Internet Freedom Weekly: News Recap, August 17th–21st, 2026
A week of accountability in multiple directions. France's Constitutional Council struck down the under-15 social media ban as unconstitutional. A whistleblower told a California courtroom that Meta hid research showing teen harm was 100 times what it reported publicly.
The report underpinning Australia's own social media ban turned out to contain citations to papers that don't exist. Our research team verified a 2-million-record breach of an Australian beauty retailer — and found 24,000 dates of birth that nobody had mentioned.
And in the DRC, a wartime internet shutdown entered its seventh week, with soldiers still holding the confiscated Starlink kits.
France Strikes Down the Social Media Ban
France's Constitutional Council blocked the law that would have banned social media for under-15s on August 14, ruling it "constitutes an infringement that is neither appropriate, necessary, nor proportionate" to freedom of expression. The court found the legislation failed to distinguish between different platforms or actual risks, and that enforcing it would demand identity checks from every adult in France — a disproportionate privacy burden. The ruling also pauses the government's planned evaluation of VPN restrictions. Macron has tasked the Prime Minister with drafting a legally robust replacement. The fight isn't over, but the first attempt didn't survive constitutional scrutiny.
Australia’s Social Media Ban Built on AI Hallucinations
A Guardian Australia investigation found at least six citation errors in the $3.48 million report commissioned to test age assurance technologies for Australia's under-16 ban — including DOIs linking to papers that don't exist. ACCS, the UK firm that produced it, initially denied using AI, then conceded ChatGPT had been used to rewrite paragraphs after the Guardian identified ChatGPT metadata in the document. One cited study had a lead author who confirmed the paper wasn't publicly available until three months after ACCS claimed to have accessed it. The governments citing Australia as a model may want to examine the research it was built on.
A Whistleblower Exposes Meta on Teen Harm
The biggest trial Meta has ever faced opened in California on August 18, brought by 29 US states. Whistleblower Arturo Béjar, a former safety executive who worked directly with Zuckerberg, testified that Meta's published prevalence of teens exposed to graphic or violent content was 0.01–0.02% — while internal user surveys the company did not publish showed the real figure was 100 to 400 times higher. He described safety and security as "an afterthought" during Meta's "move fast and break things" era, and said research detecting significant harms was not acted upon. The trial is expected to last five to seven weeks.
Meta Is Removing India Protest Content
Following meetings between Meta's leadership and India's Union government, Instagram posts by the Cockroach Janta Party, opposition politicians, and ordinary protesters have been disappearing — including a clip with over ten million views. The removals are happening under Section 79(3)(b) of India's IT Act, which carries no criminal liability and does not legally require platforms to automatically comply. Critics say Meta is "removing content it is legally not even required to remove." The government has found a liability-free path to content suppression that bypasses the judicial safeguards that were supposed to make Section 69A workable.
The DRC Has Had No Internet for Over a Month
Mobile telecommunications and internet have been cut in Fizi Territory, South Kivu, since July 3 — over 45 days — as fighting intensifies between government forces and M23-allied rebels. Government soldiers confiscated Starlink equipment from four radio stations on July 8 and told journalists it would be returned "when the war ended." Local journalists have fled to Uganda and Burundi. Radio stations have suspended their news bulletins. The people still in the conflict zone cannot call family, access aid information, or be heard by the outside world. CPJ is calling for restoration of services. Its calls to DRC authorities went unanswered.
Communication Blackouts Are Humanitarian Threats
On World Humanitarian Day, we published an editorial on what internet shutdowns actually cost in conflict zones — beyond the digital rights framing. In 2025, there were 125 conflict-related shutdowns across 14 countries, the highest ever recorded, accounting for 40% of all documented shutdowns. During the DRC's January 2025 Goma blackout, a UN humanitarian official confirmed the response was "severely hindered." In Myanmar, earthquake rescue efforts were hampered by ongoing shutdowns. In Chad, Starlink access was cut to refugee camps. In December 2025, the ICC formally recognized that internet shutdowns can directly facilitate or contribute to international crimes.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs Won’t Fix Age Verification
The EFF published an analysis showing that zero-knowledge proofs — increasingly touted as the privacy-safe solution to age verification — are gameable, hackable, and introduce new centralization risks. A security researcher bypassed the EU's ZKP-based age verification "mini-wallet" using a Chrome extension that fed the same "over-18" token indefinitely without triggering fresh verification. More structurally: ZKP systems require a single credential issuer who can track every verification and revoke your internet access entirely. Over 400 security researchers signed an open letter warning these systems create a dangerous single point of failure. The age verification paradox doesn't disappear because the cryptography gets more sophisticated.
Oz Hair & Beauty Suffers Data Leak
On August 18, a group published a database claimed to be from Oz Hair & Beauty, an Australian beauty retailer. Most coverage repeated what the leaker said was inside. Our research team went and looked at the file. We found 2,187,157 genuine customer records — verified through Shopify's sequential account numbering system, which is unfakeable. The newest signups are from July 2026. More importantly: the leaker's description and the Have I Been Pwned listing both omit 24,204 records containing dates of birth embedded in a free-text notes field. A date of birth combined with a full name, phone number, and purchase history is a different class of exposure than an email address. If you shopped at Oz Hair & Beauty, check haveibeenpwned.com.
The Internet Forgets — and It’s Not Random
On the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade, we published an editorial on digital memory loss. The Internet Archive's research documents a genuine crisis: large portions of web content from a decade ago are already gone, and the losses fall unevenly. Community content, activist documentation, and archives from grassroots organizations have the worst survival rates. For communities whose histories were erased in physical archives, digital loss continues rather than corrects that pattern. UNESCO's Recommendation on Documentary Heritage frames digital preservation as a cultural rights obligation. Forgetting is not neutral — and neither is the silence about who bears the cost of digital forgetting.
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Gintarė is a cybersecurity writer at Mysterium VPN, where she explores online privacy, VPN technology, and the latest digital threats in editorial pieces. With hands-on experience researching and writing about data protection and digital freedom, Gintarė makes complex security topics accessible and actionable.
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