If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Just weeks after Americans criticized the United Kingdom for imposing intrusive and heavy-handed social media rules, Congress is now advancing legislation that raises strikingly similar concerns about government overreach, privacy erosion, and the expansion of online surveillance. A bipartisan agreement on children’s online safety legislation unveiled by House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders would impose new obligations on social media platforms, while creating powerful incentives for companies to end online anonymity. The proposal is part of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act), an omnibus package that bundles together multiple bills, including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, the SPY Kids Act, and more, as well as data broker provisions and research and education initiatives. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone announced Monday that they had reached agreement on the legislation, which would require social media companies to provide additional safeguards and parental tools for minors. The lawmakers said it would “hold Big Tech accountable.” “We worked across the aisle for many months and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids,” Guthrie and Pallone said in a joint statement. As always, under that framing lies a familiar and deeply controversial approach: imposing broad obligations on platforms that hinge on whether companies know a user is a minor, without clearly defining how that knowledge is supposed to be obtained. Congress has tried for years to set national rules for social media and youth safety. Those efforts have repeatedly stalled, in part because of unresolved tensions between child protection goals and fundamental privacy rights. In the absence of federal action, states have moved ahead with their own laws, often pushing even more aggressive requirements. One of the main disputes appears to have been resolved in favor of House Republicans. According to a committee spokesperson, the agreement does not include a “duty of care” provision, a requirement backed by many child-safety advocates and several Senate lawmakers. The bill text states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.” That language has drawn criticism from some Senate supporters who had pushed for stronger requirements. Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA.” Even without that provision, however, the bill still creates a framework that pressures platforms to determine who their users are and how old they are. The legislation defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known.” Similar language appears across multiple sections of the KIDS Act, including provisions covering online platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services. That standard creates legal risk for companies that fail to identify minors, effectively encouraging them to gather more information about users to avoid liability. The bill attempts to soften that implication by stating that “Nothing in this subtitle may be construed to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.” But that reassurance rings hollow. Platforms are told they do not have to verify age, while simultaneously being held responsible if they “should have known” a user was a minor. The most obvious way to resolve that contradiction is to collect more data, deploy age-estimation technologies, or introduce identity checks across the board. Privacy advocates have long warned that this kind of legal structure incentivizes surveillance. The bill would require platforms that know a user is a minor to provide privacy and safety controls, including tools to limit communications, restrict geolocation sharing, reduce compulsive-use features, and offer options to opt out of personalized recommendation systems. Default settings for minors must provide what the legislation describes as “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.” But those protections depend entirely on platforms being able to identify minors in the first place, raising the question of how much personal data will be collected from all users, not just children, in order to make that determination. Parents would also receive expanded oversight tools. Platforms would be required to provide account-management controls, time-limit features, notifications about new messaging requests, and other supervisory functions for accounts belonging to minors. Another provision allows states to enact stronger protections than those set at the federal level. The bill says nothing prevents a state from enforcing laws that provide “greater protection to minors” than federal requirements. That opens the door to an increasingly fragmented regulatory outlook, where companies must comply with a patchwork of state laws, many of which may impose stricter identity verification or access restrictions. For users, that could mean more aggressive data collection and fewer opportunities for anonymous or pseudonymous participation online, depending on where they live. The measure also includes language on encryption. It states that platform requirements may not override encrypted communications and that companies must comply in ways that “do not compromise the integrity of strong encryption.” While that language appears protective, indirect regulatory pressure can still lead companies to weaken encryption, particularly if compliance requires monitoring user behavior or identifying specific categories of users. The agreement still faces hurdles before becoming law, including Senate approval and President Donald Trump’s signature. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The KIDS Act: A Bipartisan Mass Surveillance Megabill appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to give every American a property right in their own face and voice. The same vote handed anyone who holds that right a fast, cheap way to make online content disappear. That happened when the committee advanced the NO FAKES Act of 2026 on a voice vote and sent it to the full Senate. This a federal system for deleting speech on request, backed by fines large enough that platforms will delete first and ask questions never. A “right holder” tells a platform that some video, image, or audio clip is an “unauthorized digital replica” of a real person, and the platform is left with two options. It can pull the content fast, or it can gamble on a fine of up to $750,000 per work if a court later rules the replica was unauthorized. For a company fielding millions of uploads a day, the math isn’t close, so the content comes down. Pulling a clip once isn’t the end of the platform’s obligation. After it processes a single notice, the bill requires it to block every future upload that matches the same “digital fingerprint,” a cryptographic hash of the flagged file. The platform has to keep deleting, automatically, with no person checking why. A clip tagged as an unauthorized replica stays dead even when the next person posting it has a solid defense. The bill insists it imposes no duty to monitor. Screening every upload against a stored hash is that duty, whatever the bill calls it. The defenses do exist, at least on paper. News, sports, documentary, biography, commentary, criticism, scholarship, satire, and parody all get written exemptions. The catch, though, is timing. A takedown lands before anyone weighs whether your clip qualifies as any of them, so you get your speech back only by fighting for it, and the bill prices that fight on purpose. Contesting a takedown means filing a counter-notification and the bill spells out what that costs you. The document has to carry “a physical signature, witnessed or attested to in person by a licensed notary public.” You also agree to be sued in federal court and to accept service of process. Anonymous speech has carried First Amendment protection since the Founders passed around unsigned pamphlets. This bill doesn’t repeal that protection but it makes you walk into a notary’s office and put your real name on the record before you can argue your post was lawful. Then there’s Section (f), the part that turns a takedown into an unmasking. A right holder can ask a court clerk, not a judge, to issue a subpoena identifying whoever posted the flagged material. The clerk “shall expeditiously issue and sign” it once the paperwork is in order. No judge weighs whether the underlying claim holds up and no hearing happens. Send the notice, file the form, and the platform has to hand over whatever it knows about who you are. The accusation alone pries your identity loose. Labeling the work honestly gives you nothing either. The bill says it “shall not be a defense” that you marked the content as AI-generated or flagged it as unauthorized. Admitting the fakery up front buys no cover. The power to send these notices reaches well past the person depicted. A right holder includes heirs, executors, licensees, and the record labels that hold exclusive contracts with an artist. The right survives death, passes to your estate, and runs as long as 70 years after you’re gone. An estate, or a label, gets most of a century of control over how a dead performer’s voice and face may be shown. The takedown notice becomes an inheritance. The committee passed the bill without a single no vote and several members made clear they weren’t comfortable. Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Eric Schmitt flagged First Amendment problems and voted yes regardless. “The legislation as drafted now raises some potentially significant concerns regarding free speech,” Lee said. “We do need to ensure that in protecting content creators’ rights, we don’t inadvertently chill free speech or undermine long-standing First Amendment principles.” Cruz reached for a concrete example, pointing to Spencer Pratt’s recent run for mayor of Los Angeles, where the reality star ran attack ads built on AI-generated images of Mayor Karen Bass. Cruz said he wanted to protect “satire, which is an important part of speech,” and described Pratt’s videos as “hysterical, and I think are a good example of what should be protected and not fall within a bill like this.” Voting for the bill while naming the speech it threatens is a strange way to defend that speech. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who led a bipartisan group of fifteen, framed the bill as overdue. “I’ve always said that America needs one set of rules for AI, and NO FAKES is a critical component of that rulebook,” Blackburn said. The bill borrows from Tennessee’s 2024 ELVIS Act, which built a similar voice-and-likeness right with a provision protecting record labels’ contracts. SAG-AFTRA gathered more than 16,000 signatures for it. The RIAA, the Motion Picture Association, OpenAI, and Google-owned YouTube lined up behind it too. The Trump administration signaled approval in a March policy document on AI that recommended this exact kind of likeness protection. When the entertainment lobby, the AI companies, and the White House all want the same takedown regime, the people most likely to get silenced are the ones with no lobbyist in the room. The bill now heads to the Senate floor with the coalition intact and the unmasking subpoena, the notarized counter-notice, and the automatic fingerprint blocking still in the text. The floor can strip those out. Until it does, the system deletes on accusation and charges you for the right to speak again. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post NO FAKES Act Clears Senate Committee: Delete First, Ask Never appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a $55.9 billion budget in the last week, with a tax on publishers of the kind the Supreme Court has been striking down for close to ninety years. The state will now bill companies according to the size of the audience they reach. Planted in 1,600 pages of spending law sits a “social media platform fee,” a monthly charge pegged to “the number of Illinois users from whom the social media platform collects data within a month.” Illinois will charge platforms for hosting speech and, the bigger the audience, the bigger the bill. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.  Pritzker expects the levy to bring in roughly $200 million. He told reporters he feels “much more confident about the social media platform fee” surviving court than the budget’s other contested levies on digital ads, crypto, and prediction markets. Lawmakers aren’t even counting on revenue from those. That confidence is misplaced and the governor supplied the reason himself. Defending the tax, Pritzker said it “requires companies to pay for the mental health and educational degradation they’ve caused.” By the governor’s own account, the state is charging platforms for the effects of the speech they carry. When a government picks out one class of speakers and bills them for what their speech does to the public, it has created a lever over expression. Taxing publishers because they are publishers is one of the oldest tools a state has used against the press, going back to the 1765 Stamp Act on pamphlets and newspapers that helped light the fuse for the Revolution. The Supreme Court has knocked down the modern descendants again and again, voiding a Louisiana levy on large-circulation papers in Grosjean, a Minnesota ink-and-paper tax in Minneapolis Star, and an Arkansas scheme in Ragland that taxed some publications while exempting others. In 2024’s Moody v. NetChoice, the justices confirmed that platforms curating user content are doing First Amendment-protected work. A state can tax income, it can tax profits, but it cannot build a tax that targets speakers for their speech. Who gets caught in this depends on how loosely you read “social media platform,” and Illinois reads it very loosely. The charge scales with users, so it bites hardest on services that carry big audiences on thin margins. Then there’s the question the law never answers. What counts as a “user”? Reddit and similar sites work fine without an account, which leaves it unclear whether a reader counts at all. Chicago already ran this experiment. The city imposed its own per-user social media tax, and NetChoice sued in March to block it. The state copied the structure and changed the scale. The same constitutional defects came along for the ride. Pritzker wanted the tax to be read as a bill for harm. He may have drafted the plaintiffs’ opening brief instead. A government that can charge you for the effects of what you publish has already decided it gets to weigh what you publish, and from there it is a short walk to deciding some publishers owe more than others. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Pritzker’s Social Media Tax: A $200 Million Bet Against the First Amendment appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The UAE Cabinet has approved a resolution barring children under 15 from holding a social media account, state news agency Wam reported on Thursday, and enforcing it will mean verifying every user in the country, adult or child. Anyone below 15 will be barred from creating, using or operating a personal account once the resolution is ratified and locked out of publishing, commenting, sharing and joining public groups or open channels. The Cabinet, led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, gave companies up to 12 months to comply. The rules cover any platform reaching users in the country, free or paid, that ranks or recommends content through algorithms, which is to say nearly all of them. The resolution states plainly that a user simply saying how old they are will no longer count. With self-declaration off the table, companies have to verify age some other way, and every available option, from identity documents to facial analysis to behavioral profiling, means each adult hands over more of themselves to prove they are not a child. The resolution does carry privacy language and the wording reveals the tension at its center. Verification must “achieve a high level of accuracy…while adhering to the highest standards of child privacy and personal data protection.” Platforms are told to minimize data collection and avoid keeping it longer than strictly necessary. Those constraints sit on top of a system whose whole purpose is to extract verified identity from people who previously surrendered none, and the second goal undercuts the first no matter how carefully the first is phrased. The Cabinet framed the resolution as an effort to “establish an advanced model for child protection in the digital space, reinforcing the national digital safety framework in line with the rapid evolution of technology use, and striking a balance between enabling responsible use of modern technologies and ensuring the highest standards of child protection.” Teenagers aged 15 and 16 may stay on, with what the resolution calls enhanced protective measures including “age-appropriate content classification and restriction, disabling high-risk features such as interaction with unknown users, regulation of usage time and duration, and the provision of parental control tools.” The UAE is not acting alone and that is the development with the longest reach. French President Emmanuel Macron thanked the country for “joining the movement,” a global agenda that already spans Australia, the UK, and his own push in France. Each government cites child protection and each builds the same thing underneath, a verified link between a real person and an online account. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post To Keep Kids Off Social Media, the UAE Will ID Every User appeared first on Reclaim The Net.