If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. FCC member Anna Gomez has been describing what happens when a federal regulator leans on broadcasters over programming it dislikes. This month, she endorsed the JAWBONE Act, a Ted Cruz bill that would let the broadcasters and platforms on the receiving end of that pressure haul federal officials into court and collect money from them. Punchbowl News reported the endorsement on July 14. The bill Gomez is backing, S. 4749, carries the name Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, which nobody will ever say out loud, and it was introduced on June 11 by Cruz and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden. It would make it unlawful for any federal agency, or any officer or employee acting “under color or pretense of office or employment,” to coerce or attempt to coerce a broadcaster, an online platform or an AI provider into taking what the text calls a content action, meaning adding, altering or deleting speech. Coercion is defined broadly as “to take a harmful, hostile, or unfavorable action, to imply the possibility of taking such action, or to threaten such action.” The prohibition reaches conduct undertaken “for the purpose of, or if a reasonable person would understand the coercion or attempted coercion to be for the purpose of, incentivizing the broadcaster or provider to take a content action.” The bill then lists eight factors a court should weigh in deciding whether something counts as coercion. Read them against the record built in Missouri v. Biden and the fit is almost exact. Courts are told to consider the word choice and tone of the communication, whether the official had regulatory or enforcement authority over the recipient, whether the communication referred to adverse consequences, whether it was public or private, whether it carried a disclaimer saying it lacked legal force, and whether it led the recipient to act contrary to its own policies. Two of the eight cut the government’s way, asking whether the communication carried “a factual statement without legal force that could be useful to the decision-making of the recipient” and whether it “was for the purpose of aiding compliance with existing law.” The findings concede the point: “not all government communication to a private speech platform is coercive.” The government does not need a license over Facebook to have leverage over it. It has Section 230 and it has the antitrust division. Consider what that leverage produced in the summer of 2021. Rob Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy, ran a sustained campaign of emails and meetings aimed at Facebook’s moderation of COVID content. The Fifth Circuit found he had demanded internal policy details at least twelve times, pressing the company on what content was being demoted, what interventions it was making, and what measurable impact any of it had. He told the company the White House was “gravely concerned” that Facebook was “one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” accused it of running a “shell game,” and, when an answer was slow, wrote: “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” The private pressure had a public companion. On July 16, 2021, President Biden said the platforms were “killing people.” Four days later the White House communications director said the administration was “reviewing” Section 230 and that the companies “should be held accountable.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had already described antitrust enforcement as an existential threat to his company. Internal Facebook messages produced in the litigation show executives reading the signal exactly as it was sent, one of them calling the standoff not “a great place for us to be” and asking colleagues for “creative thinking on how we can be responsive to their concerns.” The company then expanded what it removed. Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction on July 4, 2023, describing the campaign as Orwellian. The Fifth Circuit trimmed the order but agreed that the White House, the Surgeon General’s office, the CDC and the FBI had likely crossed the constitutional line, and on rehearing added CISA to the list. Under the JAWBONE Act, the doctors and posters whose accounts were throttled could sue over all of it, and so could Facebook. The bill creates a private right of action in federal district court, allows compensatory damages plus attorney fees and litigation costs, permits equitable relief, and bars punitive damages. It move the burden onto the government to prove that one of the exceptions applies, those being lawful investigations, warrants, and directions about an agency’s own official accounts. No official is “immune from liability on the basis of a finding that the agency, officer, or employee had a subjective belief that the information” at issue “was not lawful expression protected by the First Amendment.” State attorneys general can sue “as parens patriae on behalf of natural persons residing in the State.” None of that helped the plaintiffs who actually brought the case. The Supreme Court ended it on June 26, 2024, ruling 6 to 3 in Murthy v. Missouri that they lacked standing because they could not trace any particular deletion to federal pressure rather than to the platforms’ own initiative. The bill attacks that evidentiary trap. Then there is the disclosure regime, which is where the bill either works or collapses. NIST would have a year to write standards for logging government communications with broadcasters, platforms and AI providers. The Office of Science and Technology Policy would build a portal, and every agency would have to feed it new or previously unreported communications at least once every 120 days, including through employee self-reporting. OSTP would publish a “publicly accessible, searchable website” carrying a detailed description of each communication, one that “summarizes the contents” and “identifies all requests, whether implied or express, for content actions.” Congress gets more than the public does: “the full, unredacted record of all covered communications” goes to the chairs and ranking members of the two commerce committees at least once a fiscal year. Inspectors general would audit compliance every two years, and a platform that thinks it has been leaned on can file a complaint through the same website without retaliation, which OSTP must forward to the relevant inspector general and the commerce committees within 15 days. Two holes are already visible. The public gets summaries written by the government about its own conduct, not the underlying communications. And redactions run through the Freedom of Information Act exemptions, which is a wide door. The bill does require that a description carry “markings detailing the specific exemption under which such redactions were made” and that the material be “unredacted when an exemption is no longer applicable.” Whether anyone checks is a separate question. The indemnification provision is the strangest part. If a federal official loses a jawboning case, the federal government pays the judgment. The Justice Department represents the official on request, and the government “shall indemnify the officer or employee for any verdict, judgment, or other monetary award.” The official pays personally only if a court finds he “acted in a willful and wanton manner,” at which point he also reimburses the government for his own defense. The people whose speech was deleted would be funding the settlement through their taxes. Cruz and Wyden are selling the same text to opposite audiences and neither is hiding it. Cruz’s statement was about the Biden administration and CISA, saying it weaponized the agency “to pressure Big Tech into ‘canceling’ Americans who spoke out against vaccine mandates and election fraud.” Wyden’s statement named the sitting president. “The most blatant example is Trump threatening cable companies because he doesn’t like their late-night shows, but jawboning isn’t partisan, and it isn’t new,” Wyden said. The statute would not distinguish between them, which is the point of writing rules rather than grievances. The bill is in the Senate Commerce Committee, which Cruz chairs, so its author controls whether it moves. Gomez’s own position is thinner. Her term expired on July 1, two days after the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in Trump v. Slaughter that the president can remove FCC commissioners without cause, removing the argument she had said she would use to fight a firing. She remains in holdover status. Her response was to point out that the Court had, in a companion decision, “protected the Federal Reserve from political interference while leaving media regulators exposed,” and to say she intends “to keep doing that work for as long as I am able to serve.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post JAWBONE Act: FCC Democrat Backs Cruz Anti-Censorship Bill 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. The trigger for losing your anonymity in Victoria, Australia, will be an accusation, not a finding of guilt. Premier Jacinta Allan announced on Sunday that her government will hand the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal the power to issue “demasking orders,” forcing social media companies to reveal the identity of anonymous users accused of online vilification. VCAT is the body Victorians deal with over rental bonds, planning permits, and faulty dishwashers. It is now being asked the question of who gets to speak without their legal name attached to it. The government’s announcement gives the reform four short paragraphs. “Too many Victorians are being vilified online by anonymous users hiding behind a screen,” it reads, before adding that the change “delivers on the Premier’s commitment to hold social media companies to account for online hate.” Allan was blunter on X. “We’re introducing nation-leading laws to keep AI and tech companies accountable, protect our kids & unmask anonymous online hate,” she wrote. Nation-leading is accurate, at least. No other Australian state lets a tribunal order a platform to name an account holder in a vilification case, and the Victorian government is treating that as a selling point rather than a warning. Victoria already rewrote its vilification law. The Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-Vilification and Social Cohesion) Act 2025 repealed the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act and moved the offenses into the Crimes Act and the Equal Opportunity Act. Serious vilification by incitement now carries up to three years in prison, and vilification by threat up to five. Those provisions apply to conduct from 20 September 2025. On 15 April 2026, a new harm-based protection commenced, which means a complainant no longer has to show that anyone was incited to do anything. Harm is enough, and harm is assessed after the fact by people who were not there. The criminal penalties arrived first, the lowered civil standard second, and now the power to attach a name to whoever said it. Each piece was announced on its own, and the government has never presented them as one package. Allan first floated a crackdown on anonymous accounts after the Bondi attack. That was the pitch then, and terrorism is not what a demasking order will be used for. VCAT does not prosecute terrorists. It will be processing complaints about posts on race, religion, and sexual orientation, brought by people who were offended by them. The government’s own language gives it away. A demasking order forces a platform to reveal the identity of anonymous users “accused of online vilification.” Not found liable. Not adjudicated. Accused. Anyone who has ever run an anonymous account knows what that changes. Once a name is out, it stays out. The order cannot be recalled, the employer cannot unlearn it, and the person who filed the complaint does not need to win anything for the exposure to be permanent. The remedy arrives before the finding does. That asymmetry is where the chilling effect on speech is relevant. A Victorian who wants to criticize a religious institution, or a religious practice, or a government policy on immigration, now has to price in the possibility that a tribunal will tell the world who they are. Most people will not run that risk. They will write something softer, or nothing at all, and no order will ever be issued against them, because the threat did the work on its own. Allan is also scrapping the legal threshold families must clear to sue social media and AI companies for negligence, causing psychiatric harm to a child. At present, a family has to prove permanent impairment of 10 percent or more, a figure assessed by medical practitioners. For claims brought on behalf of minors, that requirement goes. “Social media and AI companies design their platforms to be addictive, and our kids are paying the price,” Allan said. “If a platform hurts a child, families should be able to take that company to court.” Australia already bars children from the platforms in question through its minimum-age requirements. The government is promising to protect kids from services that those kids are not supposed to be using, and nobody at the announcement appears to have asked how those two policies fit together. Near the end of the press release is this sentence. “Whether the reform should extend beyond children to adults will be considered as the law is drafted.” The child-protection framing carried the announcement, and the question of who the law actually covers gets settled later, in drafting, without another press conference. Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny described the point of the demasking power directly. “These reforms will help victims of online hate find out who’s really behind the keyboard,” she said. Minister for Mental Health Ingrid Stitt framed it as a health measure. “We’re taking action, because no one should have their mental health impacted by senseless online hate,” she said. Victoria goes to an election in November. Parliament has four sitting weeks left. Allan says the laws are being drafted and that both reforms will go through targeted consultation with VCAT, the courts, and other stakeholders before anything reaches the chamber. Announced on a Sunday, four months out from an election, with the scope of who it covers left to the drafters. The government will keep calling it protection. What it is proposing is a process for finding out who said something the state has decided is hate, run by the tribunal that handles rental disputes, triggered by a complaint rather than a verdict. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Victoria to Force Social Media Companies to Identify Users Accused of “Vilification” 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. NetChoice is asking every judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to undo a decision that lets Ohio demand your identity before you open an account online. The group filed its petition for rehearing on July 16, weeks after a divided three-judge panel revived HB33 and became the first federal appeals court in the country to uphold this kind of law. HB33, Ohio’s Social Media Parental Notification Act, bars anyone under 16 from making an account on a long list of websites unless a parent signs off first. Getting that consent means handing over sensitive documents to confirm a user’s age and identity. The requirement reaches well past the platforms lawmakers name, catching blogs and book-recommendation sites in the same net. Those verification checks build new stores of personal data. Sites that never needed your government ID would have to collect it and hold on to it, turning ordinary services into targets for anyone hunting for identities to steal. Ohio calls this child safety. What it manufactures is a fresh cache of records waiting to be breached. The panel split 2-1 on June 18. Judge Eric Clay’s lead opinion leaned on standing, deciding NetChoice could not sue for the free-speech rights of the minors it says the law shuts out. He questioned whether the trade group had children’s interests at heart at all, and called the consent rule “a marginal burden that precisely targets the multi-faceted problem that Ohio has identified: Children’s unsupervised assent to terms and conditions for use of platforms that take advantage of and harm them.” Judge Alice Batchelder agreed the group could not stand in for young users. NetChoice’s interests, she wrote, “vis-a-vis those of minors are not ‘completely consistent,’ ‘closely aligned,’ or even neutral. They are opposed to one another.” Judge Kevin Ritz read the case differently. He warned the consent mandate could work as an “insurmountable barrier to entry for online speech,” and doubted it would deliver what Ohio promised. Parents give consent one time, he noted, after which a child keeps using a site with no further oversight, which left him unconvinced the law would head off the “issues with sleep, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression, and bullying” the state blamed on these platforms. NetChoice wants the full court to reverse. “The First Amendment’s protections apply to digital speech just as they apply to books, movies, and television. Ohio’s law is unconstitutional, and we are confident the full Sixth Circuit will strike it down,” said Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. Taske cast the case as a fight over who decides what families can read. “Parenting decisions must be made by parents. The government cannot impose its view of what some parents want on all families across the state,” he said. The debate over parental rights is on top of a data-collection regime that asks adults and children alike to surrender private records for the chance to speak online. The law has lost in court before, like when Judge Algenon Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio blocked it with a temporary restraining order in January 2024, added a preliminary injunction weeks later, then struck it down for good in April 2025, finding it was not tailored narrowly enough to serve the state’s interest in protecting kids. Ohio appealed, and the June ruling erased that win. Laws like it have collapsed elsewhere and federal judges have blocked comparable identity-check mandates in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia, each time on First Amendment grounds. The Sixth Circuit’s decision breaks from that run of losses and hands other states a template for pushing the same demands. Ohio’s new attorney general, Andy Wilson, called the panel ruling “a win for Ohio families.” Whether the full Sixth Circuit agrees, the machinery the law would build stays the same. Age verification does not verify only age. It records who you are, where you are, and what you came to say. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Full Sixth Circuit Is Asked To Kill Ohio’s Online ID 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. Ron Wyden wants the Trump administration to treat one of America’s allies as a counterintelligence threat. The Oregon senator wrote to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is doubling as acting national security adviser, on July 16. His warning centers on an invasive surveillance bill moving through Canada’s Parliament that could turn American technology companies into tools for spying on Americans. That bill is C-22, the Lawful Access Act. It would require telecoms, messaging apps, and potentially any digital service operating in Canada to rebuild their systems so that police and the intelligence service CSIS can reach into user data. Providers would also have to keep metadata, the record of who contacted whom, when, and from where, for as long as a year, pulling in millions of people suspected of nothing. Wyden’s alarm runs past Canada’s borders. American law contains no rule stopping US firms from helping a foreign government spy on Americans, even when the target is the president or a senior official. Ottawa could therefore order a company like Apple or Google to hand over data or weaken its own security, in secret, with an American in the crosshairs. Wyden called that gap “a glaring statutory vacuum.” The Lawful Access Act “threatens to weaponize American technology infrastructure by enabling the Canadian government to force U.S. companies to secretly facilitate surveillance of Americans, while systematically undermining the security of their products,” he wrote. Britain already ran the experiment. News broke in February 2025 that the UK had secretly ordered Apple to weaken encrypted iCloud backups. Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that forcing American firms to engineer backdoors violates privacy rights and opens severe holes for hostile hackers to climb through. President Trump and Vice President Vance pressed London to pull back. When Wyden’s staff asked British officials whether their laws could block a demand built to spy on Americans, no assurance came. The senator sketched five ways a foreign government could pry open the vacuum. It could force a company to store an American target’s backups on local servers, where authorities can walk in and seize them. It could demand that end-to-end encryption be switched off for specific targets. It could require a hidden, government-controlled “ghost” key that decrypts protected backups. It could relocate the signing keys that vouch for the authenticity of software updates, leaving them exposed to foreign seizure. It could push government spyware onto a target’s device through a corrupted update from a company the user trusts. The US holds leverage over how this ends. The CLOUD Act lets a foreign country that signs a deal with the Justice Department request data straight from American companies, skipping the mutual legal assistance treaty process that can crawl on for months or years. Only Britain and Australia have signed. Canada is negotiating its first agreement right now. Wyden wants American officials to use that window to lock in “ironclad, explicit prohibitions against these extraterritorial technical and prospective engineering mandates,” and to “take all necessary administrative and regulatory steps to insulate U.S. government officials and the American public from foreign surveillance demands against American firms.” The companies that would have to build all of this have spent months refusing. Google told a House of Commons committee that C-22 would create “surveillance infrastructure” and hand the Public Safety Minister “sweeping powers to issue secret orders.” A weak definition of “systemic vulnerability,” it warned, could let the law “decrease overall user security, by creating backdoors that would break end-to-end encryption and create significant cybersecurity risks, facilitating foreign interference and weakening global user privacy.” The company drew its own line. “Google has never built a backdoor or other mechanism to circumvent end-to-end encryption in our products. If we say a product is end-to-end encrypted, it is end-to-end encrypted.” Wyden has company in Washington. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast warned Canada’s public safety minister in May that American firms face a choice between “compromising the security of their entire user base, including US citizens, or risking exclusion from the Canadian market.” Bill C-22 has passed Canada’s House of Commons and awaits the Senate. Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has accused the tech companies of misreading it. They have read it closely enough to refuse to build what it asks for. A backdoor cut into Apple or Google does not know to stop at the border, and Wyden is wagering that this fear will move an administration that privacy arguments alone would not. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Wyden Urges Blanche and Rubio to Fight Canada’s Bill C-22 Surveillance 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. Missouri wants to see your ID before you can look at legal content, and it is selling that demand as child protection. Governor Mike Kehoe signed House Bill 1839 on July 9, turning an attorney general rule into hard law and dropping the state deeper into the widening group of governments that treat online anonymity as a loophole to close. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The statute goes after websites where more than a third of the content qualifies as “sexual material harmful to minors.” Cross that line and you have to route every visitor through a third-party age check before they reach anything. Social media platforms answer to the same requirement once enough of what they host trips the threshold. The check collects far more than a birthday. A visitor can hand over a government-issued ID, a form of digital identification tied to their legal name, or submit to what the bill calls “a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an individual.” That transactional data, the text spells out, can be pulled from mortgage, education, and employment records. Confirming that someone has cleared 18 now means surfacing where they went to school, who holds their loan, and where they work. Missouri could have asked for a birth year. It chose instead to build a system that welds a person’s real identity to the specific sites they visit, about the most sensitive browsing there is. The law tells the companies running these checks that they cannot keep what they gather. A third party “shall not retain any identifying information of the individual,” the bill reads, and the attorney general can charge $10,000 for every instance a company hangs onto that data. The promise reads well on the page. It also rests on trusting that a verification vendor, sitting on a database of IDs matched to porn habits, never gets breached. Age-check providers have leaked this exact kind of information before, and a no-retention clause cannot un-leak a database that has already spilled. Catherine Hanaway, the state attorney general, enforces the rule and can stack penalties fast. A site faces $10,000 for each day it operates out of compliance, plus an added sum of up to $250,000 if a minor reaches restricted content. Hanaway, who inherited the rule from her predecessor Andrew Bailey, framed the signing as a landmark. “Our office is proud to have promulgated and enforced Missouri’s age-verification rule, which prompted Pornhub to stop operating in Missouri- delivering one of the most significant online child-protection victories in our state’s history. House Bill 1839 builds on that success, and Missouri will continue leading the nation in standing with parents, protecting children, and holding pornography websites accountable,” she said in a statement. Representative Sherri Gallick, who sponsored the bill, leaned on exposure figures. “The average age of first exposure is around 11. Early exposure shapes unrealistic expectations with pornography portraying sometimes violent and degrading sexual behavior. Much of the content is violent and demeaning, especially toward women and children,” Gallick wrote. The bill does carve out news. Bona fide news and public interest content stay exempt, and the text says it cannot be read to touch the work of a news-gathering organization. Internet providers, search engines, and cloud services get their own shield, safe from liability for content they neither create nor control. Aylo, the company that owns Pornhub, shows how compliance plays out. The site cut off Missouri users in December when the rule first landed, then reappeared as the signing drew near, now serving the state an age-verification prompt where it had gone dark. One version of that gate asked visitors to click “I am 18 or older – Enter” or “I am under 18 – Exit,” a reminder that the heaviest verification machinery tends to fall on the ordinary user while the theater of protection stays cheap. The requirements take effect August 28. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Missouri Age Verification Law Signed by Governor Mike Kehoe appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.