If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Paris prosecutors announced Thursday that their investigation into Elon Musk’s social platform X has been upgraded to a full criminal probe. The Paris prosecutor’s office is now asking investigating magistrates to formally charge Musk, former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, and three companies linked to the platform, including xAI and X.AI Holdings Corp. If they refuse to appear for those charges, prosecutors say judges can issue warrants that carry the same legal weight. The charges cover a long and growing list of alleged offenses: Complicity in possessing and distributing sexual images. Nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes. Denial of crimes against humanity. Fraudulent extraction of user data. Violation of the secrecy of electronic correspondence. Manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group. Illegal collection of personal data without adequate security. The announcement came just three weeks after the US Department of Justice refused to cooperate with the French investigation, calling it an attempt to regulate American speech through foreign criminal law. France pushed ahead anyway. A speech case wearing a criminal costume The investigation did not begin with deepfakes or child safety. It began with politics. French Member of Parliament Éric Bothorel, a member of President Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, filed a complaint in 2025 alleging that X’s algorithm had been manipulated for the purpose of “foreign interference” in French politics. Bothorel accused the platform of narrowing “diversity of voices and options” after Musk’s takeover and cited Musk’s “personal interventions” in moderation decisions. A second complaint, from a senior official in French public administration, alleged the same thing, claiming to observe a surge of “hateful, racist, anti-LGBTQ” content aimed at skewing democratic debate. The theory of the case converts an editorial choice into a crime. Every platform’s algorithm is an editorial product. It decides what content gets amplified and what gets buried. When a government prosecutes a platform owner because it doesn’t like how that algorithm ranks political speech, it is asserting the power to dictate how information reaches the public. That is censorship by prosecution. By July 2025, prosecutors wanted access to the algorithm itself to examine it for “bias.” X refused. The company called the probe “politically motivated” and said it would not comply with demands to hand over its recommendation system for state inspection. Then the investigation expanded and the charges got heavier. How serious charges get stacked onto a political case In November 2025, Grok, the AI chatbot built by xAI and integrated into X, generated French-language posts questioning the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Memorial condemned the output. X deleted the post. Grok attributed the error to a programming mistake. Holocaust denial is a criminal offense in France. In late December 2025 and early January 2026, Grok’s image generation capabilities were widely abused by users to create nonconsensual images of women in bikinis. xAI restricted image generation to paid subscribers on January 9 and said it had blocked nudification capabilities by January 14. Prosecutors added these allegations to the existing investigation. This is how speech prosecutions work in modern Europe. You start with an accusation about algorithms and political content. You add serious criminal charges later. The original political motive gets buried under the weight of the new allegations, and anyone who questions the prosecution can be accused of defending child exploitation. The charges provide cover. The algorithm complaint provides the engine. The prosecutors’ own statement from February described the investigation as having “the objective of ultimately ensuring the compliance of the X platform with French law.” That’s compliance with the state’s vision of how a platform should operate. The raid, the no-show, and the DOJ On February 3, 2026, the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime division raided X’s offices in Paris alongside French national police and Europol. X called the raid “an abusive act of law enforcement theater designed to achieve illegitimate political objectives.” Musk called it “a political attack.” Both Musk and Yaccarino were summoned for “voluntary interviews” on April 20. Neither appeared. Under French law, prosecutors can issue arrest warrants for suspects who skip voluntary interviews, which makes the word “voluntary” carry less meaning than advertised. Two days before those interviews were scheduled, the US Department of Justice sent French law enforcement a two-page letter refusing to help. “This investigation seeks to use the criminal legal system in France to regulate a public square for the free expression of ideas and opinions in a manner contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution,” the letter stated. The DOJ added that France’s three requests for assistance in 2026 “constitute an effort to entangle the United States in a politically charged criminal proceeding aimed at wrongfully regulating through prosecution the business activities of a social media platform.” An xAI official responded publicly. “We are grateful to the Justice Department for rejecting this effort by a prosecutor in Paris to compel our CEO and several employees to sit for interviews,” the official told the Wall Street Journal. “We hope the Parisian authorities will now come to their senses, recognize that there is no wrongdoing here, and terminate their baseless investigation.” The DOJ’s letter puts American mutual-assistance treaties off the table for European speech prosecutions. France was the first to find out. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to 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 era of the anonymous phone number could be ending. On April 30, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customers’ identities before activating service. Government-issued ID, physical address, legal name, and existing phone numbers would all be included. The stated goal is stopping robocalls. The result would be an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans. The proposal applies to nearly every voice provider in the country, from traditional carriers and mobile operators to VoIP services. The FCC is seeking public comment on specifics, but the direction is clear. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr framed it around negligent carriers. “As we have continued to investigate the problem of illegal robocalls over the last year, it has become clear that some originating providers are not doing enough to vet their customers, allowing bad actors to infiltrate our U.S. phone networks,” he said. Some providers, he added, “do the bare minimum (or worse) and have become complicit in illegal robocalling schemes.” That language targets telecom companies and the surveillance targets everyone else. The framework borrows from banking’s anti-money-laundering rules. The FCC is also asking whether carriers should retain identity documentation for at least four years after a customer leaves and whether they should check customers against law enforcement watchlists. Penalties would shift to a per-call basis, meaning fines of $1,000 to $15,000 for every illegal call a poorly verified customer places. The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

This Post is for Paid Supporters Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. SUBSCRIBE Already a supporter? Sign In. (If you’re already logged in but still seeing this, refresh this page to show the post.) The post Brave Now Has a Stripped Down Option — Here’s Who Should Care appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The House of Commons in Canada is keeping a database of what Canadians say about their elected representatives online and officials are sorting those comments by category, including the tone and identity-based content of social media posts about MPs. That admission came from Deputy Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Mellon at a parliamentary committee, where he described the operation as a “very robust records management system.” According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the system catalogues incidents involving MPs and allows staff to sort and analyze posts, including those deemed “misogynistic” or otherwise “abusive.” Mellon told MPs the database tracks “every single incident” and can break complaints down by category, including gender-based harassment. What the records contain, why they are kept, and who has access to them, none of that was explained. Mellon offered few details. A spokesperson for the Office of the Sergeant-at-Arms said files may include both criminal and non-criminal complaints, but declined to disclose specifics, citing security reasons. So the Commons is logging non-criminal speech about politicians. Citizens posting opinions about their representatives are being filed away in a government system, sorted by category, and held for purposes the government will not describe. The line between a threat and a sharp comment is being drawn by people who answer to the institution being commented on. The testimony came as MPs pushed for the system to track speech in more granular ways. Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld asked whether officials track threats differently based on gender or identity. Mellon confirmed the system can differentiate such data and acknowledged that female MPs are often the target of misogynistic comments. Categorizing speech by the identity of the speaker’s target moves the logic from threat assessment toward something closer to content classification, with the state holding the taxonomy. The chilling effect of an arrangement like this does not require enforcement. A Canadian who learns that a parliamentary office is filing posts about MPs into a categorized database, with no disclosed retention policy and no clear line between criminal threat and ordinary criticism, has a reason to think twice before posting. That hesitation is the point at which speech is suppressed without anyone being charged or any post being taken down. The targets of the speech control the records of the speech. Parliament will not say what is in the file, what stays in the file, or what happens to the people whose posts end up there. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada House of Commons Tracks Online Posts About MPs appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A New Mexico judge spent his first morning of the Meta remedies trial signaling that he doesn’t plan to become “a one-person legislator, judge and executive branch enforcer,” and the privacy stakes of that reluctance run deeper than the child safety framing suggests. The bench trial opened Monday in Santa Fe before First Judicial District Judge Bryan Biedscheid, the second phase of a case that already produced a $375 million jury verdict against Meta in March. State prosecutors now want the judge to rewrite how Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp operate inside New Mexico, with a remedy list that reaches well past algorithm tweaks into the architecture of identity verification and encrypted messaging itself. Before opening statements, Biedscheid told both sides he held “some concerns” about the New Mexico Department of Justice’s proposals. “I’m probably not the easiest sell on an idea where I would become a one-person legislature, judge and executive branch enforcer of administrative code provisions,” he said. The warning lands at a moment when several of the state’s requested fixes look like permanent surveillance infrastructure dressed up as protection. It start with age verification. The state wants Meta ordered to confirm the age of every New Mexico user, an obligation that cannot be met by asking people to type a birth year. Meaningful age verification at the platform level means government IDs, facial scans, or third-party identity services that link a real legal identity to every account. Once that link exists, it does not unlink. The pseudonymous Instagram account becomes an identity-verified Instagram account, for adults and minors alike, in service of a check that only formally concerns the under-18 population. The state is also demanding restrictions on end-to-end encryption for minors. Encryption does not have a child mode. A platform either holds the keys to your messages or it does not and once Meta is required to scan or filter the content of conversations involving anyone under 18, it builds the technical capability to scan everyone’s. Prosecutors want bans on infinite scroll, autoplay, and push notifications during school and sleep hours for minors. They want Meta to identify underage users and detect at least 99 percent of all new child sexual abuse material on its platforms. They want a 90-hour monthly cap on access for New Mexico children and they want Biedscheid to appoint an independent monitor with ongoing authority to enforce whatever order he issues. David Ackerman, a private civil attorney representing the state, told the court that prosecutors are also seeking $3.7 billion in restitution paid out over the next 15 years. The award, he said, “recognizes the scope of the public nuisance that Meta has caused. There are items in this abatement plan for public education, to assist schools, to assist law enforcement, to assist mental health providers who are treating children who are suffering from the effects of their social media use. [This] is about preventing harm from occurring to additional New Mexico children, It’s about fixing the harm that already occurred to New Mexico children and their families.” Meta’s lawyers responded that the state’s demands are “overbroad, vague, unworkable” and would compel speech, and the company has separately threatened to withdraw Facebook and Instagram from New Mexico rather than comply. Meta attorney William Parkinson framed that threat as serious rather than performative. “This is not a PR stunt, this is not a threat,” he said. The withdrawal warning serves Meta’s interests, but it also illustrates how difficult it is for a single state to impose platform-level identity verification and content-scanning mandates without effects that bleed across borders. Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who filed the case in 2023 after his office ran an undercover operation using a fake Instagram account presented as a 13-year-old girl, has rejected Meta’s claims of impossibility. “Meta is showing the world how little it cares about child safety,” he said in a statement responding to the withdrawal threat. “Meta’s refusal to follow the laws that protect our kids tells you everything you need to know about this company and the character of its leaders. We know Meta has the ability to make these changes.” Torrez has separately argued that the March jury verdict “punctured the aura of invincibility” that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has long provided to tech companies. Consider what a 90-hour monthly access cap actually requires. To enforce it, Meta has to know, with legal certainty, which accounts belong to New Mexico minors. That means location tracking precise enough to distinguish a 17-year-old in Las Cruces from a 17-year-old visiting from El Paso, identity verification robust enough to survive legal challenge, and an account-linked usage clock that runs whether the user is on their phone, a friend’s laptop, or a school computer. The cap cannot be implemented without comprehensive surveillance sitting underneath every New Mexico account. Build that surveillance for minors and it exists for everyone because the only way to know who the minors are is to verify everyone. The 99 percent CSAM detection mandate sounds unobjectionable until you ask how it would be met. No human review process operates at that scale. The mandate is a demand for automated scanning of every image, video, and message posted by every user on the platform, calibrated to catch a category of material that automated systems are notoriously bad at distinguishing. Platforms that have rolled out aggressive automated scanning have already silenced parents sharing photos with doctors, journalists reporting on conflict zones, and survivors documenting their own histories. A court-ordered 99 percent floor pushes the false-positive rate higher, and the people whose accounts get deleted by mistake have no realistic recourse. The restrictions on encrypted messaging are the part of the proposal that should worry anyone who uses Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, or any other end-to-end encrypted service. The state is asking a court to order Meta to break, weaken, or bypass encryption for a subset of its users. There is no technical mechanism that does this only for minors. Whatever Meta builds to satisfy the order, client-side scanning, mandatory key escrow, and content inspection before encryption, becomes part of the product. It scans the journalist’s source, the abuse survivor talking to a counselor, and the political organizer in a country where organizing is dangerous. The mandate is presented as child protection but the capability it creates is general-purpose surveillance. What Biedscheid signaled on Monday is important because the alternative to his restraint is a single trial court order, in a single state, becoming the template for how more than 40 other state attorneys general resolve their own pending Meta cases. Bellwether trials are scheduled across 2026. A national identity verification regime imposed through public nuisance litigation would be a substantial shift in how Americans access social platforms, achieved without Congress voting on it, and one whose surveillance infrastructure would not disappear if a future court decided the harms it was meant to address had been overstated. The trial is expected to run for three weeks. Meta has said it will appeal the underlying verdict regardless of how the remedies phase ends, meaning the privacy questions raised by the state’s proposed fixes will continue moving through the courts well past Santa Fe. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post New Mexico’s Meta Trial Opens with Judge Wary of State’s Broad Surveillance Demands appeared first on Reclaim The Net.