This Post is for Paid Supporters Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. SUBSCRIBE Already a supporter? Sign In. (If you’re already logged in but still seeing this, refresh this page to show the post.) The post The Strange Truth Behind The New WhatsApp Privacy Lawsuits appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The British government ran a public consultation on whether to ban social media for under-16s. The consultation opened in March. It closed today. In April, while the public was still filling in the forms and expressing their outrage, ministers announced they would impose “age or functionality restrictions” regardless of what the consultation found. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 already requires restrictions for under-16s. The consultation was the democratic version of asking someone where they’d like to eat dinner after you’ve already ordered the food. Today, on closing day, a coordinated media blitz dropped with the subtlety of a carpet bombing. Wes Streeting, the former Health Secretary who quit earlier this month and is now clearly auditioning for the Labour leadership, used the usual trope and compared social media to tobacco. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was photographed meeting bereaved families. Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch wasn’t doing much opposing and accused Labour of dithering on the decision. Every minister involved found their mark and hit it on cue. The cross-party consensus is total and the permitted range of debate runs from “ban it now” to “ban it yesterday.” Streeting said: “Social media should be treated like tobacco – it’s extremely addictive, bad for our health, and Big Tech is borrowing the Big Tobacco playbook to avoid regulation.” He added: “We’ve got to give our children their childhood back.” And: “We have given the pen to tech moguls to write our future for us […] it’s time to take the pen back.” The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which represents 23 medical royal colleges and faculties, submitted a report claiming the issue “ranks alongside smoking and wearing seatbelts in cars as a unifying force for the medical profession.” Of 454 doctors surveyed, half said they treated at least one child a week whose mental distress or physical injury was linked to online content. The report described a “wave of radicalized children” from exposure to “hateful, manipulative, addictive and grossly distressing” content. Nobody is disputing that kids can get hurt online. But proposed fix is an expensive, privacy-destroying placebo that happens to be very convenient for people who’ve wanted to end online anonymity for years. The Tobacco Trick The cigarette comparison is clever in the way that a card trick is clever. It works if you don’t look too closely. Cigarettes are a product. You buy them, you smoke them, and they damage your lungs. The regulatory model writes itself. Restrict the product, regulate the manufacturer, ban the advertising, slap warnings on the package – though even this is controversial. Social media is the infrastructure through which people now access news, organize politically, contact their MP, find communities, and speak in public. When Britain decided cigarettes were dangerous, it didn’t require ID to read about smoking or ban people from discussing tobacco in the town square. But the tobacco framing does something more useful for politicians. It shrinks the debate to two sides: you’re either with the children, or you’re shilling for Mark Zuckerberg. (They obviously don’t want the pubic to know that Zuckerberg’s company Meta is the biggest company actually lobbying for these digital ID age verification checks.) If you raise concerns about civil liberties, you’re clearly in the pocket of Big Tech. If you mention privacy, you must not care about dead teenagers. There is no room in this framing for the person who is worried about children and also worried about handing the government a database of who everyone is online and what they’re saying. That person, in Streeting’s version of the argument, doesn’t exist. What a “Children’s Safety” Ban Actually Requires Here’s the part that tends to get buried under the photographs of grieving parents. A ban on under-16s using social media is technically impossible unless you verify everyone’s age. You cannot check whether someone is 15 without also checking whether someone is 35. The ICO has explicitly said self-declaration is “ineffective” and platforms must use facial age estimation, digital ID, or one-time photo matching. Follow that to its conclusion. Every adult in Britain who wants to post on social media, comment under a news article, or participate in any online forum must submit biometric data or government ID to a private company. Your face or your passport, uploaded to a server run by a company you’ve never heard of, to prove you’re old enough to look at the internet. The proposals under consultation extend beyond social media to video games, VPNs, and websites. If a website is “likely to be accessed by children,” which describes approximately everything on the internet, the ID check applies. None of this made it into Streeting’s tobacco speech. The Discord Precedent If you want to know what happens when age verification data gets collected at scale, you don’t need to speculate. There’s already a case study, and it’s exactly as bad as you’d expect. In October 2025, hackers compromised a third-party vendor called 5CA that handled Discord’s customer support. They stole approximately 70,000 government-issued ID photos collected for age verification. Passports, driving licenses, the works. Discord sat on this for nearly two weeks before telling anyone. The cybercrime group claiming credit said it took 1.5 terabytes of data from 5.5 million users. Discord disputed those numbers. What Discord did not dispute is that its age verification system created exactly the kind of centralized identity honeypot that privacy advocates had been warning about, and that it got raided almost immediately. Discord’s response to this disaster was to expand age verification globally in March 2026, now requiring face scans or government ID for full platform access. The house caught fire, so they added more flammable material. The UK government is proposing to build this same architecture across every platform used by British citizens, and nobody in the coordinated media operation today mentioned what happens when (not if) that data gets breached. Seventy thousand stolen passports from a gaming chat app apparently didn’t rate a mention alongside the tobacco comparisons. Australia: The Test Case Nobody Wants to Discuss Australia enacted the world’s first under-16 social media ban in December 2025. It was supposed to be the proof of concept, the model for the world. The early data is in, and it reads like a comedy. A survey of 835 Australian teenagers, conducted four months after the ban, found that only about one in four 14-to-15-year-olds actually comply. Three in four just carried on as before. Australia’s own eSafety regulator flagged “a number of poor practices” and “compliance concerns,” including platforms allowing minors to retry age assurance methods until they passed. Kids were essentially given unlimited attempts at a test with no penalty for failure. The regulator raised “significant concerns” about five major platforms and launched formal investigations. Complaints about cyberbullying and image-based abuse were unchanged. The ban changed nothing about the harms it was supposed to address. The Henry VIII Gambit Ministers are using the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to grant themselves “Henry VIII” powers, which allow them to implement a social media ban via secondary legislation. Secondary legislation gets almost no parliamentary debate and is voted on as a take-it-or-leave-it package. No statutory instrument has been rejected by the House of Commons since 1979. The government is essentially giving itself the power to redesign Britain’s relationship with the internet by ministerial decree, with all the democratic oversight of a planning application for a backyard shed. The House of Lords voted against this approach four times. They eventually backed down after ministers offered a vague commitment to “some form” of restrictions, which was the commitment ministers had already made in April, which was before the public consultation closed, which brings us back to the fundamental absurdity of the whole exercise. The consultation is closed. Forty-two child safety charities said this was the wrong approach. Australia’s own data says it doesn’t work. The decision was announced before the public finished responding. And Wes Streeting would like you to know that social media is basically cigarettes. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Westminster Recycles Tobacco-Style Panic Campaign For Internet Crackdown appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A Florida federal court has summoned Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to respond to an anti-censorship lawsuit filed by Rumble and Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the parent company of Truth Social. Moraes has 21 days to mount a defense. If he doesn’t, the case moves forward without him and a default judgment becomes a real possibility. The summons was served by email on May 24, 2026, after the court authorized that method two days earlier. The email went to two addresses tied to Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), one of which had previously been used in communications with Rumble. Martin De Luca, the Boies Schiller Flexner partner representing both companies, posted the summons document on X, writing: “Today, pursuant to an order from a U.S. federal court, Rumble and Trump Media served Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes by email. Summons attached.” Getting to this point took over a year. Rumble and TMTG first sued Moraes in February 2025, in the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, arguing that his censorship orders violated the First Amendment and were unenforceable on American soil. Neither company has any entities, operations, employees, or bank accounts in Brazil. They sought a declaration that a foreign judge cannot unilaterally dictate what speech is allowed on American platforms. The lawsuit targeted Moraes’s orders demanding that Rumble suspend accounts belonging to US-based Brazilian dissidents and hand over their personal data. The original complaint identified one target as “Political Dissident A,” later publicly confirmed as Allan dos Santos, a journalist and former priest who fled Brazil for the United States in 2021 after Moraes charged him with various crimes for publishing information the justice labeled “disinformation.” Moraes also sought dos Santos’s extradition; the US rejected that request in March 2024. The justice kept issuing censorship orders anyway. Moraes responded to the lawsuit not by engaging with the legal process but by ordering Rumble shut down entirely in Brazil. On February 22, 2025, he directed Brazilian telecommunications companies to block the platform and imposed a daily fine of roughly $8,700 on the US-based company for refusing to comply with his demands. Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski faced threats of criminal charges. The ban remains in effect. Truth Social, which relies on Rumble’s streaming infrastructure, was also affected. The early result was a win for the platforms. On February 25, 2025, US District Judge Mary Scriven ruled that Moraes’s censorship orders had no legal force in the United States. They had never been served through the Hague Convention, the US-Brazil Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), or any other valid mechanism. Rumble and TMTG didn’t need a temporary restraining order because there was nothing valid to restrain. As the companies’ counsel put it: “The court’s decision today denied the TRO for being unnecessary because it determined that Moraes’s orders are invalid and unenforceable in the United States. Therefore, there is no need to restrain invalid orders. Of course, if Moraes takes any steps to try to enforce his illegal orders on US soil, we can return to the judge to grant a TRO.” That ruling didn’t end the conflict. Moraes continued issuing new censorship orders from Brasilia. By July 2025, he had demanded Rumble block a second US-based political commentator, identified as “Political Dissident B,” threatening daily fines of 100,000 reais (about $20,000) if the platform refused. Rumble and TMTG filed an amended complaint. A House Judiciary Committee report published in April 2026, built on nonpublic documents, mapped the full scope of Moraes’s operation. His first documented global takedown order dates to July 2020, when he ordered Meta to delete 16 Facebook profiles worldwide to stop what he called “continued dissemination of fraudulent news (fake news), slanderous accusations, threats, and offenses imbued with animus…that affect the honor and safety of the FEDERAL SUPREME COURT.” The speech he wanted erased was a criticism of his own court. Since 2022, Moraes has ordered nearly 150 social media accounts suspended, targeting journalists, opposition legislators, satirists, jurists, and even musicians who criticized Brazil’s current government. Florida-based podcaster Bruno Aiub, known as “Monark,” saw roughly 40 accounts ordered deleted across 24 platforms in June 2024, with daily fines of about $18,500. Moraes also issued secret orders to Spotify between 2023 and 2024 demanding the removal of Aiub’s podcast. Brazil’s censorship apparatus, the CIEDDE, flagged posts about US presidents for deletion. One April 2025 post was targeted because it said Trump was “going to expose that bandit dressed as a judge [Justice Moraes] here in Brazil, as well as the interference/fraud in the 2022 elections.” X refused to comply with those orders. The US government briefly took notice. In July 2025, the State Department sanctioned Moraes under the Global Magnitsky Act, stating that he “abused his authority by engaging in a targeted and politically motivated effort designed to silence political critics through the issuance of secret orders compelling online platforms, including U.S. social media companies, to ban the accounts of individuals for posting protected speech.” Those sanctions were lifted in December 2025 as part of a broader diplomatic thaw between Washington and Brasilia, a move that drew criticism from those who saw it as trading away accountability for trade concessions. The lawsuit, meanwhile, sat frozen for over a year because the companies couldn’t formally serve Moraes. They spent months attempting service through the Hague Convention, the formal treaty process for notifying a defendant in another country. De Luca said in a post on X that rather than allowing the notification to proceed, Brazilian authorities had effectively turned the Hague process into a political shield for Moraes. The attorneys for Rumble and TMTG argued to the Florida court that the formal channels had been “blocked” and that the delays were jeopardizing the case. In February 2026, they petitioned for permission to serve by email. The Florida court granted that request on May 22, 2026, finding that the companies had spent “several months” trying formal service and that the process in Brazil had become, as the court noted, “politicized and effectively unavailable.” The ruling drew on a recent Florida Supreme Court decision allowing email service of process on defendants located abroad. Moraes now faces a choice. He can engage with the American legal process, which would require him to defend his censorship orders in a jurisdiction that treats speech suppression as constitutionally suspect. The is about more than Brazil. If a single foreign judge can order the worldwide deletion of posts that criticize him and platforms comply to preserve market access, then every government with a large enough consumer base holds veto power over speech in the United States. The Florida court has now given Moraes a deadline to explain why that shouldn’t trouble anyone. The STF, as of this writing, has not publicly responded to the US court’s authorization of email service. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post US Court Summons Pro-Censorship Brazil Judge Moraes in Rumble Lawsuit appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Google has told Canadian lawmakers that Bill C-22 would build a “surveillance infrastructure” that weakens cybersecurity for everyone. The company’s submission to the House of Commons public safety committee landed alongside a blunt refusal from Swiss-based Proton VPN and a trade warning from the Information Technology Industry Council, a US lobby group representing Amazon, Google, and Nvidia. Bill C-22 would force telecoms, messaging apps, and potentially any digital service in Canada to rebuild their systems for police and CSIS surveillance, while storing user metadata for up to a year. That metadata covers who contacted whom, when, and from where, for millions of people not suspected of anything. Even Google, which is ironically no stranger to surveillance accusations, warned that the bill gives the Public Safety Minister “sweeping powers to issue secret orders” to intercept data, and that its definition of “electronic service provider” could catch nearly any company operating in Canada. The company called the bill’s safeguard against systemic vulnerabilities dangerously narrow. “Without a stronger definition of ‘systemic vulnerability,’ the law could be used to decrease overall user security, by creating backdoors that would break end-to-end encryption and create significant cybersecurity risks, facilitating foreign interference and weakening global user privacy,” Google wrote. The company added: “Google has never built a backdoor or other mechanism to circumvent end-to-end encryption in our products. If we say a product is end-to-end encrypted, it is end-to-end encrypted.” Google joins Apple, Meta, and Signal, the last of which has threatened to leave Canada entirely rather than comply. Proton VPN’s general manager David Peterson was less diplomatic. “Complying with foreign surveillance orders without Swiss legal process is a criminal offence. Not happening,” he posted on X. “We’ll defend our Canadian users and never compromise them. We will fight C-22’s application by every means available.” Proton also noted that the EU’s highest court has struck down this kind of mass retention legislation twice already. The ITI submission added trade pressure, arguing C-22 would have “extraterritorial reach and increase conflict of law issues for global technology companies.” US congressional committee chairs Jim Jordan and Brian Mast already warned Anandasangaree that American companies face an impossible choice between “compromising the security of their entire user base, including US citizens, or risking exclusion from the Canadian market.” The government’s own defense of the bill mostly proved the opposition’s point. RCMP officials said retained metadata could identify people “on the scene or at least individuals who were in proximity” to a shooting. You may remember, Public Safety Minister Anandasangaree has accused tech companies of “misinterpreting” the bill. The companies are interpreting it just fine. They’re reading what it says and refusing to build what it demands. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Even Google Warns Canada Bill C-22 Creates Surveillance Backdoors appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Five of the biggest online platforms have for some reason just agreed to let Britain’s speech regulator Ofcom preview new features before they launch. Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snap, and YouTube will now notify the regulator whenever they update risk assessments before making significant product changes, going beyond what the Online Safety Act requires. TikTok refused, saying it would notify Ofcom only “where required.” The result is a pre-approval pipeline where a government regulator can pressure companies to alter features before users ever see them, without any formal legal process. Meta’s commitment deserves the most scrutiny. The company will deploy AI tools to monitor everyone’s messages in order to “detect likely sexualised conversations between adults and teens in Instagram direct messages” and report flagged accounts to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The timing is not subtle as Meta stripped end-to-end encryption from Instagram DMs on May 8, 2026, citing low adoption. The company never turned encryption on by default, never told most users it existed, and then used the low uptake it engineered as justification for removing it. With encryption gone, Meta can now read every Instagram message, and it’s immediately weaponizing that access as a scanning tool. Whether any human reviews these AI-generated flags before they reach NCMEC remains unclear from Ofcom’s published documents. Snap committed to “highly effective age assurance” for all UK users over the summer. Ofcom CEO Melanie Dawes told LBC that Snapchat is “no longer going to be allowing adults to find kids randomly,” calling the change “long overdue.” That Snapchat was still surfacing adult strangers to 13-year-olds through its recommendation engine until forced to stop says more than any safety pledge. The fix applies only to UK users. Globally, the feature remains active. TikTok and YouTube both declined to make additional commitments, insisting their platforms are already safe for children. Ofcom’s own research says otherwise: 73% of 11-to-17-year-olds reported encountering harmful content over four weeks, primarily through personalized feeds. Even with multiple platforms voluntarily expanding surveillance, Ofcom wants more. The regulator has written to Secretary of State Liz Kendall requesting new powers to enforce minimum age requirements, noting it is “not currently convinced” that Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok will “effectively prevent children under 13 from accessing their sites and apps.” Ofcom’s data shows 84% of 8-to-12-year-olds are already on these platforms. The anonymous internet is being replaced by one that demands identity documents, biometric scans, or behavioral profiling as the price of participation. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post 5 Tech Giants Let UK Speech Regulator Preview New Features appeared first on Reclaim The Net.