Tag: internet

The EU Insists Its X Fine Isn’t About Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.

When the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, officials could not have been clearer. This, they said, was not about censorship. It was just about “transparency.”

They repeat it so often you start to wonder why.

The fine marks the first major enforcement of the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new censorship-driven internet rulebook.

It was sold as a consumer protection measure, designed to make online platforms safer and more accountable, and included a whole list of censorship requirements, fining platforms that don’t comply.

The first target is Elon Musk’s X, and the list of alleged violations look less like user safety concerns and more like a blueprint for controlling who gets heard, who gets trusted, and who gets to talk back.

The Commission charged X with three violations: the paid blue checkmark system, the lack of advertising data, and restricted data access for researchers.

None of these touches direct content censorship. But all of them shape visibility, credibility, and surveillance, just in more polite language.

Musk’s decision to turn blue checks into a subscription feature ended the old system where establishment figures, journalists, politicians, and legacy celebrities got verification.

The EU called Musk’s decision “deceptive design.” The old version, apparently, was honesty itself. Before, a blue badge meant you were important. After, it meant you paid. Brussels prefers the former, where approved institutions get algorithmic priority, and the rest of the population stays in the queue.

The new system threatened that hierarchy. Now, anyone could buy verification, diluting the aura of authority once reserved for anointed voices.

However, that’s not the full story. Under the old Twitter system, verification was sold as a public service, but in reality it worked more like a back-room favor and a status purchase.

The main application process was shut down in 2010, so unless you were already famous, the only way to get a blue check was to spend enough money on advertising or to be important enough to trigger impersonation problems.

Ad Age reported that advertisers who spent at least fifteen thousand dollars over three months could get verified, and Twitter sales reps told clients the same thing. That meant verification was effectively a perk reserved for major media brands, public figures, and anyone willing to pay. It was a symbol of influence rationed through informal criteria and private deals, creating a hierarchy shaped by cronyism rather than transparency.

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Wizz, the ‘Tinder for kids’ app, exposes kids to predators. Congress must act.

An app called “Wizz” has been making headlines lately for connecting minors with sexual predators. Many have described this app as a “Tinder for kids.” It’s the same iconic swipe right-swipe left functionality, and the same purpose of meeting up with strangers — only this time, targeted at both teens and adults.  

What’s the result of this app design? A12-year-old girl meeting up with a supposed 14-year-old boy that Wizz connected her with … only to discover the “boy” was an adult male, who sexually assaulted her. 

An 8th grader being sexually abused by a 27-year-old man, then finding out she was only one of several underage girls he had groomed through Wizz.

An 11-year-old girl being sexually assaulted by a U.S. Marine she met on Wizz. 

All this in the last year alone. And there are many more cases.  

As reports of Wizz facilitating child sexual abuse continue to pile up, something must change with the app itself and more broadly when it comes to online child safety.   

Just a few years back, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation urged app stores to remove Wizz on account of the rampant sexual exploitation occurring on the platform. Within 36 hours, both Google Play and the Apple App Store agreed. Later on, Wizz was reinstated, with what appeared to be a number of new safety tools.  

As time went by, however, it became abundantly clear that Wizz was not as safe as it seemed. If the continued reports of sexual exploitation weren’t convincing enough, the New York Post reported on what happened when the company’s safety tools were directly pressure tested. 

Although Wizz claims to have robust age verification, a 52-year-old man said he was able to create an account as a 15-year-old. How? Because even though the age verification tech flagged this man’s profile for review, he said that Wizz moderators went ahead and approved it within minutes.

This is even worse than not having any age verification to begin with.

Wizz made claims of safety by boasting about tools like age verification — but behind the scenes, they actually directly overrode the concerns flagged by these tools.

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Teen dies just 3 hours after being ‘sextorted’ as nefarious international groups like 764 target US kids: ‘It’s 100% murder’

The afternoon that 15-year-old Bryce Tate was sextorted started off as a perfectly normal Thursday.

The Cross Lanes, WV, sophomore came home from the gym on November 6, scarfed down a plate of tacos prepared by his mom, then went outside to shoot hoops. At 4:37 p.m., he received a text message from a strange number.

Three hours later, Bryce was found in his dad’s man cave — dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“They say it’s suicide, but in my book it is 100% murder,” Bryce’s father, Adam Tate, told The Post. “They’re godless demons, in my opinion. Just cowards, awful individuals, worse than criminals.”

According to his dad, Bryce was apparently the latest victim of a vicious sextortion scheme targeting teen boys — one that law enforcement says is surging.

A representative for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told The Post the group tracked over 33,000 reports of child sextortion in 2024 alone — with nearly that number reported in the first six months of this year.

Online scammers scour public social media profiles to learn about a teen, then pose as a flirtatious peer.

“They acted like a local 17-year-old girl. They knew which gym he worked out at, they knew a couple of his best friends and name-dropped them. They knew he played basketball for Nitro High School,” Adam said. “They built his trust to where he believed that this was truly somebody in this area.”

The Post is told that the photos Bryce received were not AI-generated but most likely of a real girl who was another victim.

Scammers then ask for illicit photos in return and, once they have them, extort the victim for money by threatening to show the pics to family and friends.

For Bryce, that sum was $500.

“My son had 30 freaking dollars and he’s like, ‘Sir, I’ll give you my last $30.’ And these cowards wouldn’t take it,” a tearful Adam told The Post, recounting his son’s final exchange. 

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German Chancellor Merz Filed Hundreds of Criminal Complaints over Insults From Citizens: Report

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has reportedly filed hundreds of criminal complaints against members of the public for insulting him during his tenure as a politician.

According to research conducted by the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, Merz is “one of the most sensitive politicians in the history” of the German republic.

Die Welt’s Sunday paper reported that during his time as a member of parliament, Merz filed criminal complaints against citizens for calling him names such as “little Nazi”, “asshole,” and “filthy drunk”, among others.

The paper said that documents from a law firm commissioned by Merz to file such complaints revealed that the “little Nazi” and “filthy drunken” comments resulted in police searches, with the later ultimately being found to have been an unlawful search.

In the “little Nazi” case, police seized the phone of an elderly and physically disabled woman, who is bound to a wheelchair. The paper noted that by doing so, police hindered her ability to communicate with her doctors.

In total, Welt reported that there were 4,999 individual cases collected by the law firm.

Merz is said to have partnered with the internet monitoring agency ‘So Done:’, a firm founded by a former Free Democrat politician Alex Brockmeier. The agency is said to monitor social media sites for so-called hate speech free of charge for political figures in Germany in exchange for recouping 50 per cent of any fines levied against members of the public.

Given Germany’s strict rules against insulting politicians, it is not always necessary for the individual politician to file a criminal complaint.

Indeed, one such case in which a commenter called Merz an “asshole”, was launched by the Berlin prosecutor’s office after being tipped off by the group “Hesse Against Hate”, a project launched by the local interior ministry in the state of Hesse. The case is currently being investigated as a potential “extremist” politically motivated crime.

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Lawmakers To Consider 19 Bills for Childproofing the Internet

Can you judge the heat of a moral panic by the number of bills purporting to solve it? At the height of human trafficking hysteria in the 2010s, every week seemed to bring some new measure meant to help the government tackle the problem (or at least get good press for the bill’s sponsor). Now lawmakers have moved on from sex trafficking to social media—from Craigslist and Backpage to Instagram, TikTok, and Roblox. So here we are, with a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on 19 different kids-and-tech bills scheduled for this week.

The fun kicks off tomorrow, with legislators discussing yet another version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)—a dangerous piece of legislation that keeps failing but also refuses to die. (See some of Reason‘s previous coverage of KOSA here, here, and here.)

The new KOSA no longer explicitly says that online platforms have a “duty of care” when it comes to minors—a benign-sounding term that could have chilled speech by requiring companies to somehow protect minors from a huge array of “harms,” from anxiety and depression to disordered eating to spending too much time online. But it still essentially requires this, saying that covered platforms must “establish, implement, maintain, and enforce reasonable policies, practices, and procedure” that address various harms to minors, including threats, sexual exploitation, financial harm, and the “distribution, sale, or use of narcotic drugs, tobacco products, cannabis products, gambling, or alcohol.” And it would give both the states and the Federal Trade Commission the ability to enforce this requirement, declaring any violation an “unfair or deceptive” act that violates the Federal Trade Commission Act.

Despite the change, KOSA’s core function is still “to let government agencies sue platforms, big or small, that don’t block or restrict content someone later claims contributed to” some harm, as Joe Mullin wrote earlier this year about a similar KOSA update in the Senate.

Language change or not, the bill would still compel platforms to censor a huge array of content out of fear that the government might decide it contributed to some vague category of harm and then sue.

KOSA is bad enough. But far be it for lawmakers to stop there.

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US Under Secretary Warns Britain That the First Amendment Isn’t Negotiable

This week, Sarah Rogers, the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, touched down in the UK not to sip tea or admire the Crown Jewels, but to deliver a message as subtle as a boot in the face: stop trying to censor Americans in America.

Yes, really.

According to Rogers, the UK’s speech regulator, Ofcom, the bureaucratic enforcer behind Britain’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), has been getting ideas. Dangerous ones. Like attempting to extend its censorship regime outside the United Kingdom and onto American soil. You know, that country across the ocean where the First Amendment exists and people can still say controversial things without a court summons landing on their doormat.

To GB News, Rogers called this attempt at international thought-policing “a deal-breaker,” “a non-starter,” and “a red line.”

In State Department speak, that is basically the equivalent of someone slamming the brakes, looking Britain in the eye, and saying, “You try that again, and there will be consequences.”

To understand how Britain got itself into this mess, you have to understand the Online Safety Act. It is a law that reads like it was drafted by a committee of alarmed Victorian schoolteachers who just discovered the internet.

The OSA is supposedly designed to “protect children online,” which sounds noble until you realize it means criminalizing large swaths of adult speech, forcing platforms to delete legal content, and requiring identity and age checks that would make a KGB officer blush.

It even threatens prosecution over “psychological harm.” And now, apparently, it wants to enforce all of that in other countries too.

Rogers was not impressed, saying Ofcom has tried to impose the OSA extraterritorially and attempted to censor Americans in America. That, she made clear, is outrageous.

It’s more than a diplomatic spat. Rogers made it painfully clear the US isn’t going to just write a sternly worded letter and move on. There is legislative retaliation on the table.

The GRANITE Act, Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny & Extortion, is more than a clever acronym. It is the legislative middle finger Washington can consider if the UK keeps pretending it can veto American free speech from 3,500 miles away.

The bill, already circulating in the Wyoming state legislature, would strip foreign governments of their usual protections from lawsuits in the US if they try to censor American citizens or companies.

In other words, if Ofcom wants to slap US platforms with foreign censorship rules, they had better be ready to defend themselves in an American courtroom where “freedom of expression” isn’t a slogan, it is a constitutional right.

Rogers confirmed that the US legislature will likely consider that and will certainly consider other options if the British government doesn’t back down.

Of course, the GRANITE Act didn’t come out of nowhere. Rogers’s warning didn’t either. It is a response to the increasingly unhinged state of free speech in the UK, where adults can be arrested for memes, priests investigated for praying silently, and grandmothers interrogated for criticizing gender ideology.

“When you don’t rigorously defend that right, even when it’s inconvenient, even when the speech is offensive,” Rogers said, “you end up in these absurd scenarios where you have comedians arrested for tweets.”

This is the modern UK, where “hate speech” has been stretched to include everything from telling jokes to sharing news stories about immigration. And now, under the OSA, that censorious spirit has gone global.

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Goodbye Jury Trials, Hello Digital ID: 10 “recommendations” from the Crime and Justice Commission

The Times Crime and Justice Commission was established last year, with its mission statement being to…

consider the future of policing and the criminal justice system, in the light of the knife crime crisis, a shoplifting epidemic, the growing threat of cybercrime, concerns about the culture of the police, court backlogs, problems with legal aid and overflowing prisons.

And today is that long-promised glorious golden day where they reveal their findings. The white smoke has gone up and we get to witness the result of their long hours of toil.

How are we going to fix everything?

Let’s take a look at the complete list, with some helpful annotations:

1. Introduce a universal digital ID system to drive down fraud, tackle illegal immigration and reduce identity theft;

Digital ID for everybody! It’s going to solve every problem! We’ve talked this to death, it was always going to be in here.

2. Target persistent offenders and crime hotspots using data to clamp down on shoplifting, robbery and antisocial behaviour;

That’s about surveillance. “Data” means your private data which they will get from social media companies.

3. Roll out live facial recognition and other artificial intelligence tools to drive the efficiency and effectiveness of the police;

Again, FRT was always going to feature. I’m not sure what “other artificial intelligence tools” means, but the vagueness is likely the point. “Efficiency” is the word doing the heavy-lifting in that sentence, intended to capture the pro-MAGA, pro-Musk UK crowd.

4. Create a licence to practise for the police, with revalidation every five years to improve culture and enhance professionalism;

That’s just throwing something out for the “other side”. So far it’s all just more powers for the police and courts, this adds some faux accountability framework into the mix to make it look fair.

5. Set up victim care hubs backed by a unified digital case file to create a seamless source of information and advice;

Same as above, with some extra seasoning for the digital identity sales pitch thrown in.

6. Introduce a new intermediate court with a judge and two magistrates to speed up justice and reduce court delays;

This is about replacing trial by jury, and that’s all it’s about. It’s something they’ve been wanting to do for years and keep making excuses to try.

7. Move to a “common sense” approach to sentencing with greater transparency about jail time, incentives for rehabilitation and expanded use of house arrest;

Not sure what this means in real terms, but any use “common sense” in this kind of document should always raise an eyebrow. As should the idea of “expanded use of house arrest”.

8. Give more autonomy and accountability to prison governors with a greater focus on rehabilitation and create a College of Prison and Probation Officers;

No idea what this means yet. Could be about more prison-based work programs (a la private prisons in the US), could just be fluff between important parts.

9. Restrict social media for under-16s to protect children from criminals and extreme violent or sexual content;

Again, very predictable. And, again, very dishonest. As we’ve said a thousand times, “restricting social media to under-16s” – in practical terms – means everyone on social media has to verify their age. So bye-bye online anonymity.

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Australia: Meta begins deactivating accounts ahead of 16-year-old minimum social media age limit

Meta has begun removing social media accounts belonging to Australian children under 16 years old from its platforms, Instagram, Facebook and Threads.

The tech giant has started notifying users aged 13 to 15 years old that their accounts would cease to exist on December 4th. Starting December 10th, social media companies will face fines up to A$49.5 million ($33million USD) should they fail to take steps to halt children under 16 years old from owning accounts.

Australian eSafety Commissioners will send major platforms notices on December 11th demanding statistics about exactly how many accounts were removed from their sites. Additionally, monthly notices are planned for 2026.

It is estimated that 150,000 Facebook accounts and 325,000 Instagram users will be terminated. 

“The government recognizes that age assurance may require several days or weeks to complete fairly and accurately,” Communications Minister Anika Wells reported.

“However, if eSafety identifies systemic breaches of the law, the platforms will face fines,” she added.

Google sent out a notice on Wednesday stating that anyone in Australia under 16 would be signed out of YouTube on December 10th and will lose features accessible available only to account holders, such as playlists.

Google states it determines YouTube users’ ages “based on personal data contained in associated Google accounts and other signals.”

“We have consistently said this rushed legislation misunderstands our platform, the way young Australians use it and, most importantly, it does not fulfill its promise to make kids safer online,” a Google statement reported.

Users over 16 years old who were wrongfully revoked account access have the option to verify their age through government-issued ID or a Video selfie, per Meta.

Platforms such as X and Reddit contacted underage users, suggesting that they download their posted pictures and freeze their accounts until they become of age.

The Australian government claims the ban will protect children from the harms of social media. However, critics say this decision may isolate certain groups who depend on the platforms for connection and push children to other, potentially more harmful corners of the internet.

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As Expected, a Hearing on Kids Online Safety Becomes a Blueprint for Digital ID

The latest congressional hearing on “protecting children online” opened as you would expect: the same characters, the same script, a few new buzzwords, and a familiar moral panic to which the answer is mass surveillance and censorship.

The Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade had convened to discuss a set of draft bills packaged as the “Kids Online Safety Package.” The name alone sounded like a software update against civil liberties.

The hearing was called “Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online.” Everyone on the dais seemed eager to prove they were on the side of the kids, which meant, as usual, promising to make the internet less free for everyone else.

Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), who chaired the hearing, kicked things off by assuring everyone that the proposed bills were “mindful of the Constitution’s protections for free speech.”

He then reminded the audience that “laws with good intentions have been struck down for violating the First Amendment” and added, with all the solemnity of a man about to make that same mistake again, that “a law that gets struck down in court does not protect a child.”

They know these bills are legally risky, but they’re going to do it anyway.

Bilirakis’s point was echoed later by House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY), who claimed the bills had been “curated to withstand constitutional challenges.” That word, curated, was doing a lot of work.

Guthrie went on to insist that “age verification is needed…even before logging in” to trigger privacy protections under COPPA 2.0.

The irony of requiring people to surrender their private information in order to be protected from privacy violations was lost in the shuffle.

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Macron Wants To Go Full “Ministry Of Truth” With Draconian Censorship Grab

French President Emmanuel Macron is facing fierce pushback from conservative voices within France over his renewed drive to grant the state sweeping new censorship powers, Barron’s reports.

On Friday, Macron once again raised the alarm about so-called “disinformation” spreading on social media, insisting that parliament grant authorities the ability to immediately block content deemed “false information.” As if the existing arsenal of censorship tools weren’t enough, the left-wing president now wants to establish a “professional certification” system that would effectively create an official, state-approved class of media outlets—separating those that toe the government’s ethical line from those that refuse to do so.

France’s right-wing press has reacted with outrage, with Vincent Bolloré’s Journal du Dimanche denouncing Macron’s “totalitarian drift” on free speech and warning of “the temptation of a ministry of truth.”

Bolloré-owned CNews and Europe 1 were equally scathing, with popular presenter Pascal Praud accusing the president of acting out of personal resentment, declaring the initiative comes from a “president unhappy with his treatment by the media and who wants to impose a single narrative.”

National Rally leader Jordan Bardella also delivered a blistering rebuke, saying in a statement, “Tampering with freedom of expression is an authoritarian temptation, which corresponds to the solitude of a man… who has lost power and seeks to maintain it by controlling information.”

Bruno Retailleau, head of the Republicans in the Senate, echoed the warning on X: “[N]o government has the right to filter the media or dictate the truth.”

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