents the official on request, and the government “shall indemnify the officer or employee for any verdict, judgment, or other monetary award.” The official pays personally only if a court finds he “acted in a willful and wanton manner,” at which point he also reimburses the government for his own defense. The people whose speech was deleted would be funding the settlement through their taxes. Cruz and Wyden are selling the same text to opposite audiences and neither is hiding it. Cruz’s statement was about the Biden administration and CISA, saying it weaponized the agency “to pressure Big Tech into ‘canceling’ Americans who spoke out against vaccine mandates and election fraud.” Wyden’s statement named the sitting president. “The most blatant example is Trump threatening cable companies because he doesn’t like their late-night shows, but jawboning isn’t partisan, and it isn’t new,” Wyden said. The statute would not distinguish between them, which is the point of writing rules rather than grievances. The bill is in the Senate Commerce Committee, which Cruz chairs, so its author controls whether it moves. Gomez’s own position is thinner. Her term expired on July 1, two days after the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in Trump v. Slaughter that the president can remove FCC commissioners without cause, removing the argument she had said she would use to fight a firing. She remains in holdover status. Her response was to point out that the Court had, in a companion decision, “protected the Federal Reserve from political interference while leaving media regulators exposed,” and to say she intends “to keep doing that work for as long as I am able to serve.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post JAWBONE Act: FCC Democrat Backs Cruz Anti-Censorship Bill appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The trigger for losing your anonymity in Victoria, Australia, will be an accusation, not a finding of guilt. Premier Jacinta Allan announced on Sunday that her government will hand the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal the power to issue “demasking orders,” forcing social media companies to reveal the identity of anonymous users accused of online vilification. VCAT is the body Victorians deal with over rental bonds, planning permits, and faulty dishwashers. It is now being asked the question of who gets to speak without their legal name attached to it. The government’s announcement gives the reform four short paragraphs. “Too many Victorians are being vilified online by anonymous users hiding behind a screen,” it reads, before adding that the change “delivers on the Premier’s commitment to hold social media companies to account for online hate.” Allan was blunter on X. “We’re introducing nation-leading laws to keep AI and tech companies accountable, protect our kids & unmask anonymous online hate,” she wrote. Nation-leading is accurate, at least. No other Australian state lets a tribunal order a platform to name an account holder in a vilification case, and the Victorian government is treating that as a selling point rather than a warning. Victoria already rewrote its vilification law. The Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-Vilification and Social Cohesion) Act 2025 repealed the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act and moved the offenses into the Crimes Act and the Equal Opportunity Act. Serious vilification by incitement now carries up to three years in prison, and vilification by threat up to five. Those provisions apply to conduct from 20 September 2025. On 15 April 2026, a new harm-based protection commenced, which means a complainant no longer has to show that anyone was incited to do anything. Harm is enough, and harm is assessed after the fact by people who were not there. The criminal penalties arrived first, the lowered civil standard second, and now the power to attach a name to whoever said it. Each piece was announced on its own, and the government has never presented them as one package. Allan first floated a crackdown on anonymous accounts after the Bondi attack. That was the pitch then, and terrorism is not what a demasking order will be used for. VCAT does not prosecute terrorists. It will be processing complaints about posts on race, religion, and sexual orientation, brought by people who were offended by them. The government’s own language gives it away. A demasking order forces a platform to reveal the identity of anonymous users “accused of online vilification.” Not found liable. Not adjudicated. Accused. Anyone who has ever run an anonymous account knows what that changes. Once a name is out, it stays out. The order cannot be recalled, the employer cannot unlearn it, and the person who filed the complaint does not need to win anything for the exposure to be permanent. The remedy arrives before the finding does. That asymmetry is where the chilling effect on speech is relevant. A Victorian who wants to criticize a religious institution, or a religious practice, or a government policy on immigration, now has to price in the possibility that a tribunal will tell the world who they are. Most people will not run that risk. They will write something softer, or nothing at all, and no order will ever be issued against them, because the threat did the work on its own. Allan is also scrapping the legal threshold families must clear to sue social media and AI companies for negligence, causing psychiatric harm to a child. At present, a family has to prove permanent impairment of 10 percent or more, a figure assessed by medical practitioners. For claims brought on behalf of minors, that requirement goes. “Social media and AI companies design their platforms to be addictive, and our kids are paying the price,” Allan said. “If a platform hurts a child, families should be able to take that company to court.” Australia already bars children from the platforms in question through its minimum-age requirements. The government is promising to protect kids from services that those kids are not supposed to be using, and nobody at the announcement appears to have asked how those two policies fit together. Near the end of the press release is this sentence. “Whether the reform should extend beyond children to adults will be considered as the law is drafted.” The child-protection framing carried the announcement, and the question of who the law actually covers gets settled later, in drafting, without another press conference. Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny described the point of the demasking power directly. “These reforms will help victims of online hate find out who’s really behind the keyboard,” she said. Minister for Mental Health Ingrid Stitt framed it as a health measure. “We’re taking action, because no one should have their mental health impacted by senseless online hate,” she said. Victoria goes to an election in November. Parliament has four sitting weeks left. Allan says the laws are being drafted and that both reforms will go through targeted consultation with VCAT, the courts, and other stakeholders before anything reaches the chamber. Announced on a Sunday, four months out from an election, with the scope of who it covers left to the drafters. The government will keep calling it protection. What it is proposing is a process for finding out who said something the state has decided is hate, run by the tribunal that handles rental disputes, triggered by a complaint rather than a verdict. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Victoria to Force Social Media Companies to Identify Users Accused of “Vilification” appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. NetChoice is asking every judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to undo a decision that lets Ohio demand your identity before you open an account online. The group filed its petition for rehearing on July 16, weeks after a divided three-judge panel revived HB33 and became the first federal appeals court in the country to uphold this kind of law. HB33, Ohio’s Social Media Parental Notification Act, bars anyone under 16 from making an account on a long list of websites unless a parent signs off first. Getting that consent means handing over sensitive documents to confirm a user’s age and identity. The requirement reaches well past the platforms lawmakers name, catching blogs and book-recommendation sites in the same net. Those verification checks build new stores of personal data. Sites that never needed your government ID would have to collect it and hold on to it, turning ordinary services into targets for anyone hunting for identities to steal. Ohio calls this child safety. What it manufactures is a fresh cache of records waiting to be breached. The panel split 2-1 on June 18. Judge Eric Clay’s lead opinion leaned on standing, deciding NetChoice could not sue for the free-speech rights of the minors it says the law shuts out. He questioned whether the trade group had children’s interests at heart at all, and called the consent rule “a marginal burden that precisely targets the multi-faceted problem that Ohio has identified: Children’s unsupervised assent to terms and conditions for use of platforms that take advantage of and harm them.” Judge Alice Batchelder agreed the group could not stand in for young users. NetChoice’s interests, she wrote, “vis-a-vis those of minors are not ‘completely consistent,’ ‘closely aligned,’ or even neutral. They are opposed to one another.” Judge Kevin Ritz read the case differently. He warned the consent mandate could work as an “insurmountable barrier to entry for online speech,” and doubted it would deliver what Ohio promised. Parents give consent one time, he noted, after which a child keeps using a site with no further oversight, which left him unconvinced the law would head off the “issues with sleep, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression, and bullying” the state blamed on these platforms. NetChoice wants the full court to reverse. “The First Amendment’s protections apply to digital speech just as they apply to books, movies, and television. Ohio’s law is unconstitutional, and we are confident the full Sixth Circuit will strike it down,” said Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. Taske cast the case as a fight over who decides what families can read. “Parenting decisions must be made by parents. The government cannot impose its view of what some parents want on all families across the state,” he said. The debate over parental rights is on top of a data-collection regime that asks adults and children alike to surrender private records for the chance to speak online. The law has lost in court before, like when Judge Algenon Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio blocked it with a temporary restraining order in January 2024, added a preliminary injunction weeks later, then struck it down for good in April 2025, finding it was not tailored narrowly enough to serve the state’s interest in protecting kids. Ohio appealed, and the June ruling erased that win. Laws like it have collapsed elsewhere and federal judges have blocked comparable identity-check mandates in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia, each time on First Amendment grounds. The Sixth Circuit’s decision breaks from that run of losses and hands other states a template for pushing the same demands. Ohio’s new attorney general, Andy Wilson, called the panel ruling “a win for Ohio families.” Whether the full Sixth Circuit agrees, the machinery the law would build stays the same. Age verification does not verify only age. It records who you are, where you are, and what you came to say. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Full Sixth Circuit Is Asked To Kill Ohio’s Online ID Law appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.