social media – Page 28 – Hellbound and Down

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.

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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.

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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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