Tag: social media

MINISTRY OF TRUTH: Government To BLOCK ‘False Information’ During ‘Crisis Events’

Vague new rules will allow UK regulators to pressure platforms over “legal but harmful” content whenever government ministers declare a crisis, while the same government ploughs ahead with mandatory phone scanning, digital ID lockdowns, and jail threats for tech bosses who refuse to spy on every device.

The latest move from Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn makes explicit what privacy campaigners have long warned: the Online Safety Act is being weaponised far beyond any child-protection claim.

Benn confirmed that the internet regulator will now wield enhanced powers to tackle “false information” online during “times of crisis,” directly tying the recent Belfast unrest to this framework. The regulator has already contacted platforms, with ministers asserting that violence “appears to have been incited online.”

Benn stated that if people put online ‘false information,’ “it is not acceptable and it may well be a criminal offence depending on the circumstances as the chief constable made clear yesterday.”

When asked how a “time of crisis” would be defined, Benn said it “will be set out in due course.”

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Canada’s Bill C-34 Would Require ID or Face Scan to Use Social Media

Canada’s long-anticipated and dreaded Bill C-34 arrived on June 10 with the usual fanfare about protecting children.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, tabled it.

Strip off the press release and what is left is a law that lets an appointed federal body order Canadians’ posts deleted across the country, decide which platforms can give an account to a 15-year-old, and tell AI chatbots to watch what you type.

It also bans Canadians under 16 from social media by charging the whole country for it, in the currency of everyone’s privacy.

The government calls it the Safe Social Media Act. Safe for whom is the question it would rather you not dwell on.

The law creates a Digital Safety Commission of Canada. Cabinet appoints its three to five members. The same body writes the rules, runs the inspections, hears the complaints, and hands out the fines, which is a regulator and a courtroom folded into one office that answers to no voter.

Everything hangs on a phrase the bill declines to nail down, “harmful content.” There are seven categories, among them “content used to bully a child” and “content that foments hatred.”

The drafters did take the trouble to say content is not hateful merely because it “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends,” which is more care than these laws usually take.

It also changes very little because the people drawing the line day to day are the platforms, working from rules the Commission can rewrite whenever it wants. The edge of what a Canadian is allowed to say can shift without anyone in Parliament casting a vote.

So here is how a deletion goes. A platform decides it has “reasonable grounds to suspect” your post is child sexual abuse material or an intimate image shared without consent.

From that moment it has 24 hours to make the post inaccessible to every person in Canada. Down first, explained afterward. You can file representations and request a reconsideration, and your words stay gone the entire time you are waiting. Or someone skips you altogether and reports the post to the Commission, which can order it made “permanently inaccessible.” No judge appears anywhere in that sequence.

The definitions get bigger the longer you look at them. “Intimate content communicated without consent” now reaches AI images “likely to be mistaken for” a real recording of a person.

As a ban on revenge porn; reasonable, depending on how it’s implemented. But as written, those same words also cover a tasteless deepfake of a sitting politician, and the person sorting one from the other works for the company that gets fined either way.

Companies do not agonize over that distinction. They delete and move on.

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Carney using kids’ safety as cover to strip Canadians’ freedom

The Liberal government is preparing to introduce a new digital safety bill that would ban social media for users under 16, but on Tuesday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra said this new legislation has nothing to do with protecting children.

“Parents can limit what their kids watch with the push of a button,” he said. “This is really about everyone else. Again, using kids as the excuse.”

The bill, reported by the Globe and Mail ahead of its introduction, would create a new digital regulator to establish safety standards for social media platforms. It would also address artificial intelligence and chatbots.

But the mechanism required to enforce an under-16 ban, Ezra noted, is the problem. To determine who is under 16, every user would need to verify their age — meaning every Canadian would need to hand their personal identification to the government just to log on.

“Mark Carney wants to make everyone sign into the internet,” he said. “It’s not actually about kids, is it?”

Ezra drew a direct line to the Liberals’ past censorship efforts, noting that child protection and anti-terrorism provisions have repeatedly been used as packaging for speech regulation bills — provisions that already exist in the Criminal Code, added as a distraction from the bills’ real purpose.

“Governments use children as a cover for their plots,” he reminded viewers.

The timing raised eyebrows, as the day before Canada’s announcement, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered an almost identical speech calling on tech companies to introduce device controls to prevent children from sending and receiving explicit images.

Ezra said the parallel is not a coincidence. “On everything from censorship and digital ID to environmentalism and mass immigration, I really think Keir Starmer is setting a lot of Canadian policy,” he said.

The irony, he noted, is that Starmer has refused to call a meaningful public inquiry into the U.K.’s rape gangs and even vigorously opposed one when he was the country’s chief prosecutor.

“What a laugh to pretend he cares about kids,” Ezra said.

Another provision in the bill would grant the Canadian government a security backdoor into any app it chooses. Ezra also pointed out that every major social media platform in Canada is American owned, meaning new fines and restrictions would amount to a tax on U.S. tech firms.

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Signal, DuckDuckGo, and NordVPN threaten to exit Canada if metadata surveillance law passes

Another day, another government attempt to force tech companies to build backdoors. This time, Canada is proposing legislation that would require companies to retain certain metadata and provide law enforcement with access to it. Predictably, many tech players have sharply criticized the proposal, with some saying they would rather leave the Canadian market than comply.

The latest version of Canada’s Bill C-22 would require digital services such as internet service providers, messaging platforms, email providers, and potentially hardware companies to retain up to one year of user metadata. In addition, tech companies would have to implement mechanisms that allow authorities to obtain “lawful access” to that information for criminal investigations. Critics argue the proposal amounts to another government-mandated backdoor.

During his testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Signal executive Udbhav Tiwari said Bill C-22 would turn everyday digital tools into a surveillance network. He argued that requiring companies to retain metadata about users’ communications runs counter to Signal’s privacy practices.

A spokesperson for DuckDuckGo also confirmed that the company would remove its VPN service from Canada if Bill C-22 passes. NordVPN and other VPN providers have made similar statements.

Apple and Google have also joined industry warnings that the legislation could force them to weaken encryption. Last year, Apple successfully opposed a similar proposal in the United Kingdom that would have required it to build a backdoor into iCloud. The incident was the latest in a series of conflicts between the Cupertino-based company and government regulators over security and user privacy.

The primary concern is that malicious actors would inevitably discover and exploit any digital backdoor, regardless of whether it was designed exclusively for law enforcement or domestic government agencies. OpenMedia, which has described C-22 as an attempt to create a surveillance state, pointed to a late-2024 incident in which Chinese state-backed hackers compromised government-mandated police wiretap systems to steal sensitive data from AT&T, Verizon, Lumen Technologies, and other telecom providers.

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Hunter Biden Is Posting Like the Biden Name Needs Rescuing

Hunter Biden has found the internet again, and the timing doesn’t look accidental. The surviving son of President Joe Biden returned to X in late May after years of near silence on an account created in 2013.

In days, Hunter fired off hundreds of posts, answered critics, defended his dad, joked about his drug past, and built an odd online revival out of addiction candor and political combat. From the New York Post:

Hunter Biden is marking his seventh year of sobriety with a social media blitz that’s taking the internet by storm.

Hunter, 56, began posting on his X account last month after years of dormancy, a move so surprising some wondered if the messages were fake. 

The account proved both genuine and a hit, quickly amassing nearly half a million followers, most of whom have cheered Hunter’s purported honesty and dry sense of humor. 

After Hunter posted a message celebrating being seven years sober Monday, one user accused him of being the owner of a bag of cocaine left in the West Wing during the summer of 2023.

“It most definitely was not. I would never have forgotten my drugs,” Hunter shot back.

The clapback got more than 242,000 likes. 

The burst comes as the Biden family name faces another round of damage. “CALL ME DOCTOR” Jill Biden has a new memoir out, and Joe’s age, decline, and 2024 debacle remain part of the national conversation. Hunter stepped into the noise with the same scandals trailing behind him, but with a new tone; he’s trying to turn the evidence locker into a comedy set and the family defense into a personal comeback tour.

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CBC demands blind trust from viewers in bizarre Instagram video

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s news division released a video urging Canadians to “trust” its reporting, saying Canadians will “never ever” have to determine what is “real and what’s fake” in its coverage.

Critics online weren’t convinced, with many on X pointing to CBC coverage of major political flashpoints, including the reported discovery of unmarked graves near Kamloops in 2021 and the 2022 Freedom Convoy, as well as what they describe as “lies of omission” in covering some international stories while overlooking others of a similar nature.

“You will never ever have to wonder what is real or what is fake if it comes from CBC News,” Brodie Fenlon, General Manager and Editor in Chief of CBC News, said in a video posted to Instagram. “At CBC, our journalism is fact-checked, it’s verified. We don’t put anything out into the world unless we know it to be true, or if we haven’t verified it, then we’ll tell you that.”

The video continues, stressing that the state broadcaster, which receives approximately $1.38 billion annually from the federal government, is made by humans and meets a “really high bar” of standards.

“We’re accountable for our journalism, and in the rare cases where we get something wrong, we’ll own it. We’ll tell you what we got wrong and how we fixed it,” Fenlon said. “You will never ever have to wonder what is real or what is fake if it comes from CBC News. That’s the invitation. Choose news, not noise.”

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DOJ Sought YouTube Subscriber Data

Federal prosecutors went looking for the personal details of everyone who subscribed to three YouTube channels and a judge refused to let them.

Newly unsealed court records from the Justice Department’s prosecution of people who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota show the government reaching for subscriber data that had little to do with the conduct it was investigating.

We obtained a copy of the warrant application for you here.

Journalists and commentators Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were charged as part of the disruption, though both allege they were there as reporters rather than participants.

On February 24, prosecutors filed five search warrants. Three of them asked YouTube to turn over the names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and IP addresses for every subscriber to channels run by Lemon, Fort, and activist William Kelly, whose channel goes by DaWoke Farmer.

The applications, sworn out by Homeland Security Investigations agent Timothy Gerber, went beyond the journalists and activists running the channels. They swept toward the audience, the ordinary people whose only link to the case was having clicked the channels’ subscribe button.

Magistrate Judge John Docherty rejected all five, several of them for lack of probable cause. On the warrant aimed at Kelly’s channel, Docherty pointed to a video that “appears to be paradigmatic political speech protected by the First Amendment.” A demand that treats a list of viewers as evidence turns watching journalism or activism into a reason to be identified by the state, which is a steep price for pressing play on a livestream.

Prosecutors tried again on March 6, refiling four warrants, including the three tied to Lemon, Fort, and Kelly. This time they cut the request down to the channel owners themselves, dropping the demand for subscriber rosters and asking only for the same categories of identifying data on the three named people.

What’s interesting here is that the government already treats the list of people who subscribe to a YouTube channel as something it can ask a court to hand over.

Picture that same demand landing in a world where every account is welded to a verified government identity. That world is being built right now.

The numbers tell part of the story. By late 2025, half of US states required people to prove their age before viewing some content, with nine states enacting such laws in 2025 alone. The movement started in Louisiana in 2022 as a single-state experiment and turned into a coordinated national push.

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Graham Platner’s Senate Campaign Is Finished

Maine Democrats were warned.

They had every reason to look more closely at Graham Platner before handing him their Senate nomination. They didn’t. Now the drip, drip, drip of scandal has turned into a flood, and the question isn’t whether Platner survives; it’s whether he makes it to Election Day without the whole thing collapsing.

I’m not sure that he will.

As far as I’m concerned, the Nazi tattoo alone should have ended his campaign last year. Yet, Maine Democrats shrugged. Then came the Reddit posts. It was a barrage of embarrassing, disqualifying stuff for most candidates. Maine Democrats shrugged again.

Now we have the latest, reported Saturday by PJ Media’s Chris Queen: sexually explicit text messages with multiple women, on an app nicknamed “Predator’s Paradise.”

According to reporting from The New York Times, Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, discovered the texts on his phone in the spring of 2025, less than a year into their marriage. She later disclosed the messages during internal vetting in late August, as campaign aides were doing opposition research on their own candidate. One current campaign official said Platner had been communicating with up to six women. Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, confirmed that Gertner brought her the information, and McDonald showed the screenshots to the Times.

The Times acknowledged that the revelation could damage a political newcomer whose campaign against Sen. Susan Collins was starting to gain traction, particularly damaging in a state where women make up a large share of the electorate. The paper also flagged the broader stakes: the Maine race is considered critical to the Democratic Party’s hopes of reclaiming control of the Senate in November.

But here’s where things get even worse.

The app Platner was using is called Kik, an anonymous messaging app that has earned a well-documented reputation as a playground for sexual predators. His username, phustle0331, matches a private Instagram account linked to Platner and his Reddit account. The profile photo appears to be a mirror selfie of Platner in nothing but a bath towel, with visible tattoos matching Platner’s known ones. Platner later admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the account was his.

Here’s where it still gets worse.

Platner’s Kik account was created on June 26, 2016, at a time when the platform had already become notorious for predatory behavior and earned the nickname “Predator’s Paradise.” A 2016 sting operation resulted in the arrests of more than 2,600 predators. The New York Times had already published an exposé on the app’s dangers to children. Experts estimate 70% of Kik’s users are between 13 and 24. The app still has no age verification.

Curiously, Platner has allegedly deleted the app from his phone, but hasn’t deactivated his account.

“Graham Platner is a sexual deviant who should be locked in a room away from his phone,” RNC spokeswoman Delanie Bomar said in a statement. “He is a horrible, deranged man whose disgustingness knows no bounds.”

That’s the man Maine Democrats chose over Gov. Janet Mills, who was an experienced, vetted, credible candidate who might have actually given Collins a real race. Instead, they went with an unvetted newcomer whose past was a minefield and whose judgment, apparently, never improved. They wanted fresh and exciting. They got this.

The NRSC reportedly had enough opposition research on Platner that sources suggested he won’t just lose, he’ll need to leave the state. More damaging information is certainly coming. And I suspect the worst is yet to come.

This was an unforced error by the Democrats. The warning signs were all there; they just chose not to read them.

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THE HITS KEEP COMING: Graham Platner Has an ACTIVE Account on “Predator’s Paradise” Messaging App with a “Huge Child Exploitation Problem”

Yet another horrific revelation has unfolded regarding far-left Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, and it might be the most shocking yet.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, informed campaign staff a year ago that her husband had exchanged sexually explicit text messages with at least a dozen women.

The Platner campaign, though, ultimately dismissed the texts as a private matter and moved on.

Now, the news gets worse. The Daily Wire has revealed on Saturday that Platner is a registered user on Kik, an anonymous messaging app.

Platner’s Kik account uses the username “phustle0331,” which is similar to his Instagram handle, Phustle0331, and to the username of his Reddit account.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation describes Kik as a “predator’s paradise,” due to features that allow minors to join the app and speak with adults.

Approximately 70% of the app’s users are between the ages of 13 and 24. Even more disturbingly, the app does not require official age verification.

The Daily Wire shared evidence that Kik enables adult users to not only target innocent women but also children.

A true sexual predator’s paradise, indeed.

From The Daily Wire:

A Forbes investigation found that Kik had a “huge child exploitation problem,” while the BBC found that the app was at the center of over 1,100 child sexual abuse cases in the United Kingdom between 2013 and 2018.

But even among consenting adult users, Kik is no ordinary messenger. The platform has been described as “the app with the most severe sexual content.” Kik offers sexually explicit live chats with women, and is often found at the center of “sexploitation” cases, wherein predators coax someone to send nude photos, and then use the images for blackmail, the New York Times reported in 2016.

That report — released four months before Platner created his Kik account — chronicles a litany of heinous acts perpetrated by predators on the app, including a man who used the app to distribute child pornography, several who sent and solicited sexually explicit messages from minors, and one instance where a man attempted to kidnap a 14-year-old girl.

Kik was also where 13-year-old Nicole Madison Lowell chatted with two Virginia Tech students who kidnapped and killed her.

Interestingly, Platner joined Kik in 2016 when it had been under fire for being a hotbed for child pornography, kidnapping, and more wicked sexual activities.

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“It’s All So Tiresome”: UK’s Social Media Ban Trudges Ever Onward

The UK government’s “consultation” on social media harm is over, and – brace yourselves – it turns out they’re going to have to do something about it.

I know, I was shocked too.

The main talking point is that “social media is like cigarettes”. Everyone is saying that, it’s the meme of the day.

It’s a sentiment originally taken from a new report submitted to the consultation by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.

Titled “Growing up in an online world”, it contains this hilarious line in the foreword:

…there is, I think, an overwhelming consensus that excessive screen time can harm children and young people and we need to call this out unflinchingly rather than passively wait for someone else to prove causation”.

Which is a pretty neat summary of how our political system works in general, and certainly in this case: We don’t know if there’s even a problem yet, but by God we’re gonna do something about it.

That the something they end up doing makes them rich and powerful is just one of the curious coincidences tyrants can always rely on.

{Sidenote: This morning the BBC had “Overwhelimg consensus” in their headline on this story, but at some point the absurdity of that quote was realised, and the headline changed. Now there’s this disclaimer near the end: “There is no consensus among the wider scientific community that screen time overall is harmful to children.” Funny stuff.}

Elsewhere, the report wails about “a wave of radicalized children” who pose “a real risk to society”, and calls social media “an incredibly powerful and uncontrolled commercial detriment to health”.

In a similar vein, The Guardian is warning of a “tsunami of harm”, and has assembled an all-star cast of interested parties to talk up the scariness of social media meanness.

After meeting with “bereaved parents” earlier today, Keir Starmer has “vowed to take action”.

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