Tag: social media

Signal, DuckDuckGo, and NordVPN threaten to exit Canada if metadata surveillance law passes

Another day, another government attempt to force tech companies to build backdoors. This time, Canada is proposing legislation that would require companies to retain certain metadata and provide law enforcement with access to it. Predictably, many tech players have sharply criticized the proposal, with some saying they would rather leave the Canadian market than comply.

The latest version of Canada’s Bill C-22 would require digital services such as internet service providers, messaging platforms, email providers, and potentially hardware companies to retain up to one year of user metadata. In addition, tech companies would have to implement mechanisms that allow authorities to obtain “lawful access” to that information for criminal investigations. Critics argue the proposal amounts to another government-mandated backdoor.

During his testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Signal executive Udbhav Tiwari said Bill C-22 would turn everyday digital tools into a surveillance network. He argued that requiring companies to retain metadata about users’ communications runs counter to Signal’s privacy practices.

A spokesperson for DuckDuckGo also confirmed that the company would remove its VPN service from Canada if Bill C-22 passes. NordVPN and other VPN providers have made similar statements.

Apple and Google have also joined industry warnings that the legislation could force them to weaken encryption. Last year, Apple successfully opposed a similar proposal in the United Kingdom that would have required it to build a backdoor into iCloud. The incident was the latest in a series of conflicts between the Cupertino-based company and government regulators over security and user privacy.

The primary concern is that malicious actors would inevitably discover and exploit any digital backdoor, regardless of whether it was designed exclusively for law enforcement or domestic government agencies. OpenMedia, which has described C-22 as an attempt to create a surveillance state, pointed to a late-2024 incident in which Chinese state-backed hackers compromised government-mandated police wiretap systems to steal sensitive data from AT&T, Verizon, Lumen Technologies, and other telecom providers.

Keep reading

Hunter Biden Is Posting Like the Biden Name Needs Rescuing

Hunter Biden has found the internet again, and the timing doesn’t look accidental. The surviving son of President Joe Biden returned to X in late May after years of near silence on an account created in 2013.

In days, Hunter fired off hundreds of posts, answered critics, defended his dad, joked about his drug past, and built an odd online revival out of addiction candor and political combat. From the New York Post:

Hunter Biden is marking his seventh year of sobriety with a social media blitz that’s taking the internet by storm.

Hunter, 56, began posting on his X account last month after years of dormancy, a move so surprising some wondered if the messages were fake. 

The account proved both genuine and a hit, quickly amassing nearly half a million followers, most of whom have cheered Hunter’s purported honesty and dry sense of humor. 

After Hunter posted a message celebrating being seven years sober Monday, one user accused him of being the owner of a bag of cocaine left in the West Wing during the summer of 2023.

“It most definitely was not. I would never have forgotten my drugs,” Hunter shot back.

The clapback got more than 242,000 likes. 

The burst comes as the Biden family name faces another round of damage. “CALL ME DOCTOR” Jill Biden has a new memoir out, and Joe’s age, decline, and 2024 debacle remain part of the national conversation. Hunter stepped into the noise with the same scandals trailing behind him, but with a new tone; he’s trying to turn the evidence locker into a comedy set and the family defense into a personal comeback tour.

Keep reading

CBC demands blind trust from viewers in bizarre Instagram video

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s news division released a video urging Canadians to “trust” its reporting, saying Canadians will “never ever” have to determine what is “real and what’s fake” in its coverage.

Critics online weren’t convinced, with many on X pointing to CBC coverage of major political flashpoints, including the reported discovery of unmarked graves near Kamloops in 2021 and the 2022 Freedom Convoy, as well as what they describe as “lies of omission” in covering some international stories while overlooking others of a similar nature.

“You will never ever have to wonder what is real or what is fake if it comes from CBC News,” Brodie Fenlon, General Manager and Editor in Chief of CBC News, said in a video posted to Instagram. “At CBC, our journalism is fact-checked, it’s verified. We don’t put anything out into the world unless we know it to be true, or if we haven’t verified it, then we’ll tell you that.”

The video continues, stressing that the state broadcaster, which receives approximately $1.38 billion annually from the federal government, is made by humans and meets a “really high bar” of standards.

“We’re accountable for our journalism, and in the rare cases where we get something wrong, we’ll own it. We’ll tell you what we got wrong and how we fixed it,” Fenlon said. “You will never ever have to wonder what is real or what is fake if it comes from CBC News. That’s the invitation. Choose news, not noise.”

Keep reading

DOJ Sought YouTube Subscriber Data

Federal prosecutors went looking for the personal details of everyone who subscribed to three YouTube channels and a judge refused to let them.

Newly unsealed court records from the Justice Department’s prosecution of people who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota show the government reaching for subscriber data that had little to do with the conduct it was investigating.

We obtained a copy of the warrant application for you here.

Journalists and commentators Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were charged as part of the disruption, though both allege they were there as reporters rather than participants.

On February 24, prosecutors filed five search warrants. Three of them asked YouTube to turn over the names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and IP addresses for every subscriber to channels run by Lemon, Fort, and activist William Kelly, whose channel goes by DaWoke Farmer.

The applications, sworn out by Homeland Security Investigations agent Timothy Gerber, went beyond the journalists and activists running the channels. They swept toward the audience, the ordinary people whose only link to the case was having clicked the channels’ subscribe button.

Magistrate Judge John Docherty rejected all five, several of them for lack of probable cause. On the warrant aimed at Kelly’s channel, Docherty pointed to a video that “appears to be paradigmatic political speech protected by the First Amendment.” A demand that treats a list of viewers as evidence turns watching journalism or activism into a reason to be identified by the state, which is a steep price for pressing play on a livestream.

Prosecutors tried again on March 6, refiling four warrants, including the three tied to Lemon, Fort, and Kelly. This time they cut the request down to the channel owners themselves, dropping the demand for subscriber rosters and asking only for the same categories of identifying data on the three named people.

What’s interesting here is that the government already treats the list of people who subscribe to a YouTube channel as something it can ask a court to hand over.

Picture that same demand landing in a world where every account is welded to a verified government identity. That world is being built right now.

The numbers tell part of the story. By late 2025, half of US states required people to prove their age before viewing some content, with nine states enacting such laws in 2025 alone. The movement started in Louisiana in 2022 as a single-state experiment and turned into a coordinated national push.

Keep reading

Graham Platner’s Senate Campaign Is Finished

Maine Democrats were warned.

They had every reason to look more closely at Graham Platner before handing him their Senate nomination. They didn’t. Now the drip, drip, drip of scandal has turned into a flood, and the question isn’t whether Platner survives; it’s whether he makes it to Election Day without the whole thing collapsing.

I’m not sure that he will.

As far as I’m concerned, the Nazi tattoo alone should have ended his campaign last year. Yet, Maine Democrats shrugged. Then came the Reddit posts. It was a barrage of embarrassing, disqualifying stuff for most candidates. Maine Democrats shrugged again.

Now we have the latest, reported Saturday by PJ Media’s Chris Queen: sexually explicit text messages with multiple women, on an app nicknamed “Predator’s Paradise.”

According to reporting from The New York Times, Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, discovered the texts on his phone in the spring of 2025, less than a year into their marriage. She later disclosed the messages during internal vetting in late August, as campaign aides were doing opposition research on their own candidate. One current campaign official said Platner had been communicating with up to six women. Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, confirmed that Gertner brought her the information, and McDonald showed the screenshots to the Times.

The Times acknowledged that the revelation could damage a political newcomer whose campaign against Sen. Susan Collins was starting to gain traction, particularly damaging in a state where women make up a large share of the electorate. The paper also flagged the broader stakes: the Maine race is considered critical to the Democratic Party’s hopes of reclaiming control of the Senate in November.

But here’s where things get even worse.

The app Platner was using is called Kik, an anonymous messaging app that has earned a well-documented reputation as a playground for sexual predators. His username, phustle0331, matches a private Instagram account linked to Platner and his Reddit account. The profile photo appears to be a mirror selfie of Platner in nothing but a bath towel, with visible tattoos matching Platner’s known ones. Platner later admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the account was his.

Here’s where it still gets worse.

Platner’s Kik account was created on June 26, 2016, at a time when the platform had already become notorious for predatory behavior and earned the nickname “Predator’s Paradise.” A 2016 sting operation resulted in the arrests of more than 2,600 predators. The New York Times had already published an exposé on the app’s dangers to children. Experts estimate 70% of Kik’s users are between 13 and 24. The app still has no age verification.

Curiously, Platner has allegedly deleted the app from his phone, but hasn’t deactivated his account.

“Graham Platner is a sexual deviant who should be locked in a room away from his phone,” RNC spokeswoman Delanie Bomar said in a statement. “He is a horrible, deranged man whose disgustingness knows no bounds.”

That’s the man Maine Democrats chose over Gov. Janet Mills, who was an experienced, vetted, credible candidate who might have actually given Collins a real race. Instead, they went with an unvetted newcomer whose past was a minefield and whose judgment, apparently, never improved. They wanted fresh and exciting. They got this.

The NRSC reportedly had enough opposition research on Platner that sources suggested he won’t just lose, he’ll need to leave the state. More damaging information is certainly coming. And I suspect the worst is yet to come.

This was an unforced error by the Democrats. The warning signs were all there; they just chose not to read them.

Keep reading

THE HITS KEEP COMING: Graham Platner Has an ACTIVE Account on “Predator’s Paradise” Messaging App with a “Huge Child Exploitation Problem”

Yet another horrific revelation has unfolded regarding far-left Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, and it might be the most shocking yet.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, informed campaign staff a year ago that her husband had exchanged sexually explicit text messages with at least a dozen women.

The Platner campaign, though, ultimately dismissed the texts as a private matter and moved on.

Now, the news gets worse. The Daily Wire has revealed on Saturday that Platner is a registered user on Kik, an anonymous messaging app.

Platner’s Kik account uses the username “phustle0331,” which is similar to his Instagram handle, Phustle0331, and to the username of his Reddit account.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation describes Kik as a “predator’s paradise,” due to features that allow minors to join the app and speak with adults.

Approximately 70% of the app’s users are between the ages of 13 and 24. Even more disturbingly, the app does not require official age verification.

The Daily Wire shared evidence that Kik enables adult users to not only target innocent women but also children.

A true sexual predator’s paradise, indeed.

From The Daily Wire:

A Forbes investigation found that Kik had a “huge child exploitation problem,” while the BBC found that the app was at the center of over 1,100 child sexual abuse cases in the United Kingdom between 2013 and 2018.

But even among consenting adult users, Kik is no ordinary messenger. The platform has been described as “the app with the most severe sexual content.” Kik offers sexually explicit live chats with women, and is often found at the center of “sexploitation” cases, wherein predators coax someone to send nude photos, and then use the images for blackmail, the New York Times reported in 2016.

That report — released four months before Platner created his Kik account — chronicles a litany of heinous acts perpetrated by predators on the app, including a man who used the app to distribute child pornography, several who sent and solicited sexually explicit messages from minors, and one instance where a man attempted to kidnap a 14-year-old girl.

Kik was also where 13-year-old Nicole Madison Lowell chatted with two Virginia Tech students who kidnapped and killed her.

Interestingly, Platner joined Kik in 2016 when it had been under fire for being a hotbed for child pornography, kidnapping, and more wicked sexual activities.

Keep reading

“It’s All So Tiresome”: UK’s Social Media Ban Trudges Ever Onward

The UK government’s “consultation” on social media harm is over, and – brace yourselves – it turns out they’re going to have to do something about it.

I know, I was shocked too.

The main talking point is that “social media is like cigarettes”. Everyone is saying that, it’s the meme of the day.

It’s a sentiment originally taken from a new report submitted to the consultation by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.

Titled “Growing up in an online world”, it contains this hilarious line in the foreword:

…there is, I think, an overwhelming consensus that excessive screen time can harm children and young people and we need to call this out unflinchingly rather than passively wait for someone else to prove causation”.

Which is a pretty neat summary of how our political system works in general, and certainly in this case: We don’t know if there’s even a problem yet, but by God we’re gonna do something about it.

That the something they end up doing makes them rich and powerful is just one of the curious coincidences tyrants can always rely on.

{Sidenote: This morning the BBC had “Overwhelimg consensus” in their headline on this story, but at some point the absurdity of that quote was realised, and the headline changed. Now there’s this disclaimer near the end: “There is no consensus among the wider scientific community that screen time overall is harmful to children.” Funny stuff.}

Elsewhere, the report wails about “a wave of radicalized children” who pose “a real risk to society”, and calls social media “an incredibly powerful and uncontrolled commercial detriment to health”.

In a similar vein, The Guardian is warning of a “tsunami of harm”, and has assembled an all-star cast of interested parties to talk up the scariness of social media meanness.

After meeting with “bereaved parents” earlier today, Keir Starmer has “vowed to take action”.

Keep reading

Social Media Users LIGHT UP James Talarico After Hearing the Woke Four-Word Term He Uses to Describe Women

Texas Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico managed to go viral for all the wrong reasons on Friday after a SuperPAC uncovered some old clips of him using a weird term to describe women.

Any normal person knows that there are two sexes: male and female. In addition, the terms men and women are used to describe those with male and female body parts.

Talarico, though, is anything but normal. It turns out he has a bizarre four-word term to describe the female race: neighbors with a uterus.

The Lone Star Liberty PAC, which supports Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, released two clips of Talarico saying exactly this.

“Every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the state,” Talarico says to a church audience in the first clip.

“Our neighbors with a uterus need to be able to control their own bodies,” he says in the second clip.

X users quickly lit up Talarico for not being able to use the term woman to describe the female

Keep reading

John Cornyn Sends Internet into a Frenzy with This Cryptic Tweet Following Landslide Loss to Ken Paxton

Senator John Cornyn (RINO-TX) drove the internet crazy on Friday after posting a very cryptic tweet a few days following his massive loss to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas GOP Senate runoff election.

As The Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson reported, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton smoked Cornyn in a landslide victory on Tuesday. The race was called within one hour of the polls closing.

Out of nowhere, Cornyn decided to tweet the famous fable of the scorpion and the frog. As TGP readers know, the frog decides to carry the scorpion across the river after the eight-legged arthropod promises not to sting it.

But the scorpion suddenly betrays the frog, stinging it in the middle of the river, and both die. When the dying frog asked the scorpion why it stung, the arthropod replied: “I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.”

“An old, but apt fable,” Cornyn began in his tweet. “A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across.”

“The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river,” he continued. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion.”

“Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.’ ”

Keep reading

Minnesota Law Requires Platforms to Monitor and Age-Estimate All Users

Governor Tim Walz signed House File 4138 on Tuesday, turning Minnesota into the latest state to demand that social media platforms profile every user who logs on.

The law, which takes effect in July 2027, forces platforms with at least 10,000 account holders or $1 billion in annual revenue to estimate the age of all Minnesota users, obtain parental consent before anyone under 16 can hold an account, and disable a list of features the legislature has labeled “addictive.” It passed the state House 132-2 and the Senate 66-0.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The bipartisan consensus is remarkable given what the bill actually requires. Buried beneath the child protection language is a surveillance apparatus that applies to every user, not just minors.

When you create an account on a covered platform, the law demands you declare your month and year of birth. That’s just the beginning. Once you’ve spent 25 hours on the platform within six months, the company has 14 days to estimate your age using “reasonable efforts, taking into consideration available technology and the data in the possession of the covered social media platform.”

If the platform can’t reach 80% confidence that you’re 16 or older, you get classified as a child and locked into restricted mode.

Hit 50 hours, and the confidence threshold rises to 90%. Still not verified? The age estimation repeats every six months for the first seven years your account exists, or more often if the platform runs any demographic analytics on your profile.

That means platforms are legally required to continuously analyze how you behave, what content you engage with, and who you communicate with for the better part of a decade. The law creates an obligation to surveil that didn’t exist before.

The mechanisms available for “verifiable parental consent” come from the COPPA 1.0 framework which speaks volumes about the privacy costs this law is willing to impose.

Parents can sign a consent form, hand over credit card information, submit a copy of a government-issued ID alongside a face scan, or verify their identity through video conferencing.

Keep reading