Tag: social media

Meta To Comply With Florida Age Verification Digital ID Law

Meta agreed to comply with Florida’s age verification law, HB 3, and will begin purging accounts belonging to children under 14 starting in May. 

The company’s capitulation comes ahead of an April 8 deadline set by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who threatened litigation against any platform still refusing to verify the ages and identities of its users. Uthmeier is now pressuring Snapchat, Roblox, Discord, and TikTok to do the same.

What Florida calls child protection is also the construction of a statewide identity verification system for the internet. Meta is one of the biggest companies lobbying for age verification checks on the app store level.

HB 3 bans under-14s from social media entirely and requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds. But to block minors, platforms first need to determine who is and isn’t a minor. That means age-checking everyone, adults included. The surveillance burden falls on millions of people who have every legal right to use these services without proving who they are.

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Downed U.S. Drone Appears On TikTok Live As Iraqi Children Try To Sell It

As the U.S.-Iran conflict enters its second month, America’s Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, or LUCAS, is becoming increasingly visible across the Middle East theater, a sign that the Department of War has learned one critical lesson from both the Iranian drone playbook and the Ukraine-Russia war: cheap drones are the future of warfare.

The latest news on LUCAS comes from an unverifiable TikTok video, amplified on X, which appears to show a downed drone seized by Iraqi children who are reportedly trying to sell it.

If authentic, the footage is another reminder that low-cost drones are proliferating so widely across the region that they will likely spread to other parts of the world.

In a separate video reposted on X, Iranian forces appear to have recovered a LUCAS drone in the Persian Gulf area.

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Foreign Influence Exposed: How Non-U.S. Social Media Accounts Shape the Narrative on Iran Conflict

Foreign social media accounts could be shaping negative narratives about the U.S.-Iran conflict, raising concerns about misinformation and public perception.

A report by Pew Research Center on March 25 indicates that a significant number of Americans are against U.S. military involvement in Iran. According to their survey, about 61 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with President Donald Trump’s handling of the conflict, while 37 percent express approval.

Furthermore, by a margin of almost two-to-one, more of the survey’s participants believe military action is not progressing well—45 percent compared to the 25 percent who think it is going extremely or very well.

But is someone shaping this narrative? On X, foreign users are certainly influencing the way the conflict is perceived. A recent analysis published on conservative political commentator Glenn Beck’s website of more than 1,000 viral English-language posts may offer valuable insights into who is crafting the narrative.

These posts, published between February 28 and March 13, showed a significant influence from accounts based outside the U.S. In his opinion, these accounts, along with the groups or governments behind them, are significantly steering the conversation on X, inundating it with “inflammatory and demoralizing propaganda,” which can alter public perception and sentiment.

Mauro, a national security analyst and founder of The Mauro Institute, spoke to The Gateway Pundit about his discovery. He shared that, according to his research, “more than half, specifically 559 out of 1,000, of the viral X posts written in English about Iran come from abroad. These 559 posts garnered more than 650 million views and accumulated nearly 22 million total interactions, including reposts, likes, and replies. For him, “This engagement underscores the power of social media to amplify certain narratives.”

Interestingly, a random selection of 150 posts from the thousand viral X posts showed that 108 (72%) were negative, whereas only 40 (27%) were positive. The non-U.S. portion of that random selection showed a significantly negative response, with 64 percent expressing negativity and only 10 percent showing positivity. According to Mauro, this imbalance alone raises questions about the authenticity of the discourse surrounding the issue.

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British Law Enforcement No Longer Policing Social Media Posts Looking for ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’, as Commissioner Celebrates Increased Ability To Investigate Real Criminals

British police are back to investigating crime, not hurt feelings.

The United Kingdom is the leading country in incarcerating citizens for social media posts, and – what’s worse – police wasted time and resources with something called ‘non-crime hate incidents’.

You read it right: perfectly legal posts.

But now, the police are no longer involved in these internet arguments, and that has enabled officers to ‘solve more real crimes’.

The Telegraph reported:

“Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said the force had doubled the number of real hate crimes that it had solved since he announced in December last year that his force would no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs).

In an exclusive article for The Telegraph, he said this change had already saved officers ‘thousands of hours’, enabling them to devote more time to ‘preventing and solving crime, protecting vulnerable people, and responding to real risks of harm’.”

It’s been two days since Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the abolition of NCHIs nationally.

“Sir Mark, whose force pre-empted the national move, said NCHIs had ‘eroded’ the public’s trust in the police because of ‘unclear guidance’ from policing bodies and the Government on how to apply them.

Officers had been knocking on people’s doors to deal with ‘online squabbles and everyday disagreements that never met the threshold of criminality’, he said.”

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Children’s Health Defense Wins Settlement in Landmark Censorship Case

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) finalized a settlement in CHD’s landmark class action censorship lawsuit against key Biden administration officials accused of colluding with tech companies to censor social media content.

In a press release, the DOJ cited President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, Executive Order “acknowledging that ‘the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.’ 90 Fed. Reg. 8243 (Jan. 28, 2025).”

CHD, along with its then-Chairman Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sued the Biden administration in March 2023.

The lawsuit, Kennedy v. Biden, became CHD v. Trump after Trump became president of the U.S., and Kennedy, who first left CHD to run his own presidential campaign, was later named secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Trump administration.

The class action lawsuit against then-President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies alleged they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.

Jed Rubenfeld, attorney for CHD, called the settlement a “tremendous win” against government censorship.

“We brought this case years ago to challenge the Biden administration’s assault on free speech,” Rubenfeld said. “Today, the government, under a new administration, acknowledged that assault. And via a previously issued Executive Order, the president prohibited government officials from pressuring social media companies in the future to trample on Americans’ First Amendment rights.”

As part of the settlement with CHD, the government agreed to pay attorneys’ fees.

The DOJ also settled a similar lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, and issued a consent decree in the case.

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Possible X account of missing general William McCasland claimed fellow general was murdered over nuclear material

Online sleuths think they have uncovered missing retired Air Force general William Neil McCasland’s anonymous social media account — which claimed another general was murdered for his dealings with nuclear material.

McCasland, 68, went missing from his Albuquerque, NM, home on Feb. 27 — which is the same day that the person behind a conspicuously credentialed X account centered on spacecraft and advanced science made their last post.

The account @tmbspaceships claims to be run by a “retired 38-year active duty” United States Air Force with a PhD in engineering — listing the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), the Air Education Training Command (AETC), and Air Force Material Command (AETC) as places they’ve worked.

Both the AFIT and AFMC are located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which McCasland ran from 2011 to 2013. He attended the Air War College during his 34-year career, which is a subordinate to the AETC. McCasland attained a PhD in Astronautical Engineering from MIT in 1988.

The account shockingly claimed just months before McCasland’s disappearance that Maj. Gen. John Rossi, who allegedly committed suicide in 2016, was actually murdered because of refusal to hand over nuclear material to private contractors.

The 55-year-old two star general ended his life just two days before receiving a third star and taking the reins at US Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Army Times reported.

Army investigators ruled his hanging death was due a severe lack of sleep and job anxiety, according to the outlet.

“Gen. Rossi was a good friend and it is my opinion he did not commit suicide,” the account wrote in a reply posted on Sept. 2, 2025.

“I believe Gen Rossi was killed because of a [sic] incident, reported to the pentagon IG [inspector general], that he would not transfer nuclear weapons to private hands, just months prior in an attempted Nuclear Weapons theft from Ft. Sill,” the post claimed.

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Stripper reveals US troops are blabbing to her about being deployed— and blowing operational security

Loose nips sink ships.

A stripper revealed that on TikTok young US troops are apparently leaking news of their deployments to her while blowing their cash at jiggle joints.

San Diego-based dancer Charm Daze — who has 900K followers online — shared an emotional video late Sunday describing a wave of “depressed” servicemen from nearby military bases lamenting a deployment scheduled for next week.

“Something I’ve noticed lately is all the military guys are coming in and they’re spending all of their money,” Daze said. “They’re kind of depressed … They’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna have fun,’ but you can tell something’s off. And then they’re like, ‘We deploy next week.’”

Daze performs in clubs around the country, but her Facebook page says she is based in San Diego, home to the largest naval base on the West Coast.

As is custom with military towns, there are also plenty of strip joints.

Major units with the US Navy — including the Navy SEALs — as well as a Marine Expeditionary group are stationed at Naval Base San Diego, Naval Base Coronado and Camp Pendleton in the region.

The dancer described the men as strikingly young — so young she called them “fetuses.”

Daze said many of the troops are polite and soft-spoken, which only made the experience more emotional for her.

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The Age Verification Con

Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are competing to look tough on Silicon Valley. They hold hearings, write bills, and pose for photographs with parents who say their kids’ lives were ruined by social media algorithms they somehow couldn’t pull them away from.

The cause is protecting children from social media, and it supposedly polls so well that it has achieved something almost unheard of in modern politics: genuine bipartisan consensus. Republicans and Democrats in Washington. Labour and Conservatives in Westminster. The Australian parliament voted the whole thing through with barely a whisper of dissent.

There is just one problem with the narrative. The tech giants these politicians claim to be fighting are spending record sums to help them do it. And the tool they have all converged on, age verification, is not really about checking whether someone is 15 or 16. It is the architecture for a verified internet, one where anonymous access is replaced by identity checkpoints, and where using a social media account, downloading an app, or browsing a website requires you to show your papers first.

The campaign is presented as protecting children. The infrastructure being built will apply to everyone.

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White House Posts Cryptic Messages to X

The White House on Thursday posted a series of cryptic photos on X after posting and deleting a cryptic video.

Late Wednesday night the White House posted a mysterious video – then quickly deleted it, sparking a buzz.

X users pointed out that it sounded like White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt saying, “It’s launching soon, right?”

A male voices responds, “Yes.”

The White House posted another video later Wednesday night with a phone ping notification sound.

On Thursday afternoon, the White House posted a pixilated photo.

Later Thursday, the White House two more pixilated photos.

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The Verdict Against Meta and Google That Could End the Anonymous Internet

A Los Angeles jury has found Meta and YouTube negligent in the design of their platforms and awarded $3 million to a plaintiff identified as K.G.M., a young woman who testified that years of near-constant social media use contributed to depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia. The jury assigned 70% of the responsibility to Meta and 30% to YouTube. Punitive damages came to another $6 million.

The verdict is being reported as a landmark for child safety. It also represents a significant legal mechanism for dismantling anonymous internet access, built in plain sight, with bipartisan enthusiasm and a CEO’s enthusiastic assistance.

K.G.M.’s attorneys built their claim not around what users posted, which Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act largely shields platforms from liability for, but around how the platforms were designed.

Infinite scroll, algorithmically amplified notifications, engagement loops engineered to maximize time on site. The argument treats social media architecture the way product liability law treats a car without brakes. A defective product that the public needs to be protected from.

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