@TooMuchSponge No money nor client work anymore most likely, don't have time for that schedule anymore, but maybe dropping an edit sometime when I feel like doing it or wanting to see if I still got it just like my GOAT does
I think it's save to say that is THE match everybody following wXw is waiting for. I believe this will be THE match everybody not following wXw yet to change their watchlist again. Elijah Blum vs. Ahura! How can you not be excited about this?
🇪🇺 Exposing the Misdirection: A Critical Analysis of the EU "Child Safety Online" Report
I've analysed the July 2026 European Commission report, Child Safety Online: Protecting and Empowering Minors in a Digital World. Behind its protective rhetoric lies a calculated campaign of misinformation, misdirection, and unprecedented scope creep.
Part I: The Illusion of Scope (The "Social Media+" Trap)
The report deliberately relies on an extraordinarily broad, feature based definition rather than identifying services by company name, category, or legal classification.
The key definition appears in the "Scope and Terminology" section, which introduces a new catch all term:
"Social media and other digital services (in short, social media+)"
The report states that "social media+" is used to:
"broadly define services that may be available to minors and contain age-inappropriate and or risky features… and or content."
It labels basic, industry standard interactive elements as "addictive and harmful features," specifically calling out:
🇪🇺 Infinite scroll
🇪🇺 Autoplay
🇪🇺 Recommendation algorithms
🇪🇺 Persistent notifications
The definition then expands aggressively to encompass:
🇪🇺 Social media and video sharing platforms
🇪🇺 Online platforms acting as intermediaries for third party content
🇪🇺 App stores
🇪🇺 AI systems and AI companions
🇪🇺 Video games
What the Report Conspicuously Omits:
💡 No limitation to traditional social networks.
💡 No limitation to user generated content platforms.
💡 No limitation to services whose primary purpose is social interaction.
By defining the regulated space via universal features like notifications, recommendation algorithms, and app distribution, they've quietly drafted a blueprint to regulate almost the entire internet.
Part II: The True Objective Behind "Chat Control"
This sweeping "social media+" definition can't be viewed in isolation. It's directly feeding into the broader legislative push for mandatory online scanning, colloquially known as "Chat Control".
While European Parliament President @EP_President and the @EPPGroup forced through Chat Control 1.0, a "voluntary" precursor designed to normalise corporate scanning, the permanent, mandatory framework of Chat Control 2.0 was authored by @PHummelgaard.
Serving as the Danish Minister of Justice and leveraging Denmark’s influential role during its EU Council Presidency, Hummelgaard designed a regime to eliminate end to end encryption. His own words expose the authoritarian philosophy driving this legislation:
"We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services."
This is the ultimate goal, stated by the law's chief architect: the end of private human conversation. By treating the right to private digital communication as a "totally erroneous perception" to be corrected by the state, Hummelgaard's framework turns every personal device into a government wiretap.
Orwell warned of a world where "nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull." Hummelgaard’s infrastructure ensures the state controls those, too.
Part III: Key Concerns
🆔 Identity Infrastructure: The demand for "effective age assurance" is a privacy fallacy. Despite claims of "privacy preserving" tech, reliable verification ultimately depends on a government ID, biometric scan, credit card information, or deep personal data profiles. Once identity's verified, true anonymity is lost.
🌐 Expansion of Scope: Sold as a targeted restriction on social media, the broad "social media+" umbrella means citizens have got to undergo identity checks simply to download an app, play a game, query an AI, or browse a website.
❄️ Chilling Effects on Free Expression: If accessing basic digital services requires proving who you are, marginalised individuals, political dissidents, and people researching sensitive health or personal topics will self censor and avoid seeking information or support.
📈 Mission Creep: History proves surveillance powers are never contained. Telecommunications metadata and financial monitoring systems were introduced under narrow, exceptional mandates and later expanded into permanent, everyday tracking tools.
🪪 De Facto Digital ID: Age estimation is highly inaccurate. The stricter regulators demand age assurance to be, the more pressure there's to rely on government backed, identity linked verification. This creates an unavoidable path toward mandatory, digital identity wallets.
🏛️ Centralisation of Power: The framework strips parents and individuals of agency, placing government regulators in charge of deciding which ideas, features, and platforms are "appropriate" for citizens.
⚠️ Weaponisation under Future Regimes: Technology outlives the politicians who build it. The turnkey surveillance state built by today’s well meaning policymakers will eventually be inherited by administrations with vastly different views on speech, privacy, and political opposition.
🔄 A Contradictory Standard: The report demands that platforms restrict child access while simultaneously requiring providers to prove their services are "safe by design" for minors. If children are legally barred from entry, forcing platforms to reconstruct their entire architecture to accommodate them is a logical paradox.
🔒 Regulatory Capture: Tech giants can easily absorb the massive compliance and verification costs of these regulations. Smaller competitors, open source projects, and startups can't, effectively locking in the monopoly of the dominant platforms.
About the Author (Me)
👨👦👦 Father of 3: I’m a father of 3, but that doesn't qualify my expert opinions. Being a parent drives my passion, but it doesn't dictate my understanding of what’s technically possible, what’s not, what’s actually feasible, or the severe cost of getting it wrong. There’s always a delicate, necessary play between security and privacy, and getting it wrong destroys both.
👤 AOL Child Safety Pioneer: I was first introduced to child safety tech and content moderation in 1996, when I led the new technologies team at AOL and helped launch AIM.
🌐 W3C Standard Creator: I cofounded the W3C standard for Content Labelling and URI Classification in 2004, which formally replaced PICS in 2009. I'm also one of the seven founders of the Mobile Web Initiative at the W3C where I was tasked with rewriting Tim Berners-Lee's vision of "One Web".
🪪 Co-Inventor of Account Verification: I co invented the concept of user account classification on the internet, the foundational idea behind features like Twitter Verified, though it's not really implemented as well as I'd imagined. While I'm an advocate for platforms offering optional identity verification, I've got zero tolerance for any government enforcing it on citizens to access software and services on the web.
🧠 Trust and Human Behaviour Expert: I've spent my career studying human behavior around online trust, reputation, and visual indicators because psychology and technology go hand in hand.
📱 Deep Security: I've designed some of the most intrusive security services for mobile devices, including custom Android firmware that intercepted every HTTPS request inside every app. I've built API services for mobile device OEMs, browser extensions for computers, and custom web browsers for iPad and iPhone.
📜 Deep Security Patents: Most leading security companies benefit from my patents for in app security, a proprietary portfolio covering 65 distinct categories of URI lookup, including malware, phishing, disinformation, child safety, identity, child abuse, and pornography.
🏛️ Strategic Government Advisor: I've advised both the IWF and NCMEC, the very organisations the EU constantly references to justify Chat Control. I've also hosted coordination calls between NCMEC and the DOJ on how to implement proactive monitoring on the web for child exploitation. In 2012, I advised the UK government during its original parliamentary inquiry into online safety, where I pushed for new controls, but allow parents can turn on for their children rather than blanket state mandates. They went ahead anyway and it has failed to keep teens off porn sites for 10+ years. No need to look at the failures in Australia.
🛡️ The App vs. Content Distinction: We must recognise that content filtering on social networks is an entirely different conversation that requires a completely different approach and set of solutions.
The truth is that most big tech companies don't care enough to build tools that allow people to easily avoid what they don't want to see on their platforms. But blocking or restricting entire apps and websites at the infrastructure layer is a vastly different, far more dangerous beast that threatens the architecture of the open internet.
Ursula von der Leyen has confirmed that everyone in the EU will need to use the EU's app for identity authentication before being able to access or post on social media websites.
🇪🇺 As an expert in online child safety, I am here to expose the misinformation and misdirection in von der Leyen's statements.
Today von der Leyen said:
"This is not about whether children can access social media, it is about whether social media can access our children".
💡The first part is true. This isn't about children. It's about surveillance and combating political dissent. A state that can't control its own citizens is more dangerous than a state rife with criminals. The second part is a PR soundbite that politicians are using like a campaign slogan straight out of 1984.
🇪🇺"The question is no longer if children face risks online, but what can we do to give children a safer start online".
💡No. You can't give children a "safer start" online any more than you can offline. In the offline world, the government doesn't enforce curfews or ban children from entering liquor stores, bars or restaurants. That's a parent's responsibility. The digital world should be no different.
🇪🇺"The age verification app is one of the tools to get it done".
💡This is a contradiction because she also said "It won't be foolproof".
🇪🇺"It's easy to use, it is privacy preserving and it is open source".
💡The app was compromised as soon as it was released. "Privacy-preserving" age verification is an oxymoron. You can't verify a person's age without verifying their identity. Where or how that age is shared afterwards is irrelevant.
🇪🇺"This is basically about putting back the power into the hands of parents".
💡More from 1984. The EU is doing the opposite. Parents are having their authority stripped by politicians who think they know better. Many parents are capable and unaffected by peer pressure, and they know how to use parental controls to block any app classified as 13+. Some teens are safe, their parents trust them, and the state has no business overruling that trust.
🇪🇺"We don't give our children keys to the car before they have their licence"
💡Comparing an app to a car is a false equivalence used to justify mass surveillance. Governments don't decide when a young person is ready for car keys, guardians do.
💡Forcing every adult and child into a biometric checkpoint just to use an app or website is not licensing drivers. It's the state seizing everyone's keys, locking the garage, and forcing every driver to ask a private company for permission to take a drive.
💡 This is a gross, unethical overreach that strips authority from parents while imposing state sanctioned identity verification on every adult who doesn't even have a child.
💡Additionally, people who pass a test, obtain a licence and drive a car aren't forced to use an app to constantly authenticate their suitability to drive.
🇪🇺"We do not let them buy alcohol until they are legally allowed"
💡False equivalence. We don't force every person to show ID at a shopping mall entrance just because a few people might buy alcohol with a meal at a restaurant. Some parents are okay with their 12 year-old going to the mall with friends while others aren't. Either way, it's their choice. Whatever irresponsible decisions some parents might make, every adult in the country shouldn't be forced to pay the price.
🇪��"It won't be foolproof"
💡This is all the proof we need to show that the EU and every government know that banning social media for teens won't protect them. When pressed by journalists about VPNs being used to circumvent a ban, politicians always state the ban isn't a silver bullet and will take time. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan went as far as to say "we know it's not the solution".
💡Either age verification works, or it doesn't. As a technical expert in this space, I can tell you there are no additional steps to take and no progress to be made. Either the approach does what it is supposed to do, or it's not fit for purpose. If they claim a bulletproof solution is coming, it can only mean one thing. They intend to ban or restrict VPNs to people who verify their identity.
🇪🇺"It will take time to invite the cultural change that is already taking shape in our society, just as it took time to outlaw drink driving, just as it took time to use seatbelts in the cars. Great change never happens overnight, but when it comes to our safety it is always worth it".
💡Comparing a social media ban and age verification to seatbelts is a completely broken analogy. Seatbelts are a safety feature that protects children while allowing them to travel in a car. A ban doesn't give kids a seatbelt. It kicks them out of the car entirely.
💡Instead of supporting parents who want to guide their own children through the digital world, this heavy-handed law strips away parental authority by banning the apps and websites that many parents are perfectly fine with and actively monitor.
💡Furthermore, enforcing these bans requires biometric age verification, which means forcing millions of adult citizens to scan their IDs, faces or credit cards just to browse the internet. That isn't a common-sense traffic law.
💡It's a digital checkpoint on every street. True safety means teaching kids how to navigate the digital world safely with real guardrails and parental guidance, not burning down digital spaces for everyone under the guise of protection.
🇪🇺☠️ The EU wants to ban teens from social media so every person is forced to verify their identity before they can read, share or post anything online. In their words, this is to protect children from dangerous content.
🇪🇺☠️ The EU wants to enforce "Chat Control" so every app has to monitor everything people say privately inside it, including apps with end-to-end encryption. In their words, this is to protect children from dangerous criminals.
���Where this ends
🇪🇺 "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever".
George Orwell, 1984.
.@NiKoCS_ never gave up.
He kept his flame alive and lit up the Cathedral of Counter-Strike, claiming his first Major Championship.
To celebrate, win signed gear from the Razer NiKo Collection.
✅ Repost and tag a friend in the comments
Giveaway ends 26 JUNE 2026 11:59 PM PST #FeelTheFire