Tag: social media

‘Online Predator Network’: Court Hears Chinese Migrants in Germany Shared Rape Advice in Group Chat

They called themselves the “German driving school for experts,” but prosecutors say the true purpose of their Telegram chats was to brag about the women they raped and share tips about how to drug them.

In posts that sometimes included photos and videos of their attacks on unconscious victims, they referred to women as “cars,” sedatives as “fuel” and rape as “driving,” according to court documents. They called their victims “dead pigs.”

Investigators have been poring through several years’ worth of posts in roughly two dozen group chats on the popular messaging app that authorities believe served an online predator network of mainly Chinese men targeting mostly Chinese women in Germany. Their investigation has led to the convictions of three alleged inner circle members on rape and other charges, and the ongoing trial of a fourth man in Berlin.

“The perpetrators were characterized by a particular ruthlessness, an objectification of the victims, and the perfidious planning of their crimes,” Frankfurt chief prosecutor Dominik Mies told The Associated Press.

Major details of the investigation remain unknown, at least to the public, including how many attacks and perpetrators have been linked to the German Telegram chats and how the chats, some of which reportedly had tens of thousands of members, could have operated for so long. It’s also unclear if the chats are linked to a ballooning investigation in Europe and the Americas into drug-facilitated sexual assaults by misogynist online communities.

Under German privacy laws, prosecutors are limited in what they can say outside the courtroom, documents are restricted and, in the ongoing case in Berlin, members of the public have been forced to leave the courtroom during parts of the trial.

This may be why the investigation into the Telegram group has garnered less attention in Germany than might be expected. But members of the country’s Chinese community, mostly women, have been attending court proceedings to show support for the victims even if they don’t know them.

“What makes one really angry is to see that such groups hate women, they have no respect,” said Fu Xiao, who traveled roughly 500 kilometers (310 miles) to Berlin last week to attend the trial. “Women aren´t seen as people.”

In China, state media has covered the cases comprehensively, but wider discussion about the prosecutions on Chinese-language social media like Rednote has been partially censored. Certain tags have been more likely to get a post deleted or banned on Rednote, screenshots and searches show. But posts using less direct language have survived the censors, including ones that refer to “date rape” or the euphemistic “students studying abroad in Germany.”

China´s Ministry of Public Security and Rednote didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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Democrats Pick Up the Global Digital ID Agenda in Project 2029

A group of operatives gathers every few years to write the document that will supposedly save the party, and this season’s entry comes from Project 2029, a “liberal” outfit built as the mirror image of the conservative Project 2025.

One side wrote a blueprint that ended up staffing part of a presidential administration. The other would like the same result, but opens with the safest subject in American politics, the welfare of children.

What it has actually picked up is a global digital ID agenda, a policy spreading through Australia, Britain, and the European Union, the government-backed age check, increasingly a digital ID, that decides who gets onto a platform.

As first reported by Semafor, Project 2029 wants to make it the opening pitch of the next Democratic campaign, sold under the same banner every other global elite is using, child protection.

The first product off the line is called “Kids Over Clicks.” It would ban social media accounts for anyone under 16, trim the liability shield in Section 230, cap data collection on minors, and outlaw the targeted ads that follow them around the web.

The group’s executive director, Chad Maisel, a former adviser to Joe Biden and Cory Booker, frames the rollout as a contest of nerve. “We’re going to see many people running for president…and we want to set the standard in terms of the type of ambition that we want to see when it comes to solving these problems,” he said.

The pitch arrives wrapped in the language of a public-health crusade. Project 2029 calls this the “tobacco moment” for social media, and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of its boosters, supplies the closing argument. “We are at the ‘tobacco moment’ for social media. The science is in, the lawsuits are succeeding, and public support is overwhelming. This agenda gives policymakers no excuse not to act,” he said.

It’s a clean story, complete with a villain and a rescue. It also runs on something its authors rarely say out loud.

To keep children off a platform, somebody has to check the age of everyone who shows up. At the scale of a national social network, there is no gentle way to do that. You confirm identity. A birth year typed into a box proves nothing, so the check hardens into a government ID, a face scan, or a digital credential tied to a real person.

The under-16 rule, sold as a wall around children, becomes a turnstile that adults have to badge through too. The framework keeps this in the footnotes. Once a platform must verify ages, the anonymous account stops being possible, and the pseudonymous handle that lets someone speak without surrendering a legal name turns into a verified record, logged and stored, waiting for the next breach or subpoena.

Not all of Kids Over Clicks pulls in that direction. Banning surveillance ads and capping data collection on minors would shrink what companies hoard, the rare provisions that take something from the platforms rather than from the user. The age gate sits awkwardly beside them, demanding the one thing the rest of the document is trying to protect, a person’s identity.

The countries already running it offer a preview, and not all of them are democracies. Australia switched on its under-16 ban in December 2025.

Britain’s Online Safety Act now greets users of Reddit and X with a demand for a passport or a face scan before they reach ordinary content, a regime broad enough that the Wikimedia Foundation went to court arguing it could force identity checks onto the people who edit Wikipedia.

The European Union is folding age verification into a continent-wide Digital Identity Wallet. The United Arab Emirates bars under-15s outright and requires digital identity checks to enforce it. Saudi Arabia, which already runs one of the most heavily policed internets on earth, shows where the road ends, in a country where the link between a citizen and every word they post is permanent and state-held.

That is the recurring shape of age verification as a genre. It is sold on its effect on children and judged, eventually, on its effect on everyone else.

The bet is that no candidate will want to be filmed arguing against protecting children, which is almost certainly correct. The price of winning it is a Democratic Party that runs, in 2028, on the same instrument Britain, Brussels, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh are each building for their own reasons, a standing check on who gets to speak without a name. Australia has already shown how the story goes. The kids find the workaround but the ID requirement stays.

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Carney is considering lawsuits over “misinformation” posts

The federal government’s latest attack on free expression is straight out of 1984.

An Access to Information memo obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter shows the Industry Department is weighing legal action against social media users accused of spreading “false and misleading information.” The heavily redacted 35-page memo offers no details on the proposed legal action.

This contrasts with the Liberal government’s past stance against internet control as a human rights threat.

Four years ago, they said, “the rights and freedoms that individuals have offline must also be protected online.”

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WOKE AND OUT OF TOUCH: Multi-Millionaire Singer Alicia Keys Whines on Instagram That American Women ‘Don’t Have Equal Rights’

Multi-platinum recording artist Alicia Keys just dropped a fresh dose of radical feminist grievance porn on Instagram, sobbing that it’s been “100 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced” and gasp “women don’t have an explicit guarantee to equal rights under the U.S. Constitution.”

The out-of-touch celebrity then directed her followers to the site peoplesbillofrights250.org to “turn outrage into authorship” and help craft some new “People’s Bill of Rights” for America’s 250th anniversary.

In a video posted to Instagram, Keys said:

“Did you know that it’s been 100 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced? And now, still, women don’t have an explicit guarantee to equal rights under the U.S. Constitution. Can you believe that? I couldn’t even believe that was real. I mean, women are not asking for special rights, just equal rights.

Let’s turn outrage into authorship. If it’s the 250th celebration of the country, isn’t it time to update some things? What rights or guarantees do you feel all women should have in America? That’s a good question. I’m not here to speak for you. I just want to pass you the mic. So have your say at peoplesbillofrights250.org. Not red, not blue. Just you.

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EU Reddit Users Must Verify Age With Government ID or Selfie

Reddit began forcing many of its European users to prove their age on June 24, and it chose an invasive way to do it. Anyone the platform’s automated systems flag as possibly under 18 now has to hand over a government ID or a live face scan to a third party before opening a single mature community. The rollout covers the European Union and Norway, and Reddit frames the whole thing as compliance with censorship and digital ID EU law.

If you refuse the check and you keep your account, though, the mature side of Reddit vanishes from view. Agree to it, and you feed your identity into Persona, the outside verification firm Reddit leans on to decide whether you are old enough to read what you came to read.

The screening starts before anyone asks for a document. Reddit runs software that monitors your every move and estimates your age from how you behave on the site, reading your posting history, and the words you use.

If you look like an adult to the machine, nothing changes. If you look like a teenager, the mature communities lock until you verify. The company has not published the full list of signals it weighs, which leaves users to reverse-engineer a system that has already decided something about them.

The net catches far more than adult content. Users posting screenshots of the verification flow reported that some mental health support communities are tagged NSFW, which drags them behind the same wall. Someone reaching out during a crisis can find themselves asked to show a passport first. Reddit built its name on letting people speak without one attached, and that is the exact thing the check strips away.

Teenagers face a separate set of rules. Accounts held by 13 to 15-year-olds are locked to the most restrictive privacy settings with no way to loosen them, covering chat, followers, and whether the profile surfaces in search. Yet, keep in mind, everyone’s privacy has already had to be invaded to get to this point.

Users who are 16 or 17 start with the same defaults but can change them. Reddit presents this as protection, and some of it does protect, though it arrives welded to the identity demand rather than offered instead of it.

The expansion follows months of regulatory pressure, most of it out of the United Kingdom. British regulators fined Reddit £14.47 million, roughly $19 million, earlier this year after finding the company had unlawfully handled children’s personal information between May 2018 and July 2025.

Reddit had let people self-declare their age at signup, a method the Information Commissioner’s Office said children could get around without effort. “It’s concerning that a company the size of Reddit failed in its legal duty to protect the personal information of UK children,” Information Commissioner John Edwards said.

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YouTube Warns Independent UK Creators of Impending Censorship Push From Labour Government

American video-sharing platform YouTube told users in Britain that, under pressure from the left-wing Labour Party government, independent creators will likely see their content suppressed.

The British government has been accused of attempting to silence political opposition, with YouTube telling UK creators that proposed new rules would include a “prominence regime” that would force sites like YouTube to give a “privileged position” to the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and other legacy media.

The notice said that artificially propping up establishment media would naturally result in independent media being downranked and obscured from view, as “pushing this group forward means pushing everyone else downward. Mandatory prioritisation of broadcasters would affect how your content reaches your audience, regardless of what your audience actually wants to see.”

“Mandating prominence for established media networks would push the UK’s diverse mix of independent journalists, educators, and digital-first businesses down the line,” YouTube added.

Creators were also told that this would impact their ability to grow their communities, generate views, and ultimately earn money as a business.

The government is said to have told the site that legacy broadcasters had the “trust” of the state to provide accurate reporting, which YouTube noted implies that “digital-first voices are less credible, damaging the foundational trust that sustains the creator economy.”

This comes despite the BBC recently facing significant scandals involving the accuracy of its reporting, including last year when it was forced to apologise to U.S. President Trump after a documentary produced by the public broadcaster deceptively spliced together different sections of his speech on January 6th 2021, to falsely give the impression that he had encouraged supporters to riot, when he did the exact opposite.

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OH BOY: Globalist Alex Soros Catches Major Backlash After Unbelievable ‘Freudian Slip’ Exposes Dark Reality of the Far-Left Agenda

While patriots celebrated 250 years of American greatness, the radical left’s favorite nepo baby let slip exactly how he really feels about the country his father has spent billions trying to destroy.

Social media exploded Saturday night after Alex Soros, the radical son of far-left billionaire George Soros, posted a tone-deaf and grammatically disastrous message celebrating America’s 250th birthday.

The now-deleted post read simply: “Happy 250th Birthday America! I’ll never loving it.”

Accompanying the caption was a four-photo collage showing Soros and his far-left wife, Huma Abedin, in romantic poses.

The obvious typo, missing the word “stop,” was immediately seized upon as a Freudian slip revealing what many Americans have long suspected: the Soros family doesn’t actually love this country. They want to transform it.

Following the backlash, the hand-picked heir to George Soros’ multi-billion-dollar empire of far-left disruption deleted the tweet and posted an updated caption.

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Australia’s Top Censor Wants Power Over The “Ratio”

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wants legal power to order social media companies to shield favored users from criticism and to suspend everyone piling on against them. Julie Inman Grant made the pitch on July 2, testifying to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, the government probe set up after the Bondi Beach terror attack.

She calls the tool a “notification power.” What it does is let her office tell a platform that a particular Australian account is under heavy criticism and demand that the platform punish the accounts responsible.

Her own description of the trigger runs to “insulting” and “ugly” comments stacking up beneath someone’s posts. “If there’s a pile-on, if there’s a brigade, if it’s meant to be an avalanche of online hate, we put the onus back on the platform to say, this Australian is being targeted,” she told the commission.

“We expect you to protect their account and take action against all of those people that you can see… whether it’s you just suspend them or you take them away.”

Watch the video here.

She wants the power to reach across platforms, too. The current adult cyber-abuse rules frustrate her because they force her office to “look at that specific tweet” rather than the whole swarm of replies beneath it. The fix she wants hands platforms a standing order to police disapproval on her behalf.

Grant does not think of this as censorship, of course. Asked about companies that frame their resistance as free speech, she said “it’s easy to slip a censorship label on just about anything,” and offered a softer account of her own work. “What we’re trying to do is minimize harm. Encourage as much speech as possible, but when it veers into the lane of hurting individuals, hurting communities, hurting society and undermining democracy, I think we all need to band together and take more of a stand.”

The regulator asking for authority to suspend users in bulk says her goal is more speech.

Who defines the harm that flips speech from protected to punishable? She does. Phrases like “hurting communities” and “undermining democracy” stretch far enough to cover most heated political argument, and the office reaching for them writes the definition.

Much of her testimony was a complaint that the companies keep winning. eSafety has eight cases running against X Corp, and Grant said six of them were “led by X.” She cast the legal pushback as commercial greed dressed up in principle, accusing platforms of fighting “to be able to serve, share and monetize horrific content.”

Asked whether she had actually seen platforms fight to monetize such material, she answered “I can’t imagine any other reason they would want to put it up there.”

The clearest example she offered cuts against her. After the Wakely church stabbing of Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, eSafety sent formal removal notices to Meta and X. “Meta applied within the hour, and then of course, X Corp said, ‘We’re not taking it down, we’ll see you in court,’” Grant said.

X won the legal challenge. And the bishop whose stabbing she cited as the reason to censor went on to back Elon Musk and defend free speech from the pulpit in his first sermon after surviving the attack.

The person eSafety said it was protecting did not want her protection.

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4Chan trolls UK government with another AI hamster as fines hit $800k

4Chan has continued to troll the UK government and Ofcom after they hit the website with fines of over $800,000, and they’re answering with more AI hamsters.

Over the last year, a number of governments have been cracking down on what online content can be accessed by children under the age of 18. That includes the United Kingdom, which is working on a social media ban similar to the one that Australia implemented. 

The UK has implemented age safety verification checks for certain material too and has hit a number of websites with takedowns, as well as fines. 4Chan has been caught up in the latter, being issued with fines that now total over $800,000.

While Ofcom, the UK regulator, is still seeking payment from 4Chan, their lawyer has once again responded with an AI hamster.

4Chan hits back at UK government’s latest fine

“Ofcom wrote. Again. Demanding that 4chan pay its fine. Sent us bank details and everything. Oh no. Super scary. We replied with a hamster. Again,” Preston Byrne, the website’s lawyer, posted on X. 

Byrne also showed off the email response he sent to the regulator. “You want money, huh? Come get it,” he started, with an AI hamster wearing a Thug Life hate being surronded by mountains of dollar bills.

“As 4Chan has no assets in the United Kingdom (given that it has no connection to the United Kingdom), that would require you to show up in a US court as a platiff, waive soreign immunity, and overcome existing U.S. doctrine regarding the non-enforcement of foreign regulatory penalties. 

“We suspect that isn’t going to happen. We suspect you know it isn’t going to happen, too.”

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TikTok Settles Lawsuit Accusing Social Media Giants Of Harming Florida Boy

TikTok has reached a settlement with a Florida teenager who blamed the platform and other social media companies for fueling his addiction, leading to depression, anxiety, and sleep loss, just ahead of a trial to determine the industry’s part in the youth mental health crisis.

The settlement, made public Tuesday, lays to rest claims against ByteDance’s TikTok related to the lawsuit filed by the boy.

Details of the settlement were not disclosed.

Trials against Meta’s Instagram and Snap’s Snapchat remain scheduled for July in California.

According to court filings, the plaintiff argues he began using social media at approximately age 8 and became addicted.

As Kimberley Hayek reports for The Epoch Times, the case is one of many taking aim at social media companies, accusing them of designing the platforms to addict young users.

Earlier this month, YouTube settled with the same plaintiff.

“YouTube’s decision to resolve this case before having to face a jury speaks for itself,” the plaintiff’s attorneys from Morgan & Morgan stated in that settlement.

“We will continue fighting on behalf of all those affected by social media addiction to bring these companies to justice and compel them to prioritize the safety of their young users over their bottom lines.”

In March, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and Google liable for harms to a young woman, awarding damages after findings of negligence tied to addictive design features.

Jurors found the platforms contributed to addiction and mental health issues, leading to millions in compensatory and punitive damages. A judge upheld the verdict this month.

More than 3,300 addiction-related lawsuits remain pending in California state court, with thousands more pending in federal court. School districts and states have also pursued claims, with some settlements reached, such as a Kentucky district’s agreement with several platforms.

The TikTok settlement allows the company to avoid what would have been only the second individual trial of its kind in California over social media’s impact on minors.

Plaintiffs in these cases argue that features, such as endless scrolling, personalized algorithms, and notifications create a “vicious cycle” of engagement that does harm to young brains.

Tech companies argue they have implemented parental controls, age-appropriate tools, and other safeguards for young users. Google, for instance, has underscored its safety efforts in statements regarding the YouTube settlement.

“Our focus remains on building age-appropriate products and parental controls that deliver on that promise,” Google spokesman José Castañeda said in a statement. 

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