U.K. Might Force Social Platforms To Give Government-Backed Media Special Status

While I was chowing down on fresh seafood and collecting beach rocks with my kids last week, busybodies on both sides of the Atlantic were scheming up ways to give the government more control over online speech and information. So for today’s newsletter, I want to cover a few of those developments—plus one uncharacteristically good omen for tech users’ civil liberties.

Forcing Social Platforms To Center Government-Approved Media

Let’s start with the bad. In the U.K., this included a proposal to force social media companies to prominently feature content from the BBC and other state-approved media. Authorities are calling it a way “to make it easier for people to discover trusted news sources on social media.” But behind that noble-sounding rationale, it’s just another attempt to control what people can read and watch online.

The idea—which at present is still just an idea, not a mandate—is to “require social media companies and video sharing platforms to make sure that news content from public service media (PSM), which includes the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4, S4C and 5, and other trustworthy providers, is prominent and easy to find on their platforms.” U.K. authorities are also considering ways to make sure their approved platforms are “prominent, discoverable and promoted wherever audiences are watching TV, including on third-party platforms, such as video sharing sites.”

That could mean outlets approved and subsidized by the government would get top billing on social media, video sharing platforms, and streaming services, while independent media outlets and content creators would come second or be downgraded. U.K. authorities say this would help “tackle mis- and disinformation, particularly during times of social unrest or crisis,” but it’s better described as a plan to make sure that legacy media and government-approved messages get star placement.

Democrats Band Behind Online Identity Verification Proposal

Meanwhile, in the U.S., we’ve got prominent Democratic thinkers and activists floating new limits on Section 230 protections and a nationwide ban on people under age 16 using social media. As part of “Project 2029″—a proposal put forth by Andrei Cherny, founder of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other influential progressives, including Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden—everyone who uses social media platforms would have to submit to identity verification.

The architects of Project 2029 may get their wish: Fifty-six percent of U.S. adults say we should ban people under age 16 from social media, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. And only about 21 percent oppose it; the rest aren’t sure. (Related: how statistics become propaganda.)

The KIDS Act—a giant package of proposed internet regulations passed by the House of Representatives last week—stops short of outright banning kids from social media (or imposing a “duty of care” on social platforms). But it’s still full of new rules that create “stronger incentives for platforms to employ broad and blunt age restrictions for anyone using their services,” as the Cato Institute’s David Inserra has pointed out.

The Senate seems poised to reject the KIDS Act—but only because some senators (and a lot of advocacy groups) don’t think it goes far enough.

Good News in Geofence Warrant Case

It wasn’t all bad news on the technology and civil liberties front last week. The U.S. Supreme Court also ruled that “geofence warrants” count as searches for Fourth Amendment purposes. That may sound kind of wonky and academic, but the ruling has major real-world implications (as this newsletter explored in June). It means that when police want to conduct digital dragnets—things like asking Google for information on all devices and device owners within a certain proximity of a crime scene—they have to take due-process protections into account.

“In recent years, police around the country have relied on geofence warrants like the one in this case tens of thousands of times to cast dragnets that violate the privacy of innocent bystanders, all without even targeting a known suspect or device,” explained Andrew Crocker, surveillance litigation director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a statement. And while “the Court stopped short of striking down these warrants as inherently unconstitutional,” it at least “reaffirmed that you have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world.”

That means any such searches must be based upon probable cause and must particularly describe any data to be searched—even if that data is stored by a third party, such as Google.

“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in the majority’s opinion, which was joined in full by four other justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch backed the idea that people have a property right in their digital data. “Mr. Chatrie’s Location History data qualifies as his personal property”—and this means that it’s included in the personal “effects” that the Fourth Amendment protects from unreasonable searches and seizures, opined Gorsuch. “It should hardly come as a surprise that the Fourth Amendment might protect as personal ‘effects’ electronic diaries of one’s travels as it always has more traditional ones,” he wrote. (More on Gorsuch’s opinion here.)

“With Gorsuch thus voting in favor of Chatrie, the final result of the case was 5–1–3 on the legal reasoning and 6–3 on the result,” notes Reason‘s Damon Root.

The case now goes back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which will rule on “whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause,” Kagan wrote.

On Substack

“So much of what we love about the internet wouldn’t exist without kids on it,” writes Kate Lindsay at Embedded. For example:

Take one of the first memes of 2026. In the comments of a TikTok about rebranding for the new year, someone named Tamara wrote: “I’m getting 365 buttons, one for each day because I want to do more stuff and I’m scared of time so I want to be more conscious of it.”

Commenters pushed for clarification. What do you mean, “buttons”? Are you wearing them?

“Just to have, to see how quick days pass and to remind myself that time passes and I should just have fun and do a lot of stuff,” she explained.

When a commenter pressed further—okay, but what are you doing with them?—Tamara typed the words now lodged into the TikTok lexicon:

“Hey so it actually only has to make sense to me for me to do it and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else.”

This meme, and so many others, comes from a minor. “TikTok has been defined by children, its early adopters,” Lindsay writes. “Imagine if adults created the culture there?”

She goes on to suggest that banning minors from social media would be not only “a nightmare for free speech and privacy” but bad for culture. It would “harm not just who it claims to help, but everyone who spends time online.”

Read This Thread

And it gets worse! The FTC is now claiming authority to police AI outputs for “accuracy.”

It’s a new Disinformation Governance Board—or, as Orwell put it, a Ministry of Truth.

That’s a clear violation of AI developers’ First Amendment rights. pic.twitter.com/sbzusLjCaw

— Nico Perrino (@NicoPerrino) July 1, 2026

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