Tag: social media

Why Meta Suddenly Loves the Kids Online Safety Act

For years, Meta cast itself as the reluctant holdout against the Kids Online Safety Act, the one company that just could not bring itself to endorse a bill that was, at least on the face of it, written to protect children, but has an ulterior motive.

That resistance lasted right up until the Senate sweetened the pot. Once lawmakers bundled KOSA with a federal block on state AI laws and a national digital ID push, two measures Meta has spent millions lobbying to win, the company located its conscience and decided the bill was tolerable after all.

POLITICO reported that the conversion arrived the moment the Senate paired KOSA with the App Store Accountability Act, a digital ID bill aimed squarely at app stores. Meta now sits beside Microsoft, Apple, X, Snap, and Pinterest, all of them cheering for the legislation. It makes for an awkward look; a law sold to the public as a leash on the biggest platforms, when most of the biggest platforms turn out to be holding the leash.

As we’ve said many times before, and it seems we’re having to now say on a daily basis, verifying how old you are means proving who you are. The systems that estimate your age want a government ID, a face scan, or enough surveillance of your behavior to make an educated guess. None of them confirm your age and nothing else; they confirm your identity and keep a copy, so the platform that once let you be a username now wants your legal name on file.

So why would a company that lives off your data fight to make you surrender more of it? The App Store Accountability Act would order Apple and Google to verify ages at the store, which would load the cost and the legal risk onto the two companies that run the stores. Its own apps pick up no new obligation at all. Meta collects the identity-checked internet it has wanted for years and gets to look like a bystander while Apple and Google play the heavy.

The deeper payoff is older than this bill. Meta has dreamed of a real-name internet since Facebook’s early days, back when it enforced an authentic-identity rule until the public revolt made the policy too expensive to keep.

“Age verification” revives that dream by statute and applies it to everyone, with the invoice mailed to somebody else. A network of confirmed, identity-linked humans is also a network where the bots that annoy advertisers thin out, and ad space attached to real people fetches a premium. Protecting children is the version for the cameras; the version that moves the company sits on the balance sheet.

The less advertised half of the package lives in the preemption language. A handful of states have started writing their own AI rules, some governing how companies grab biometric data and let algorithms make decisions about residents. A federal block would bulldoze those efforts and erase one of the few places ordinary people can still object to how these systems treat their information.

Meta strolls away with a single, gentler national standard while residents lose the local protections they had started to build and the whole trade gets filed under everyone wins, as long as “everyone” means Meta.

The bundle also tucks in the NO FAKES Act and this is where the child-safety wrapping paper comes off completely. The bill would let anyone sue over an “unauthorized digital replica” and would hit platforms with heavy penalties for failing to obey its demands, among them fast removal of flagged content and policies to cut off repeat offenders.

A company staring down those fines for guessing wrong on a hard case will pull lawful speech first and worry about the details later. What the bill builds is a takedown machine, with the lever handed to whoever complains the loudest.

The actors’ union SAG-AFTRA has been pushing the bill hard from the other side, gathering more than 16,000 signatures on an open letter that frames it as a shield against deepfakes used in scams, fake endorsements, and the replacement of human performers. “Unchecked AI can ruin lives,” union president Sean Astin said and on that narrow point, he has a fair case. The trouble is what the rest of the bill does and how it curbs satire and parody.

The latest version came back last month from a bipartisan group that includes Senators Marsha Blackburn, Chris Coons, Thom Tillis, and Amy Klobuchar, with OpenAI, YouTube, and IBM applauding from the wings. The Senate Judiciary Committee takes it up Thursday.

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Israeli Desperation Leading to Enormous Sums for Lobbying, Media Manipulation

Things aren’t going so well these days for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. While his partner President Trump is working actively to end the war with Iran by inking a memorandum of understanding to halt the fighting, American public opinion of Israel continues to plummet. That is no surprise — Israel’s war on Gaza has now killed over 73,000 Palestinians (at least), the Gaza Strip is largely rubble, and Israel has moved to do the same in south Lebanon.

Netanyahu blames the loss of support on TikTok and social media writ large (not his government’s own policies) and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue media management and pro-Israel advocacy in the U.S. On a parallel track, Israel is seeking unprecedented integration with the U.S. military and its intelligence agencies — which would mean co-production on weapons, technology and sharing of sensitive intel. Experts say this is why Israel has been insisting it doesn’t “need” the 10-year agreement that provides Israel $3.8 billion annually in military aid. This would shift that aid to the places that don’t require the same oversight and overt American buy-in.

My colleagues Ben Freeman and Nick Cleveland-Stout, who form up the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, have been digging away at these Israel efforts on myriad fronts. Ben has been writing about the integration legislation on both the military and intel sides, now making their way through Congress. Nick has been sifting through Foreign Agent Registration Act and other public efforts to expose the millions that have been going to former Trump campaign guy Brad Parscale to push pro-Israel messaging through conservative media platforms, text campaigns, manipulating ChatGPT, and more.

Both talk to me this week about how all of these efforts have ramped up as Israel is more keenly aware that it has lost the thread with the American people and that powerful lobbying forces like AIPAC are not enough.

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Telegram Founder Warns UK Social Media Ban Is Digital Iceberg About To Sink The Free Internet

Telegram founder Pavel Durov told the Freedom Forum audience in Oslo that Western societies have already struck the iceberg and started sinking – yet most citizens remain in their cabins, convinced the ship of personal freedoms is unsinkable.

His remarks arrive precisely as Keir Starmer’s government rams through a social media ban for under-16s that functions as the perfect pretext for mandatory digital ID, device-level scanning on every phone, and the practical elimination of anonymous speech online.

The policy is dressed in the familiar language of child protection. In practice it requires every major platform to verify ages with facial scans, passports or credit card data. What starts as a restriction on minors rapidly becomes a national system of internet passports.

Encrypted messaging apps currently sit outside the ban, but the same Online Safety Act framework already contains the levers to demand backdoors later. Tech executives who refuse to turn every smartphone into a government scanner face up to five years in prison.

Durov drew on two decades running major platforms and direct experience with state pressure in Russia, the EU and France. The core message was unmistakable.

“Our ship has already hit the iceberg. We have already started to sink without even realizing it. And I’m talking about the ship of our personal freedoms.”

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UK Tech Minister Hints at Potential VPN Ban to Enforce Social Media Restrictions

The British government has suggested it may ban VPN services as it seeks to enforce its upcoming social media ban for children under 16.

The censorious left-wing UK government said that it will announce plans for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) next month amid growing questions about how it intends to ensure that children do not subvert the upcoming social media prohibition.

Critics have warned that the social media ban for under-16s will require the state to implement a digital ID system to verify internet users’ ages, potentially impacting the privacy of all citizens, including law-abiding adults.

Others have also questioned what the government intends to do about children who simply use VPNs to mask their IP addresses and access the internet from countries that don’t prohibit children from using social media sites.

While VPNs were once mostly used by people in authoritarian countries like Communist China, Islamist Iran, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia to unblock vast swathes of the internet, they have grown in popularity in Western countries in recent years amid rising state censorship.

Indeed, according to data collected by the IT Asset Management Group, Google searches for “VPN” rose by 165 per cent after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer formally announced plans to ban social media for those under 16 on Monday, City AM reported.

Technology Minister Liz Kendall told the BBC on Tuesday morning that the government will “make further statements in July about VPNs and further restrictions.”

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UK’s Social Media Ban: The Monumental Pretext For Total Digital Surveillance 

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s announcement of a social media ban for under-16s represents one of the most sweeping advances of the surveillance state in modern British history. 

Framed as “giving children their childhoods back,” the policy demands that big tech implement mandatory age verification across major platforms. In reality it forces every adult in the UK to surrender identity documents, facial scans, passports or credit card details simply to post, scroll or communicate online. 

What begins as a restriction on minors quickly becomes a national digital ID regime, device-level monitoring on every phone and tablet, and the effective end of anonymous speech. 

The move builds directly on years of incremental power grabs and aligns with identical efforts now rolling out in Canada, Australia and the EU. It ignores the government’s own evidence of no causal harm from social media while accelerating the very infrastructure that hands the state permanent visibility into private lives. 

This is not reform. It is the construction of a permissioned internet where access itself requires state-approved identity.

The scale is breathtaking. Age verification will not stop at one app. It will require systems capable of checking every user on Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. 

Additional rules turn off livestreaming and stranger communication by default for under-18s on gaming platforms, and impose overnight curfews plus infinite-scroll ‘breaks’ for under-18s. 

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Starmer’s Social Media Ban, the Reinvention of the Surveillance State

Here is a fun fact to keep in your back pocket the next time a politician appears on the morning TV sofas to explain that the government’s new face-scanning and digital ID regime is really, deep down, about protecting your children.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, spent the first half of his career as a human rights lawyer and the second half running the Crown Prosecution Service.

He has argued for the individual against the state and he has aimed the full weight of the state at the individual. He has, in other words, seen this particular movie from both seats.

So when he tells you he has stumbled, blinking and innocent, into the most comprehensive surveillance apparatus in British peacetime history, do not extend him the courtesy of believing it. He spent twenty years learning precisely what these powers do to a person. He is not building this in his sleep.

And what he is building is a country in which you must ask permission to exist online. Not ask the platform. Ask the state. Before you read, post, store a photo, or send a message, you are expected to step up to the booth, show your papers, and prove you are a citizen the government has pre-approved.

The default setting of a free society, that you are left alone until you give the state a reason, is being flipped on its head. The new arrangement is that you are a suspect with a phone until you prove otherwise, and you prove it constantly, because proving it has been welded onto the act of going online and speaking at all.

That is the whole game. Everything else is set dressing.

Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?

You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport.

The face scan is sold to you as the polite option, the velvet rope. It is, in fact, the funnel and, at the bottom of the funnel, sits the national identity check that three million people already told this government, in no uncertain terms, to scrap.

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Graham Platner Mocked Teen’s Unsuccessful Suicide Attempt in Resurfaced Reddit Post

Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner is under fresh scrutiny after a resurfaced Reddit post appeared to show him mocking a teenage girl’s suicide attempt.

The post from May 2012, obtained by The New York Post, featured a photograph of a teenage girl hanging from an upper-story window while several students attempted to pull her to safety.

“A girl at my old highschool [sic] tried jumping from a window because her cousin died the day before,” the caption read. “These students saved her. I have hope.”

According to screenshots circulating online, an account identified as “P-Hustle” responded with the comment: “Someone clearly isn’t trying hard enough.”

The resurfaced post is the latest in a growing series of controversies surrounding the Maine Democrat, who recently won his primary election.

Other archived Reddit comments attributed to Platner have drawn criticism in recent weeks.

These have included posts in which he allegedly mocked a wounded Purple Heart recipient, praised a Hamas attack on Israeli soldiers and made graphic comments about his personal behavior.

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Illinois Just Adopted a Half-Baked Scheme to Tax Social Media

Government officials may not fully understand what social media is, but they damned well plan to do something about the ills it may or may not inflict on our society. They’ll happily start with extracting some money from the companies behind social media, though it may take a few tries, given politicians’ complete lack of understanding of the thing they want to tax. Illinois is a good example, where legislators just passed an attempt at a social media levy that runs afoul of its authors’ ignorance.

“A nearly $56 billion state spending plan is headed to Gov. JB Pritzker’s desk after the Democratic-controlled Illinois legislature approved it in the early-morning hours of another overtime spring session,” the Chicago Tribune‘s Dan Petrella noted last week. “The biggest source of new revenue is a new per-user tax on large social media companies.”

The governor’s signature is essentially guaranteed, since the budget proposal and social media tax originated in his office. Pritzker hopes to raise $200 million per year from the scheme. But the plan faces challenges, not least of which is that a similar tax passed by Chicago is tied up in court. Another and potentially more serious problem, as pointed out by Dan Levin of Straight Arrow News, is that “one of the elements that remains the most unclear is what exactly is being taxed? The language in the bill does not answer that question directly and is, frankly, confusing.”

As passed, the budget plan imposes a tax on social media companies based on “the average number of monthly users of the platform located in the State of Illinois.” Platforms with 100,000 to 500,000 “Illinois users” will have to pay $0.10 per user each month; platforms with 500,000 to 1 million “shall pay $40,000, plus $0.25 per month” per user; and platforms with over 1 million users will pay $165,000, plus $0.50 per user, each month on the number of users over 1 million. A provision adjusts the tax for inflation starting in 2028. Companies that fail or refuse to pay will be punished with a fee of “an amount equal to 100% of the unpaid fee and any penalties each month until the fee is paid.”

That’s an awful lot of numbers backed by dire threats. But it still doesn’t clarify how to tally up the bill.

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Trolls Ignite Social Media Firestorm with Photos of Protesters Peeing on Murder Victim Austin Metcalf’s Grave

Outrage and disgust went viral this week as internet trolls posted doctored photos on social media of purported black protestors urinating on white murder victim Austin Metcalf’s grave.

The photos appear to show images of holders of X accounts “pissing” on Metcalf’s grave in reaction to 19-year-old killer Karmelo Anthony’s conviction earlier this week by a Texas jury.

“FUCK AUSTINNNNN METCALF,” one photo of a young women desecrating the grave was captioned, allegedly by an account attributed to “Mari Hicks.”

Anthony, who is black, was convicted of fatally stabbing Metcalf, who is white, in the heart after he refused to leave the stadium tent of the victim’s team at a high school track meet.

The conviction resulted in protests outside the courthouse and prompted some black leaders to say the trial was unfair because the jury did not have any black panelists.

Some of the photos were tagged with “#FreeKarmeloAnthony,” “#AustinMetcalf,” and even “#F–kEm.”

The urination photos on X became a racial flashpoint, causing the X platform to blow up with reaction after they were featured on the popular conservative account Libs of Tik Tok which claimed the individuals in the photos were BLM activists.

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Britain Goes Full ‘Airstrip One’

In George Orwell’s 1984, Great Britain was just a province of Oceania named “Airstrip One” as a none-too-subtle nod to the U.K.’s role as host to the heavy bombers of U.S. Eighth Air Force during World War II.

Four decades past the real 1984, and there’s still no Oceania. But Britain looks more and more like Airstrip One as Parliament considers a bill opening up everyone’s smartphone to government supervision — and jail time for tech execs who don’t submit.

You had to figure this was probably coming, right?

Right.

Reclaim the Net reports that “Ministers are reportedly drafting a law that would force Apple, Google, and the rest to make it impossible for a child to send, receive, view, or share a single nude image, with the executives who refuse facing up to five years in prison.”

That might sound all well and good, but as usual, For the Children™ is little more than the government’s justification for total surveillance.

“You cannot block every naked picture someone might stumble across without inspecting every picture, every message, every video call, every streamed film, on every device, all the time,” Reclaim noted, with nudity serving as “the excuse and the unbroken view into your phone is the actual prize.”

The industry term is “client-side scanning,” which sounds much nicer than “a government mandated app that looks at everything on your phone all the time.”

And even that sounds better than “Big Brother is Watching You,” which is exactly what it is.

As already required by Britain’s Online Safety Act, Apple and Google forcibly install age verification on every iPhone and Android device in the UK via app store updates.

No, it can’t be uninstalled.

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