US Censorship News

US Chief District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a New Mexico abatement fund. He refused to overtly order age verification across Facebook and Instagram. But then he ordered a narrower version of it, aimed at the accounts Meta's own systems predict belong to children under 13, which would ultimately lead to age verification anyway.

New Mexico Attorney General Raoul Torrez sued Meta and Mark Zuckerberg in 2023, alleging that the company failed to protect children from abuse, online solicitation and human trafficking. This legal action was addressed in two trials:

A Santa Fe jury in March found 75,000 violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act and imposed $375 million in civil penalties , the maximum state law allows. The jury determined that the company knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

Now a second, bench asked whether the platforms are a public nuisance, and Biedscheid concluded that they are a significant contributing cause of the teen mental health crisis in New Mexico.

Torrez had asked the court to require Meta to apply various age-verification tools on its platforms , accurate to 99%, enough to keep under-13s off the apps entirely.

Because of the COPPA Rule, it is the Court's conclusion that it cannot order Meta to request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age-verification purposes, Biedscheid wrote. But how would Meta know that an account belongs to someone under 13 without at the very least passively tracking them, what they write, say, and do?

What Biedscheid did order on age came from Meta. He adopted the company's own proposed relief, calling it far from ideal or sufficient and, all the same, most appropriate. Meta must keep improving its age assurance models in New Mexico using AI tools, and must attempt within two years to build a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model. Where it cannot estimate a precise age, it must treat the user as under 13 or under 18 until they verify. And verify here likely means adults have to show ID to speak online, even though Judge Biedscheid said he wasn't mandating that.

Meta must also delete the personal information it has already collected on under-13s, and build a portal with schools or a child safety organization for flagging suspected underage accounts.

The money will be paid over five years, with $420 million of it going to treatment and the rest to awareness, prevention, screening, referral and evaluation. It comes on top of the March penalties.

 

Comment: The Meta Settlement: What It Means for Your Speech and Privacy

Under the teen safety provisions is a court-supervised identity system for every Facebook and Instagram user.

See article from reclaimthenet.org

The US State Department is developing an online portal that will allow users in Europe and other regions to view content banned by their governments. Three sources familiar with the plan told Reuters that Washington sees the initiative as a way to counter censorship.

The site will operate at freedom.gov, according to the sources. One of the sources said officials have discussed including a VPN (virtual private network) feature that would make user traffic appear to originate in the United States. The same source added that user activity on the site will not be tracked. The project is being led by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers.

In a statement to Reuters, a State Department spokesman said the US government does not have a specific censorship circumvention program for Europe, but stressed that digital freedom is a priority for the State Department, and this includes the proliferation of privacy and censorship circumvention technologies like VPNs.

The Trump administration has placed freedom of expression at the center of its foreign policy, especially in cases where it assesses that conservative voices are being restricted online, including in Europe and Brazil.

EU censors regularly ask US-based platforms to remove content and, as a last resort, can impose bans. Platform X, owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, was fined 120 million euros in December for failing to comply with the rules.

In Germany, during 2024, authorities issued 482 removal orders for material they deemed to support or incite terrorism and forced providers to delete 16,771 pieces of content. Similarly, Metas supervisory board in 2024 ordered the removal of posts by a Polish political party that used racial slurs and portrayed immigrants as rapists, a category that EU law treats as illegal hate speech.

Florida has selected a few victims for its recently introduces ID/age verification internet censorship law. Florida's attorney general James Uthmeier filed two separate lawsuits against Lustyheroes.com and also Aylo, the parent company of Nutaku.net and SpiceVids.com. The dual suits allege that the three websites have violated HB 3, the state law that went into effect in January and forced explicit websites to verify the ID/ages of Florida users.

According to Uthmeier, all three websites have skirted the responsibility of ensuring that people visiting them are at least 18 years old. As such, he's serving them fresh lawsuits to ostensibly make examples out of them. He said in a press release:

We passed strong legislation to keep kids from being exposed to harmful and toxic material, and instead of following it, these platforms ignored it. We are taking them to court to make sure they cannot continue bypassing Florida's common sense safeguards.

LustyHeroes is an online video game with sexy female players. It is very heavily pushed in adverts found on porn tube site.

Nutaku.net is a subscription site for multiple sexy video games whilst  SpiceVids.com is a subscription site for regular porn videos.

Aylo said both Nutaku and SpiceVids have complied with the legislation since it went into effect earlier this year, adding:

We intend to vigorously defend against these allegations in court. These platforms are committed to ongoing compliance with applicable state laws. We look forward to presenting the facts through the appropriate legal process.

If you live in Mississippi, you may have noticed that you are no longer able to log into your Bluesky or Dreamwidth accounts from within the state. Thats because, in a chilling early warning sign for the U.S., both social platforms decided to block all users in Mississippi from their services rather than risk hefty fines under the states oppressive age verification mandate.

If this sounds like censorship to you, youre right--it is. But its not these small platforms fault. This is the unfortunate result of Mississippis wide-sweeping age verification law, H.B. 1126 . Though the law had previously been blocked by a federal district court, the Supreme Court lifted that injunction last month, even as one justice (Kavanaugh) concluded that the law is 'likely unconstitutional.' This allows H.B. 1126 to go into effect while the broader constitutional challenge works its way through the courts. EFF has opposed H.B. 1126 from the start, arguing consistently and constantly that it violates all internet users First Amendment rights, seriously risks our privacy , and forces platforms to implement invasive surveillance systems that ruin our anonymity .

Lawmakers often sell age-verification mandates as a silver bullet for Big Techs harms, but in practice, these laws do nothing to rein in the tech giants. Instead, they end up crushing smaller platforms that cant absorb the exorbitant costs. Now that Mississippis mandate has gone into effect, the reality is clear: age verification laws entrench Big Techs dominance, while pushing smaller communities like Bluesky and Dreamwidth offline altogether.

Sorry Mississippians, We Cant Afford You

Bluesky was the first platform to make the announcement. In a public blogpost , Bluesky condemned H.B. 1126s broad scope, barriers to innovation, and privacy implications, explaining that the law forces platforms to 'make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site--or risk massive fines.' As Bluesky noted, 'This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.' Instead, Bluesky made the decision to cut off Mississippians entirely until the courts consider whether to overturn the law.

About a week later, we saw a similar announcement from Dreamwidth, an open-source online community similar to LiveJournal where users share creative writing, fanfiction, journals, and other works. In its post, Dreamwidth shared that it too would have to resort to blocking the IP addresses of all users in Mississippi because it could not afford the hefty fines.

Dreamwidth wrote: 'Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat.' The service also expressed fear that being involved in the lawsuit against Mississippi left it particularly vulnerable to retaliation--a clear illustration of the chilling effect of these laws. For Dreamwidth, blocking Mississippi users entirely was the only way to survive.

Age Verification Mandates Dont Rein In Big Tech--They Entrench It

Proponents of age verification claim that these mandates will hold Big Tech companies accountable for their outsized influence, but really the opposite is true. As we can see from Mississippi, age verification mandates concentrate and consolidate power in the hands of the largest companies--the only entities with the resources to build costly compliance systems and absorb potentially massive fines. While megacorporations like Google (with YouTube) and Meta (with Instagram) are already experimenting with creepy new age-estimation tech on their social platforms, smaller sites like Bluesky and Dreamwidth simply cannot afford the risks.

Weve already seen how this plays out in the UK. When the Online Safety Act came into force recently, platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and Spotify implemented broad (and extremely clunky ) age verification measures while smaller sites , including forums on parenting , green living , and gaming on Linux , were forced to shutter. Take, for example, the Hamster Forum , 'home of all things hamstery,' which announced in March 2025 that the OSA would force it to shut down its community message boards. Instead, users were directed to migrate over to Instagram with this wistful disclaimer: 'It will not be the same by any means, but . . . We can follow each other and message on there and see each others [sic] individual posts and share our hammy photos and updates still.'

When smaller platforms inevitably cave under the financial pressure of these mandates, users will be pushed back to the social media giants.

This perfectly illustrates the market impact of online age verification laws. When smaller platforms inevitably cave under the financial pressure of these mandates, users will be pushed back to the social media giants. These huge companies--those that can afford expensive age verification systems and arent afraid of a few $10,000 fines while they figure out compliance--will end up getting more business, more traffic, and more power to censor users and violate their privacy.

This consolidation of power is a dream come true for the Big Tech platforms, but its a nightmare for users. While the megacorporations get more traffic and a whole lot more user data (read: profit), users are left with far fewer community options and a bland, corporate surveillance machine instead of a vibrant public sphere. The internet we all fell in love with is a diverse and colorful place, full of innovation, connection, and unique opportunities for self-expression. That internet-- our internet--is worth defending.