The advocates of enforced age verification promise safe and secure technologies that protect user privacy.
Age verification mechanisms have, they insist, developed sufficiently, users need not fear, and skeptics’ arguments are relics of a bygone time. The newest security protocols, they argue, have rendered the privacy and cybersecurity concerns once attached to age verification outdated.
But promises of what can, theoretically, be done by public policy often founder when implemented — when practical, technological, and human constraints mount a counteroffensive against the best-laid plans of academics’ white papers.
If privacy is to be forfeited, the citizenry can demand evidence that their sacrifice will yield significant benefits, but the data provided so far gives little assurance.
The claims of robust security can be dispensed with: Age verification services routinely succumb to hacks, data breaches, leaks, and sloppy data-management practices. These failures publicize users’ government-issued documentation and other personal information.
The latest case study from the European Union lends no assistance to the advocates of age verification.
Only hours after Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announced the EU’s new age verification platform, soon to be made available — and mandatory — to the continent, the app proved rotten.
Security consultant Paul Moore, as reported by Politico, claimed to have hacked the app in under two minutes. He found in the application myriad deficiencies, including one that enabled users to evade the verification process altogether. The EU repaired its code, but Moore quickly dismantled the updates.
The EU has stumbled, joining a lengthy list of compromised verification platforms. Count among their number Outabox, AU10TIX, and two third parties employed by Discord. Add to these a breach of IDMerit, which alone compromised 1 billion records of personal data.
In March, hundreds of security and privacy academics signed a letter “call[ing] for a moratorium on [age verification] deployment plans” — at least “until the scientific consensus settles on the benefits and harms” of the technologies in question.
The manifest dangers of age verifications remain unresolved, even as regulators rush to enact mandates that would precondition access to everyday digital services on the user’s willingness to give up sensitive information about himself to vulnerable digital databases.
“Two critical issues have not been addressed: whether age assurance is efficacious and what the potential damages to general security and privacy are,” the letter reads.
Besides the privacy failings, the letter raises another inconvenient question: the efficacy of age-verification regimes. If privacy is to be forfeited, the citizenry can demand evidence that their sacrifice will yield significant benefits, but the data provided so far gives little assurance.
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The implementation of the Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom was met with a rush of British users resorting to virtual private networks, which allowed them to circumvent the age verification process.
Australia attempted to bar minors from major social media platforms, instituting age verification to effect the mandate. And yet, according to the findings of the Molly Rose Foundation, “three fifths (61%) of [12- to 15-year-olds] who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts.” Moreover, seven in 10 children called it “easy” to dodge the law.
Children are by nature troublemakers and hell-raisers. They carry these qualities — at once endearing and enraging — into the digital world. The government cannot ensure that children remain safe online, because it cannot love or know children as parents can, nor can it monitor children’s operations in the digital world.
Age verification is sold to credulous legislators as the one-size-fits-all fix for a world populated by innumerable young people, diverse in their abilities, proclivities, desires, and weaknesses. As extant age verification mandates demonstrate, noncompliance is, quite literally, at the fingertips of minors enterprising enough to best the regulatory requirements they confront.
No government knows enough about any given child or what he does every day to parry his every thrust. Once more, the responsibility comes home to parents, who must raise and protect their children as vigorously in the digital world as in the physical one.
From one vantage, it seems logical to support enforced age verification. But the technological and human facts of the case reveal the policy’s manifest dangers and scant chances of success.
Traditional child-protection standards lodge primary responsibility for children’s formation and well-being in the family — with parents. The digital world is novel, but human nature is eternal. Even in the digital world, the remedy is to be found at kitchen tables, not in legislatures.
France was among the Western nations whose elites determined it worthwhile in the second half of the 20th century to open the floodgates to mass migration from the third world, especially from former colonies.
Award-winning French novelist and travel writer Jean Raspail foresaw the threat this demographic replacement posed to his nation and to Western civilization more broadly and dared — following the collapse of the Fourth Republic and amid the flight of Vietnamese "boat people" to Europe — to explore this threat in his controversial 1973 dystopian novel, "The Camp of the Saints."
'A ban by Amazon is a virtual ban of book sales and distribution.'
Both then and now, Raspail's novel serves, on the one hand, to illuminate the folly of multiculturalist aspirations and allowing unassimilable hordes of culturally antipathetic foreigners into one's nation and, on the other hand, to enrage those who are still pretending that unchecked mass migration is a laudable policy and that saying otherwise is "racist."
Evidently, the book is still ruffling feathers. This time around, the novel has apparently prompted a negative reaction from the world's largest company, Amazon.
The novel — characterized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a "racist fantasy about an invasion of France and the white Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees" — was first translated into English in 1975 and has been published several times since in the United States. Despite growing in relevance and popularity, supply couldn't meet demand for the book in recent years, especially as the right-holders had reportedly refused to reprint it. A small publishing house stepped up, however, and managed to secure the rights.
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Vauban Books, an imprint of Redoubt Press, published a new edition in September, generating significant waves and sales. After months of sales of the title on its platform, Amazon U.S. removed the paperback listing for the new edition on Friday.
Vauban Books editor in chief Ethan Rundell said in a statement on Sunday that his publishing house was "informed by Amazon that the book is in violation of the company's 'offensive content' policy. Amazon has supplied no information as to which portions of the book are offensive nor to whom."
After noting that Vauban had sold roughly 20,000 paperback copies of the book since first listing it for presale on Amazon last summer and that it nets an average rating of 4.8 stars, Rundell said, "It may be no coincidence that the listing was removed one day after New York Magazine published a critical article on Vice President Vance that referenced the book. This echoes a 2019 campaign that targeted Stephen Miller, leading the novel's previous publisher to drop the title from its catalogue."
Rundell noted that regardless of whether Amazon chooses to distribute the title, Vauban Books "remains committed to keeping the novel in print and accessible worldwide."
Shortly after making the initial statement, Vauban Books announced that Amazon U.S. had also removed the hardcover edition of the novel.
There was a great deal of backlash over the book's removal.
Nathan Pinkoski, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America who penned the introduction for the new edition, called the reported removal of the paperback option "an egregious act of censorship."
"Amazon is committed to the burning of your fine oak doors," wrote BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre, referencing the following line from the novel, "Your universe has no meaning to them. [The invading migrants] will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door."
Former Idaho Solicitor General Theo Wold wrote, "Amazon just censored a book first published in 1973 that depicts the destruction of the west through third-world mass migration. I'm sure all the people who whine about 'book bans' when a school board prevents 6-year-olds from reading about gay sex will be just as upset."
Jason Kenney, Canada's former Conservative minister of immigration and former Alberta premier, tweeted, "This is outrageous. Amazon handles up to 80% of book distribution in North America. A ban by Amazon is a virtual ban of book sales and distribution. I have never read The Camp of the Saints (although I am now moved to do so,) so offer no judgement about its merits. But there is no denying that it is a widely read novel with a significant cultural impact on France, and around the world."
It appears the backlash prompted Amazon to rethink things.
As of Monday morning, the paperback version of the novel is available again on Amazon.
When asked for comment about the novel's removal, Amazon told Blaze News that an "error" was responsible for the paperback listing of the book's temporary removal and that other formats were not affected.
An Amazon spokesperson told Blaze News, "We’ve resolved an error that briefly affected the availability of a paperback listing of The Camp of the Saints, and the title is now restored."
Vauban Books stated after its title reappeared on the platform, "Amazon has still not offered an explanation as to why the novel was taken down. We have received NO explanation, much less apology, for the deletion of the paperback Friday and hardcover this morning."
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A Long Island mayor is standing firm despite calls for his resignation after he ridiculed a local activist online.
The Sag Harbor Board of Trustees voted unanimously on Tuesday to formally request that Tom Gardella resign as mayor of his Long Island village. Gardella said he would participate in social media and anti-harassment training but that he wouldn't think of resigning.
'Church man. He's a Christian.'
"I will not resign from the office of mayor," said Gardella, reported the Sag Harbor Express. "That is not going to happen. You have me confused with somebody else. I’m not the guy that runs from a crisis. I’m the guy that runs into it."
While the board members provided other justifications for Gardella's ouster, their ire centers on a comment the mayor left on an Instagram post last month.
Animal rights activist Rebecca Chavez shared a video on March 6 in which she grooves to a song with a dog in her lap while her masculine lesbian lover dances in the background.
Gardella — a Sag Harbor resident for over 30 years who runs a plumbing company, served as chief of the local fire department, and served in military intelligence during the Cold War — reportedly commented, "What's that thing in the background? A guy? A girl? Some creature?"
Chavez wasted no time tracking down Gardella and making a stink, noting in a video, "Church man. He's a Christian. And a mayor?!"
Chavez's characterization of Gardella as a "church man" may be the result of her superficial reading of an event posting advertising a talk the mayor gave at "The Church," a creative center on Long Island.
The Texas-based lesbian, committed to giving a "Master Class in pettiness and accountability," stated, "I would expect an elected official and Christian man like yourself to behave better."
Chavez then directed her followers to "send him a few emails to remind him that his behavior is unbecoming of a public servant."
Deputy Mayor Edward Haye noted during a village board meeting last month, "We were made aware on March 9, yesterday, of a social media comment attributed to Mayor Gardella that disparaged members of the LGBT community."
"Sag Harbor has long prided itself being a welcoming and a tolerant village, and those values deeply matter to us both as members of the village board and as residents," continued Haye. "While the comment appears to have been made on a personal social media account, it has understandably caused concern and hurt within our community."
Gardella apologized, but that evidently wasn't enough for the activist.
"They always make an apology after the fact. So for me, his apology is not genuine," Chavez told News 12 Westchester, revealing an apparent confusion about how apologies work.
The mayor's thin-skinned peers had the village launch an investigation into his comment.
The investigation culminated in a report that accused the mayor of violating the village government's social media policy and anti-harassment policy and claimed that his 12-word comment was "disruptive to operations, negatively impacted members of the community, and created the false impression that village leadership does not support or tolerate diversity," reported the Express.
On the basis of the report, the board voted to censure the mayor.
"I’m not going to resign as mayor of this village," Gardella, who was first elected in 2023, reiterated on Tuesday. "I would also say that I never sought to be mayor of this village. The residents of this village came to me and asked me to lead them. And I hope I can lead us out of this mess and at some point be able to work together with the board."
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It didn't take long for a federal government agency originally designed to censor certain foreign entities and curate their narratives on terrorism to be turned on Americans.
Then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order in 2011 establishing the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications within the State Department — an agency tasked initially with "using communication tools to reduce radicalization by terrorists and extremist violence and terrorism that threaten the interests and national security of the United States."
Obama broadened the mission of the agency and renamed it the Global Engagement Center in another executive order just months prior to President Donald Trump's electoral victory in 2016.
'Greatest level of disinformation risk.'
The Global Engagement Center — overseen by a steering committee of deep-state officials, codified into law in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, and afforded both grant-making authorities and the ability to "leverage expertise from outside the federal government" — eventually became, as one former intelligence source told investigative reporter Matt Taibbi, "an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex."
In the final days of the first Trump presidency, the deep state and its censorship contractors — desperate to control the narratives about the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 virus — apparently turned this "disinformation complex" on Blaze Media in a proof-of-concept test.
According to discovery evidence gleaned by the Federalist in a now-settled case against the government, the Global Engagement Center backed a trial targeting Blaze Media and the free speech it platforms, despite concerns at the State Department about possibly censoring an American company with an American audience in contravention of the agency's foreign-focused mandate.
The Global Engagement Center — which Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged "actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving" — was nominally closed in January 2025, then effectively killed by the Trump administration last April under its final name, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub.
Two years prior to the agency's demise, the Federalist and several other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the Global Engagement Center and the State Department.
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The lawsuit accused the government of actively intervening in the news media market through the Global Engagement Center "to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press."
Prior to negotiating a deal with the State Department and settling the case last week, the Federalist obtained discovery evidence confirming that the Global Engagement Center had regularly backed and promoted censorial technologies including NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index.
Blaze Media previously reported that NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index generated blacklists of supposedly risky or misleading news outfits with the aim of getting them demonetized and directing funds to news organizations that advanced establishment narratives.
In the Global Disinformation Index's fall 2022 report, for example, NPR, the Washington Post, and other liberal news outfits were labeled as the "least risky sites," whereas Blaze Media, Reason, the Federalist, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, and other conservative publications made the top 10 list of "riskiest sites" and were smeared as having the "greatest level of disinformation risk."
It turns out that Blaze Media was targeted for more than just a blacklist.
In an August 2020 press release, NewsGuard showcased that it and two other technology companies — PeakMetrics and Omelas — had won a $25,000 contract earlier that year offered jointly by the State Department and the Pentagon to develop solutions that would help the departments evaluate "disinformation narrative themes in near real time 'by identifying online sources spreading COVID-19 disinformation or misinformation narratives.'"
The Federalist obtained evidence that these Global Engagement Center-funded companies ran a test from Dec. 14, 2020, until Jan. 7, 2021, wherein Blaze Media was apparently a featured target.
The Global Engagement Center reportedly explained ahead of time that the test would entail PeakMetrics "first identify[ing] popular yet potentially divisive narratives relevant to the U.S. elections that are trending across channels."
Omelas, in turn, was supposed to provide "evidence of direct attribution of these narratives to state-sponsored sources of disinformation."
After PeakMetrics and Omelas assessed which narratives were becoming "integrated into domestic messaging," NewsGuard "would highlight which sites the narratives continue to surface from and 'provide information on the reliability, popularity, and endurance of the sites and dissemination platforms,'" reported the Federalist.
This proposed plan apparently made at least one person at the State Department uncomfortable. In a September 2020 email, the person apologized for a lack of clarity regarding the proposed test, noting that the agency had "explained to CYBERCOM" that it would be "impossible" to "focus on domestic audiences" and that "this test will NOT focus on US audiences."
A PeakMetrics report — produced by the State Department and reviewed by the Federalist — suggested these reassurances, which prompted a department official to approve the test, were misleading.
The report explained that the outfits "collaborated to create a mockup of a joint dashboard incorporating all three companies' capabilities."
PeakMetrics noted further that it had performed a preliminary analysis on "Omelas' 'Unrest and Violence in America' narrative," then integrated its "technology enrichment for sources," allowing "operators to garner insights such as technology stacks used for a site, IP addresses (and IP2GEO) associated with the site, and potentially affiliated sites using the same ID for particular technologies."
The report added that "analysis of this metadata can provide unique insights into networks of disinformation propagators."
PeakMetrics' report featured two examples of so-called "disinformation propagators": Sputnik News — a Russian state-owned news agency — and Blaze Media, one of America's largest independent media companies, which the report claimed had a "record of promoting conspiracies [sic] and misinformation surrounding prominent figures and elections."
Through a grant of over $2 million to a third party, the State Department funded the testing of the three companies' technology and financed the test bed on which they collaborated, the Federalist noted.
"Our government financed testing for private technology companies to improve their products — products that target American[s’] speech and seek to silence domestic media outlets," the Federalist summarized.
PeakMetrics and Omelas did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
Matt Skibinski, the COO of NewsGuard, attempted to downplay the finding, telling Blaze News, "This small contract with the Trump administration's Global Engagement Center was exclusively for the purpose of tracking narratives emanating from Chinese and Russian media outlets. The scope of work was extremely specific, even going so far as to list the foreign-owned publications that would be the subject of our monitoring."
Skibinski did not deny that Blaze Media was used in the test.
"PeakMetrics simply incorporated that publicly available rating into its dashboard to test whether this would be useful," said Skibinski. "Again, this was not part of the scope of work we were paid for, and again, The Blaze [sic] was rated well before we had this unrelated small Trump administration [Global Engagement Center] contract covering foreign disinformation."
"We did it because we thought it might be a useful capability that could lead us to future contracts," said Skibinski.
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'The Commission agrees that it may not consider irrelevant factors in performing its function and specifically agrees that it will not take into account the perceived political beliefs, political speech, or labor practices of SpaceX or its officers.'
Jean Raspail’s ‘The Camp of the Saints’ isn’t a racist screed, it’s a story about how civilizations die.
Stripping Eastman of his livelihood sends a chilling message that representing a client with the 'wrong' views is career suicide in Democrat-led states.
Blum quotes precisely one fan from the stadium, who says, actual quote, “I think it’s a good thing." See all the CONTROVERSY!?!?!?!?
'Disinformation' firms weaponized the 'misinformation' designation to 'promote the demonetization of disfavored political viewpoints.'
Should we use a scalpel to turn boys into girls? That's not a value judgment or a debate, because it's just a clinical decision to be made by trained experts.
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