If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Supreme Court has cleared the way for a lawsuit that treats a platform’s decision not to check your ID as an illegal business practice. By declining to hear Meta’s appeal in Meta v. Vermont, the justices let Vermont’s claim against Instagram move forward and tucked inside that claim is a demand that should worry anyone who values logging on without handing over proof of who they are. The case began in 2023, when Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, a Democrat, sued Meta, alleging violations of the state’s consumer protection laws. The headline accusation is that Instagram was built to hook young users. One of the listed offenses is Meta’s failure to “verify users’ age upon account creation,” which the state frames as an “Unfair Acts and Practices” violation of Vermont’s Consumer Protection Act. The remedy Vermont seeks is an injunction barring those practices and the practical effect of such an order would push Meta toward far broader age verification than it runs today. A lawsuit nominally about addictive design is being used to recast the absence of identity checks as consumer fraud. Verifying age online means collecting government IDs, scanning faces, or building behavioral profiles detailed enough to estimate how old someone is and every one of those methods replaces an anonymous account with a tracked, identified one. The state could have argued for narrower design fixes. It chose a theory whose logical endpoint is mandatory ID at the door. Meta fought to stop the case on constitutional grounds, telling the Supreme Court, “The complaint alleges that Meta violated Vermont law by ‘designing’ Instagram to be addictive, but there is no allegation that Meta ‘designed’ Instagram in Vermont or with features in any way unique to or targeted at Vermont.” Earlier, the Vermont Supreme Court rejected Meta’s claim, noting that because the state sued Meta for allegedly pushing an addictive program on minors and lying to users about it, any due process concerns have been “clearly extinguished.” Clark, announcing the suit, said, “Instagram’s harm to teens, and particularly girls and young women, is well-documented. But Meta has denied and downplayed these harmful impacts for continued profits. Meta knowingly designed and developed Instagram features to exploit teens’ vulnerabilities to maximize revenue. This is reprehensible and a violation of Vermont’s Consumer Protection Act. This lawsuit aims to hold Meta accountable.” With the appeal denied, Vermont v. Meta returns to Chittenden County Superior Court, where discovery is expected to be the next phase. The reach of the ruling extends past Instagram. A parallel suit, Vermont v. TikTok, had been frozen while Meta’s appeal played out, and now it can move too. TikTok faces the same construction, accused of targeting children with addictive features and faulted for failing to “adequately verify TikTok users’ age upon account creation,” again pleaded as an “Unfair Acts and Practices” violation of the same statute, again paired with an injunction request that would seemingly force broader age verification. You can hold a dim view of how these platforms treat teenagers and still see what is being built through the courtroom side door. The verdicts and each surviving complaint adds weight to a legal theory in which staying anonymous is itself the harm, and the cure is a system that knows your name before it lets you in. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Supreme Court Refusal in Vermont v. Meta Strengthens Addiction Suits Threatening Online Anonymity appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Governor Tim Walz signed House File 4138 on Tuesday, turning Minnesota into the latest state to demand that social media platforms profile every user who logs on. The law, which takes effect in July 2027, forces platforms with at least 10,000 account holders or $1 billion in annual revenue to estimate the age of all Minnesota users, obtain parental consent before anyone under 16 can hold an account, and disable a list of features the legislature has labeled “addictive.” It passed the state House 132-2 and the Senate 66-0. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The bipartisan consensus is remarkable given what the bill actually requires. Buried beneath the child protection language is a surveillance apparatus that applies to every user, not just minors. When you create an account on a covered platform, the law demands you declare your month and year of birth. That’s just the beginning. Once you’ve spent 25 hours on the platform within six months, the company has 14 days to estimate your age using “reasonable efforts, taking into consideration available technology and the data in the possession of the covered social media platform.” If the platform can’t reach 80% confidence that you’re 16 or older, you get classified as a child and locked into restricted mode. Hit 50 hours, and the confidence threshold rises to 90%. Still not verified? The age estimation repeats every six months for the first seven years your account exists, or more often if the platform runs any demographic analytics on your profile. That means platforms are legally required to continuously analyze how you behave, what content you engage with, and who you communicate with for the better part of a decade. The law creates an obligation to surveil that didn’t exist before. The mechanisms available for “verifiable parental consent” come from the COPPA 1.0 framework which speaks volumes about the privacy costs this law is willing to impose. Parents can sign a consent form, hand over credit card information, submit a copy of a government-issued ID alongside a face scan, or verify their identity through video conferencing. Each method requires collecting and processing sensitive personal data from both the parent and the child. Platforms now have a legal incentive to build identity verification systems that harvest government documents and biometric information from families who want nothing more than to let their kid use an app. Sen. Erin Maye Quade, who sponsored the bill in the Senate, tried to distinguish this approach from hard ID checks, saying Minnesota relies on “age estimation” where platforms “use data points such as the content a person consumes and posts to estimate the age of users.” That’s supposed to be the privacy-friendly alternative. Platforms watch what you read, who you talk to, and how you engage with content, then feed those behavioral signals into algorithms that guess your age. It’s behavioral surveillance dressed as something softer because it doesn’t require you to upload a driver’s license. The content restrictions applied to child accounts strip out infinite scrolling, autoplay video, profile-based feeds, targeted advertising, and push notifications. Accounts default to maximum privacy settings with parental monitoring and usage limits. These provisions sound protective in isolation, but they only function because the law compels platforms to build the profiling systems needed to identify which users are children. You can’t restrict a child’s account without first building the apparatus to classify every account. The law also carries a provision that has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with turning platforms into government informants. If a covered platform “becomes aware of any information that a mass violence event is threatened, or has taken place, is taking place, or is likely to take place” in Minnesota, it must report its suspicions to the Minnesota Fusion Center and provide “all relevant information available” within 24 hours. The MNFC is a state-run intelligence sharing hub that coordinates between local, state, and federal law enforcement. The law now requires social media companies to scan publicly available content and funnel it directly to an intelligence apparatus that has faced years of scrutiny over its surveillance practices and lack of transparency. Walz framed the law as parental empowerment, not government-backed mass surveillance. “As social media becomes more advanced, we need to make sure our families don’t fall victim to the powerful companies that use kids as a testing ground to make algorithms more addictive,” he said in a statement. “Privacy and safety have to come first.” The claim that privacy comes first is difficult to reconcile with a law that mandates continuous behavioral profiling of everyone on a platform to determine whether they might be a minor. The law gives platforms until July 2027 to comply, which is enough time to build the behavioral analysis and identity verification systems the law demands but not enough time to solve the fundamental contradiction at its core. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Minnesota Law Requires Platforms to Monitor and Age-Estimate All Users appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. DuckDuckGo’s US app installs peaked at 30.5% week-over-week growth on May 25, six days into a sustained surge that the company says followed Google’s announcement at I/O 2026 that it would replace traditional search results with an AI agent. The agent answers queries, runs tasks, and monitors things in the background, all without asking whether users wanted any of it. Between May 20 and May 25, DuckDuckGo’s US app installs climbed an average of 18.1% week over week, compared to the prior period of May 13 to May 18. On iPhone, growth averaged 33% and peaked at 69.9%. Traffic to noai.duckduckgo.com, a version of DuckDuckGo that disables every AI feature by default, grew 22.7% on average and hit 27.7% on May 24. DuckDuckGo even gained users over Memorial Day weekend, a period when the company says it normally sees traffic drop. Sensor Tower data backs this up. DuckDuckGo’s iOS app climbed to number 4 in the free Utilities category on the US App Store, from a low of 26th earlier in May. Its Android app hit number 9 in the free Productivity category on Google Play, up from 20th. source: SensorTower These are small numbers relative to Google’s dominance. DuckDuckGo holds roughly 2% of US search. Google VP of Search Elizabeth Reid recently said AI Mode had passed one billion monthly users, with queries doubling every quarter since launch. But the direction of movement does say something. People are not passively accepting Google’s decision to put an AI layer between them and the web. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg said: “Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” he said in a statement. “As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want.” On X, DuckDuckGo posted: “People aren’t just complaining about Google’s AI search overhaul, they’re leaving,” the company posted on May 26. “Yesterday alone, our week over week installs surged 30% in the U.S. Momentum is growing. It’s time to Fire Google.” The context here goes back years. Google has spent billions locking itself in as the default search engine on virtually every phone and browser that most people use. At the 2023 antitrust trial, Weinberg testified that Google’s exclusive contracts made it nearly impossible for DuckDuckGo to compete for default placement. “We hit an obstacle with Google’s contracts,” he told the court. Changing your default search engine across all your devices required, he said, as many as 30 to 50 steps. Google argued users could switch “with a couple of clicks.” That friction is the gap between a theoretical freedom and a real one. Now Google has used that captive position to push something its own users didn’t ask for. The company has replaced the familiar list of blue links with AI-generated summaries, conversational results, and what it calls “information agents.” And here is the part that should concern anyone who cares about how information moves on the open web. Zero-click searches, where Google answers the question itself and the user never visits a source website, now account for roughly 60% of all queries. For searches that trigger AI Overviews, that figure climbs to 83%. Google is more than ever deciding what users see, how they see it, and whether the original source of that information gets any traffic at all. Publishers, journalists, and independent creators are watching their referral traffic collapse as Google’s AI absorbs their work and presents it as its own. The user revolt is real, if still small. DuckDuckGo ran a poll earlier this year asking its own visitors whether they wanted AI integrated into search. More than 175,000 people responded, and over 90% voted no. That’s a self-selected audience, sure. But when Google’s own changes start driving people toward the exits, it stops being just a niche preference. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post DuckDuckGo Installs Surge 30.5% After Google AI Search Overhaul appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. California Assembly Bill 1856 is getting friendly press coverage because it now exempts Linux from the state’s age-tracking mandate. The part nobody’s talking about is that it simultaneously expands the surveillance to your web browser. AB 1856, authored by the same lawmaker who wrote the original Digital Age Assurance Act, amends the law to exclude open-source operating systems from its definition of “operating system provider.” Any software distributed under a license that lets users “copy, redistribute, and modify the software” would no longer be covered. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Mint all walk free. That sounds like a win and tech outlets are reporting it as one. It’s also a distraction from what the bill adds. The original law, AB 1043, required operating systems to harvest users’ ages during device setup and feed that data to app stores and app developers through a real-time API. AB 1856 keeps all of that and extends the data pipeline to browser providers and website operators. Browsers would now be required to collect age signal data from the OS and pass it along to any website subject to online age verification laws. We obtained a copy of the amended bill for you here. Those websites, in turn, would have to request the age signal when you visit them. Your age bracket, declared once during OS setup, would follow you from app to app and now from site to site, broadcast to every developer and website operator who asks. This is how a law originally limited to apps and app stores becomes an age-tracking system for the entire internet. The Expanding Universe of “Covered” Websites The category of websites subject to age verification laws started narrow as the earliest mandates targeted pornography sites. It has since expanded to social media platforms and a growing list of sites legislators consider likely to “harm” children in loosely defined ways. That list keeps getting longer and AB 1856 doesn’t define its own boundary. It piggybacks on whatever other laws exist, meaning every future expansion of age verification requirements automatically expands the reach of AB 1856’s browser-based data pipeline, too. California has actually built an age-tracking infrastructure that scales itself. How the Original Law Works Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1043 into law on October 13, 2025. It passed both chambers unanimously, 76-0 in the Assembly and 38-0 in the Senate, with backing from Google and Meta. The law takes effect January 1, 2027. AB 1043 requires every operating system provider to ask users for their age or birth date during account setup. That information gets sorted into four brackets: under 13, 13 to under 16, 16 to under 18, and 18 or older. Operating systems must then maintain a real-time API that hands this age bracket to any app or app store that requests it. Developers who receive the signal are treated as having “actual knowledge” of the user’s age, which triggers liability under other laws like the California Age-Appropriate Design Code. Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who authored both AB 1043 and the new amendment, said the original bill “avoids constitutional concerns by focusing strictly on age assurance, not content moderation.” Age assurance is the prerequisite that enables content moderation. Sorting every user into an age bracket and broadcasting that bracket to developers in real time is the mechanism through which content gets restricted. Calling it something else doesn’t change what it does. What AB 1856 Actually Changes AB 1856 makes four modifications to the original law. The open-source exemption gets all the attention. The other three deserve more. AB 1856 now requires the OS-level age signal to flow not just to apps and app stores, but to browser providers and website operators covered by age verification laws. Browser providers must collect the age signal and relay it to covered websites. Covered websites must request it. This transforms a system designed around app stores into one that reaches across the open web. Second, the bill limits the age-tracking mandate to operating systems that have an account setup feature. Systems without one are excluded. This is the provision that, combined with the open-source carve-out, puts most Linux distributions clearly outside the law’s reach. Third, AB 1856 narrows the “actual knowledge” provision. Under the original law, receiving an age signal gave a developer deemed knowledge of a user’s age “across all platforms of the application and points of access of the application.” The amendment limits that to “when the user accesses the application from a specified device.” This is genuinely less invasive for the user, preventing a single age signal from following them across every device they own. But the narrowing only applies to apps. The new browser-to-website pipeline creates a separate channel where your age data flows directly to web servers. Fourth, the definition of “operating system provider” now excludes anyone distributing software under open-source license terms. The latest version of the bill, dated May 18, 2026, was read a second time on May 19 and ordered to third reading, with committee reviews expected in June. What Nobody’s Asking The Linux exemption addresses a compliance absurdity. But the bill’s expansion of the age-data pipeline to browsers and websites received almost no scrutiny in coverage. The original law was bad: it required operating systems to harvest your age and beam it to app developers. The amended law does the same thing and extends the pipeline across the web. Newsom himself acknowledged the law’s problems when he signed AB 1043, citing “complexities such as multi-user accounts shared by a family member and user profiles utilized across multiple devices.” AB 1856 responds to some of those concerns. The device-specific “actual knowledge” provision is a real improvement but the governor didn’t ask for browser-based age tracking and the amendment delivers it anyway. The bill is still moving through the legislature and committee reviews are expected in June. The open-source exemption, if it passes, will protect most Linux users from the system’s reach but it doesn’t solve the looming issue. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post California’s New Age-Verification Bill Frees Linux But Expands Age Tracking to the Open Web appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Germany’s state media regulators are building a system that would force social media platforms to boost content from government-approved news outlets in their algorithms. A leaked document, obtained by Apollo News, lays out the plan and if it goes ahead, a state authority will decide which media organizations count as “reliable,” and platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok will be legally required to make those outlets’ content more visible in users’ feeds. The proposal could become law within months. Thorsten Schmiege, head of Germany’s Landesmedienanstalten (state media authorities) and president of Bavaria’s media regulator, said the German states plan to present a first draft of the Digital Media State Treaty this summer. Part of it would address “how reliable information can be pushed more prominently into feeds.” More: The Money Behind the Muzzle: Germany’s Fivefold Surge in Speech Control The document, titled “Paper on the Further Development of Public Value,” describes a multi-stage process. First, entire media organizations get designated as “public value” outlets by the Commission for Licensing and Supervision (ZAK), a body composed of the heads of all 14 state media authorities. Those heads are elected by media councils whose members are, depending on the state, partly or entirely chosen by state parliaments. The chain from elected politicians to the people deciding which media are “reliable” is short. Second, individual articles and videos from approved outlets would receive the “public value” label, with outlets flagging their own content as serving the public interest. Then platforms would be legally required to alter their algorithms to prioritize this content. The paper even floats a “legal quota” for how much state-approved content must appear in feeds. The paper warns of “disinformative, polarizing, or merely attention-grabbing content” dominating algorithms. The entity defining “disinformation” and the entity selecting “reliable” sources are, functionally, the same network of politically appointed regulators. Since 2025, outlets granted “public value” status have already gotten preferential placement in app stores and smart TV interfaces, with ARD and ZDF ranked at the top. The new proposal extends that system directly into social media feeds. The regulatory apparatus making these decisions already has a track record of targeting inconvenient outlets. The Berlin-Brandenburg media authority used Paragraph 19 of the Interstate Media Treaty to sanction Nius, a right-leaning outlet, over a report about refugees. Independent journalist Alexander Wallasch was told to delete three articles and audit his entire archive. Since 2020, the authorities have sent 94 formal warning letters to online media, overwhelmingly aimed at smaller, independent publications. If regulatory approval determines whether your content gets boosted or buried, every editorial decision starts to factor in what the regulator wants to see. Germany’s state media authorities call themselves “independent from the state.” The people who run them are selected through a chain that begins in state parliaments. If this proposal becomes law, that chain will reach directly into your social media feed. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Germany Considers Law to Force Social Media Algorithm Boost for State-Approved News appeared first on Reclaim The Net.