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X Wins Australian Case Over Private Message Scanning Rule

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wrote a rule requiring online services to scan what their users send each other. Not to act on reports, but to run detection systems across private messages before anyone has complained, hunting child sexual abuse and pro-terror material. Top censor, Julie Inman Grant, wrote it herself, under powers the Online Safety Act hands her, and breaching it carries penalties of up to $49.5 million.

Then she took the view that it covered social media platforms as well, because they let users send each other messages.

On August 12, the Federal Court told her it does not. The Relevant Electronic Services Standard “does not apply” to X, Justice Elizabeth Raper held, ruling for the platform in a case it brought in May 2025. It “would be rather perverse for a social media service…not to enable messaging or chat between end users,” X’s barrister had argued — on eSafety’s reading, having a DM function was enough to pull a platform into a rulebook written for something else.

The distinction is important because of who writes what. Social media services in Australia are covered by a code developed with the industry, X included. The RES Standard is not a negotiated code. It is an instrument the Commissioner drafts and enforces herself. The standard says it applies “to the exclusion of any industry code” — so reading it to cover social media would have let the instrument she controls displace the one she negotiated.

Raper said so directly. “I accept X Corp’s characterisation of the facts that the RES Standard has been made by the commissioner…as a standard applicable to participants in a different section of the online industry, that are specified…as ‘providers of relevant electronic services’,” she wrote.

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X Warns Australia’s Censor Wants Reach Beyond Australia

X has told the Australian Senate committee that a proposal expanding the powers of the nation’s top censor would let the regulator demand documents from people outside of Australia. The only connection that would be required for X to have to hand over documents to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is that the person is “affiliated” with a platform.

The submission, published Tuesday, targets the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. The bill cleared the House of Representatives on July 1 and hit the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on the same day. That committee will report on August 25.

The changes would “compel any person outside Australia…to provide information and documents merely because they are ‘affiliated’ with a company,” X said in a filing.

X described that as being “in clear conflict” with international legal principles, warning that the amendment “raises potential for a severe impact on international comity.”

X said the plans gave no “due regard to procedural fairness, privacy, the broader impacts on online services, and Australia’s digital economy.”

A company that fails to take “reasonable” steps to keep under-16s off its platform currently faces a penalty of up to A$49.5 million or 30,000 penalty units. The bill doubles that to A$99 million, around US$69 million, for systematic breaches.

Under the bill, eSafety could also compel the records from the third-party digital ID vendors that platforms hire, as well as from app store operators.

Those vendors hold face scans, ID document images, and inference data drawn from Australians who handed over sensitive data in order to stay on the platform after Australia banned social media for under 16s.

The bill would give the government regulator a legal route into all of that data that it recently mandated to be collected.

eSafety complained to the panel that its current authority to compel documents lags behind that of other regulators and that it’s left to depend on “representations from providers about their own compliance.”

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CNN Hack Falls for Satirical Tweet from Fictitious Republican Lawmaker While Reading List of Comments Regarding Mitch McConnell’s Health

A CNN anchor made an embarrassing blunder this week while reading off what she thought was a quote from a GOP lawmaker regarding Senator Mitch McConnell (RINO-KY).

As The Gateway Pundit reported, McConnell was reportedly found unconscious in his DC home last month before he was rushed to the hospital.

While the 84-year-old Kentucky Senator is supposedly “receiving excellent care,” it is still unclear why McConnell was admitted to the hospital. However, he may have had a heart attack, according to newly released audio of a 911 call.

During Wednesday’s edition of “CNN This Morning,” anchor Audie Cornish shared a series of statements from Republicans who said they had recently spoken with McConnell.

“We have a lot of Senate Republicans coming out, we’re just going to show some on-screen,” Cornish said. “All saying, I talked to him, I talked to him, I talked to him for 20 minutes, I talked to him for 45 minutes.”

Among the comments Cornish read off were from CNN contributor Scott Jennings and statements attributed to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY).

She also showed a post from the X account @RepJackKimble, thinking that he was a real person as well.

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U.K. Police Offer ‘Unreserved Apology’ and £25,000 to Irish Comedian and Writer Graham Linehan After Armed Arrest at Heathrow Airport for ‘Gender-Critical’ X Posts

In September 2025, The Gateway Pundit reported that Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, best known for creating Father Ted and The IT Crowd, was arrested at Heathrow Airport over social media posts criticizing transgender ideology.

Linehan was met by five armed officers on arrival in London and detained in connection with three posts made on X.

The posts under investigation included one in which Linehan wrote that men entering female-only spaces were committing abusive acts and should be challenged, with police called if necessary.

A second post read, “Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

The third post flagged read, “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** ’em.”

Linehan said he was taken into custody, locked in a cell, and later taken to the hospital because of stress.

He added that the condition for his release was that he stop posting on X.

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‘Citizen Vigilante’ broadcast on X to combat censorship

The controversial new film “Citizen Vigilante” received a free-to-stream debut on X in the wake of reports that some European nations would not approve the action flick for distribution.

German Director Uwe Boll spoke about the film’s journey in an interview with The Telegraph, noting that “Citizen Vigilante” was banned by his home country due to its violence and “anti-migrant” content, which displays the struggles of current culture clashes between peaceful European natives and the violence brought through mass migration from incompatible cultures like Islam.

He detailed how distribution rights have been delayed in Britain, blocking a film release there as well. Boll explained that the film was based on a true case of migrant violence, which entailed the gang-rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl by migrants in Hamburg ten years ago, and flips the script, where a vigilante punishes the perpetrators, after the legal system allowed them to walk free (as it did in real life).

“It’s as if we’re living in a completely insane and absurd political environment, especially in Europe, where people have completely lost track,” Boll stated during his interview. “There is a huge difference between so-called ‘hate speech’ and stabbing people in the neck. But facts don’t matter any more.”

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X Agrees to Review Illegal “Hate” Within 48 Hours Under UK Online Safety Act

X has agreed to process the vast majority of content flagged as illegal “hate” under the UK’s Online Safety Act within 48 hours, giving Ofcom, Britain’s speech regulator, a significant new enforcement win.

The platform committed to “review and assess UK suspected illegal terrorist and “hate” content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool on average within 24 hours of it being reported, to be calculated as a mean” and to “review and assess at least 85% of UK suspected illegal terrorist and hate content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool within a maximum of 48 hours.”

The deal is a notable reversal for a platform that, less than a year ago, publicly accused Ofcom of taking a “heavy-handed approach” and warned that the Online Safety Act was “seriously infringing” on free expression.

X’s August 2025 statement, titled “What Happens When Oversight Becomes Overreach,” called out regulators by name and argued that the law amounted to a “conscientious decision to increase censorship in the name of ‘online safety.’” That language is gone now. What’s left is a compliance agreement with specific performance targets and a 12-month reporting obligation.

The commitments go beyond speed of review. X also agreed to block access to accounts in the UK if they are reported for “posting UK illegal terrorist content” and deemed to be “operated by or on behalf of a terrorist organisation proscribed in the UK.”

The platform will share quarterly performance data with Ofcom so the regulator can audit compliance. And following complaints from organizations that couldn’t tell whether X had received or acted on their reports, X agreed to “engage with experts regarding reporting systems for illegal hate and terror content.”

Who those experts are tells you something about the direction of travel. Ofcom’s own press release names the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) as one of the organizations it worked with to “gather evidence about suspected illegal terrorist content and illegal hate speech online.”

The CCDH is a pro-censorship campaign group co-founded in 2018 by Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney, who went on to become UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

McSweeney stepped down from CCDH’s board two days after Starmer became Labour leader. The organization maintains close ties to the current government and has stated that its goal was to “kill Musk’s Twitter,” according to leaked internal documents reported by Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker.

Ahmed himself was sanctioned by the US State Department in December 2025 over concerns that his organization had led “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints.” A federal court blocked his deportation with a temporary restraining order.

This is the organization Ofcom chose to help build the evidence base for pressuring X into compliance. Ahmed, for his part, welcomed the deal. Speaking to POLITICO, he said CCDH will be “watching closely to ensure this results in meaningful action, not just words.”

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Virginia Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger erupted in anger on social media Friday after the Supreme Court refused to reinstate the state’s new congressional map that Democrats openly designed to flip up to four House seats in the 2026 midterms.