If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The US State Department has settled a lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas, accepting a consent decree that bars it from using, financing, or promoting technology designed to suppress or “fact-check” the constitutionally protected speech of American citizens and domestic media outlets. The settlement also prohibits the Department from working with foreign governments or NGOs for those purposes, whether through formal agreements or informal arrangements. We obtained a copy of the joint motion for you here. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented The Daily Wire and The Federalist, secured what amounts to a binding admission that the government had been doing exactly what it was accused of. The Department now acknowledges that its plaintiffs’ speech on COVID-19, sexual ethics, the biological nature of sex, and election integrity was constitutionally protected all along. It took three years of litigation to get the government to say that out loud. The consent decree runs until 2036. The Daily Wire and The Federalist will serve as compliance monitors, receiving annual reports from the State Department on its activities. If violations surface and go uncorrected, a federal judge in Texas has the authority to force the Department into compliance. The agreement is binding on future administrations, meaning the next president, whoever that is, inherits the same restrictions. The mechanism that made all of this possible was the Global Engagement Center, a State Department office originally tasked with countering foreign propaganda. The GEC funded, marketed, and promoted roughly 300 “Countering Propaganda and Disinformation” tools. Some of those tools were aimed at foreign adversaries. Others targeted American news outlets that published stories the government didn’t like. Companies like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index received GEC-linked funding and used it to brand domestic outlets as unreliable or risky. The effect was financial. Advertisers were encouraged to pull spending from outlets that appeared on these blacklists, and the outlets that kept showing up were the ones running stories that challenged government messaging on Covid-19, vaccines, and elections. The Daily Wire and The Federalist were among them. The GEC didn’t delete their articles. It tried to starve them of revenue instead. Secretary of State Marco Rubio first confirmed the core allegations in an April 2025 op-ed published, pointedly, at The Federalist, where he announced plans to abolish the GEC entirely. Congress had already declined to renew the GEC’s funding in late 2024. The Biden Administration responded by moving its operations to a different office inside the State Department and giving it a new name, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference framework. Same people, same activities, different letterhead. The settlement also requires the State Department to remove specific material it funded, including “media literacy training” videos produced by Media Literacy Now that targeted The Daily Wire and The Federalist by name. “Media literacy” has become a preferred euphemism for government-adjacent efforts to tell people which outlets they should and shouldn’t trust. These particular videos, funded with taxpayer money, told viewers that two specific publications were not to be believed. The State Department will train all employees in 2030 and 2035 on how the First Amendment limits the government’s ability to suppress Americans’ speech. This settlement lands less than a week after the NCLA settled Missouri v. Biden, the companion case that barred the CDC, CISA, and the US Surgeon General from threatening social media companies into censoring protected speech on Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube. The two consent decrees represent the most significant legal constraints placed on the federal government’s censorship apparatus since it was first exposed. The pattern these cases revealed should worry anyone who values free expression, regardless of political alignment. Government agencies used taxpayer money to fund private companies that rated and suppressed domestic media. They encouraged social media platforms to censor viewpoints that contradicted official messaging. They did all of this while claiming to fight “disinformation,” a category that the government itself got to define, redefine, and apply at will. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post US State Dept Settles Free Speech Suppression Lawsuit appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Apple’s identity verification demands are spreading across Asia. Starting in late March, the company expanded age verification requirements in both Singapore and South Korea, adding these countries to a growing list alongside the UK, where users must prove they’re adults before Apple lets them fully use their own devices. Singapore has been partially locked down since February 24, when Apple began blocking downloads of apps rated 18+ unless users confirmed they were adults. That initial wave also hit Australia and Brazil. But the late March update goes further, bringing Singapore’s requirements closer to the UK model. Apple now requires Singaporean users to confirm they’re 18 or older to download or purchase 18+ apps, using a credit card, a driving license, a National Registration Identity Card, or a Foreign Identification Number card. Passports, debit cards, and gift cards aren’t accepted. That list of acceptable documents tells you something about Apple’s priorities. Passports are internationally recognized government IDs, but they don’t work here. Debit cards, which millions of adults use as their primary payment method, are also excluded because minors can technically hold them. So Apple has decided that proving you’re an adult means handing over either financial credentials or a government identity document linked to your real name and legal status. The company presents this as “reasonable methods.” The methods happen to require you to tie your anonymous Apple Account to your legal identity. South Korea’s version is even more invasive. To download or stream mature content through Apple services in South Korea, users must verify they’re at least 19 years old (the legal age of majority there). The process requires entering your name exactly as it appears on your mobile carrier account, along with your birthday, mobile carrier information, mobile phone number, your gender, and your nationality. Apple then sends a verification SMS to confirm the number matches. This goes beyond age verification. It’s a full identity check routed through your telecom provider, linking your Apple Account to your phone contract, your carrier records, and your demographic data in a single transaction. And you have to do it again every year. The law requires Apple to re-verify someone’s age annually, meaning South Korean users face a recurring obligation to confirm their identity just to keep accessing content they’ve already been verified to use. Apple says it doesn’t store your credit card or ID document unless you choose to save them for other purposes, such as adding a payment method to your account. The company claims it may use “information related to your Apple Account” to help confirm age, including whether you have a credit card on file or how long you’ve had an account. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Apple Expands Age Verification to Singapore & South Korea 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 has just announced, with all the cheer of a thief returning a stolen bicycle and expecting a medal, that it is scrapping non-crime hate incidents, NCHIs. This was the system that allowed a uniformed police officer to turn up at your front door, notebook in hand, because somebody on the internet didn’t like your tweet. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood declared that forces would “no longer be policing perfectly legal tweets” and could get back to “patrolling our streets, catching criminals and keeping communities safe.” Excellent. Except for the small detail that the government, in the very same announcement, promoted a thing called “Protecting What Matters,” a social cohesion plan so crammed with censorship provisions it makes the Chinese Communist Party look like a book club. This plan includes algorithm regulation, a brand new definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” so vague it could apply to virtually anything, and a government-appointed “special representative” who gets to decide how the whole thing works across the police, the NHS, schools, universities, and your workplace. So the government gave you back a marble. And then it took your entire house. To understand the con being pulled here, you need to know what NCHIs actually were. They were invented in 2014 by a body called the College of Policing, which is not a college and has very little to do with actual policing. It is an unelected body that writes guidance for police forces across England and Wales, and the guidance it wrote on NCHIs was, to put it politely, completely mental. An NCHI was logged whenever any person, anywhere, perceived that your behavior was motivated by hostility or prejudice. That’s it. No crime needed to have occurred. No evidence was required. Someone just had to feel a bit offended, and suddenly you had a police file. A nine-year-old child had an NCHI recorded against her for something she said in the school playground. A man got one for whistling the Bob the Builder theme tune. If that sounds like something from a particularly bad episode of a sitcom, you must not be familiar with modern Britain. Between 2014 and 2019, police forces recorded nearly 120,000 of these things. And here’s the truly poisonous bit. An NCHI could turn up on an enhanced DBS check, the kind of background check you need if you want to work as a teacher, or a carer, or a volunteer at a charity. Meaning that a “non-crime” could prevent you from getting a job. You might not even know the record existed until a prospective employer found it. Nobody was required to tell you. Harry Miller, a former police officer and clearly a man with more backbone than the entire Home Office, brought a judicial review after officers turned up at his workplace to “check his thinking” over a gender-critical limerick he’d retweeted. A limerick. The Court of Appeal ruled in 2021 that the whole NCHI guidance was unlawful. And yet, like a cockroach surviving a nuclear blast, the system carried on for years after that ruling. The Metropolitan Police only stopped investigating NCHIs in October 2025, after five armed officers arrested the creator of Father Ted at Heathrow airport over three social media posts. No stabbings. No burglaries. Just a comedian with opinions. Now, the government says NCHIs are finished. And what’s replacing them? A system that records certain incidents of “anti-social behaviour” with “a prejudice qualifier” when they meet a new “incident threshold.” If that sounds like the same thing wearing a different hat, that’s because it is the same thing wearing a different hat. This is a rebrand with a slightly more restrictive triage process. Reports are still logged. Personal data is still recorded. Disclosure rules haven’t changed. Officers and staff will still be spending their days monitoring incidents that don’t meet any criminal threshold, at a cost in time and resources that would make your eyes water if you knew how many actual burglaries went unsolved last year. The government says the new system will prevent police from recording lawful speech. But the new approach is still designed to deal with lawful speech. It has to be. If the behavior being captured were actually criminal, it would be a crime, and existing laws would handle it perfectly well. The entire point of this system is to record things that aren’t crimes. And nobody in government has said a word about the roughly 100,000 historic NCHIs still sitting on police databases, still disclosable through DBS checks. Still capable of stopping people from getting jobs for having committed, and I cannot stress this enough, no crime whatsoever. The House of Lords voted 227 to 221 earlier in March to force the deletion of those records. The government has done nothing about it. A hundred thousand people in Britain have marks on their records for things that were never, at any point, illegal, and those marks can still prevent them from working as teachers, carers, or charity volunteers. The institutional culture that produced this mess is untouched, too. The same people who designed the NCHI scheme still work at the College of Policing. The ideological architects are still in the building, still writing guidance, still operating in an unelected, unaccountable body that answers to nobody the public voted for. So. The government has scrapped the old speech-policing system and replaced it with something almost identical. You might think that would be enough excitement for one day. You would be wrong. Because buried in the same press release was a link to the government’s “Protecting What Matters” social cohesion action plan. The thing opens with a foreword from Housing Secretary Steve Reed, who blames “online echo chambers exacerbated by malevolent algorithms” for threatening the very foundations of the nation. The executive summary warns of a “rising tide of extremism and malign foreign influence.” If you’ve been alive at any point the last century, you’ll recognize this language. It is the sort of thing every government invokes right before it starts telling you what you’re allowed to read and say. The plan says the government will “make use of robust powers to require platforms to mitigate risks related to their algorithms.” Which is a fancy way of saying it will tell social media companies what content to suppress. The government will “give people greater control over what they are exposed to online and reduce accidental exposure to hateful content.” Which is a fancy way of saying the government will filter what you see, because a British citizen clearly cannot be trusted to encounter an unpleasant opinion without immediately joining a cult. It gets better. The government will “give independent researchers access to platform data so they can help to build the evidence base to hold companies to account.” In English, this means giving handpicked academics the keys to social media’s back office so they can write reports about why the platforms need to censor more aggressively. Independent researchers doing independent research to independently reach the conclusions the government independently wanted. And the plan warns that “as people spend more time online” it “becomes easier for people to fall into ‘rabbit holes’ or ‘echo chambers,’ where they are vulnerable to misinformation and radicalisation via content they see online.” The solution, apparently, is for the government to decide which rabbit holes are acceptable and which ones need filling in. The document also promises the development of new tools and powers to disrupt “wider extremist influence and activity.” It does not define “extremist influence.” It does not say who decides what counts. It does not explain the safeguards. The vagueness is not an accident. Vague definitions are the point. They let the person holding the power use it however they like, and they leave everybody else guessing about where the line is. Which, of course, means most people will stay well back from it. That’s the whole trick. The government has also adopted a new non-statutory definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” and is appointing a “Special Representative” to roll it out across British public and private life. Let’s start with the obvious. Britain already has hate crime laws. It already has the Equality Act 2010. Violence against Muslims is already a crime. Discrimination against Muslims is already unlawful. Nobody needed a new definition to deal with either of those things. What this definition adds is a third category: “the prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims…treating them as a collective group defined by fixed and negative characteristics, with the intention of encouraging hatred against them, irrespective of their actual opinions, beliefs or actions as individuals.” Read that carefully. It covers “prejudicial stereotyping.” A term that has no legal definition, applied by people with no statutory authority, to speech that is not necessarily a crime. And the government’s own guidance notes confirm this. The definition, the government writes, “is intended to encompass behaviour that is not necessarily unlawful, but which is reprehensible in this context, because it extends beyond the bounds of protected free speech.” For the record, the government has created a definition that, by its own admission, covers lawful speech, and it has labelled that lawful speech “reprehensible,” and it has appointed an unelected tsar to make sure everyone takes it seriously. The Free Speech Union has launched a judicial review, and rightly so. The definition is incoherent because it relies on legally undefined concepts that could mean almost anything to almost anyone. And it breaches the “occupying the field” doctrine, since Parliament already assigned responsibility for religious discrimination to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. You don’t get to create a parallel enforcement system just because you feel like one. What the government has built, piece by piece, policy by policy, press release by press release, is an architecture for controlling speech without the inconvenience of a criminal prosecution. No charges. No trial. Just a record on a database, a definition so vague it could mean almost anything, a tsar with undefined powers, and a quiet word with your employer. The government calls it social cohesion. Others call it something else entirely. But you’d better not say what, in case someone logs it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Britain’s Great Speech Police Rebrand appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Adam Smith Institute has published the Free Speech Act 2026, a model bill that would dismantle virtually the entire legal architecture the British state uses to police speech. Written by Preston Byrne, an Adam Smith Institute Senior Fellow, alongside co-authors Elijah Granet and Michael Reiners, the legislation runs to 32 sections and seven schedules. It would repeal seven entire Acts of Parliament, create a statutory right to free expression, ban the state from censoring lawful speech directly or through third parties, and give citizens a private right of action to sue when their rights are violated. Byrne, a dual-qualified English solicitor and US attorney, is best known as the lawyer who responds to Ofcom’s enforcement notices with cartoon hamsters. He represents 4chan in its federal lawsuit against the UK’s speech regulator in Washington, D.C., and acts for every current US-based enforcement target of the Online Safety Act. He is also the architect of the GRANITE Act, the first foreign censorship shield bill in American history, which passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46-12 before running out of time in the state Senate. All of that, Byrne writes, was prologue. “The big fight, the real fight, is to restore free speech in the UK. Publishing this Model Bill today, we mean to start it.” The Bill’s stated purpose is to answer a single question: “If the UK wanted to enact something like the First Amendment, what would the resulting statute look like?” The answer is a controlled demolition. What Goes Schedule 1 of the Bill is the wrecking ball, and the list of repeals is long. The Online Safety Act 2023 would be repealed in its entirety, along with the Public Order Act 1986, the Public Order Act 2023, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, and the Obscene Publications Act 1959. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, used to prosecute “grossly offensive” social media posts, would go. So would sections of the Terrorism Acts that have been applied against non-violent protestors for political speech, Article 10(2) of the Human Rights Act 1998 (the provision that permits restrictions on expression), and the strict liability rule for press reporting on court proceedings under the Contempt of Court Act 1981. Freedom of information data compiled by The Times found that over 12,000 people were arrested under section 127 of the Communications Act and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act in 2023 alone, roughly 30 a day. That figure had nearly doubled since 2017. A separate investigation by The Telegraph found 292 people charged under the Online Safety Act between its enforcement and February 2025. The US State Department’s 2024 human rights report on the United Kingdom noted these arrests with the kind of language it typically reserves for countries with less established democracies, recording that “numerous individuals were arrested for online speech” and that the government “called on companies, including U.S. firms, to censor speech deemed misinformation or ‘hate speech.'” Article 19, the free speech advocacy organization, has downgraded the UK below the threshold for “Open” status in its Global Expression Report for the first time since the index began. The Free Speech Act would repeal the laws responsible for that decline. Byrne and his co-authors acknowledge openly that the Bill, if enacted, would decriminalize expressions they personally find repugnant. “In a free society, fools, bigots, and assholes get to speak and remain free men,” the post reads. “That is not the price of liberty. It is liberty, and the rest of us get it too.” Bryne asks readers to consider who the existing laws actually catch. Not hardened extremists operating in encrypted channels, he argues, but ordinary people. What Gets Built The Bill does more than tear down. It constructs a new framework from scratch. Part 2 establishes a statutory right to free expression. The right of any United Kingdom person to hold opinions and engage in lawful expression cannot be violated by the State. That right covers expression that is “offensive, grossly offensive, insulting, abusive, shocking, blasphemous, indecent, or otherwise objectionable.” Section 5 states it plainly: there is no right in law not to be offended by the expression of others. Expression on matters of public interest, politics, morality, philosophy, and religion receives special protection under Section 6. No person may be convicted or sanctioned for such expression unless it falls within a defined category of unprotected speech and the legal conditions are strictly satisfied. Speech is presumed protected. The burden falls on whoever wants to restrict it. The narrow exceptions are defined in Part 3, which adopts the American Brandenburg test for incitement. Speech is unlawful only where it is directed to a specific audience, intended to produce imminent lawless action, and likely to produce it. General advocacy, praise, or defense of unlawful conduct is not incitement. Beyond that, criminal liability is preserved for perjury, contempt of court, unlawful threats, fraud, blackmail, offenses under the National Security Act 2023, procuring or assisting crime, criminal conspiracy, defamation, and harassment. The Bill also tightens the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 so that a person does not harass another merely by posting content the other person chooses to seek out or monitor. This directly addresses cases where citizens reporting on police conduct without contacting the subjects have been arrested under harassment provisions. Part 4 bans the state from censoring lawful expression directly or indirectly, including through conditions on licenses, funding, or benefits that require a person to hold a particular political or ideological opinion. Non-crime speech monitoring, including the recording of lawful expression as a “non-crime hate incident,” is prohibited, and any existing records must be destroyed. The outsourcing loophole is closed: the state cannot fund, procure, or arrange censorship through third parties. Any contract designed to suppress lawful expression is void. Compelled speech is also prohibited. No public authority may require any person, as a condition of employment, education, professional licensing, funding, or citizenship, to declare or affirm any political, moral, religious, or ideological belief (the sole exception being allegiance to the Crown). Part 5 amends the Employment Rights Act 1996 to protect workers from detriment and dismissal on the ground of lawful expression made in a personal capacity outside the workplace. It also amends the Equality Act 2010 to make “lawful expression” a protected characteristic alongside race, sex, disability, and religion. A freedom from compelled expression is inserted into the Equality Act as well. Part 6 prohibits essential service providers, including banks, payment services, telecoms, and domain registries, from refusing or withdrawing services because a person has engaged in lawful expression. Financial deplatforming has become a censorship mechanism that operates entirely outside the reach of speech protections. Section 20: The Most Controversial Provision The provision likely to generate the most debate is Section 20, which replaces the entire Online Safety Act regime with a rule modeled on Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act. In other words, online platforms cannot be held legally responsible for what their users say or post, which is a major censorship pressure point in the Online Safety Act. One mandatory obligation remains: platforms must detect and remove child sexual abuse material and report it to law enforcement within 24 hours of obtaining actual knowledge. Failure to comply is already punishable under existing UK criminal law. The immunity applies to civil liability only. Criminal law is unaffected. Byrne addresses the obvious objection directly: “I lived in the UK as recently as 2017, and it wasn’t a post-apocalyptic anarchist hellscape; repealing the Online Safety Act in full, as this Model Bill proposes to do, won’t make it one. It will, however, end the UK’s exercise of censorship powers over political speech online.” Enforcement and Wiped Records Part 7 gives individuals a civil right of action against the State or essential service providers that violate the Bill, with a presumption of costs in the claimant’s favor. Without cost protection, the right to sue is hollow when the defendant is a state with limitless resources. Section 22 creates an anti-SLAPP mechanism so that defendants in strategic lawsuits designed to silence public participation can apply for early dismissal, with mandatory costs and possible damages if the claim is struck out. Section 24 annuls and vacates all convictions, cautions, and binding-over orders entered under the laws being repealed, where the conduct at issue would constitute lawful expression under the Free Speech Act. Every person convicted of “grossly offensive” posting, every person cautioned for an “indecent” message, every person bound over for causing “distress” through speech: their records would be wiped. Schedule 2 rebuilds public order law from the ground up, preserving riot, violent disorder, affray, and unlawful assembly as content-neutral offenses stripped of any ideological element. Two new communications offenses are created: fear or provocation of violence, and threatening communications. Both punish conduct rather than ideas. The Bill also redefines breach of the peace so that a person cannot be arrested for lawful expression alone, “even if a likely or predictable consequence of that person’s lawful expression would be the unlawful actions of another.” The Political Fallout Byrne told GB News ahead of the publication that “a couple” of parliamentarians know the Bill is coming, and that he emailed the final text to one member of the House of Lords. The Bill will be available for any MP to introduce. “This bill is designed to do something very simple: It gets the Government out of the business of policing the opinions of the British people,” Byrne said. “The Government doesn’t get a say in the future that we see and what people say and think. It’s not going to be able to arrest people for it, it’s not going to be able to penalize them for it, it’s not going to be able to force them to say things that they don’t want to say.” The timing is deliberate. The intervening years since Byrne’s 2020 paper Sense and Sensitivity, an earlier prototype for a UK Free Speech Act, have seen the Online Safety Act passed, Ofcom set loose on the world, Scotland’s hate crime law enter force to widespread ridicule (despite public opposition from then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who did nothing about it), fresh speech prosecutions through the summer of 2024, and the Online Safety Act’s entry into force accelerating the decline. The Bill is published in a climate where polling by YouGov for Prospect magazine has found that nearly half of Britons say they are not allowed to say what they think about key issues. The Free Speech Union, founded in 2019 by journalist Toby Young, has seen membership surge from 14,000 in July 2024 to 35,000, alongside a record number of requests for help. The Model Bill’s authors do not pretend this is moderate or incremental. The post makes the point explicitly: “In publishing the Model Bill, and in proposing the extent of repeals we propose, the Model Bill’s authors ask readers one question, and one alone: do you want the UK to have a free speech right that is equivalent to the First Amendment?” The question, Byrne notes, “has a binary answer: yes or no.” “The Model Bill is not a sacred text,” Byrne writes. “It is simply three lawyers’ vision for a free Britain.” He expect readers to propose improvements, amendments, and additions, or to throw the Bill out and propose their own approaches entirely. Whether any MP picks it up is an open question. That the Bill exists at all, drafted in full statutory language with schedules, enforcement mechanisms, and repeals ready to go, represents a move from complaining about the censorship state to offering a complete legislative blueprint for dismantling it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The Free Speech Act: A Demolition Plan For Britain’s Speech Laws appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Keir Starmer wants to regulate what British people see online, and he wants to do it fast, with as little parliamentary involvement as possible. The British Prime Minister told The Mirror he backs a Budget-style annual update process for online censorship rules, a mechanism designed for speed rather than scrutiny. Budget updates are expedited by convention, with MPs given limited time and opportunity to pick apart what’s being pushed through. Starmer wants the same treatment applied to the government’s ability to control what appears on social media. When asked about this, he said: “We’re going to have, we’ll have to think of a device of whether it’s rolling provisions or something like that. But what we can’t have is a government that is stumbling to keep up because it keeps needing to pass provision that takes years before it goes in. People who’ve got children now want to know you’re going to do something that actually helps my child, not something which might take years in the making.” If you hadn’t noticed, “rolling provisions” is a polite term for a permanent, fast-tracked legislative pipeline where the government gives itself new censorship and surveillance powers year after year, and Parliament barely gets to debate it. The model Starmer is describing here is sometimes called a “Henry VIII clause,” where ministers can amend primary legislation through statutory instruments that limit debate and bypass the usual parliamentary process. The government has already tabled amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill and the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would allow senior ministers to modify the Online Safety Act and restrict children’s access to specific online services, all without the need for full parliamentary approval. The justification, as always, is children. Starmer also told The Mirror he now considers himself “open-minded” about banning under-16s from social media entirely, and declared that “addictive algorithms” should be prohibited. He made similar comments in an interview with The Observer, published the same weekend. He told The Mirror: “This is the platforms trying to get children to stay on for longer, to get addicted. I can’t see that there’s a case for that, and therefore I can see we’re going to have to act.” He added: “We’ll go through the consultation, but I think I’ll be absolutely clear things will not stay as they are. This is going to change. I don’t think the next generation would forgive us if we didn’t act now.” Children are always the justification. They were the justification for the Online Safety Act, which has already blocked UK users from accessing support pages for alcohol addiction, child sexual abuse survivor resources, and sexual assault survivor communities on Reddit, along with political and legal content, including parliamentary speeches. They were the justification when the government said “no platform gets a free pass” and went after Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot. And they are the justification now, as Starmer pushes for a system where the next round of speech controls gets expedited through Parliament every year, like a line item in the tax code. Starmer’s timing is telling. A jury in Los Angeles recently ruled that Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design of their platforms, awarding $3 million in compensatory damages and $6 million in punitive damages to a 20-year-old woman who said childhood social media use had contributed to depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia. Meta and Google both plan to appeal. Starmer has said the decision could mark “a turning point” leading to “much stricter content restriction,” and his government source told reporters: “Nothing is off the table when it comes to protecting children online.” “Nothing is off the table” is the kind of phrase that should make anyone paying attention uncomfortable. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Starmer Pushes Fast-Track Online Censorship Powers appeared first on Reclaim The Net.