Governor Hochul signed a law this week banning “unsafe AI companion features” for minors. The catch is in the wording. Companies can’t offer those features to anyone until they’ve confirmed the user is not a minor. That means everyone gets checked. The banned features include memory of anything you said more than twelve hours ago, flattery, and replies that sound too human. (The First Amendment wants a word.) It covers general chatbots, not just companion apps. From January 1, adults who want a useful chatbot will have to hand over a government ID, a selfie, or an email or phone number to be matched against data already held on them. When asked about the privacy implications of these methods in July, Attorney General Letitia James said it was “not a question of privacy.” The Attorney General can also add new features to the banned list whenever she likes.

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New York’s AI Law Will Require Age Checks for All Users

New York already wants social media feeds behind an age gate. Chatbots were always going to be the sequel.

France had a bill to make rioters pay for the stuff they smash. It had five articles, and none of them had anything to do with the internet. Then the Senate got hold of it. Now the police can get posts taken down without a judge being involved. If a platform doesn’t delete within 24 hours, it’s looking at prison time, fines of up to 2% of global turnover, and getting blocked. There was also a one-hour takedown rule, but the Interior Minister pulled it because it might be unconstitutional. (He’s said he wants to bring it back later anyway.) You can also get banned from social media for organizing a protest that wasn’t declared properly. The police can fly as many camera drones as they like, and AI gets to watch the footage until 2030. France’s top court already threw out a one-hour takedown rule back in 2020. Apparently nobody in the government took that as a hint.

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France’s Senate Approves Bill Expanding Police Powers Over Online Speech

A bill about broken windows now reaches into feeds, cameras, and the machinery of dissent and criticism.

Last year, Ontario’s chief information officer told a provincial committee that the digital credentials program had closed in 2024 and that no work on digital ID was underway. This week Ontario announced a phased digital ID rollout, starting with the Ontario Photo Card and followed by driver’s licenses and health cards. The province has not said which company is building the app, what data each ID check sends, whether those checks are logged, or how long the records are kept. It has also not said who will be allowed to demand the digital version. The law protecting your right to keep using a plastic card is promised for late 2027. Physical ID stays optional only as long as banks, services and websites keep accepting it.

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Ontario Begins Phased Rollout of Digital Provincial ID

A digital identity can be optional on paper and unavoidable in practice.

Apple is building tools to support the digital ID agenda. Apple’s iOS 27.2 gives users in the UK, Australia, Brazil and Singapore a new way to prove their age: a face scan. You turn your head right, left, up, and down while a model guesses how old you are. In Texas, your age range is now shared with developers and you can’t switch that off. Apple opposed the Texas law at first but now its chairman, Tim Cook, is praising the EU’s age check proposal. The real problem is that the age gate now lives inside the operating system, and every government that wants one will find it already built.

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Apple Supports Digital ID Push With Facial Age Estimation

Once age checks live at the system level, every new mandate gets an easier ride.

Canada sold C-34 as a simple ban on under-16s using social media. Now Identity Minister Marc Miller says cabinet can extend it to Roblox and Discord through an Order in Council, with no vote in Parliament required. The bill was written to allow exactly this. Meta wants the scope widened too. When the government and Meta agree on internet policy, users should check their wallets and their passports. To keep kids off these platforms, every user has to prove their age. That means adults handing over government ID or a face scan to play a video game. Discord already leaked 70,000 ID images through a support vendor last October. Ottawa’s plan is to make the pile bigger.

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Canada’s Digital Censorship Bill Could Expand to Roblox and Discord

Roblox and Discord may be next in line for Canada’s age verification experiment.

Poland has sent its president a bill that lets a telecoms regulator order websites blocked at the request of police, prosecutors, tax officials, copyright holders, or any internet user. Sites that refuse go on a domain register, and internet providers have 48 hours to wipe them from DNS. That register is exempt from freedom of information law. The Senate moved “political affiliation” cases from judges to regulators so they can be blocked without delay. The person who posted the content gets 24 hours to respond. The law states plainly that there is no appeal. Nawrocki vetoed this in January and compared it to the Ministry of Truth. The government split the blocking powers into a separate bill and sent them straight back. Now he has to say it again.

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Poland Approves New Internet Blocking Powers

Poland’s president is being handed a same censorship bill to the one he rejected as a Ministry of Truth in January.

Texas is suing OpenAI because ChatGPT collects too much sensitive data about Texans. AG Ken Paxton's fix is to force every user to hand over ID before they can use it. He also wants a court-approved evaluator to sign off on every new model before Texans are allowed to talk to it. The state says it's worried about private conversations...so it wants each one tied to a verified name.

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Texas Sues OpenAI Over Lack of Digital ID Age Checks

Texas wants ChatGPT to card its customers, preferably with a government ID in hand.

Lula celebrated his election win by announcing he will no longer allow himself to be “interpreted by journalists acting in bad faith.” From now on, he plans to speak to Brazilians directly, many times a day. In the same speech, he promised to regulate the tech platforms where Brazilians speak to each other. That promise comes from a government that has already made Brazilians prove their age with ID or a face scan, turned VPN use into an aggravating factor in crimes, and sued Discord after the First Lady called for it to be blocked “by any means.” Lula wants a direct line to the public. He is less keen on the public having one back.

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Brazil’s Lula Signals More Internet Restrictions After Election Victory

Lula wants to speak directly to the people, preferably after regulating everyone else’s speech.

France’s Prime Minister sent a letter to Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues telling them to prepare to block TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and X for up to 12 hours if protests flared again. He asked them to keep it confidential. The government wanted the order delivered privately to each company, with nothing in the official journal. The public would get a press release 30 minutes before the block went live. It was the operators’ lawyers who asked whether shutting down four platforms nationwide was necessary or proportionate. Orange insisted on a formal, signed order. France’s top administrative court ruled the 2024 TikTok block in New Caledonia illegal last year. The government drew up a bigger one anyway. Staff were on call all weekend. Nobody pulled the switch this time, but they built it ready for the next one.

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France Prepared to Block Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram During Protests

The kill switch never flipped, but the government had already drafted the scene.

Canada’s Bill C-22 would force telecoms and messaging apps to keep six months of metadata on every citizen, whether or not they’re suspected of anything. Cabinet will decide who has to comply and how, with the first regulations due up to two years after it becomes law. Companies can be fined $250,000 a day for not obeying secret ministerial orders. The minister insists it isn’t about surveilling honest Canadians. Signal would rather leave the country than find out, and Windscribe is packing too. The bill is now with a Senate committee, which is the last place anyone can change it.

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Bill C-22: Time Is Running Out to Stop Canada’s Surveillance Law

Canada’s Bill C-22 would require metadata retention and surveillance capabilities from service providers.

Australia has its first class action against Meta over “addictive design.” Eight plaintiffs say Facebook and Instagram harmed them as children. The details are sealed, but the theory is familiar. In the US this year, every case built on the addiction argument ended with Meta agreeing to check users’ ages. A New Mexico judge called age verification “the key.” A multistate settlement now requires it for every Facebook and Instagram account in the settling states.

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Australian Meta Lawsuit Puts Online Privacy at Risk

Meta’s design choices are on trial, along with the increasingly popular idea that identity checks are the cure.

Four senior Democrats just wrote to 25 tech companies, including Rumble, SpaceX, and Truth Social, demanding they remove more “false, misleading, or inauthentic” election content before the midterms. They want independent "fact checkers," dedicated reporting tools for election officials, and notices sent to users who engaged with flagged posts. AI chatbots should only cite state election offices, “top trusted news organizations,” and approved civil society groups. The letter never says who decides what counts as misleading. It also name-checks the FTC, which is a strange thing to mention if this is just friendly advice. In March the government signed a consent decree admitting that calling speech “misinformation” doesn’t strip its constitutional protection. Lawmakers can’t order the removals, so they’re pressuring the platforms to do it. The lawmakers get the censorship and the companies take the blame.

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Democrats' Letter Presses Big Tech on 2026 Midterm Election Posts

The proposed solution is familiar: more moderation, more monitoring, and fewer places for ambiguity.

Governments keep telling us ID checks will make the internet safer. Here is what an ID check actually did for a woman in Pennsylvania. Cash App demanded Social Security numbers to stop fraud. Hers leaked in a data breach, a scammer opened an account with it, and the police arrested her for his crime. She spent three nights in jail. Cash App now refuses to show her the account because she can’t prove it’s hers, which is exactly what she has been telling them. Every ID check builds another vault of stolen identities waiting to happen. The more of them we’re forced through, the easier fraud gets, and the people paying for it are the ones who did everything they were told.

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Know Your Customer, Feed Your Fraudster

Every law that requires another platform to collect ID is also a law that schedules another breach.

Florida is now the most aggressive state in America when it comes to pushing digital ID. It already bans social media for anyone under 14, and a federal appeals court just let that law take effect. In September, the Attorney General asked a court to force age verification on ChatGPT. In October, he went after Meta for the same thing. Then Discord was sued for not scanning private messages thoroughly enough. Now he wants age checks built into your phone’s operating system and the app store itself. Every app download in the state would start with proving how old you are. He promises the checks will be privacy-protective. He has not said how. Discord’s last experiment with ID checks leaked over 70,000 government IDs.

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Florida Wants to Put an Age Gate on the Entire Internet

Florida banned kids under 14, took Meta to court, and went after ChatGPT. Now it wants the phone itself to check your age.

The 90s is back... This weekend, the Australian media’s response to a man charged with causing serious injury to an MP is to suggest a culprit is…Grand Theft Auto. Just based on the fact that he played one of the most popular games ever made. The same game hundreds of millions of people have played without running anyone over. This is the worst form of journalism: pure insinuation manufactured to call for control of media and entertainment.

Be a small town politician. A child puts bunny ears on your photo and comments on how you dress. So mad you report it to the police. Cops show up at the child's house. Causes international outrage. Now the bunny pic is in the New York Post. And your Google results are just rabbit ears forever.

France’s interior minister said this week that social networks are becoming a "real problem" and that the government has the option of suspending them. Within a day, the French had made bitchat the number one social networking app in the country. Bitchat runs over Bluetooth, hops from phone to phone, and needs no internet, no phone number, and no central server. You can’t switch it off at the network level because it doesn’t use the network.

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French Users Flock To Bitchat Amid Social Network Shutdown Fears

France’s interior minister floated suspending social networks amid riots. Offline messenger Bitchat surged.

New Mexico just won $25 billion from Meta, and most coverage will call it a privacy case. (Facebook told users they were in control while handing their data to partners, then redefined “misuse” so it never had to tell 2,000 apps’ worth of victims.) The rest of the verdict is something else. The jury also punished Meta for saying it didn’t profit from “misinformation” and “hate speech,” which turns the case into a fine for not deleting posts fast enough. The math is worse. The state multiplied each statement by every Facebook user or resident in New Mexico, and nobody had to prove a single person saw it, relied on it, or was harmed. When every unremoved post can become a per-head penalty, platforms will learn one lesson, and it is to delete more.

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Meta Fined $25 Billion Over "Hate Speech" and Privacy Claims

The privacy scandal is familiar. The speech counts are where this case gets genuinely unsettling.

Australia’s Communications Minister Anika Wells is lobbying governments around the world to adopt her Digital Duty of Care bill as a model. It isn’t law yet, and it may not survive the Senate. The 90-page text never mentions free speech once, lets regulators run fake “sock puppet” accounts, and tells platforms the cost of compliance must not be taken into account. Fines reach A$109.2 million. To keep under-16s away from feeds and likes, every user will have to prove their age first. Meanwhile, her existing under-16 ban is so widely ignored that she is preparing to sue five platforms over it. Exporting a disgraced law that doesn’t even work at home is a bold sales strategy.

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Australia Wants the World to Follow Its Online Censorship Blueprint

The bill says it is not about speech, but its critics are already reading the subtext.

France had riots, so a minister summoned TikTok, Meta, YouTube, X, Snapchat and Discord to an emergency meeting. They left promising to remove more content, act faster on livestreams and hand user data to police. Gabriel Attal wants the power to block platforms during unrest, despite France’s top court ruling his TikTok ban in New Caledonia illegal. There are no new laws or court orders. The government just needed a crisis to implement its agenda.

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France’s Riot Response Moves From The Streets To The Platforms

The meeting was called in a crisis, but the machinery had been waiting since 2022.