Tag: social media

Germany’s Censorship Frontier And The Rise Of Digital Control

Some achieve notoriety and fame by chance. Fortune may fall into one person’s lap, another may experience his ten minutes of public shine through a fluke rhetorical spark. In the case of the Minister‑President of Schleswig‑Holstein in Germany, however, this is a dubious honor.

In his appearance on Markus Lanz’s show on Germany’s state TV “ZDF”, CDU politician Daniel Günther slid into that revealing tone of small talk to which people are prone precisely when they believe themselves in a supposedly safe social environment – a place where no criticism is expected, no matter what leaves their lips.

What emerged during his guest spot on Lanz was a condemnable attitude toward the principle of free speech and toward critical media: the threat of censorship up to and including the blocking of individual platforms, including the portal Nius, reveals a profound ethical collapse. A growing, subtly operating apparatus of repression is now reaching us – a warning we should take seriously.

It was almost comical how Lanz, styled by public‑broadcasting elites as a star moderator, in tandem with the state‑aligned media sector repeatedly sought in the aftermath to rhetorically downplay Günther’s clearly articulated desire for censorship. Decontextualize, diffuse, and smother the real scandal with new waves of outrage like the Greenland debate – that’s how the media repair operation works.

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Miami Beach police chief defends detectives’ visit to activist over Facebook post about mayor

Miami Beach Police Chief Wayne Jones issued a statement Friday explaining why detectives visited the home of a local political activist earlier this week following a social media comment about Mayor Steven Meiner.

“Given the real, ongoing national and international concerns surrounding antisemitic attacks and recent rhetoric that has led to violence against political figures,” Jones wrote that he “directed two of his detectives to initiate a brief, voluntary conversation regarding certain inflammatory, potentially inciteful false remarks made by a resident to ensure there was no immediate threat to the elected official or the broader community that might emerge as a result of the post.”

He went on to write that “the interaction was handled professionally and at no time did the mayor or any other official direct me to take action.”

The statement comes after Raquel Pacheco, a Miami Beach political activist and veteran who previously ran for city commission and a Democratic state Senate candidate, said Miami Beach detectives arrived at her home.

“He said, ‘We are here to talk to you about a Facebook comment’ and I said – ‘What? Is this really happening?” Pacheco told Local 10 News.

Pacheco had commented on a Facebook post by Meiner, who is Jewish, in which he described Miami Beach as “a safe haven for everyone,” contrasting it with New York City, which he said was “intentionally removing protections” for and “promoting boycotts” of Israeli and Jewish businesses.

Pacheco responded to the post by writing, “The guy who consistently calls for the death of all Palestinians, tried to shut down a theater for showing a movie that hurt his feelings, and REFUSES to stand up for the LGBTQ community in any way (even leaves the room when they vote on related matters) wants you to know that you’re all welcome here,” followed by three clown emojis.

She recorded the brief exchange with the detective who spoke with her about the post. In the video, Pacheco is heard asking, “Am I being charged with a crime?” and “So you are here to investigate a statement I allegedly made on Facebook?”

She later added, “This is freedom of speech. This is America, right?”

Pacheco said she believes the visit was politically motivated rather than a matter of public safety.

In the video, the detective is heard saying, “What we are just trying to prevent is somebody else getting agitated or agreeing with the statement, we are not saying if it’s true or not.”

“So that, to me, is a clear indication that people are not allowed to agree with anyone but the mayor and that is not how America works,” Pacheco said. “I don’t agree with him and I am going to continue to voice that.”

The encounter comes amid a national conversation about censorship and free speech, including recent debates sparked by the brief suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

While the First Amendment does not apply to private companies, it does protect Americans from government interference in speech.

In the video, the detective advised Pacheco to “refrain from posting things like that,” telling her that her comment about Meiner’s views on Palestinians “can probably incite somebody to do something radical.”

Pacheco, who said she was simply “calling out” what she described as Meiner’s “hypocrisy,” said her comments do not meet that standard.

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Jacksonville official placed on leave after urging social media followers to dodge ICE enforcement

A Jacksonville city employee tasked with outreach to the Hispanic community has been placed on administrative leave after using her taxpayer-funded position and recording the video in her city office during work hours to broadcast warnings and evasion tips to potential immigration violators, undermining the critical work of federal agents enforcing U.S. law.

Yanira Cardona, the Hispanic Outreach Coordinator appointed by Mayor Donna Deegan, went live on Instagram on Wednesday, sounding the alarm that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were “out and about” in the city. She detailed alleged hotspots like speed traps on Emerson, Beach Boulevard, Atlantic Boulevard, and highways, where agents were supposedly targeting lawn care companies, air conditioning services, and construction vans.

“They are literally stopping them just to make sure that they have their paperwork,” Cardona complained in the video, framing routine immigration checks as some kind of harassment rather than the essential law enforcement Florida demands.

Her “advice” to followers included stocking up on lawyers, granting power of attorney for businesses and children to trusted contacts, and, after all the scheming, cooperating if actually stopped.

“I wish I could do more, and I wish I could say more,” she added.

Gov. Ron DeSantis addressed the situation during a press conference on a separate topic. “I know you had that one woman in the City of Jacksonville government putting out information. Look, that’s not the way we roll here in thestate of Florida,” he said. “You know, we’re going to respect the law enforcement, respect the rule of law.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier condemned the post as “illegal and needs to be seriously addressed.”

The Republican Party of Florida demanded accountability, calling Cardona’s rhetoric “dangerous” and urging Mayor Deegan to act decisively.

“Florida taxpayers should not foot the bill for deranged anti-ICE rants on how to evade law endorsement,” they said. “[Mayor Deegan] must hold Yanira Cardona accountable for her dangerous rhetoric!”

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‘We Need To Kill These People’: Left-Wing TikTok User Calls For ‘More’ Violence Against ICE Agents

A left-wing TikTok user urged his followers to “get violent” and to “kill” United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in a video that rapidly spread across social media Monday.

Resistance to ICE enforcement has grown more and more violent nationwide, with agents fired on and targeted in multiple states amid increasingly heated rhetoric. Tensions have only escalated further in the wake of Wednesday’s fatal shooting of Minnesota resident Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent during an enforcement operation in Minneapolis.

The TikTok user, who posts under the username monkeydbeans0 and uses they/them/theirs pronouns, said ICE agents are just mall cops and Proud Boys and cited Good’s death as justification for his call to murder federal agents.

“I’m just going to come out and say it. I don’t really care about the consequences anymore. I don’t care. We need to kill these people,” the green-haired TikTok user said. “There’s — there’s just no alternative.”

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Progressives misdiagnose their X problem

In the year 2002, then US-President George W. Bush did something historic: He became the first sitting US President in decades to see his party gain seats in midterm elections.

This came, at the time, as something of a shock to the still-dominant and still reliably liberal mainstream news outlets in the US. The punditry, as the votes rolled in, was one of shock and surprise and “how could this have happened?” – scenes that would be repeated on election night two years later, and then taken to their absolute extreme in 2016 as Donald Trump consigned the First. Woman. President. to an electoral footnote.

Anyway, that election night has always stuck with me because of an exchange that took place on, I think, CNN between Democrat political advisor James Carville and Bush advisor Karl Rove. “Democrats just didn’t get their message out this time”, intoned Carville, somberly. “No”, replied Rove. “You guys always say that.” “The problem is not that you didn’t get your message out, it is that you did, and people didn’t like it”.

That particular exchange has come to mind in recent days watching the latest round of the twitter/X wars. Yesterday, Una Mullally took to the pages of the Irish Times to become the latest liberal pundit to denounce X. Over in the UK, there is talk of a ban. An internet blackout, of sorts, in a democratic country, preventing the public from accessing Elon Musk’s digital playground. Similar discussions are apparently happening in Australia, Canada, and of course in Brussels.

The official reason is of course that people are shocked, shocked to discover that there is porn on the internet and that AI tools are capable of digitally altering images to remove people’s clothes (I consider myself fortunate enough that nobody would ever wish to do that to me, for the sake of their eyes). But there’s an unofficial reason too, and it’s openly admitted. Here’s Una:

“Politicians need to realise that X is not Twitter. Under Musk, X is a vast disinformation network, a hotbed of racism, hate, extremism and dystopian delusions. It is a radicalisation tool, an arena of harassment, and yes, its chatbot is a creator, publisher and distributor of awful material.”

Note the “and yes” there at the end before she gets to Grok. It’s as plain an admission that you’ll see that the AI porn problem is an ancillary reason, not the primary reason, why politicians should be taking action. The primary reasons are set out in detail before hand: Disinformation, racism, hate, extremism, and something called dystopian delusions.

(Seriously, one might have thought the notion that governments should ban online discussion forums to save democracy from the people was a “dystopian delusion”. Evidently not.)

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Here’s PROOF That UK’s X Ban Has NOTHING To Do With Protecting Children

As UK authorities ramp up their assault on free speech, a viral post shared by Elon Musk exposes the glaring hypocrisy in the government’s “protect the children” narrative. Data from the The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and police forces reveals Snapchat as the epicenter of online child sexual grooming, dwarfing X’s minimal involvement.

This comes amid Keir Starmer’s escalating war on X, where community notes routinely dismantle government spin, and unfiltered truth is delivered to the masses. If safeguarding kids was the real goal, it would be the likes of Snapchat in the crosshairs, given that thousands of real world child sexual offences have originated from its use.

Instead they’re going after X because, they claim, it provides the ability to make fake images of anyone in a bikini using the inbuilt Grok Ai image generator.

Based on 2025 NSPCC and UK police data, Snapchat is linked to 40-48% of identified child grooming cases, Instagram around 9-11%, Facebook 7-9%, WhatsApp 9%, and X under 2%.

These numbers align with NSPCC’s alarming report on the surge in online grooming. The charity recorded over 7,000 Sexual Communication with a Child offences in 2023/24—an 89% spike since 2017/18.

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Starmer’s Looking for an Excuse to Ban X

Keir Starmer has signaled he is prepared to back regulatory action that could ultimately result in X being blocked in the UK.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has suggested, more or less, that because Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has been generating images of women and minors in bikinis, he’ll support going as far as hitting the kill switch and blocking access to the entire platform.

“The situation is disgraceful and disgusting,” Starmer said on Greatest Hits Radio; the station best known for playing ABBA and now, apparently, for frontline authoritarian tech policy announcements.

“X has got to get a grip of this, and Ofcom has our full support to take action…I’ve asked for all options to be on the table.”

“All options,” for those who don’t speak fluent Whitehall euphemism, now apparently includes turning Britain’s digital infrastructure into a sort of beige North Korea, where a bunch of government bureaucrats, armed with nothing but Online Safety Act censorship law and the panic of a 90s tabloid, get to decide which speech the public is allowed to see.

Now, you might be wondering: Surely he’s bluffing? Oh no. According to Downing Street sources, they’re quite serious.

And they’ve even named the mechanism: the Online Safety Act; that cheery little piece of legislation that sounds like it’s going to help grandmothers avoid email scams, but actually gives Ofcom the power to block platforms, fine them into oblivion, or ban them entirely if they don’t comply with government censorship orders.

Killing X isn’t a new idea. You may remember Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff, founded the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. In 2024, leaks revealed that the group was trying to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.”

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EU Veterans Rally to Recast the Digital Services Act as Accountability Not Control

It’s not every day that a collection of retired European grandees emerges from Brussels’ revolving doors to tell everyone how misunderstood the European Union is.

Yet here we are, with Bertrand Badré, Margrethe Vestager, Mariya Gabriel, Nicolas Schmit, and Guillaume Klossa linking arms to pen a sentimental defense of the bloc’s new digital commandments.

Their essay, “The Truth About Europe’s Regulation of Digital Platforms,” aims to assure us that Europe’s online rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), does not constitute censorship. It is “accountability,” they say.

In their telling, the DSA is less a blunt legal instrument than a moral document, a kind of digital Magna Carta designed to civilize Silicon Valley’s chaotic playground.

“There is no content regulation at the EU level,” they wrote, invoking the phrase like a magic spell meant to ward off skeptics.

The laws, they explained, simply make big tech companies “evaluate and mitigate systemic risks” and “act against illegal content.” Nothing to see here, just a little transparency, a dash of democracy protection, and the occasional removal of whatever a member state happens to call “illegal.”

It is the sort of language that can only come from officials who have spent decades describing regulation as liberation.

The letter was a response to a growing chorus of critics, including former US officials, who say Europe’s digital regime gives bureaucrats indirect control over what billions of people can see or say online.

Under the DSA, platforms must scan for “harmful or misleading” content, report their mitigation efforts, and warn users when something gets zapped.

Free speech groups have pointed out that when the law tells companies to “evaluate risks to democracy,” those companies tend to err on the side of deleting anything remotely controversial.

To them, “mitigation” often means mass deletion.

Badré and company brushed this off. “When we require platforms to be transparent about their algorithms, to assess risks to democracy and mental health, to remove clearly illegal content while notifying those affected, we are not censoring,” they wrote.

“We are insisting that companies with unprecedented power over public discourse operate with some measure of public accountability.”

When Europe does it, it is not censorship, it is civic hygiene.

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Germany’s “Transparency Act” Lets Regulators Search Media Offices and Platforms Without Warrants

The German government has discovered a clever way to expand its surveillance powers: call it “transparency.” The federal cabinet has approved a bill that would let state agents enter media offices and digital platforms without needing a judge’s permission.

The official justification, ensuring honesty in political advertising, sounds harmless enough until you read the fine print and realize it’s about as transparent as a brick wall.

The “Political Advertising Transparency Act” is described as an effort to align with new EU rules on political ad disclosure.

What it actually does is grant the Bundesnetzagentur, a telecom regulator, search powers usually reserved for criminal investigators.

If the agency suspects a company has failed to file the right paperwork, it could send its people to “inspect” offices without a court order, provided they claim there’s an “imminent danger.”

“Imminent danger” is one of those magic bureaucratic phrases that can mean anything from “credible bomb threat” to “somebody forgot to upload a PDF.”

Once that phrase appears in law, the limits become a matter of interpretation.

Legal experts have warned that the law tramples Germany’s Basic Law, which guarantees the inviolability of the home. For journalists, the stakes are higher.

Confidential sources, ongoing investigations, and protected data could all be exposed to inspection because a regulator feels “concerned” about compliance.

In plain language: this opens the door to state intrusion under the banner of good governance.

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10 convicted of cyberbullying France’s First Lady Brigitte Macron

A Paris court on Jan 5 found 10 people guilty of the cyberharassment of France’s First Lady, Mrs Brigitte Macron, for spreading false claims that she is a transgender woman who was born male.

Mrs Macron and her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron, have long faced such falsehoods, including allegations that she was born under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux – the actual name of her older brother.

The couple’s 24-year age gap has also drawn criticism and barbs, which they largely ignored for years, but have recently begun challenging in court.

The ruling on Jan 5 marks a victory for the Macrons as they pursue a separate high-profile US defamation lawsuit against right-wing influencer and podcaster Candace Owens, who has also claimed Mrs Macron was born male.

The eight men and two women were found guilty of making malicious comments about Mrs Macron’s gender and sexuality, even equating her age difference with her husband to “paedophilia”.

They received a range of sentences. One received a six-month jail sentence without suspension. Others received suspended jail terms of up to eight months.

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