If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Ofcom wasted months chasing a website it cannot reach, came up empty, and has decided the fix is more power. Britain’s speech regulator closed its investigation into an American suicide discussion forum this week, admitted it has hit the outer wall of what the Online Safety Act censorship law allows, and used the same announcement to ask the government for tools that reach further. The forum, which Ofcom will only call an “online suicide forum,” has allegedly been linked with more than 130 deaths in the UK and named in coroners’ reports. Ofcom fined it £950,000, roughly $1.3 million, under the Act. The forum is based in the United States, holds no assets in Britain, is protected by the First Amendment, and has not paid. So the regulator is holding a penalty against a company it has no clear way to bill. Ofcom thinks there’s a chance the money is still coming. It says it has “initiated work regarding the pursuit of this debt, as we have done with all companies that have not paid their fines by their deadlines.” A separate post, cheerfully titled “What happens when a company doesn’t pay a fine,” lays out the plan. For a company with no UK assets, obtaining a judgment debt “is more complex and challenging,” and Ofcom says “it is often necessary to engage with law enforcement agencies and private specialists in other countries to identify individuals and assets against which Ofcom can take action.” Whether Ofcom recovers a penny “can also depend on whether a court in that country will recognise a UK court judgment, and whether we can identify individuals on whom we can serve proceedings.” That means, a British regulator wants American help to collect a British censorship fine from Americans, and even Ofcom concedes an American court might throw it straight out. Ofcom has tried this before. It floated the same approach while chasing a fine against 4chan, a strategy that Preston Byrne, the US lawyer representing both sites, called “legally illiterate.” Byrne was just telling it like it is about the forum case. “Censorship fines are anathema to our Constitution,” he said, adding that “if Ofcom attempts to enforce the fine in a US court, which we do not expect, American law is on our side. As far as we can tell, however, this enforcement action is functionally over.” Ofcom’s own words describe the ceiling it has reached. The forum has “made changes that block access for vast majority of UK users.” Those changes, Ofcom says, “are the fullest extent of what can be achieved under the Online Safety Act,” and “all possible legal routes under the Act have now been exhausted.” An agency that has run out of legal options usually stops there. Ofcom did the opposite. It is working with the government to “consider areas for strengthening enforcement powers,” with a particular appetite for “business disruption measures,” the court orders that force internet providers to block a site across the UK. Keep in mind that this type of blocking is easily bypassable with a VPN and VPNs are impossible to ban. The current powers already frustrate Ofcom, and it listed exactly where they pinch. Today it cannot ask a court to block a site purely because that site poses “a significant risk of harm to people in the UK”; it also has to prove “ongoing non-compliance.” It cannot apply for a blocking order “for failure to pay a fine alone.” It looked at seeking a “conditional order,” a pre-emptive block that would take effect the moment a site drops its geoblock, and found the Act “does not provide a mechanism to do so.” It also noted that “neither Ofcom nor the UK courts have the power through the business disruption measure process to shut down a website globally.” The pattern in that wishlist is hard to miss. Ofcom wants to block sites on a risk-of-harm test alone, before any actual breach. It wants preemptive orders that trigger on their own. It is eyeing impossible powers that reach past British borders to pull a site down for everyone on earth. All three are bigger levers than the one that just failed, and all three will outlast this particular forum. The whole proposal turns on one phrase, “significant risk of harm,” and Ofcom would write the definition. A test that broad does not stay pointed at suicide forums. It stretches to whatever a regulator decides is risky this year, and the site goes dark before a court hears a word of defense. The tally is grim reading for Ofcom. The fine looks uncollectible. The forum has already blocked British users. The case is, in Byrne’s words, “functionally over.” What outlasts all of it is a regulator lobbying for permanent authority to block websites faster, on looser grounds, and with the rest of the world in view. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK’s Ofcom Seeks Wider Powers After American Forum Fine Fails 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. American diplomats handed around a piece of paper asking governments to stop jailing and fining people for saying things that turn out to be wrong. European lawmakers received this as a hostile act. The draft declaration, which the Trump administration wants signed on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September, asks signatories to “commit” to “recognize that punishing allegedly false speech” like “disinformation,” “misinformation” or “hate speech” can endanger “freedom of expression,” with a carve-out for speech that directly incites violence. Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers said her office circulated the text “in the margins of OECD” talks. Politico reported that the document also asks governments to back off demands that platforms monitor and delete what users post. The operative sentence demands very little. It does not ask anyone to repeal a law but it asks governments to acknowledge that locking someone up for a false statement might have consequences for the ability to make true ones. That acknowledgment is now controversial enough in Brussels to count as a diplomatic provocation, which tells you something about where the argument has traveled. The thing everyone understands the draft to be aimed at is the Digital Services Act, the EU law that requires the largest platforms to identify and reduce what the text calls systemic risks, a category that expressly includes disinformation and civic discourse. Fines run to six percent of global annual revenue. The European Commission decides what counts as adequate mitigation. Nobody has to be convicted of anything, no court has to find that a specific post was false, and the pressure lands on the company rather than the speaker, which is the point of designing it that way. A platform facing a nine-figure penalty for insufficient risk mitigation will delete first and litigate almost never. That produces the chilling effect without ever producing a defendant. The user whose post disappears gets no hearing because the user was never the target. The Commission never has to define disinformation with any precision, because it never has to prove a single instance of it in front of a judge. The definition lives in guidance documents and compliance reviews, and the companies guess at where the line falls, and they guess conservatively, because guessing wrong costs six percent of everything. The Commission’s own position on the age verification guidance it issued last year runs along the same track. Platforms are told to keep minors away from certain content, told that regulators will assess whether their methods are adequate, and left to work out the rest. What emerges is identity checking for adults, because the only reliable way to confirm a user is not fourteen is to confirm who the user actually is. Trump signed a memorandum in February 2025 directing a review of whether the EU and UK were pressuring American companies into censorship. The House Judiciary Committee published a 145-page report that summer accusing the EU of building “a global censorship regime” that “infringes on American online speech.” Marco Rubio’s State Department sent a cable in August calling the bloc’s restrictions on expression undue. Rubio also ordered US diplomats into a lobbying campaign against the law. By December the administration was barring five Europeans from entry over what it described as efforts to censor American viewpoints, and floating retaliation against European companies including Spotify. Europe’s answer has been consistent and mostly procedural. Commission spokesperson Paula Pinho said in August 2025 that “It is the sovereign right of the EU and its member states to regulate economic activities on our territory, which are consistent with our democratic values.” The Commission repeated the formula in December, describing the EU as “an open, rules-based single market, with the sovereign right to regulate economic activity in line with our democratic values and international commitments.” Officials point out that the DSA passed with overwhelming support in the European Parliament and unanimous backing from all 27 member states. Both claims can be true at once. A law can be democratically enacted and still hand a regulator the power to determine which speech a platform must suppress. Elections don’t convert that power into something else. The question of who writes the definition of “disinformation” survives every vote, and in this case the answer is a Commission directorate in Brussels that no European voted for and cannot remove. What the administration is offering is nonbinding. A UN declaration creates no cause of action, overrides no statute, and binds no regulator. Contrast that with the DSA, which is enforceable today, with penalties calculated as a share of global revenue, against companies that host most of the world’s political conversation. One of these documents can silence someone and the other cannot, and the one that cannot is the one generating the outrage. Whatever the motives behind circulating it, and there are obvious commercial ones involving American companies that would prefer smaller compliance bills, the sentence in the draft is correct. Punishing allegedly false speech does endanger the ability to speak. Governments that reserve the authority to declare statements false and impose costs for making them will use that authority, and they will use it most often against the people with the least ability to absorb the cost. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Trump Admin Circulates Draft UN Free Speech Declaration Targeting EU Censorship Law 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. A briefing note for Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, dated June 11, sets out how to defend Bill C-34, the “Safe Social Media Act,” which the Canadian government tabled the day before. The note expects Google and Meta to support the bill and lists child-safety groups among its backers. C-34 raises the minimum age for a social media account to 16 and puts age-verification duties on the platforms Canadians use every day. To keep anyone younger off a service, a platform first has to establish how old everyone is, which means checking the age of adults as well. The bill lets companies verify age directly or estimate it, the first route pointing toward government ID, the second toward AI that guesses age from a face. A Digital Safety Commission of three to five members would decide which methods are acceptable and would oversee the destruction of the data collected along the way. Age verification works only by gathering identity data on the entire adult population of a platform. The rule to destroy that data exists because the system collects it from adults in the first place, and the government’s safeguard is a promise to delete it afterward. Anonymity ends at the sign-up screen. The talking points sell none of this. The note tells Guilbeault to call the bill “an essential step forward” and to describe online safety as a shared duty, with protecting children “a collective responsibility.” The note quotes Google as “committed to working with the federal government to establish higher safety standards for all platforms.” Meta told the government it wants “safe, positive online experiences for young people” and is assessing the bill. The government read those replies as approval and built its messaging around them. Google and Meta run on harvesting personal data, and the bill would route a new stream of identity checks through the platforms they operate. The note also lists endorsements from Children First Canada, UNICEF Canada, and the Canadian Medical Association. It cites polling to show the public is already onside. A 2025 Dais survey put support for requiring platforms to reduce harmful content at 69 percent. A Leger poll found 77 percent backing tougher regulation of social media and AI. The government says four in 10 Canadians report exposure to online hate every week or month. The bill also reaches into what stays online. It names seven categories of content platforms must address, from child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images to hatred, incitement to violence, and terrorist content. Companies carry a “Duty to Protect Children” and have to build safety features into how their services work. The same duties extend to AI chatbot services. Platforms that fall short face administrative penalties of up to $10 million or 3 percent of global revenue and criminal fines reaching $20 million or 5 percent. The seven categories are loosely drawn. A company removes lawful speech rather than risk a fine that size. C-34 revives an effort the government lost once already. Its predecessor, the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, died when Parliament was prorogued. The government reconvened an expert advisory group in March 2026 to update the plan, with artificial intelligence added to the list of concerns. Which platforms the law touches is left to Cabinet, which can designate services by regulation. A company can escape the age rule if the Commission decides its safeguards for children are enough. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada’s Safe Social Media Act Requires ID Checks 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. French lawmakers spent Monday afternoon behind closed doors agreeing that children under 15 should be locked out of social media. They built a legal requirement for every adult in France to prove who they are before they can post anything. Seven deputies and seven senators, sitting as a commission mixte paritaire, took roughly two hours to reconcile two very different versions of Renaissance deputy Laure Miller’s bill. The text they produced follows the National Assembly almost exactly. A new provision slotted into France’s 2004 digital economy law declares that “access to an online social network service provided by an online platform is forbidden to minors under fifteen years of age.” Both chambers voted Tuesday on the committee’s conclusions. The Senate signed off first, the National Assembly followed 279 to 81. Support ran from the Rassemblement National through the centrist bloc. La France Insoumise voted against, and the Socialists abstained. Emmanuel Macron celebrated within hours. “I had committed to it, and now it’s been voted on: social media will be banned for those under 15 starting back-to-school,” he wrote, thanking the parliamentarians. “It’s up to the Constitutional Council to rule, then on to action to make this measure concrete and protect our children online.” The Council now has a month to weigh the text against the constitution. If it survives, Macron signs, a formality given how hard he pushed for it. The arithmetic of an age ban has not changed since the first one was drafted. Blocking 14-year-olds means screening everyone, because a platform cannot tell who is 14 without asking who all of us are. Age assurance, whatever the marketing calls it, runs on identity documents or a state-issued digital identity. You photograph your passport, or you sign in through France Connect. The other option on the table, facial age estimation, is unreliable enough that a British study found a drawn-on mustache can fool it, and the CNIL has already refused to allow the technique in tobacco shops. French officials answer all this with the phrase “double-anonymat,” a term ministers and regulators have leaned on since 2023 to describe an arrangement where a third party inspects your ID and hands the platform a signed token instead of your name. AI Forensics found in 2025 that AgeGo, a verification vendor working for numerous pornography sites, was harvesting the full URL of the video each user wanted to watch. The committee then stripped out the guardrails. Earlier versions of the bill instructed providers to use technical solutions conforming to a standard drawn up by Arcom after consultation with the CNIL, and gave Arcom the power to send formal notices to companies that ignored it. The compromise deletes the standard, deletes the enforcement, and deletes the CNIL’s advisory role over age verification systems. France is about to demand age verification without defining what age verification means, and without any regulator supervising the firms that will end up holding millions of identity documents. Platforms pick their own vendors and users hand their passports to whoever bids lowest. It was Brussels that drove the deletions. The European Commission raised objections two weeks ago, worried about the amount of discretion the Senate version handed Arcom over which platforms would be blacklisted. Parliamentarians responded by scrubbing Arcom from the law entirely, including its role in checking whether the law is being followed. Miller told Public Sénat that maintaining a blacklist risked non-compliance with the Digital Services Act, and that the Commission confirmed as much in informal exchanges, “Hence the idea of returning to a general ban, more comprehensible and without additional constraints for the platforms.” A general ban, then, chosen because it asks less of the companies and more of the public. Senate rapporteur Catherine Morin-Desailly, who had championed the abandoned two-tier approach, downplayed the retreat. “As it stands, messaging services are excluded from the definition of social networks. When you announce a general ban, there are already exceptions,” she said, noting that messaging services fall outside the definition. She was franker about the law’s reach, saying its scope is limited because it does little beyond setting a digital age of majority while European rules are about to be written anyway. Laurent Lafon, the centrist senator who chairs the Senate culture committee and sat on the joint committee, conceded that “Everyone is aware of the limits of the text, both legally and in terms of enforcement,” while praising the message sent to platforms. There are some carve-outs but they’re thin. Online encyclopedias survive, along with educational and scientific directories and platforms for developing and sharing open-source software and open-source educational projects. Nothing exempts small or non-commercial services, which means a Mastodon instance run by three volunteers falls under the same obligation as Instagram. The people building the decentralized, non-extractive corners of the internet get handed a compliance burden designed for Meta, and the surveillance business model that created the harm goes untouched. The law takes effect on September 1, with accounts created before that date getting a four-month grace period. Covered platforms have to block under-15s from opening new accounts from that day, and close the accounts those users already hold by January 1, 2027. Enforcement is where these laws tend to fall over. Australia banned under-16s from social media in late 2025, and its own regulator has acknowledged that two thirds of the affected teenagers get around it. Article 28 of the DSA, the provision the Commission and Paris both lean on, states in its third paragraph that it does not require platforms to process additional personal data to work out whether a user is a minor. An age verification mandate does exactly the thing the text says it does not require. Other routes existed and were not taken. Mandatory interoperability would let people walk away from a platform without abandoning everyone they know on it. Banning surveillance advertising would defund the infinite scroll. Rules on recommendation systems would go after the design choices that produced the harm French lawmakers keep citing. What parliament chose instead leaves the business model untouched and bills the public for the fix, payable in identity documents. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post French Parliament Reaches Deal on Social Media Ban appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

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