Cindy Harper
Cindy Harper blogs mostly about social media censorship and culture stories. [email protected]
Turkey Blocks 41 Social Media Accounts Over Iran War Posts
The same officials who ordered the crackdown also wrote the definition of what counts as disinformation.
New York Bill Would Force Age ID Checks at the Device Level
The bill’s child safety framing is doing a lot of work to normalize what is, in practice, a government-linked identity layer baked into every device you own before you open a single app.
Roblox Introduces AI System That Rewrites Users’ Chat Messages in Real Time
The message that leaves your keyboard is not the message that arrives.
Australia’s “eSafety” Commissioner Threatens App Stores Over AI Age Verification Deadline
The same government that already bars under-16s from social media is now coming for AI chatbots, app stores, and search engines.
UK Consults on Social Media Age Verification While Directing Parents to Report “Hate Speech” to Big Tech
The consultation closes in May, but Parliament already handed ministers the power to act in February.
UK Government Secretly Tracked 25 Million People as Potential EV Owners
Two years of surveillance, £600,000 spent, and the program ended not because anyone asked if it was wrong, but because the data was garbage.
Republican Lawmakers Demand Answers on UK’s iCloud Encryption Backdoor Order
Britain’s demand that Apple build a backdoor for everyone on earth, then quietly reframe it as a domestic matter after Washington pushed back, is the kind of legal gymnastics that makes intelligence lawyers nervous on both sides of the Atlantic.
Twitch Forces Partners to Show ID To Persona to Collect Earnings
Twitch is asking streamers to hand over a government ID and selfie to a controversial third-party service to collect money they’ve already earned.
Germany’s SPD Pushes Mandatory Government ID Verification for Social Media
The SPD is selling this as child protection, but the architecture they’re building looks a lot more like a checkpoint than a parental control.
The FSB Has a New Word for Encryption: Terrorism
The man who outlasted a French arrest now faces a Russian prison threat from the country he left behind two decades ago.
UK’s Reddit Fine Forces Users Into Mass Biometric Surveillance
Reddit’s fix for protecting children’s data requires adults to hand their face and government ID to a third-party system that runs 269 verification checks per person.
Colorado Senate Bill Would Require Apple and Google to Embed ID Checks in Operating Systems
Colorado’s OS-level age verification bill sidesteps the failures that killed its predecessors by making Apple and Google do the heavy lifting and outsourcing the problem to a more powerful set of defendants.