Henrik Alexandersson

Frihetlig debattör, skribent och bloggare.

[Femte juli @femtejuli]

Grundläggande rättigheter får stå tillbaka när politiken vill hindra unga från att använda sociala medier.
https://t.co/Dsk8E7Yv9y

[Karl Emil Nikka @KarlEmilNikka]

I’m still waiting for @vonderleyen to correct her statement, claiming “the app works on any device – phone, tablet, computer, you name it”.

https://t.co/S81kGzgrPy

[Karl Emil Nikka @KarlEmilNikka]

Idag släpps den danska versionen av EU:s åldersverifieringsapp. Precis som väntat finns det ingen version för Windows, Mac OS eller Linux.

https://t.co/G36Sg9DKXS

#AltID

[Privacy International @privacyint]

MEPs are urging the European Commission to hold some of Europol's budget after it was revealed they were running a "shadow IT system" for phone records, identity documents, financial and geolocation information - even of people not suspected of a crime.
https://t.co/gB5ElkoV14

[Henrik Alexandersson @HAX]

De rödgröna förstörde Sverige. Sossarna lät det hända i utbyte mot att de fick makten.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Commander of Ukraine's 3rd Corps Biletsky: Russia runs short on manpower — you feel it every month.

The meat waves that were normal 7-8 months ago are gone, even at the hottest sections of the front. And Ukraine now dominates the air — from the first trench to 200km deep.

1/

[WW3finalboss @WW3finalboss]

🇮🇪🇷🇺 RUSSIAN CARGO ROUTES TO IRELAND NOW LOOK LIKE MORE THAN TRADE

Ships linked to Russia’s Rusal route are reportedly moving between Ireland’s Aughinish Alumina plant and St. Petersburg, supplying alumina tied to Russia’s war economy.

But the bigger concern is what happened around the cargo ship Arne.

The 134-meter vessel left St. Petersburg on January 1, 2026, reached Ireland on January 25, loaded at Aughinish, then moved off the Irish coast on January 28 with its anchor lowered near the AEC-1 transatlantic data cable between Ireland and the U.S.

Before that, it had crossed the C-Lion cable between Germany and Finland, which was damaged around the same period. On February 22, German police reportedly found at the Kiel Canal that the ship’s port anchor and chain were missing.

So this is no longer just about raw materials.

It is about Russian-linked ships moving through European waters with perfect cover, commercial cargo on paper, and potential access to the internet infrastructure Europe depends on every single day.

[Mats Larsson @Mats0staM]

Det är på riktigt sinnessjukt om svenska folket byter ut den bästa regeringen vi haft på decennier, mot det rödgröna eländet igen.

[WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 @WarMonitor3]

WATCH: Russia is airlifting huge amounts of North Korean soldiers and Equipment to the frontlines In Ukraine, I have noted over the last 3 days at least 10 flights of AN-148 troop transfers and ll-76md military cargo flights flying from Vladivostok to Eastern Russia.

[MCC Brussels @MCC_Brussels]

🚨 EU's guidelines hand more power to unaccountable censorship NGOs

The EU just quietly announced some special guidelines for the "trusted flaggers" - the NGOs who get priority access to flagging and removing online speech.

The key new detail is that they will insist that trusted flaggers can help identify ‘systemic gaps’ in platform moderation. In other words, rather than sticking to their remit, the trusted flaggers will be granted a role to relentlessly expand the definition of harmful content, and then to police its removal.

Brussels also wants platforms to give trusted flaggers dedicated channels, special onboarding, API access, bundled URL reporting, machine-readable logs, faster processing and access to complaint systems.

This is a recipe for industrial-scale censorship, with the legwork being done by a horde of unaccountable NGOs.

Trusted flaggers are not just outside bodies reporting illegal posts. They are the machinery of platform moderation.

This is your regular reminder that the Digital Services Act is a Brussels-approved pipeline for selected NGOs, public bodies and private actors to shape what you can see online.

[UN Watch @UNWatch]

Congratulations to Bangladesh's Khalilur Rahman on being elected as the next President of the U.N. General Assembly.

Bangladesh's credentials:
🇧🇩 Enforced disappearances
🇧🇩 Torture
🇧🇩 Attacks on Hindus, religious minorities
🇧🇩 Suppression of journalists
🇧🇩 Political intimidation

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

These are not shots from a post-apocalyptic movie—this is what the massive Russian attack on Kyiv looked like last night.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

While Russia wages war against Ukraine and carries out sabotage operations across Europe, Schengen countries issued over 620,000 visas to Russian citizens in 2025.

France, Italy and Spain alone granted 68% of them.

Once inside Schengen, movement across much of Europe is effortless.

This is a massive security vulnerability.

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

How to manufacture a crisis:

A WHO commission wants to declare climate change a “global health emergency.”

Their big evidence? Rising heat deaths in Europe.

But once you adjust for an ageing society, the “crisis” essentially disappears.

Even more dishonestly, the report conceals that cold deaths have declined by approximately 250 times as much as heat deaths have risen.

https://t.co/8T5c9Hmesh

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

Ukrainian rescue team digging out the body of a 3-year-old Ukrainian boy from under the rubble of his apartment in Dnipro.

23 Ukrainian civilians were killed in this morning’s major Russian airstrikes on Ukraine.

16 killed in Dnipro and 7 in Kyiv

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

A humiliating day for Putin, as things at the St Petersburg Economic Forum start off with a bang.

Despite Putin flying in all the American influencers, Ukraine just blew things up.

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

So-called age verification for social media is spreading across the world, framed as an effort to create a safer internet for children. In reality, age verification lays the foundation for a fully controlled internet.

The age verification rush must be slowed down, and politicians need to recognize the consequences of different types of legislation and systems.

Age verification is the wrong approach to fix “the social media problem”
The big tech social media companies are bad. Their business model is bad; it is based on mass surveillance and manipulation, and they cooperate with governments in mapping entire populations. But age verification is fundamentally the wrong approach to preventing children from using big tech social media platforms. Introducing age verification is based on coercion; the state forces social media companies to verify their users’ identities. But the big tech social media platforms already know which of their users are children. Their business model depends on knowing this. They know how old users are, and they know exactly what type of person they are. As age verification is based on coercion, politicians could instead force platforms to stop doing the things politicians consider harmful to children, or force them to block children (again, they know who they are) from using their services. But instead, politicians seek to massively invade everyone’s privacy and undermine democratic rights on a global scale. In other words, the latter is the real objective – they do not want to protect children; they want to impose control.

Slippery slope of age verification
It is undeniable that age verification threatens freedom of expression, risks increasing mass surveillance, and is likely to lead to censorship. It will not only shrink the online world and reduce young people’s right to privacy (for example, if VPN services were to be restricted); but also risks becoming a significant step toward a controlled internet for everyone.

Most age verification is identity verification
Most countries are now considering introducing age verification systems, meaning that everyone would have to identify themselves either to the service/website they want to use or to a third party capable of linking them to their activity on that service or website. This is not age verification but identity verification, and the consequence is therefore that freedom of information is restricted (you can no longer visit regulated websites anonymously) and that you can no longer post anonymously on social media. This is a major problem in countries like the UK and Germany where the police conduct raids on people’s homes for posting content on social media that the authorities dislike. Or in the United States, where authorities are trying to pressure tech companies into revealing the identities behind accounts protesting ICE. Social media identity verification removes important tools for activists in countries where criticizing those in power is dangerous.

Restrictions on app store or operating system level
Some countries are looking to impose identity verification at the app store level or even within the operating system itself. This is an exciting experiment, since this is possible to circumvent using open-source operating systems. Some countries are already looking to include open-source systems. Since open-source systems cannot be controlled, politicians would ultimately need to ban devices that are not controlled by the state. The end point: telescreens like those in Orwell’s 1984, devices that both monitor you and broadcast only the information approved by the state.

The Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) alternative and the EU
The EU has presented its own age verification app as “completely anonymous”. The idea is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is currently designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.

Read more on our site.
https://t.co/wTVKHMS1zg

[Femte juli @femtejuli]

Får du ingen rimlig respons när du censureras eller stängs av från sociala medier? I 59 procent av fallen ändrar Appeals Centre Europe beslutet.
https://t.co/LFIY78mPZu

[Ann-Sofie Hermansson @soffangbg]

Jag avskyr brutaliseringen av samhällsdebatten. https://t.co/OTzRK1knEk

[UAVoyager🇺🇦 @NAFOvoyager]

💔 Dnipro. This 3-year-old boy was just asleep in his own bed.

We don’t hate russia enough.