who could have seen this coming

We brought the fight against Flock ALPR’s straight to their headquarters in Atlanta yesterday with @conmijente.bsky.social @mediajustice.bsky.social @18millionrising.bsky.social @deflockatlanta.org & other local community members!

FlockOut.org -Time to start a campaign in your city!

New laws to crackdown on harmful pornography Possessing or publishing pornography depicting incest or adults pretending to be children to be criminalised and tech execs could be held liable.

UK Lords just passed a ban on porn depicting incest — including step-family relations that are legal in real life. www.gov.uk/government/news/new-laws...

Is it right to jail people for fictional depictions of legal acts? Commons debate next week.

Drawing the Line at RightsCon - Center for Online Safety and Liberty RightsCon 2026 sheds light on new legal trends in handling fictional and AI-generated content and its implications for freedom of expression.

At our RightsCon workshop, we'll explore the regulation of fictional vs. real abuse material. Our expert panel features @jere.my, @exshaps.bsky.social (@ncacensorship.bsky.social), KS Park (Open Net Korea), Mar Diez, and Shambhawi Paudel (ILGA Asia)

📍 May 7, Zambia
🔗 https://bit.ly/41Y9GAm

The EU says its age verification app is ready The EU has unveiled an open-source age verification app using zero-knowledge proof to shield children from harmful content online.

The EU says its rolling out an age-verification app for use across its member states. Users will have to upload their passport or national ID in order to access large swaths of the internet.

ALPRs and Minneapolis’ Growing Discriminatory Surveillance Dragnet - UNICORN RIOT Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs), an extremely invasive form of public surveillance, have been around for decades, but lately they have been becoming more prevalent.

ALPRs and Minneapolis’ Growing Discriminatory Surveillance Dragnet

Support Us - Center for Online Safety and Liberty Other donation options If you would like to support our work with a more substantial gift, endowment, or bequest, please contact us […]

Parents need calm, evidence-based guidance to spot everyday grooming risks. Support COSL’s training to get practical safety guides into every caregiver’s inbox: https://c4osl.org/support-us/ #Safety #Support

This week, Congress will vote to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), one of the US government’s most objectionable, widely abused surveillance policies. Section 702’s abuses were exposed by Edward Snowden.

stateofsurveillance.org/articles/gov...

if only someone could have warned us of exactly this

MASSACHUSETTS!

The social media ban legislation that passed the House is a nightmare for online privacy and safety, would force YOU to upload a gov ID to post online, and would harm LGBTQ youth and undocumented families.

@fightforthefuture.org is organizing a sign-on for MA orgs opposed. DM me!

Ad in newspaper with a caption ‘Trump and Stephen Miller want to buy your phone data’ showing Trump whispering in Congressman Hines ear

We teamed up with @demandprogress.bsky.social to call out @jahimes.bsky.social for supporting Trump's mass surveillance efforts by trying to push through Section 702 without reform.

Wrote about last week's Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling, following on those jury verdicts against Meta, as yet another very problematic workaround for Section 230.

Support Us - Center for Online Safety and Liberty Other donation options If you would like to support our work with a more substantial gift, endowment, or bequest, please contact us […]

Help COSL bring the Drawing the Line Watchlist to RightsCon. Support survivor-centered advocacy and help cover travel + production:
https://c4osl.org/support-us/ #DrawingTheLine #RightsCon #Advocacy

#savespeech #nosocialmediaban #notodigitalID

CANADIANS! CARNEY & THE LIBERALS ARE BETRAYING YOU

Both have decided to vote on a Resolution for social media bans for under 16s

www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

We know where this leads: Digital ID. Internet chilling

Call them. Tell them "vote NO" on this

On this day eight years ago, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) was signed into law by President Trump.

The Internet has never been the same.

Mass. House passes bill to ban kids under 14 from social media The legislation would also prohibit cellphone use during the school day.

🪡🧵The MA State House advanced HB 5349, a draconian, unconstitutional bill to ban minors from social media, force platforms to enable parental surveillance of teens’ online activity & subject everyone to online ID checks to access info or speak out online. www.wgbh.org/news/politic...

If training on these images was intentional the model creator could face CSAM charges. Possession of its outputs would also already be criminalized if they resembled a real child (eg. deepfakes). As a third option, the UK is considering a separate crime of training an AI to create illegal outputs.

Support Us - Center for Online Safety and Liberty Other donation options If you would like to support our work with a more substantial gift, endowment, or bequest, please contact us […]

Drawing the Line is going to RightsCon to keep laws focused on real survivors, not fiction. Support COSL to bring the Watchlist and Principles to more rooms: https://c4osl.org/support-us/ #DrawingTheLine #RightsCon #RightsCon2026

very cool that Massachusetts lawmakers, who spend all day every day talking about how they're protecting us from Trump, just passed the "upload your ID to the Palantir database in order to access social media" law while saying they're "protecting the kids"

Drawing the Line at RightsCon - Center for Online Safety and Liberty RightsCon 2026 sheds light on new legal trends in handling fictional and AI-generated content and its implications for freedom of expression.

We're bringing together a panel of experts at RightsCon this May to discuss why it's important to draw the line between personal expression – such as stories and artwork – and lived abuse – such as deepfakes and CSAM. Join us there to learn more: c4osl.org/rightscon-20...

Conversely, when the term CSAM is loosened to cover victimless content, it chills legitimate expression from LGBTQ+ communities, sex educators, CSA survivors, and even children themselves. We documented how in the Drawing the Line Watchlist 2025: drawingthelineprinciples.org/watchlist

Reserving the term CSAM for content with real victims doesn't mean impunity for other offensive content online. From content warnings and filters to platform bans, there's plenty that can be done without diverting prosecution resources away from sex offenders.

This isn't just theoretical! In the United Kingdom, prosecutions of crimes with real victims fell by 60% while prosecutions over fantasy content, including cartoons and AI images, exploded to 40% of all image-based sex crimes.

CSAM is treated more seriously than other image-based offences because it's not merely offensive content, it's a sex crime with a child victim. When we treat fictional content as if it were the same, the result diverts away resources from prosecuting real sex offenders.

There's a trend of referring to AI-generated images as CSAM. Unless they depict a real victim, that's wrong. CSAM is a term that has real victimhood at its core. Using it for anything else weakens that focus. Read on to learn how.

Drawing the Line at RightsCon - Center for Online Safety and Liberty RightsCon 2026 sheds light on new legal trends in handling fictional and AI-generated content and its implications for freedom of expression.

RightsCon prep: The Drawing the Line Principles will be presented on May 7. Register here: https://c4osl.org/rightscon-2026/ #DrawingTheLine #RightsCon #RightsCon2026

Technological monitoring and surveillance of people accessing benefits without their consent, pose notable human rights concerns

Wisconsin’s Governor Just Killed an Age Verification Bill — And Exposed the Fault Lines Splitting America’s Internet Policy Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed an age verification bill, citing First Amendment and privacy concerns. The decision exposes deep contradictions in the nationwide push for mandatory identity check...

"Governor Evers’ veto won’t stop the movement. But it provides a template for the argument that needs to be made more often and more loudly: that the Constitution doesn’t permit the government to build a checkpoint at the entrance to the internet, no matter how sympathetic the justification."

Support Us - Center for Online Safety and Liberty Other donation options If you would like to support our work with a more substantial gift, endowment, or bequest, please contact us […]

From headlines to everyday conversations, COSL helps caregivers keep kids safe online with practical steps. Support the work: https://c4osl.org/support-us/ #Support #Donate #Volunteer

Children can easily become targets of dangerous people online - how can you keep them safe? - Center for Online Safety and Liberty The current release of documents connected to the Jeffrey Epstein case has revived public attention on child sexual exploitation. High-profile cases like […]

Parents are the first defense against online grooming. Learn the risks and how to respond with empathy and boundaries: c4osl.org/children-can-easily-beco...