If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Federal officials set out to erase the online voices of Americans who said Covid vaccines had hurt them. A new appeal asks the Fifth Circuit to give those Americans their day in court. The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed its opening brief on July 7, asking the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to revive Dressen v. Flaherty. We obtained a copy of the brief for you here.  A federal judge in Texas had thrown the case out before a single document changed hands in discovery. The suit accuses the Biden administration of running a joint government and private censorship operation against people who went online to talk about vaccine injuries. Brianne Dressen alleges she was injured after she volunteered for an AstraZeneca vaccine trial. Shaun Barcavage, Kristi Dobbs, Nikki Holland, and Suzanna Newell each reportedly suffered serious, debilitating injuries after Covid vaccination. Ernest Ramirez was vaccinated without incident and then lost his healthy 16-year-old son five days after the boy received his first Pfizer dose. The autopsy pointed to an enlarged heart and myocarditis. They did what people in pain tend to do. They went to social media to trade medical research, look for treatments, share hopeful stories, and find others who understood. For many of them, closed online support groups became a lifeline. The government treated that lifeline as a threat. The Surgeon General’s Office, the CDC, HHS, DHS, CISA, and the White House leaned on social media companies to flag this speech as “misinformation,” shadow-ban it, or delete it outright. The operation reached across agencies and into the platforms themselves, coercing and colluding with the companies that decide who gets to be heard. The plaintiffs are represented by the NCLA. Stanford supplied the machinery. The now-defunct Stanford Internet Observatory and its “Virality Project” tracked posts and handed the platforms lists of speech to suppress. The Virality Project targeted Covid-vaccine speech that broke from the administration’s preferred policies, whether or not that speech was accurate. Real accounts of real injuries got flagged because they were inconvenient, not because they were false. The censors were specific about their targets. Their tracking called out Bri Dressen by name. A woman reportedly injured in a vaccine trial, describing what happened to her own body, became something a federal effort wanted the public not to see. None of that was enough for the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas, which dismissed the case at the pleading stage. The plaintiffs had laid out a detailed factual account of a nationwide censorship conspiracy, and the court closed the door before discovery could begin. NCLA’s brief says the district court got the law wrong in several ways. The judge set too narrow and exacting a bar on personal jurisdiction and used it to wave off the Stanford defendants and the individual government officials. The court also misread the Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri, which weighed whether a different set of NCLA clients had shown enough to win a preliminary injunction. No injunction is being sought here, so that higher standard does not govern this case. The brief argues, the court made a further error on the civil-rights conspiracy claim. It tossed the plaintiffs’ claim under 42 U.S. Code Section 1985(3) on the theory that they had not alleged racial discrimination. The statute never mentions race. It protects “any person or class of persons” stripped of their rights through an invidiously discriminatory conspiracy, and the Supreme Court has said the provision can reach non-racial classes. “To call what happened to our clients ‘troubling’ is a massive understatement. After suffering devastating medical injuries following Covid vaccination, they turned to social media as a lifeline for support and connection with others who understood. Rather than compassion or aid, the Government responded with relentless censorship, maligning them as liars and conspiracy theorists and cutting off the lifelines that they depended on. “Their only offense was that their lived experiences, pain, and even private conversations in online support groups contradicted the Administration’s preferred Covid-vaccine narrative. The cruelty and injustice are difficult to overstate,” said Casey Norman, Litigation Counsel at NCLA. The appeal also presses a point the district court skipped over. Censorship harms more than the person silenced. “We are confident the Fifth Circuit will correct the District Court’s numerous errors in dismissing the complaint, which included taking an inappropriately narrow view of personal jurisdiction and ignoring that not just speakers, but also potential listeners, suffer harm resulting from unlawful government censorship,” said Caitlin Moyna, Senior Litigation Counsel at NCLA. The stakes reach past these six plaintiffs. If courts keep reading Murthy as a wall against every censorship suit, the government gains a template for silencing people with almost no risk of accountability. “Lower courts are misapplying the Supreme Court’s Murthy v. Missouri decision, and the ruling below here is a prime example. The Murthy decision set a high bar for standing in the context of a preliminary injunction to stop future censorship. But no PI was sought here, so the Murthy standard is not applicable. If Bri Dressen cannot satisfy standing—when the defendants called her out by name in their censorship tracking—then no one will,” said Mark Chenoweth, President and Chief Legal Officer of NCLA. According to NCLA, the campaign still burdens its clients’ ability to speak, to associate privately, and to exchange information with others in closed support groups. The question in front of the Fifth Circuit is whether Americans silenced by their own government can even make their case to a jury, or whether the courthouse door stays shut before anyone looks at the evidence. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Dressen v. Flaherty: Vaccine Censorship Case Goes to Appeal 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. South Korea now fines you for being wrong online, and the state reserves the right to decide what wrong means. A revision to the country’s Network Act took effect Tuesday, letting courts order anyone with a real audience to pay up to five times a victim’s financial losses for spreading information the government deems intentionally false. Distribute more than twice, and the penalty climbs to 1 billion won, about $660,000. The measure amends the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, known at home as the “fake news” law. It targets publishers with more than 100,000 subscribers or monthly views, the threshold where a voice starts to carry. Reach that many people, get accused of lying, and you now write under the shadow of a payout calculated as a multiple of someone else’s claimed loss. Platforms wear a separate leash. Any service averaging a million or more daily users can be tagged “large-scale” by the Korea Media and Communications Commission, and eight already have been. The Korean four are Naver, Kakao, Nate, and DC Inside. The overseas four are Google, Meta, X, and TikTok. Designation brings homework. The companies must build reporting channels for “unlawful” content, publish transparency reports, and sign agreements with fact-checking organizations that the state gets to approve. As we’ve seen before, a platform facing fivefold damages will not wait for a court to separate truth from error. It just deletes first. Choi Soo-jin, the People Power Party’s chief floor spokesperson, said the pressure points in a single direction. “To avoid large damages and fines, platforms will have no choice but to preemptively delete posts even before illegality is clearly determined,” she said. “Excessive deletion and de facto prior censorship are structurally inevitable.” The unanswered question is who defines the lie. The law punishes “false or manipulated information,” yet Korea built no body to rule on what qualifies before the penalties land. Joo Jin-woo, a People Power Party lawmaker preparing a constitutional challenge, called it “rushed legislation that does not even have a body to determine false or manipulated information.” Jeong Jeom-sig, the party’s floor leader and its top legislative strategist in the National Assembly, has vowed to file a constitutional complaint of his own. Washington noticed. A State Department spokesperson voiced “significant concerns” on Wednesday, warning that “the amendment could lead to excessive content regulation and undermine freedom of expression.” The statement pressed further, saying South Korea “should not impose undue burdens on U.S. companies and must not use the law’s implementation as a mechanism to demand censorship of free expression.” Korea’s regulator says the platforms, not the government, will make the first call. “Basically, the platforms will be the first to determine whether a post — including satire and parodies — violates their internal guidelines,” said Shin Young-kyu of the Korea Media and Communications Commission. “Ultimately, the courts will hold the final authority on whether any given content violates the law. As rulings accumulate over time, more concrete standards will emerge.” The reassurance carries an admission. No concrete standards exist yet, so satire and parody get filtered now while the rules are written later, after the posts are gone. The ruling Democratic Party, which pushed the amendment through the National Assembly in December, insists ordinary people have nothing to fear. “Not a single citizen who shares daily life, expresses legitimate political opinions or sharply criticizes power will be subject to punishment under this law,” said party spokesperson Jeon Su-mi. A promise like that depends on who defines legitimate, and that power now sits with the state and the courts it staffs. Opposition reaches well past one party. The Journalists Association of Korea, the country’s largest press group, has come out against the law. Korean legal groups and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a US tech trade body, have too. A petition demanding repeal gathered more than 140,000 signatures before the law even took effect. Any petition clearing 50,000 names in 30 days goes to a standing committee, which can advance it or bury it. The people who wrote this law get to decide what counts as false, who reached too many readers, and which posts vanish before a judge ever looks. Korea has handed its platforms a single incentive. Delete first, ask questions never. The result is a chilling effect with the force of statute behind it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post South Korea’s Fake News Law Puts a Price on Online Speech 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. Microsoft has decided that copying your company’s Windows settings to its cloud should stop being your choice. Starting with Windows 11 version 26H2, the feature now called “Windows settings backup and restore” switches itself on for eligible business machines, and it does so without asking. The one place that escapes this treatment is the European Union, where the Digital Markets Act keeps the setting off until an administrator turns it on. The service copies a device’s settings and the list of Microsoft Store apps a user has installed, then parks all of it in Microsoft’s cloud so the data can be loaded onto a replacement machine later. Microsoft has spent months renaming the thing, from Windows Backup for Organizations to its current label, and the rename changes nothing about what happens. Settings data leaves the device on a schedule, once every eight days, and lands in a tenant store that Microsoft operates. The company’s pitch leans on the fear of the moment things go wrong. “Imagine a lost laptop, a hardware refresh, or an unexpected reset. These are some of the moments when your users need backup most. And that’s rarely when anyone wants to discover that backup was never turned on,” Microsoft wrote in its Windows IT Pro blog. Its documentation frames the flip as a way of establishing “backup as a baseline capability, helping user environments stay protected without requiring setup.” Read past the reassurance and the stated goals look different. Microsoft’s own overview lists what it wants the feature to achieve, and neither aim is really about protecting you. One is to help organizations “accelerate PC refresh cycle or the transition to Windows 11 or deploying AI-powered PCs.” The other is to move companies onto “a cloud-first approach for managing devices and user settings.” Backup is the friendly word. Migration into Microsoft’s cloud is the objective. The default flips only for machines running 26H2 or later. Windows 11 25H2 and earlier stay as they are, and any device whose administrator already wrote a policy disabling backup keeps that policy. GCCH and sovereign clouds fall outside the change, and so does China. Everything else that qualifies gets switched on after a feature update, reaching Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel this month before a wider release later in the year. Only the backup half turns on by itself. Restoring settings to a new device still needs an administrator to flip a separate switch. The EU carve-out is the tell. Where regulation forces the question, Microsoft asks permission. Where nothing forces it, Microsoft assumes a yes. A company outside Europe that cares about data sovereignty now has to notice the change, understand what it does, and turn it back off across machine after machine. The work of keeping data in place falls on the customer, not on the vendor shipping that data out. The Register, which broke the story, described the cost to the people who run these fleets, noting that “an opt-out setting that quietly ships settings data off-device is exactly the sort of thing that adds to administrators’ workloads rather than lightening them.” Microsoft concedes this is not even a complete backup solution, calling it “one step in a broader Windows resiliency effort.” What sits on the table, then, is partial protection traded for a standing copy of user settings on Microsoft’s servers, enabled by a default nobody requested. Users can resist, though the controls are tucked away in Settings under Accounts and Windows backup, where toggles labeled “Remember my preferences” and “Remember my apps” decide what gets sent. Those toggles only respond if an administrator enabled the feature to begin with, so the people most exposed often have the least power to stop it. Data already uploaded does not disappear on its own. Clawing it back means an administrator has to reach into the tenant’s data store, or make Microsoft Graph API calls with the right permissions, to view and delete what was taken. Away from Microsoft’s blog, the response ran cold. On Slashdot, one reader boiled the consent model down to “Yes or Ask Again in Three Days.” Another asked for a rule an operating system ought to follow on its own, writing “Do not change my OS from the one I purchased unless and until I explicitly request it.” A third tied the change to the company’s broader record, observing that “with the latest news that Microsoft used the Windows ID to identify users, one should really wonder if they should have a copy of your settings.” The feature will help some workers recover a lost laptop. It will also hand Microsoft a fresh, always-current inventory of how millions of corporate machines are configured and what runs on them, gathered by default and dressed up as resilience. Switching it off is possible. Learning that it switched itself on is the harder half. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Microsoft Decided Your Windows Settings Belong in Its Cloud 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. Meta sat before Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion this week and heard a demand it gets from governments all over the world: Take down more. The company loosened its speech rules in January 2025, fewer posts have been deleted since, and the commission wanted to know why Meta would not turn the machinery back on. Benjamin Good, Meta’s global director of core policy, joined by video link from the United States to account for the change. The old system, he said, reached well past dangerous material and pulled down ordinary political argument. Jewish users answering antisemitism were among the people it silenced. “They were trying to engage in counter-speech and unfortunately our systems were affecting them,” he told the inquiry. That is a striking admission from the company that built the system. For years Meta ran aggressive automated removal and told the public it made everyone safer. Its own policy director now describes software that couldn’t tell an attack from a reply to one and censored the reply. Good defended the trade-off Meta made when it scaled that software back. “In proactive enforcement, it is the gold standard to remove violating content before it is viewed,” he said. “However, it carries risks when we remove content proactively. If we are wrong, if the content does not violate, then there is a significant risk of over-enforcement.” Delete first and you delete the innocent along with the guilty. Meta learned the expensive way and changed course. The January 2025 rules moved most content to what Meta calls “reactive” moderation. A post stays up until a user reports it, rather than an algorithm guessing at intent before anyone has seen it. The company still hunts proactively for the worst material, child sexual abuse and the promotion of terrorism, which it removes with AI. Good drew a line between that category, which Meta calls “truly heinous,” and so-called hate speech, which it now handles with a lighter touch. The commission arrived with a number. Action on hateful conduct fell 79 percent after the policy changed, from 5.8 million items between October and December 2024 to 1.2 million between July and September 2025. Counsel pressed Good for a “plausible explanation” for the drop “other than the announced change in the policy.” He agreed the figure was in the ballpark. He said he did not know the cause and would not speculate, citing the complexity of the system. Turned around, the number looks less like failure. A 79 percent fall in removals means far more speech left standing, most of it the political argument Meta admits its old filters used to catch. The commission treats the smaller pile of deletions as a problem to be corrected. The people whose posts survived might see it differently. Defining the thing being counted is its own problem. Good said about 0.02 percent of content on the network qualifies as “hateful conduct,” a category Meta writes and Meta measures. He also noted that users often deploy “Zionist” as a “coded term” for Jews, which shows how fast a rule against hate becomes a judgment call about what a word secretly means. Hand that judgment to an algorithm and it will make the call at scale, on millions of posts, with the errors Good had just finished describing. Kick faced the same counsel and a harder afternoon. Nicholas Bender SC, acting for several Jewish community groups, asked the streaming platform’s general counsel Tiat Oon Ooi whether calling Jews “evil rats and subhumans” on a live-stream would break the rules. “I believe so, but I think that’s a difficult one for me to answer,” Ooi said. “I’m not specifically well-acquainted with the details of the moderation guidelines.” Identifying hate speech, he offered, is “more of an art than a science. It’s not really a formula where I can say A plus B definitely equals hate speech.” Much of Kick’s moderation runs through a team in Serbia, and Ooi said the platform fields a heavy volume of false reports from viewers flagging people they simply dislike. Ooi’s answer was clumsy, and it was also honest. Nobody has a formula that functions in a way that pro-censorship governments demand, which is the reason a mandate to delete more produces the over-enforcement Good described. The commission’s pressure runs one direction, toward more removals, broader definitions, faster deletion. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Australia: Royal Commission Presses Meta to Censor More Content 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. Ofcom has landed on a fresh plan for collecting the £520,000 it insists 4chan owes, and here it is in all its glory: get American police to do the British censor’s dirty work. That, more or less, is what the regulator told The Independent this week. Asked how it intends to squeeze cash out of a company with no staff, no servers, and not so much as a spare fiver anywhere in the United Kingdom, Ofcom said it had “initiated work” to chase the money and would pursue it “regardless of where the firm is based.” For a company that keeps everything abroad, a spokesperson said, the job “can involve engaging debt recovery and financial investigation specialists in the jurisdiction where companies do have assets, as well as local law enforcement agencies and courts.” Local law enforcement agencies and courts. A British quango has floated the idea that American cops will be dispatched to collect a British speech fine, on the week of America’s 250th birthday, from a website whose entire legal existence sits under the First Amendment. You could not make it up, and yet here we are. Preston Byrne, the US lawyer representing 4chan, gave the plan the review it deserved. “This is legally illiterate,” Byrne wrote on X. “If they really want to sue us in the United States to recover a foreign censorship penalty, we welcome the fight.” He was only warming up. “we now have a foreign censor claiming not only that their laws work on U.S. soil, but also that they can conscript U.S. police forces to finish the job,” Byrne wrote, adding that “Ofcom’s threats here are, much like their fines regime, toothless and designed to intimidate.” His conclusion on the whole business: “it’s long past time for the U.S. to put the UK back in its box.” The police point is not a lawyer’s flourish. Byrne noted that “deprivation of rights under color of law is a literal felony in the United States,” then wondered aloud, “Not sure how much assistance Ofcom is expecting to get under those circumstances.” Recruiting American officers to enforce a foreign censorship penalty against a protected American publisher is the kind of favor that comes with a harsh sentence attached. Byrne went further still, saying Ofcom “basically says it’s going to engage in espionage against US citizens who, entirely lawfully refuse its orders.” Every legal road Ofcom might take runs into a wall. US police cooperation “would have to go through the MLAT, which they have previously refused to use; a US lawsuit would lead to certain defeat + adverse precedent,” Byrne wrote. A US court will not lift a finger to help “in a million years,” he said, because “U.S. courts don’t collect debts for foreign sovereigns, and the UK knows it.” His theory on why the demand letters keep arriving anyway is worth quoting in full: “What this tells me is that Westminster is using Ofcom as a pressure release valve for the OSA regime,” and “Admitting that the regime is unenforceable against Americans is politically disastrous. They’re going to pretend the Emperor is wearing clothes as long as they can.” Here is what the emperor is wearing. Ofcom fined 4chan £520,000 in March for allegedly breaching the Online Safety Act, the UK’s censorship and age-verification law. The bill breaks down as £450,000 for not bringing in age ID checks, £50,000 for skipping an illegal content risk assessment, and £20,000 for failing to explain how it would protect users from criminal content, plus £800 a day for as long as 4chan carries on ignoring the regulator. The latest deadline for payment came and went on Thursday. It was never going to be met. 4chan’s answer has been the same throughout. It operates only in the United States, breaks no American law, and enjoys constitutional protection for what it publishes. “In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment,” Byrne said. The style of the reply has been rather more memorable than a legal brief. When Ofcom first came looking for its money, Byrne emailed back an AI-generated hamster. When the regulator wrote again, “penalty remains due and payable,” bank details helpfully attached, Byrne posted: “Ofcom wrote. Again. Demanding that 4chan pay its fine. Sent us bank details and everything. Oh no. Super scary.” His response? “We replied with a hamster. Again.” The formal version made the same point with fewer rodents: “As 4 chan has no assets in the United Kingdom…that would require you to show in a US court as a plaintiff, waive sovereign immunity, and overcome existing US doctrine regarding the non-enforcement of foreign regulatory penalties.” Byrne’s earlier promise still stands. “It will be a cold day in Hell before my client pays that fine. Ofcom won’t be collecting it unless they’re prepared to land ground troops in America, overthrow our government, and rescind our constitutional order by force.” The lawyers watching from the sidelines are no kinder. Myles Jackson told The Independent that Ofcom has “no right imposing fines on US domiciled companies that they have no right to collect,” that “the UK government has no jurisdiction over the American Constitution,” and that any US enforcement action would “seem destined to fail.” He called the fight “undoubtedly a test case for global regulatory overreach” and warned the law is having a “disastrous” effect on foreign tech investment in Britain. Nick Phillips of Edwin Coe said enforcing the fine against a company with no UK assets is “going to be difficult.” Daniel ShenSmith, the barrister who posts as BlackBeltBarrister, put it like this: “no U.S. court is ever going to help Ofcom enforce this fine and override your own laws. It’s frankly embarrassing.” A censorship regime that cannot reach beyond its own borders has two ways to save face. It can admit the limits of its power, or it can keep sending invoices it has no means to enforce and hope nobody notices the difference. Ofcom has picked the invoices. Somewhere in America, a hamster is waiting to reply. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Ofcom Wants American Police to Collect Its Speech Fine appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.