Tag: social media

X Warns Australia’s Censor Wants Reach Beyond Australia

X has told the Australian Senate committee that a proposal expanding the powers of the nation’s top censor would let the regulator demand documents from people outside of Australia. The only connection that would be required for X to have to hand over documents to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is that the person is “affiliated” with a platform.

The submission, published Tuesday, targets the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. The bill cleared the House of Representatives on July 1 and hit the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on the same day. That committee will report on August 25.

The changes would “compel any person outside Australia…to provide information and documents merely because they are ‘affiliated’ with a company,” X said in a filing.

X described that as being “in clear conflict” with international legal principles, warning that the amendment “raises potential for a severe impact on international comity.”

X said the plans gave no “due regard to procedural fairness, privacy, the broader impacts on online services, and Australia’s digital economy.”

A company that fails to take “reasonable” steps to keep under-16s off its platform currently faces a penalty of up to A$49.5 million or 30,000 penalty units. The bill doubles that to A$99 million, around US$69 million, for systematic breaches.

Under the bill, eSafety could also compel the records from the third-party digital ID vendors that platforms hire, as well as from app store operators.

Those vendors hold face scans, ID document images, and inference data drawn from Australians who handed over sensitive data in order to stay on the platform after Australia banned social media for under 16s.

The bill would give the government regulator a legal route into all of that data that it recently mandated to be collected.

eSafety complained to the panel that its current authority to compel documents lags behind that of other regulators and that it’s left to depend on “representations from providers about their own compliance.”

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Raskin Launches Probe of Scheme to Sell Insider Access to Trump Truth Social Posts

“Are you helping the president sell people advance access to market-moving information?”

That’s the opening line of a Thursday letter that US House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent to Kevin McGurn, interim CEO of President Donald Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) Corp.

TMTG runs Trump’s Truth Social platform and earlier this month announced plans to launch “Truth API” by August 1. API, or application programming interface, lets software applications talk to each other. Critics have warned that the new endeavor will give Wall Street firms faster access to posts by the president and other top accounts.

“Trump Media’s target market for buyers of this service is ‘high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms,’ which would each pay a
handsome $100,000 monthly subscription fee,” Raskin wrote. “Nearly half of each fee would go directly into the pocket of Donald Trump, who owns roughly 41% of the company’s shares through a trust that he continues to control.”

“Put another way, Trump Media will soon be selling early access to President Trump’s so-called ‘Truth’ missives to the most sophisticated investment firms in the world,” he stressed. “This insider-information scheme will enable Wall Street to profit from the president’s frequent market-moving posts on major businesses and cash in on swings in stock prices caused by the president’s buying and selling (or pumping and dumping, if you prefer) of publicly traded stocks to unwitting retail investors.”

As Investopedia pointed out Thursday: “In recent months Trump has posted about new developments in the Iran War, which is particularly important for buyers and sellers of futures contracts who are trying to ascertain where oil prices are headed. Over the past year, he has also posted about tariff policy, government investments in publicly traded companies, and other corporate news developments.”

Additionally, as Raskin highlighted, “Trump has promoted over 20 companies on his Truth Social account shortly after purchasing the companies’ stocks, including government contractors where the Trump administration exerted substantial ability to move markets in those companies’ favor. Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, has posted a staggering 200% investment return since his father’s return to the White House, with the president recently admitting that his oldest sons are coventurers in his corruption.”

Once the new service is up and running, “whenever President Trump uses Truth Social to announce that a ceasefire is imminent, or prematurely leaks US jobs data, his customers will now be able to front-run the market using their privileged access to his social media posts, leaving retail investors, pension plans, and retirement accounts irreparably disadvantaged,” he warned. “This is precisely the type of harm that federal securities laws are designed to prevent.”

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Texas Orders Discord to Run UK-Style Age Checks for State Users

A Texas court has ordered Discord to turn on the age-verification system it built for the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act for every user in the state. Britain’s age-check regime has reached America by court order, and opening or keeping a Discord account in Texas can now mean a face scan or a government ID.

The agreed temporary injunction, signed by a Collin County judge, gives Discord 90 days to extend its age-assurance and default settings to Texas.

We obtained a copy of the temporary injunction for you here.

The company can still ask the court for more time if it shows the deadline is not feasible. Discord must serve the Texas Attorney General’s Office a confidential progress report every 30 days until it complies, and the order binds the company until final judgment, enforceable by contempt. The order lets Discord identify Texas users from data it already holds rather than gather new categories of personal information.

Today a Texan opens an account with an email address and a self-reported birthday, nothing more. The injunction imports that system instead. By Discord’s own published account, more than 90 percent of users are never asked to confirm their age, facial age estimation runs on the user’s own phone, and identity documents go to a third-party vendor rather than to Discord. The reassurance holds only for the users the system never questions. For everyone else, the account now comes with a face scan or a government ID handed to an outside company.

Under the order, Discord must route messages from strangers into a separate request inbox and block sensitive content for Texas teens unless it confirms the user is an adult. It must also close adult-only spaces to anyone it has not age-assured, according to the attorney general’s office. The state says these are the protections Discord already gives British children under the Online Safety Act and withheld from Texas.

Texas’s expert told the court that extending Discord’s existing safety features to the state was “just a matter of turning it on for Texas.” Discord runs the age-assurance system in the UK, Australia, and Brazil, its witnesses testified. In Texas the company still relies on a self-reported birthday at signup, a fact it did not dispute for the order.

Discord announced in February 2026 that it would roll its protections out worldwide, with the US launch only weeks away. Then it pulled back, telling the public the rollout would wait until the second half of 2026.

Attorney General Ken Paxton called the ruling a historic victory. “Discord built a platform where adult predators could hunt Texas children, then looked parents in the eye and told them it was safe,” he said in a statement. His office says Discord submitted 489,782 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2025, more than 1,300 a day. Under cross-examination, Discord’s lawyers drew out that those reports largely amount to the company flagging crimes it finds on its own platform and passing them to the center.

New Jersey sued before Texas did, and Nevada, Indiana, and Arkansas have taken their own legal action. Texas filed on May 22, 2026, and won a restraining order within weeks. The case heads to a trial on the merits set for June 2027, where the state will seek civil penalties under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which can reach $10,000 per violation.

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Russia accuses Telegram CEO Pavel Durov of aiding terrorism in its latest digital crackdown

Russian authorities said Wednesday they had charged Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the popular messaging app Telegram, with aiding terrorism, the latest step by the Kremlin to bring the internet and digital communications under its control.

The charges against the Russian-born Durov, who lives abroad, came as authorities have sought to restrict the use of Telegram as part of a widespread crackdown on online freedom that followed Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Federal Security Service, or FSB, said in a statement it had accused Telegram’s administration of failing to remove “numerous channels, chats and bots” allegedly used by “Ukrainian intelligence agencies, terrorist and extremist organizations to prepare and coordinate acts of sabotage and terrorism, mass murder, and cyber fraud” in Russia, which resulted in “numerous human casualties.”

The FSB accused Ukrainian security services of using a popular dating chatbot on Telegram to lure and recruit Russians for “sabotage and terrorist activities,” and said 46 users of the chatbot, from 12 to 22 years old, have been detained in Russia over the past year for assaulting law enforcement officers, arson and other acts.

It also said it was adding the name of the 41-year-old billionaire to international wanted lists.

Durov had said earlier this year that Russian authorities opened a criminal investigation against him, and he accused them of fabricating pretexts to restrict access to Telegram as part of an attempt to “suppress the right to privacy and free speech.”

If convicted, he could face up to life in prison in Russia.

Telegram, which boasts of more than 1 billion users worldwide, did not respond to a request for comment. Its official website links to an account on X that on Wednesday posted am image of Durov raising a middle finger to the camera.

Telegram’s website says that the company is based in Dubai and that Durov, who holds dual citizenship in France and the United Arab Emirates, lives there, too.

Russia has sought to censor the internet
Under President Vladimir Putin, Russian authorities have engaged in multipronged efforts to rein in the internet, adopting restrictive laws and banning websites and platforms that don’t comply and focused on improving technology to monitor and manipulate online traffic.

Popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and X, have been banned in Russia; YouTube has been throttled; popular messaging apps, such as Signal and Viber, have been blocked, and the most popular ones — WhatsApp and Telegram — have been restricted.

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UK Committee Hears Calls to Expand the Online Safety Act’s Powers

A row of peers has gathered in Westminster to decide whether the Online Safety Act has been cruel enough to the internet yet. After some hours of evidence, the verdict came back: not nearly.

The Communications and Digital Committee has been quizzing stakeholders about how the law is going, and the charities it called have a grievance: Ofcom is too soft. Andy Burrows of the Molly Rose Foundation put it like this: “I do not get the impression that the companies are quaking in their boots at Ofcom’s enforcement approach.” The boots, by every account, stood steady.

The censorship law, for anyone who missed its arrival, will make Britain the safest place in the world to be online. It says so itself. The maximum fine runs to £18 million ($24M) or a tenth of worldwide revenue, whichever bites harder, which for the biggest platforms would reach into the billions. And still, no boots.

So the room reached for the obvious cure. More of it. Baroness Kidron of the 5Rights Foundation, defending Ofcom and filleting it in the same breath, allowed that “the act is wrong in certain places and does leave certain gaps, and will need some more work.” Some more work. The gaps, you understand, all run in the one direction.

Look at the machinery already bolted on. A platform that performs “Ofcom’s 44 measures, or whichever number it is now” — Kidron’s phrase — is safe. Do the 44 things, claim your safe harbor, go home. Try something cleverer and you forfeit the protection. The law rewards the box-tick over the better idea. A bold design.

And the boxes do get ticked. Nearly two-thirds of daily visits to Britain’s adult sites now pass through an age check. Lord Vaizey told the Lords that Ofcom had begun investigating 47 sites for non-compliance. Ofcom’s own spokesperson said 69. Enforcement is one of those two numbers.

Ofcom says the picture is better than that. Change was already happening, its spokesperson offered; platforms held to account, fast enforcement launched, more protections put forward. Burrows allowed that some of the action already under way might be supervisory, Ofcom working with a firm rather than fining it, though the process is opaque enough that nobody could say how industrious it was.

Meanwhile, the children the whole edifice was raised to protect. On the risk it already knew well, child sexual abuse, Burrows granted Ofcom was doing a good job. His worry was the newer harms. He kept returning to the Com groups; networks largely of teenage boys, whose reported numbers rose sixfold between 2022 and 2024, running a new kind of grooming pointed at suicide and self-harm. The Molly Rose Foundation carries the name of Molly Russell, fourteen, who viewed thousands of images promoting suicide and self-harm before she took her own life.

Rani Govender of the NSPCC laid out the trap: when a platform spots a harm the codes of practice never named, it carries no obligation to act on it. The law covers what the law already wrote down. More scope. More codes. More measures numbered 44, or whichever it is now.

One problem stayed off the agenda. The Act treats two hard engineering questions as things a statute can order into being. The first is reliable age estimation; in the opening days of the new rules, people strolled past the checks using video game avatars to pass as adults. The second is reading encrypted messages without breaking the encryption, which cannot be done, a point Signal made by offering to leave the country rather than build the back door. “If the choice came down to being forced to build a backdoor, or leaving, we’d leave,” its president wrote. A mandate is a wish with a fine attached.

The public has been voting with its downloads. When the age checks landed on July 25, Proton VPN clocked an hourly sign-up increase of over 1,400 percent. Ofcom’s answer was to tell the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to encourage VPN use. To Ofcom, a loophole to close. The verdict in it went unheard.

And the petition to repeal the whole thing has passed 550,000 signatures. Having heard all of this (the avatars, the VPN stampede, the third of a million names) the committee asked whether the age-check regime might also be extended to VPN providers.

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Flashback: Fauci Funded Technique To Hide Evidence Of Genetic Engineering According To RFK Jr.

Four years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an accusation that got him shadowbanned, “fact-checked,” and dismissed as a crank: that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID had bankrolled the development of a laboratory technique whose primary utility was erasing the fingerprints of human engineering from a manipulated virus – and that the technique was then handed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

With Fauci’s personal diaries now public, Tulsi Gabbard’s last-day document dump on the record, Ralph Baric stripped of his NIH grants and placed on leave by UNC, and Fauci himself scheduled to appear under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this Wednesday at 8:30 a.m., Kennedy’s remarks are worth revisiting.

Here’s what he said:

“He [Fauci] funded Ralph Baric to develop a technique called seamless ligation. And that is a technique for hiding the engineering project.”

“So, normally, when you do that kind of engineering, you can see it, and you can say, ‘That bug was created in a lab.'”

“He [Baric] developed a way of hiding all traces [of what] was developed. And he taught that to the Chinese scientists – to Shi Zhengli.”

“There is no public health [reason for this]; it is the OPPOSITE of what you would do if you are interested in public health… To teach people how to hide that only has a nefarious purpose.”

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Canada’s New “Hate” Law Is Already at People’s Doors

Royal assent came in June, the law landed in July, and by the end of the month somebody was standing on a porch asking about a post from three years ago.

Government officials in Canada are contacting people at their homes over social media posts written months or years ago, according to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF).

The legal advocacy group says the reports began arriving after Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, cleared Parliament. The law received royal assent on June 18 and came into force on July 18, expanding Canada’s “hate speech” offenses, raising penalties, and eliminating defenses that had limited prosecutions for what the state calls hate-related expression.

“We are receiving reports that some Canadians are being contacted at their homes by government officials about social media posts made months or even years ago,” the JCCF wrote. “These reports come after the passage of Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, which expands Canada’s hate speech laws by creating new offences, increasing penalties, and removing certain legal safeguards that previously limited prosecutions for hate-related expression.”

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BACKFIRE: X Users Bury Marxist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani with This Brutal Reminder After He Mocks Rich New Yorkers About Paying Their “Fair Share”

Communist New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani probably did not anticipate being humiliated online after dunking on rich New Yorkers about paying their “fair share” in taxes earlier this week.

As Fox News reported, Mamdani and New York Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled a joint legislative proposal in April that went after luxury second homes worth $5 million or more. This is known as a pied-à-terre tax.

On Thursday, Mamdani took to X to brag that his office had sent notification letters reminding these homeowners that the tax would be implemented soon and to “check your mailbox.”

Mamdani added that only when the rich pay their “fair share” can the Big Apple afford the “best parks, libraries, and schools in the world.”

“If you have a second home in New York City worth more than $5M, check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs — because you’ve got mail,” Mamdani wrote.

“Today, we sent notification letters to property owners, letting them know that our new pied-à-terre tax is coming soon,” he continued. “The best city in the world deserves the best parks, libraries, and schools in the world. That’s only possible when we all pay our fair share.”

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Instagram to Ban Creeps Filming Harassment Videos with Meta Smart Glasses

Instagram has announced a new policy prohibiting videos captured with Meta smart glasses that feature harassment of strangers in public spaces, targeting creeps who film pranks and pickup attempts without clear consent. Meta’s smart glasses have picked up the nickname “pervert glasses” due to their misuse.

Business Insider reports that Instagram head Adam Mosseri revealed the platform’s crackdown on certain types of content filmed using Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses in a recent Instagram story response. The new policy specifically targets videos showing harassment of unsuspecting individuals in public locations, including the controversial pickup artist videos and prank content that have proliferated on social media platforms.

“If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we’ve heard of and seen, then we’re going to take the content down,” Mosseri stated. “We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we’re trying to fight that every way we can.”

The policy change comes after increasing concerns about the misuse of Meta’s smart glasses technology for creating questionable content. There is a growing trend of videos appearing on TikTok and Instagram Reels where content creators film themselves executing pranks on service industry workers while wearing the glasses. These pranks often cross the line into harassment territory, with examples including incidents where creators spray fart spray into candles at retail stores and then ask employees to smell them.

Following the policy announcement, Business Insider discovered that at least two major accounts belonging to pickup artists who filmed themselves approaching women while wearing Meta glasses had been deactivated. Both accounts previously boasted followings exceeding one million users. A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that these accounts were removed for violating the new policy regarding harassing content filmed with the smart glasses.

However, details about the policy’s enforcement mechanisms remain unclear. Meta has not provided specific information about what exactly constitutes a violation under the new rules or how the company plans to systematically identify and remove offending content.

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CO Dem Candidate Deleted These Reddit Posts. You Can See Why He Did That.

Manny Rutinel is the Colorado Democrat running in the 8th district. He’s also another candidate with some unusual social media posts. No, it’s nowhere near as extreme as Graham Platner, who is on a different level with posts about masturbating in port-a-potties, among other things, but it’s worth noting that Rutinel deleted these Reddit posts, likely because they could damage the local economy. They were a form of advocacy for vegan authoritarianism, which is not something ranchers want to hear.

State Rep. Manny Rutinel, in since-deleted posts made nearly a decade ago on the social media site Reddit, voiced support for a movement that aims to put animals on the same legal footing as humans and in turn prohibit their slaughter for food and other uses. 

Rutinel, a Democrat running to represent Colorado’s toss-up 8th Congressional District, envisioned a future in which so-called animal liberation legislation would be adopted.

“Veganism will grow at a gradual pace, farmers will produce fewer farm animals to meet the decreased demand,” he posted in 2017. “The fewer animals that are left living by the time an animal liberation amendment arrives will spend the remainder of their lives happily in either an animal sanctuary or be kept as a pet.”

[…]

His changing views on meat could be politically helpful: The 8th District, which spans Denver’s northeast suburbs into Greeley, is arguably Colorado’s agricultural capital. 

It’s filled with ranches, feedlots and dairy farms, which generated about $1.2 billion in animal products in 2022. The district is also home to a JBS meatpacking facility in Greeley, one of the nation’s largest beef slaughterhouses. 

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