If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Andy Burnham hasn’t set foot in Downing Street, and his team has already worked out how to protect your children. They’re going to card every adult in the country who wants to get online. The favorite to be the next British Prime Minister will keep the current government’s age-verification scheme running. His spokesperson told The Mirror, “Andy is committed to keeping kids safe online, and has been vocal in his support of age restrictions for kids using social media.” “He knows this ban is a critical first step to keeping kids safe online and preventing further tragedies for families. The task now is to build on the consensus across political parties to make sure it’s enforced in full, and delivered with the urgency this issue demands.” Nobody wants children hurt. The question worth asking is what “age restrictions” has grown into, because this thing was fed after midnight and it is no longer about social media. It began as a rule about Instagram and TikTok. It now reaches into online gaming, artificial intelligence chatbots, and, if the government gets its way, the VPNs that millions of people use to keep their browsing private. Back in June, the government published a progress statement on its under-16 plans. Tucked into the “what happens next” section is a promise to report back by 16 July 2026 on, among other things, the “risks of circumvention through use of virtual private networks.” Read that as a threat to your VPN. The same document raises “whether the age of digital consent should be raised,” which is a roundabout way of saying they might start restricting adults up to 18, or older. Then there is Liz Kendall. In June the Technology Secretary said she would come back in July with more on VPN restrictions, chatbot rules, and, my personal favorite, “overnight curfews or breaks in doomscrolling for 16 and 17 year olds.” A curfew for the internet. Someone in Whitehall seriously believes the cure for teenage anxiety is a nationwide bedtime enforced by software. The gaming rules are already drawn up. Under-16s will lose access to what the statement calls “risky functions on services like gaming services, including communicating with strangers and creating livestreams.” Talking to strangers and going live, the two things that make online games worth playing. Players aged 16 and 17 get them switched off by default. To decide who is allowed what, every player has to prove how old they are, which means every player has to prove who they are. You cannot check a nation’s ages without checking a nation’s identities. Age verification and identity verification are the same machine wearing different hats. To prove you are over 16 to a games company, or over 18 to a chatbot, you hand over a face scan, a credit card, or a government ID. Adults included. The 45-year-old who wants to shout at strangers about football now has to upload a passport for the privilege. The VPN plan is the part that gives the game away. A VPN reroutes your connection so a website can’t see where you really are. People use them to shop safely on public wifi, to dodge tracking, to read news their own government would rather they didn’t. Going after VPNs isn’t child protection. It’s an admission that the whole scheme falls apart the second someone can hide their location, so the location has to be nailed down by force. Kendall’s report is due on July 16. It will arrive wrapped in the language of child safety, because all of this does. Open it up and the request is the same one every time, for your ID, your face, or your real location. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Burnham Backs UK Social Media Ban, Digital ID Age Verification 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. Britain’s Labour Party’s deputy leader wants your social media feed to obey the same election rules that already restrict what British broadcasters are allowed to say. Lucy Powell spent the past week making that case across UK media, and she intends to write it into law. Her plan borrows from Section 6 of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code, the regime that governs UK television and radio once an election period begins. Those rules tell broadcasters how much airtime each party and candidate may receive, force them to stay “impartial,” and shut down discussion of election issues entirely on polling day, from the moment polls open until they close. Opinion polls go dark too. Powell looks at that machinery and sees a template for the open internet. “We absolutely need to strengthen regulation in the social media space,” she told LBC’s Sunday show with Lewis Goodall. “I’ve got some proposals for doing that, especially when it comes to election time, where you know, as a broadcaster, Lewis, how much you are restricted and regulated during election periods, who you can have on your show, how you have to be impartial, how you have to share information and facts about different people standing for election and so on.” Social media, she went on, “is where most people get their news and information and are influenced from, is out with that completely.” Her censorship fix runs through legislation already moving through the House of Commons. “We’ve got an elections bill going through the House of Commons at the moment to strengthen that bill so that social media comes under some of the same requirements during an election period as our broadcasters do.” The bill she means is the Representation of the People Bill. Powell wants amendments that would police, in her words to Times Radio, “what information and news they can amplify and share during election time if it’s not been checked for its accuracy or balance.” Someone would have to check. Someone would have to decide what counts as accurate, what counts as balanced, and which posts get throttled for failing the test. Powell has not said who that someone is. Of course, she frames all of this as protection rather than control. “Freedom of expression is fundamental to our democracy,” she told The Mirror. “These proposals are not about policing political opinions or censoring legitimate political debate. They are about asking how we can make sure the public can make informed choices based on accurate information.” The reassurance sits awkwardly next to the request, which is a demand that the state gain power over which political speech spreads during the exact weeks when political speech decides who governs. Her stated reason is the usual one. “The biggest influence on what many voters see during election campaigns is not a TV news bulletin, it’s social media feeds decided by opaque algorithms, where falsehoods, deepfakes and co-ordinated mis and disinformation can spread at alarming speed, with real-world consequences,” she told The Mirror. She added that “hostile actors, bad-faith campaigners, and bot farms can be used to distort democratic debate.” Every one of those categories requires a definition, and whoever writes the definition of “disinformation” gets to decide whose posts qualify. You also won’t be surprised to learn that Powell also made clear she has soured on the platform she most wants to rein in. X is “a platform that increasingly I find to be quite a toxic and difficult environment,” she told Goodall, echoing Cabinet colleague Lisa Nandy’s decision to quit the platform. A politician who finds a platform toxic while also seeking legal power over what it amplifies during elections invites an obvious question about whose speech ends up targeted. Powell’s voice carries further than a typical deputy leader’s. She keeps the deputy leadership regardless of who succeeds Keir Starmer, and by the party’s own rules she cannot be fired from it. She is close to Andy Burnham, the frontrunner to become the next Labour leader and prime minister, which puts her in line for a senior Cabinet post. What she wants for the internet is a reasonable preview of what a future Labour government might try to pass. The amendments themselves have not been filed yet. What already sits on the bill is a proposed requirement that ministers publish a report on foreign platforms, singling out “US-based social media companies amplifying electoral campaign material via algorithms,” along with “any recommendations considered necessary to protect the integrity of United Kingdom elections.” The Electoral Commission has gone further, urging the government to consider “a new overarching duty on social media platforms operating in the UK.” Each of those phrasings leaves the hard question unanswered. A duty to do what, enforced by whom, measured against whose idea of the truth. Broadcasters accepted these constraints as the price of a license to use public airwaves. The internet was never that. Extending election-period speech controls from a regulated broadcast channel to the platforms where hundreds of millions of people talk to each other changes what the rule is for. It stops being a condition of a scarce license and becomes a standing power to decide which political arguments reach voters when the stakes are highest. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Labour Eyes Social Media Censorship for UK Elections 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. Washington wants a warning sticker on the tools that millions of Americans now use to make art, video, and writing, plus a federal agency standing by to punish anyone who leaves it off. Senator Brian Schatz reintroduced the AI Labeling Act on June 25, handing the Federal Trade Commission power to treat an unlabeled AI image as an unfair or deceptive act. John Curtis of Utah and Mark Warner of Virginia signed on as co-sponsors. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The reach goes well past what the word “label” suggests. Any company whose generative AI produces covered content would have to stamp that output twice. The first mark is a visible disclosure a person can read, the second a hidden machine-readable record of the system, its version, and the moment of creation. Large platforms would then have to carry that data forward, flag the content for users, and mark every chatbot as artificial. Skip a step and the FTC can come calling. “Covered AI-generated content” carries the weight of the whole bill and the definition stretches. It captures anything a generative system creates or substantially modifies so that the meaning shifts and a reasonable person would not assume a machine had a hand in it. A working group convened by the National Institute of Standards and Technology would spend a year deciding what that means in code, which detection tools count, and what else the hidden markers must store. The government here writes the definition, designs the label, and picks the enforcer. That is the shape of compelled speech, and courts have grown wary of it. The ACLU has argued that forcing a disclaimer onto lawful synthetic media is no different from ordering a comedian to announce a parody before the joke lands. FIRE names the constitutional defect directly, warning that label mandates turn speakers into “government mouthpieces for views they may not hold.” The courts have already run this experiment. A federal judge blocked California’s election-deepfake statute in Kohls v. Bonta, ruling that its restrictions and disclosure demands on AI political content violated the First Amendment. Satire, parody, and criticism of officials keep their protection when the tool that made them is new. Enforcement is where the bill grows teeth. A separate section bars anyone from stripping, faking, or trafficking in tools that defeat the disclosures, and it opens the courthouse to the US Attorney General, state attorneys general, and private companies alike. Statutory damages climb to $2,500 for every act of circumvention, or $25,000 per violation, tripled for repeat conduct inside three years. The text promises no prior restraint on protected speech, though the machinery bolted around it points the other way. Only the largest platforms sit inside the net, those with at least 10 million monthly US users or $1.5 billion in revenue. That hands the compliance job to the same few companies that already decide what most people see online. The FTC would also gain authority to write rules and bless “safe harbors,” a standing invitation to widen the mandate later. The backers are open about what they want. “People deserve to know whether the videos, photos, and content they see and read online are real or not,” Schatz said, calling his bill simple. Curtis pitched “clear, commonsense transparency standards,” and Warner said it was “time for the U.S. to catch up.” The Authors Guild, SAG-AFTRA, the National Association of Voice Actors, and Public Citizen lined up behind it, each with a stake in marking machine work as machine work. Good intentions do not settle the constitutional question. A rule that compels a speaker to attach the government’s chosen message to lawful expression starts on the wrong side of the First Amendment, whatever that message happens to be. The scams and fakes the bill points at are already illegal as fraud, forgery, and defamation, reachable without a permanent order that every AI creator wear a federal tag. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Washington Wants a Government Label on AI Speech 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 Canadian government drew up a plan to take individual citizens to court over what they post online. That plan sat inside a 35-page internal memo from the Department of Industry, most of it blacked out before the public could see it. Blacklock’s Reporter pried the document loose through an Access to Information request. Dated March 31 and titled “Misinformation And Disinformation Strategy,” it belongs to the department run by Minister Mélanie Joly, known as ISED. The memo weighs “legal action” against people who post what the government calls “false and misleading information” on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. What kind of legal action? The redactions hide that. What survives the black ink is the logic. “This strategy seeks to uphold the integrity of and public trust in government information,” the memo says. The department is appointing itself guardian of its own reputation, with lawsuits as one available tool. Here is who would decide. ISED itself would judge whether a post is “factually incorrect, misleading or out of context.” The same department that dislikes a post gets to rule on whether the post is true. No court makes that call first and no independent reviewer checks the work. The government writes the definition of misinformation and then enforces it against the people it defines. The memo describes any punishment as “proportionate and subject to senior level approval.” That language reassures no one. Proportion gets measured by the same officials pushing the complaint, and senior approval means a manager signs off, not a judge. Officials already watch. Managers “already monitor the department’s official social media channels and media outlets on a daily basis for comments and recurring inaccuracies,” the memo says. The strategy would push that surveillance from reaction toward “prevention and early detection,” catching disfavored speech earlier in its life. The chilling effect writes itself. A citizen who knows a federal department is reading posts, grading them for accuracy, and holding a lawsuit in reserve thinks twice before typing. The threat does the work a courtroom never has to. The government’s own files admit the problem. Its research found Canadians feel capable of spotting fake news and do not want Ottawa “declaring what is true or not.” The memo concedes that answering misinformation can amplify it, and that going after individuals risks “further backlash.” The department understood the public would object and mapped the plan anyway. Compare the tune from four years back. This same Liberal government declared that “the rights and freedoms that individuals have offline must also be protected online.” That promise reads differently next to a memo about suing people for their posts. Ottawa has not explained how the monitoring runs, how often lawsuits were floated, or what a post must do to land on the department’s radar. The memo sets no threshold. It names no outside check. It leaves a federal department free to decide which citizens spoke falsely and what the price should be. A government sure of its facts answers speech with more speech. This one drafted a plan to answer speech with lawyers. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada Considered Suing Citizens Over “False and Misleading” Social Media Posts 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. Every new car and van sold across the European Union will watch its driver from July 7, when an infrared camera aimed at the person behind the wheel becomes a legal condition of sale. The requirement reaches tens of millions of vehicles a year, and it arrives wrapped in the language of safety. The rule goes by Advanced Driver Distraction Warning, or ADDW, and is inside the bloc’s General Safety Regulation, formally 2019/2144. Carmakers have had to fit it to new vehicle types since July 2024. From July 7, 2026, they must fit it to every new car and van that reaches the market. The camera tracks where a driver’s eyes are aimed and how the head is positioned, then judges whether the driver has looked away from the road for too long. Glance off for more than six seconds at speeds between 20 and 50 km/h and the system has to warn you. Above 50 km/h the allowance shrinks to three and a half seconds. Each warning has to be visible, reinforced by sound or a physical buzz, and it grows more insistent the longer the software believes your attention has drifted. Brussels sells this as lives saved. The Commission expects the wider safety package to prevent more than 25,000 deaths and 140,000 serious injuries by 2038, part of a long-running target called Vision Zero that aims to end road fatalities by 2050. “The EU is a world leader in general safety rules for vehicles,” said Thierry Breton, then the bloc’s internal market commissioner, as the broader rules took effect. “We ensure that innovative technology solutions can be used to improve safety on our roads.” Set the messaging aside and a plainer fact remains. A law now requires a camera to face you for the entire time you drive. It is not an option you enable or a feature you pay to add, but a standard condition of owning a new vehicle. The regulation does carry a limit. The system cannot use facial recognition or any biometric identification of the people inside the car. The data it generates is not allowed to leave the vehicle, and it cannot be passed to third parties. The camera may know where your eyes are aimed while being forbidden from knowing who you are. Those are somewhat favorable rules, but they are also just settings. Data can get stolen or accidentally swept up. A later revision could loosen any of them. Regulators who mandate the hardware today can widen its job tomorrow and, by then, the expensive, fiddly work of wiring a camera into every cabin will already be finished. Once the lens is in and the software is running, the open question stops being whether cars can watch their occupants and turns into what else that watching should cover. None of this depends on pretending that texting at 120 km/h is safe. The worry is normalization. A generation of drivers is about to grow up treating a machine that studies their face as an ordinary part of travel, the way we came to shrug at always-on phones and doorbell cameras that report home. Consent gets manufactured through sheer repetition. Someone also has to pay for the hardware and that someone is the buyer. Cameras, processors, and the code that runs them cost money, and the bill lands on the sticker price of cars that already cost plenty. Switzerland and other markets that track EU rules will follow, stretching the reach of the mandate well past the bloc’s own borders. There is a strange asymmetry in how Europe treats machines that watch drivers against machines that drive. Advanced self-driving features that their makers say cut crashes face tight restrictions on European roads, while a camera trained on your eyes becomes compulsory. As dealerships across the continent open their doors this month, buyers are agreeing to more than a set of keys. They are accepting a camera on every trip, on the promise that the footage stays in the cabin and the software only ever cares about their eyes. That promise holds right until the day someone decides it no longer should. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Mandates Driver-Facing Cameras in New Cars From Today appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.