Tag: social media

House Lawmakers Unite in Moral Panic, Advancing 18 “Kids’ Online Safety” Bills That Expand Surveillance and Weaken Privacy

The House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade spent its latest markup hearing on Thursday proving that if there’s one bipartisan passion left in Washington, it’s moral panic about the internet.

Eighteen separate bills on “kids’ online safety” were debated, amended, and then promptly advanced to the full committee. Not one was stopped.

Ranking Member Jan Schakowsky (D) set the tone early, describing the bills as “terribly inadequate” and announcing she was “furious.”

She complained that the package “leaves out the big issues that we are fighting for.” If it’s not clear, Schakowsky is complaining that the already-controversial bills don’t go far enough.

Eighteen bills now move forward, eight of which hinge on some form of age verification, which would likely require showing a government ID. Three: App Store Accountability (H.R. 3149), the SCREEN Act (H.R. 1623), and the Parents Over Platforms Act (H.R. 6333), would require it outright.

The other five rely on what lawmakers call the “actual knowledge” or “willful disregard” standards, which sound like legalese but function as a dare to platforms: either know everyone’s age, or risk a lawsuit.

The safest corporate response, of course, would be to treat everyone as a child until they’ve shown ID.

Keep reading

Australia launches youth social media ban it says will be the world’s ‘first domino’

Can children and teenagers be forced off social media en masse? Australia is about to find out.

More than 1 million social media accounts held by users under 16 are set to be deactivated in Australia on Wednesday in a divisive world-first ban that has inflamed a culture war and is being closely watched in the United States and elsewhere.

Social media companies will have to take “reasonable steps” to ensure that under-16s in Australia cannot set up accounts on their platforms and that existing accounts are deactivated or removed.

Australian officials say the landmark ban, which lawmakers swiftly approved late last year, is meant to protect children from addictive social media platforms that experts say can be disastrous for their mental health.

“With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the man who created the feature as ‘behavioral cocaine,’” Communications Minister Anika Wells told the National Press Club in Canberra last week.

While many parents and even their children have welcomed the ban, others say it will hinder young people’s ability to express themselves and connect with others, as well as access online support that is crucial for those from marginalized groups or living in isolated parts of rural Australia. Two 15-year-olds have brought a legal challenge against it to the nation’s highest court.

Supporters say the rest of the world will soon follow the example set by the Australian ban, which faced fierce resistance from social media companies.

“I’ve always referred to this as the first domino, which is why they pushed back,” Julie Inman Grant, who regulates online safety as Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, said at an event in Sydney last week.

Keep reading

Australian Leaders and Legacy Media Celebrates Launch of Online Digital ID Age Verification Law

It was sold as a “historic day,” the kind politicians like to frame with national pride and moral purpose.

Cameras flashed in Canberra as Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stood at the podium, declaring victory in the fight to “protect children.”

What Australians actually got was a nationwide digital ID system. Starting December 10, every citizen logging into select online platforms must now pass through digital ID verification, biometric scans, face matching, and document checks, all justified as a way to keep under-16s off social media.

Kids are now banned from certain platforms, but it’s the adults who must hand over their faces, IDs, and biometric data to prove they’re not kids.

“Protecting children” has been converted into a universal surveillance upgrade for everyone.

According to Albanese, who once said if he became a dictator the first thing he would do was ban social media, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 will “change lives.”

He described it as a “profound reform” that will “reverberate around the world,” giving parents “peace of mind” and inspiring “the global community” to copy Australia’s example.

The Prime Minister’s pride, he said, had “never been greater.” Listening to him, you’d think he’d cured cancer rather than making face scans mandatory to log in to Facebook.

Keep reading

Tourists to US would have to reveal five years of social media activity under new Trump plan

Tourists to the United States would have to reveal their social media activity from the last five years, under new Trump administration plans.

The mandatory new disclosures would apply to the 42 countries whose nationals are currently permitted to enter the US without a visa, including longtime US allies Britain, France, Australia, Germany and Japan.

In a notice published on Tuesday, the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) said it would also require any telephone numbers used by visitors over the same period, and any email addresses used in the last decade, as well as face, fingerprint, DNA and iris biometrics. It would also ask for the names, addresses, birthdates and birthplaces of family members, including children.

CBP said the new changes to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (Esta) application were required in order to comply with an executive order issued by Donald Trump on the first day of his new term. In it, the US president called for restrictions to ensure visitors to the US “do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles”.

The plan would throw a wrench into the World Cup, which the US is co-hosting with Canada and Mexico next year. Fifa has said it expects will attract 5 million fans to the stadiums, and millions more visitors to the US, Canada and Mexico.

Tourism to the US has already dropped dramatically in Trump’s second term, as the president has pushed a draconian crackdown on immigrants, including recent moves to ban all asylum claims and to stop migration entirely from more than 30 countries.

California tourism authorities are predicting a 9% decline in foreign visits to the state this year, while Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles reported a 50% fall in foot traffic over the summer. Las Vegas, too, has been badly hit by a decline in visits, worsened by the rise of mobile gambling apps.

Statistics Canada said Canadian residents who made a return trip to the US by car dropped 36.9% in July 2025 compared with the same month in 2024, while commercial airline travel from Canada dropped by 25.8% in July compared with the previous year, as relations between the two countries plummeted.

The US has already started squeezing foreign tourism in other ways, slapping an additional $100 fee per foreign visitor per day to visit national parks, such as the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, on top of the regular admission fees. Nor will national parks have free admission on Martin Luther King Jr Day any longer: they will now only be free to visit on Trump’s birthday.

The notice gives members of the public two months to comment. The Department of Homeland Security, under which CBP operates, did not respond to media outlets’ requests for comment. Meta, which owns two of the biggest social media platforms – Facebook and Instagram – did not immediately respond to questions.

The Trump administration had already launched a more widespread crackdown on visas for people hoping to live and work in the country. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said in August that it will start looking for “anti-American” views, including on social media, when assessing the applications of people wanting to live in the US.

The administration has also demanded that prospective foreign students unlock their social media profiles; those who refuse will be suspected of hiding their activity. Several high-profile foreign-born students have been detained for voicing support for Palestinians. The social-media policy also applies to anyone applying for an H1-B visa for skilled workers, which are now also subject to a new eye-watering $100,000 fee.

As recently as last week, the administration told consular officials to deny visas to anyone who might have worked in factchecking or content moderation, for example at a social media company, accusing them in blanket terms of being “responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the US”.

It has suggested reducing visa lengths for foreign journalists from five years to eight months, and has started demanding any visitors who are not from the 42 visa-exempt countries pay a new $250 fee.

CBP claims the authority to search the devices of any prospective entrant to the US. Although you can refuse, you may then be denied entry. While CBP said in 2024 it searched about 47,000 devices of the 420 million people who crossed the US border that year, experts said the number may be much higher under the new Trump administration.

There were already fears that the World Cup could become chaotic if US immigration raids continue at the same torrid pace.

Keep reading

British Soccer Star Joey Barton Given Six Months Suspended Prison Sentence For ‘Grossly Offensive’ Posts on X

Former British soccer star Joey Barton has been given a six-month suspended sentence for making “grossly offensive” posts on the X platform.

In the latest escalation in the British state’s war on freedom of expression, 43-year-old Barton was found guilty last month at Liverpool Crown Court of six counts of sending a grossly offensive electronic communication with intent to cause distress or anxiety.

The conviction related to posts he made targeting the football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko, as well as the BBC broadcaster Jeremy Vine.

Sentencing Barton on Monday, Judge Andrew Menary KC said that “robust debate, satire, mockery and even crude language may fall within permissible free speech.”

”But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.”

Menary went on to describe Barton as “not a man of previous good character” and said he had carried out “a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful.”

While Barton’s comments could definitely be condemned as extremely unkind, most were intended as jokes or crass humor.

During an FA Cup tie in which Ward and Aluko were commentating, Barton described them as the “Fred and Rose West of football commentary,” a reference to the notorious British serial killers.

In another post, he mocked Jeremy Vine as a “bike nonce” and asked if he had visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island.

Keep reading

This FTC Workshop Could Legitimize the Push for Online Digital ID Checks

In January 2026, the Federal Trade Commission plans to gather a small army of “experts” in Washington to discuss a topic that sounds technical but reads like a blueprint for a new kind of internet.

Officially, the event is about protecting children. Unofficially, it’s about identifying everyone.

The FTC says the January 28 workshop at the Constitution Center will bring together researchers, policy officials, tech companies, and “consumer representatives” to explore the role of age verification and its relationship to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.

It’s all about collecting and verifying age information, developing technical systems for estimation, and scaling those systems across digital environments.

In government language, that means building tools that could determine who you are before you click anything.

The FTC suggests this is about safeguarding minors. But once these systems exist, they rarely stop where they start. The design of a universal age-verification network could reach far beyond child safety, extending into how all users identify themselves across websites, platforms, and services.

The agency’s agenda suggests a framework for what could become a credential-based web. If a website has to verify your age, it must verify you. And once verified, your information doesn’t evaporate after you log out. It’s stored somewhere, connected to something, waiting for the next access request.

The federal effort comes after a wave of state-level enthusiasm for the same idea. Texas, Utah, Missouri, Virginia, and Ohio have each passed laws forcing websites to check the ages of users, often borrowing language directly from the European Union, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Those rules require identity documents, biometric scans, or certified third parties that act as digital hall monitors.

In these states, “click to enter” has turned into “show your papers.”

Many sites now require proof of age, while others test-drive digital ID programs linking personal credentials to online activity.

The result is a slow creep toward a system where logging into a website looks a lot like crossing a border.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

“The Days Of Censoring Americans Online Are Over”: Senior US Diplomats Slam EU’s “Attack” On American Tech Platform X

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and several other senior U.S. officials have criticized the internet policies of the European Union (EU), likening them to censorship, after the governing bloc last week levied Elon Musk’s social media platform X with a $140 million fine for breaching its online content rules.

On Dec. 5, EU tech regulators fined X 120 million euros (about $140 million) following a two-year investigation under the Digital Services Act, concluding that the social platform had breached multiple transparency obligations, including the “deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark,’ the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.”

The EU accused X of converting its verified badges into a paid feature without sufficient identity checks, arguing that this deceived users into believing the accounts were authentic and exposed them to fraud, manipulation, and impersonation.

This meant the platform had failed to meet the Digital Services Act’s accessibility and detail standards, leaving out key information that prevented efforts to track coordinated disinformation, illicit activities, and election interference, according to the EU.

Even before the EU’s fine was announced, U.S. Vice President JD Vance suggested it amounted to punishing X for “not engaging in censorship.”

Keep reading

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. 

Keep reading