If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. X has agreed to process the vast majority of content flagged as illegal “hate” under the UK’s Online Safety Act within 48 hours, giving Ofcom, Britain’s speech regulator, a significant new enforcement win. The platform committed to “review and assess UK suspected illegal terrorist and “hate” content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool on average within 24 hours of it being reported, to be calculated as a mean” and to “review and assess at least 85% of UK suspected illegal terrorist and hate content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool within a maximum of 48 hours.” The deal is a notable reversal for a platform that, less than a year ago, publicly accused Ofcom of taking a “heavy-handed approach” and warned that the Online Safety Act was “seriously infringing” on free expression. X’s August 2025 statement, titled “What Happens When Oversight Becomes Overreach,” called out regulators by name and argued that the law amounted to a “conscientious decision to increase censorship in the name of ‘online safety.'” That language is gone now. What’s left is a compliance agreement with specific performance targets and a 12-month reporting obligation. The commitments go beyond speed of review. X also agreed to block access to accounts in the UK if they are reported for “posting UK illegal terrorist content” and deemed to be “operated by or on behalf of a terrorist organisation proscribed in the UK.” The platform will share quarterly performance data with Ofcom so the regulator can audit compliance. And following complaints from organizations that couldn’t tell whether X had received or acted on their reports, X agreed to “engage with experts regarding reporting systems for illegal hate and terror content.” Who those experts are tells you something about the direction of travel. Ofcom’s own press release names the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) as one of the organizations it worked with to “gather evidence about suspected illegal terrorist content and illegal hate speech online.” The CCDH is a pro-censorship campaign group co-founded in 2018 by Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney, who went on to become UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. McSweeney stepped down from CCDH’s board two days after Starmer became Labour leader. The organization maintains close ties to the current government and has stated that its goal was to “kill Musk’s Twitter,” according to leaked internal documents reported by Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker. Ahmed himself was sanctioned by the US State Department in December 2025 over concerns that his organization had led “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints.” A federal court blocked his deportation with a temporary restraining order. This is the organization Ofcom chose to help build the evidence base for pressuring X into compliance. Ahmed, for his part, welcomed the deal. Speaking to POLITICO, he said CCDH will be “watching closely to ensure this results in meaningful action, not just words.” Oliver Griffiths, Ofcom’s Online Safety Group Director, framed the agreement as a necessary step. “We have evidence that terrorist content and illegal hate speech is persisting on some of the largest social media sites,” he said. “We are challenging them to tackle the problem and expect them to take firm action.” X’s agreement also includes the dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool, which is specifically designed for flagging content that violates Britain’s censorship law. That tool creates a direct pipeline from whoever reports the content to X’s review queue, and from there to Ofcom’s auditing process. The 24-hour average and 48-hour backstop create a system where the pressure is always toward deletion. When you have to process 85% of flagged content within two days and a regulator is auditing your speed, the incentive is to delete first and reconsider never. Every platform operating in the UK is watching this deal and calculating the cost of resistance versus compliance. The message from Ofcom is clear: agree to our terms, on our timeline, using our preferred partners as evidence sources, or face investigation, fines, and potential shutdown. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post X Agrees to Review Illegal “Hate” Within 48 Hours Under UK Online Safety Act appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Oklahoma became the latest state to sue Roblox last week, filing a 51-page complaint accusing the platform of endangering children and deceiving parents. Attorney General Gentner Drummond said Roblox “marketed itself as a safe place for children but turned a blind eye as predators targeted and exploited minors on its platform.” We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here. The lawsuit identifies the absence of age and identity verification at account creation as a “design feature that leads to child endangerment” and dismisses the facial age estimation Roblox introduced in November 2025 as “far too little, and far too late.” Oklahoma is at least the tenth state to sue. The complaint follows lawsuits from Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, Florida, and LA County, plus settlements with Alabama, Nevada, and West Virginia totaling tens of millions of dollars. The allegations across these cases are serious; documenting organized abuse rings, adults posing as children, and a company that employees say prioritized engagement metrics over safety. “Roblox’s willingness to sacrifice the well-being of children in pursuit of profit is unconscionable and indefensible,” Drummond said. But look at what every one of these lawsuits and settlements demands as the fix: more identity verification, more biometric collection, more government ID scanning. Roblox has obliged. The company now requires age verification through Persona, a third-party vendor, before users can access chat or voice features. The options are a government ID scan or a facial age estimation via selfie video. Half of Roblox’s 150-million-plus user base had completed the process by early 2026. In April, Roblox announced two new account tiers launching in June that lock unverified users out of most games and all communication features. You either submit biometric data or lose the platform. There is no third option. More: From Roblox To The IRS: The Great Biometric Data Grab Nevada’s settlement pushed even further, requiring Roblox to strip encryption from minor users’ chats. That means children’s private messages become readable by the company and available to anyone who obtains access through a subpoena, a data breach, or a policy change Roblox hasn’t written yet. This is the pattern now. A platform fails to protect children. States sue. The legal remedy is a biometric surveillance system that harvests face scans and government IDs from tens of millions of kids, funneled through a vendor caught running an identity surveillance operation far more extensive than age estimation requires. The children whose safety was supposedly the point end up with less privacy than they started with, their faces processed by systems they never consented to and can’t opt out of without losing access entirely. The standard being set is one where using a children’s gaming platform requires handing over biometric data. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Oklahoma Sues Roblox, but the “Fix” Is Biometric Checks 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 The School Spy Boom Nobody Asked For appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The UK’s Online Safety Act has been in force for less than a year and it is again being used to censor political speech during an election. TikTok blocked and then deleted a campaign video by Reform UK’s Spokesperson for Home Affairs, Zia Yusuf, after someone reported it under the OSA’s content reporting mechanism. The video was about immigration policy and takes place during a period of campaigning for a by-election. TikTok cited its “Hate Speech and Hateful Behavior” rules. The law that gave the complainant the reporting tool and that gives TikTok every financial reason to comply without asking too many questions, is the Online Safety Act. The OSA was sold to the British public as child protection. The actual legislation requires platforms to police all content against UK law, including broadly defined “hate speech” provisions. Companies that fail to comply face fines of up to £18 million ($24m) or 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. For a platform the size of TikTok, that penalty could run into billions. The rational response to that kind of liability is to delete first and never think about it again. Under the OSA, platforms must provide UK users with tools to report content they believe is illegal under British law. TikTok confirmed this is what triggered the action against Yusuf’s video. The notification he received stated: “We have detected this policy violation based on a report that the content violated our Community Guidelines.” TikTok did not say it independently concluded the video was hateful. Someone filed a report through the OSA’s mechanism and the platform treated that report as reason enough to act. There is no requirement that reports be made in good faith, no penalty for filing frivolous ones, and no transparency about who complained or why. This is a system built for political abuse. If you want a political opponent’s video deleted during an election, you file a report. The platform, facing enormous financial penalties for under-enforcement, does the rest. TikTok also warned Yusuf that further violations could result in a permanent ban, which he called “all the more staggering given TikTok happily hosts hundreds of videos of people calling for the assassination of [Reform Party Leader] Nigel Farage.” Yusuf accused Labour of “using the ‘Online Safety Act’ to silence political opponents” and called the deletion “a chilling attempt to silence one of the biggest and fastest-growing UK political accounts on the platform. TikTok is engaging in direct political interference in the midst of the most pivotal elections in our country’s history. All under the auspice of the ‘Online Safety Act’ that the Tories and Labour claimed to be about protecting children. It is, and always will be about silencing voices the open-borders political establishment don’t like.” Nigel Farage called it “unacceptable political interference from a big tech company.” Yusuf has been warning about this exact scenario since the OSA’s provisions started taking effect last year. He told GB News the law would “create an incentive structure for social media companies to over censor, because that’s the rational thing to do if you’re trying to protect shareholder value.” The Conservative Party drafted the OSA and the current governing Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, backed it. Both parties now face a political insurgency from Reform UK and the law they built together hands platforms the tools and the financial incentive to suppress Reform’s message during an election. If elected, the Reform Party has said it will repeal the OSA. The OSA’s defenders will say this is a platform decision, not a government one. That distinction doesn’t survive contact with the law’s actual structure. The government wrote the rules, set the penalties, and required the reporting tools. A Department for Science, Innovation and Technology spokesman told GB News: “The decision to remove content is made by the platforms independently. The Online Safety Act is designed to keep children safe online – protecting them from harmful content – and not to censor political debate. It doesn’t enable platforms to arbitrarily remove content, and tech firms have a duty to uphold freedom of expression.” The government is telling platforms to uphold freedom of expression while simultaneously threatening them with fines that could run into billions if they fail to police categories of speech as subjective as “hate” and “harm.”  Those two instructions cannot coexist. When a platform has to choose between leaving up a borderline political video and risking a penalty sized to a percentage of its global revenue, it will delete the video every single time.  That is the system functioning exactly as the incentives dictate. You cannot write a law that forces platforms to make judgment calls about what counts as hateful, punish them catastrophically for getting it wrong in one direction, and then act surprised when they over-censor in the other.  The government knows this. The “duty to uphold freedom of expression” line is there so ministers can point to it when the inevitable censorship happens and say it wasn’t their fault. The threat of fines ensure it keeps happening anyway. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post TikTok Removes Reform UK Campaign Video Using Online Safety Act “Hate” Censorship Rules appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Crown Prosecution Service has found the time and the ambition to publish brand new guidance telling prosecutors to consider the “likely impact” of protest chants and banners on…people scrolling through their phones. It was published on May 15 and the timing was about as subtle as a brick through a greenhouse. The CPS dropped this guidance precisely two days before London was set to host two enormous marches, the “Unite the Kingdom” rally and the “Nakba Day” protest, with a combined estimated turnout of 80,000 people and 4,000 police officers and helicopters and drones and, for the first time at a protest in this country, live facial recognition cameras pointed at people exercising what we used to quaintly call their democratic rights. CPS lawyers were embedded with the Met Police to offer “real time charging advice,” which is the sort of phrase that should make every hair on the back of your neck stand up. The guidance targets “the use of offensive banners, slogans, chants or symbols.” And the key innovation is this: prosecutors must now weigh “the likely impact on those present and any wider audience, including online dissemination.” Your chant at a march is no longer assessed by the effect it has on the people standing around you. It is now assessed by how some stranger might feel when they see a shaky 12-second clip of it on X three weeks later, completely stripped of context, probably sandwiched between a cat video and someone’s vacation photos. How did we get here? The legal machinery behind this sits under Part 3 of the Public Order Act 1986, a piece of legislation that was passed when the internet was roughly as influential as a particularly obscure fanzine. The Act covers offenses of “stirring up racial hatred,” defined as “hatred against a group of persons…defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins.” Conviction carries up to seven years in prison. You could burgle fifteen houses in the UK and get less. The CPS now tells prosecutors to consider the “meaning and intent” of protest speech, its “context,” and “the timing, particularly where tensions are heightened by national or international events.” They should examine suspects’ phones and social media accounts. They should ask whether “the suspect’s actions at the protest were reaching a wider audience beyond those physically present,” whether the suspect played “an active role in coverage of their actions being shared more widely,” and whether “the suspect aware that their actions were likely to be captured and shared more widely.” I want to dwell on that last one, because it is genuinely astonishing. Were you aware that your actions were likely to be captured and shared? At a march in London in 2026, with police body cameras filming, media crews filming, every bystander’s phone filming, drones overhead filming, and facial recognition cameras drinking in your features? Yes. Obviously yes. Everyone at a large public event in 2026 is aware they’re being filmed. You’d have to have arrived from the year 1340 on horseback not to know this. And yet the CPS has decided that this universal, inescapable awareness of modern technology is now a factor in whether you get charged with a criminal offense. Knowing that cameras exist has become evidence. The Man From the CPS Says It’s Fine Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson delivered the obligatory “don’t worry, we love free speech” preamble: “Everyone has the right to protest and to express their views freely. That right is a cornerstone of our democracy.” And then, as reliably ever, came the “but:” “However, it does not extend to using words, images or symbols to spread hatred, incite violence or cause fear and intimidation within our communities.” And finally the sentence that every bureaucrat with new censorship powers has uttered since the invention of bureaucrats: “This is not about restricting free speech. It is about preventing hate crime and protecting the public, particularly at a time of heightened tensions. Where the line into criminality is crossed, we will not hesitate to prosecute.” “This is not about restricting free speech” has become such a reliable indicator that free speech is about to be restricted that you could set your watch by it. The moment someone feels the need to assure you that a thing isn’t happening, that thing is absolutely happening. The same banner can be fine at one march and a prosecutable offense at another, depending on which international crisis has “heightened tensions” that week. The CPS has built a system where the rules change based on the weather of the global news cycle, and they’ve handed the thermostat to prosecutors. The Friday Afternoon Trick Here’s the thing about the timing. The CPS published this on a Friday afternoon, the traditional dumping ground for news that governments and institutions would rather not have scrutinized too carefully. Two days before the marches. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to see what this achieves. You announce new prosecution criteria just before 80,000 people take to the streets. The coverage is immediate. Everyone heading to a march reads the headlines. And the calculation changes. Some people decide their banner might be a bit much. Some organizers soften their slogans. Some people who were going to attend decide, actually, maybe they’ll give it a miss. They’ve got things to do. The weather might turn. You know how it is. That’s the chilling effect and it is the most efficient form of censorship ever devised because you don’t have to prosecute anyone. You don’t have to go to court, present evidence, or risk a judge telling you you’ve overreached. You just publish some guidance, get it on the news, and let anxiety do the work. The speech that disappears was never spoken, so nobody can point to it and say: that’s what you silenced. It’s invisible. It’s elegant. And it’s deeply sinister. No judge will ever rule on the protest signs that were left in the cupboard, the chants that were swallowed, the marches that lost half their crowd because people read a headline on Friday afternoon and thought: not worth the risk. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Britain Decides Viral Protest Clips Need Prosecutors appeared first on Reclaim The Net.