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.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Discord on Friday. The lawsuit alleges the platform enabled child predators, deceived parents, and violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act. But the remedy Texas is asking the court to impose goes far beyond fixing Discord’s broken safety systems. Paxton wants a judge to order mandatory age verification for every user on the platform under the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act, Texas’ SCOPE law. That means before you can type a message, join a server, or talk to anyone on Discord, you would need to prove your identity to the state’s satisfaction. Government ID uploads. Biometric face scans. Third-party verification services that cross-reference your private records. The SCOPE Act doesn’t specify which method, just that the platform must use a “commercially reasonable” one. All of that requires surrendering personal data that goes well beyond confirming you’re over 18. This is the pattern now. Age verification laws are the vehicle through which governments are dismantling anonymous access to the internet and they’re doing it one platform at a time, one state at a time, always framed as protecting children. More than 25 US states now require age checks to access some form of online content. The Supreme Court upheld Texas’s age verification law for adult websites last year. The EU is rolling out its Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026. Australia banned under-16s from social media entirely. Discord is just the latest target. “Discord has allowed and invited all kinds of nihilistic violence and evil,” Paxton said. “We live in a time where the dangers children face online have never been greater, and every parent in Texas deserves to know their child is protected.” Paxton filed the lawsuit in Collin County state district court, part of a burst of tech company litigation from his office ahead of his US Senate GOP runoff against John Cornyn, which he won yesterday. We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here. Earlier this year and last, his office has gone after Snapchat, TikTok, and Roblox on similar grounds. Texas joins Nevada, Indiana, and New Jersey in suing Discord specifically, with Florida investigating separately. The filing paints a bleak picture of how Discord operates. According to the lawsuit, the platform defaulted every account setting toward maximum exposure, staffed critical safety functions with unpaid volunteer moderators who had little training or support, let user violations expire from the record after 90 days, and buried its safety tools where most people would never find them. Federal prosecutors have separately described Discord’s architecture as “a hunting ground to find, manipulate and sextort our most vulnerable.” The state cites specific cases like a 13-year-old Texas girl was groomed on the platform for several years before being sexually assaulted in her home. A 15-year-old boy was coerced into producing explicit material through Discord’s messaging system and later died by suicide. A 13-year-old in Washington state died by suicide after being targeted by the extremist “764” network operating on Discord servers. Discord responded by saying, “the lawsuit’s characterization of Discord does not reflect the platform we have built or the investments we have made in user safety. “We look forward to collaborating with policymakers in working toward a safer online experience for all users on Discord and across the internet.” The company notes that roughly 80% of its users are adults and that the service already requires users to be at least 13. The SCOPE Act itself has been taking hits in court. A federal judge has blocked several of its provisions, including the age verification requirement, calling them unconstitutionally vague. We already know what happens when platforms check identity documents for age verification, because Discord already demonstrated it. On September 20, 2025, attackers compromised a support agent’s account at one of Discord’s outsourced customer service vendors and spent 58 hours inside the company’s support system. Discord confirmed that roughly 70,000 users had government-issued ID images exposed, driver’s licenses and passports that people had uploaded to verify their ages. The hackers claimed the real numbers were far higher, pointing to over 520,000 age verification tickets in the system and alleging they had extracted 1.6 terabytes of data tied to 5.5 million unique users. Discord disputed the scale but acknowledged the breach. Paxton has been filing lawsuits using whatever pieces of the law remain standing. The legislation passed the Texas House with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2023, designed to give parents more control over what their children see online and how platforms handle minors’ data. Its enforcement has been anything but smooth. None of that stopped Paxton from asking a court to compel Discord specifically to implement SCOPE’s age verification requirements, along with defaulting all safety settings to maximum protection, paying back all revenue tied to unlawful conduct, and facing civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation. The SCOPE Act’s approach assumes that the solution to bad behavior on the internet is removing the ability for anyone to be online without the government knowing who they are. That assumption is wrong, and building the infrastructure to enforce it will cause damage that long outlasts whatever safety improvements it produces. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Texas Sues Discord, Seeks Mandatory Age Verification appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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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.