While the game-playing that RFK Jr.'s CDC has conducted is ongoing, they can only keep up the charade for so long. The nation is undergoing the worst outbreak of measles in over three decades, with Pennsylvania currently the hardest hit of all the states. As we've discussed, there have now been four measles-related deaths in...

I'm sure whoever thought this might be a good idea -- that would be the Dallas city council members who approved this contract -- thought no one would ever find out about it. But nothing stays secret for long, not even furtive movements like this one, which added AI-addled cameras to garbage trucks with the...

The EU Commission draft law to restrict young people’s access to the internet that it presented last week will come at a high cost: it will put online services behind age gates, expand the use of intrusive age verification, and undermine the privacy of all users. The EU Kids Act aims to protect children from...

Last week, "Reckless" Ben Schneider did Wired's "Autocomplete Interview" which is always fun. At one point, one of the questions is "Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?" and his answer is amusing (for anyone who isn't one of Reckless Ben's current lawyers): Does Reckless Ben have a law degree? My whole thing with when...

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Let's start this off by clearing the air: Stephen Miller looks exactly like the sort of person who wants to elevate white people above everyone else. Sure, he doesn't have the Hitler 'stache or a blond pompadour, but he's the same bit of unspectacular "whiteness" Hitler was. Miller is bald, mostly chinless, and looks like...

In the piece Dave Willner and I published last week about why "the apocalypse won't be sexy," we discussed how the real threat wasn't "rogue" out of control AI tools, but rather humans doing stupid shit, sometimes because they stop thinking in the presence of these AI machines. A deeply reported Bloomberg article by Ben...

I'm starting to think we have unknowingly entered the age of great American civic nihilism. The impetus for that belief most recently has been RFK Jr. and the wider government's complete acquiescence to his bald-faced lies and betrayals. If nobody can be bothered to lift a finger over that man, then they obviously don't think...

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions...

Content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Which also means it's sometimes difficult to tell garden variety fuckups apart from the rich and powerful putting their finger on the scale. On Friday, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that all of the major social media platforms were rejecting attempts by distributor Bleecker Street to advertise...

Last week California Democrats -- including Governor Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass, and AG Rob Bonta buckled under pressure and got 12 states to drop their antitrust lawsuit against Paramount's $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. Worse: they did so without affixing any meaningful conditions or divestments, ensuring that the deal, as with all...

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We've moved past cops doing stuff because a dog gave them permission to do it. Now, we're at the post-truth era of policing, where cops will do stuff because a machine told them to do it. We already know ALPRs (automated license plate readers) generate false positives. And we know that these false positives can...

Remember the Disinformation Governance Board? As we were quick to point out, this organization was named in the dumbest possible way by some incompetent people within the Biden administration, which only fed into the [ahem] disinformation around it. The program, a part of DHS, was an advisory group with no enforcement capabilities, and was tasked...

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the data on improving mental health among teens: But this contradicts my agenda! Can’t you just ignore the facts “for the sake of the children?!?” …and my political and business aspirations? Notice that all the proposed “do something” solutions...

This Week in 2016 Indian Court Says 'Copyright Is Not An Inevitable, Divine, Or Natural Right' And Photocopying Textbooks Is Fair Use Former UMG Exec: Major Label Music Should Cost More And DMCA Safe Harbors Should Be Destroyed Will The Washington Post Give Back Its Pulitzer And Stand Trial With Snowden? Senate Comes To Its...

Pete Hegseth and Trump got a dubious win today: a 2-1 panel of the DC Circuit found that the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was not unlawful. It dismissed Anthropic's challenge despite (1) a different court having found the exact opposite not that long ago; (2) being predicated on a statutory interpretation...

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions...

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation's Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on...

A ton of attention was paid recently to some offhand statements from OpenAI and Microsoft employees that surfaced in filings in the NY Times' ongoing case against OpenAI, which has been consolidated into a much larger class action lawsuit. As I argued earlier, that struck me as something of a nothingburger of a story, because...

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On Monday we wrote about Donald Trump's direct attack on the First Amendment and the free press by banning reporters from the White House. As we expected, a judge on Thursday morning issued a Temporary Restraining Order, blocking the White House from continuing this unconstitutional action, though (as happened the last time Trump tried this)...

I've written a lot this year about how Republicans hijacked the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program (created by the 2021 infrastructure bill) and immediately set about weakening oversight standards, eliminating enforcement of stuff like broadband affordability, speed, and equitable deployment, and making it a priority to heavily subsidize Elon Musk for...

The velocity with which RFK Jr. continues to break the promises he made during his confirmation hearings is simply incredible. As we get further and further away from those hearings, which amazingly occurred only 21 months ago, we may lose sight of the assurances Kennedy gave directly to Congress about his plans if appointed to...

Over the last few years, it has become accepted knowledge that the internet — mainly social media and, lately, AI tools — was damaging the mental health of kids and increasing the suicide rate among that demographic. To hear the media and politicians talk about it, this was the biggest issue on the planet and...

Originally published as an op-ed in The Mercury News. Republished here with permission from the author. Meta’s settlement with the state attorneys general (currently awaiting court approval) has been touted as industry-redefining. Indeed, Meta desperately hopes it will be. Although Meta was the only industry player to negotiate its terms, the settlement agreement is structured...

You may recall that after he had won the 2024 Presidential election, the sorest winner in the history of sore winners, Donald Trump sued retiring pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for... having reported the — admittedly surprising and, in retrospect, wildly off — poll results suggesting that Kamala Harris actually had a...

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Guantanamo Bay has always been shorthand for disappearing people. It's a place where people cease to exist, along with any rights they may have been afforded if they'd been imprisoned inside the United States. Its name is synonymous with torture and indefinite detention. And the excuse has always been the same: it's impossible to secure...

After burning $80 billion on the failed metaverse pivot -- and billions more on desperate "me too" offerings in the AI space -- Meta is looking to leverage its massive ad dominance to colonize the agentic AI (or personal assistant) market. So they recently introduced Muse, an AI agent represented by cutesy and personalized avatars,...

What if all this time, we have completely misunderstood RFK Jr.'s obsession with keeping children from being vaccinated? What if the notion that he was a true anti-vaxxer, or was ignorant and confused on how this whole science things works, was completely wrong? What if he just hates children, particularly black and brown children, and...

In what was a severely belated response to acts of violence by immigration enforcement officers, "Border Czar" (who seems far more interested in raiding inland cities than patrolling the border) Tom Homan assured the nation that all ICE officers would soon be wearing body cameras. The only holdup, he said, was a lack of funding....

You may have seen the headlines about a Microsoft employee calling AI scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history." It made the rounds on social media, with plenty of people insisting it was a slam dunk admission of criminality. I think I saw this gif applied to it multiple times: It certainly doesn't...

This story was originally published by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker...

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The true nature of hastily erected ICE detention facilities -- especially the so-called "Alligator Alcatraz" erected in Trump buddy Ron DeSantis's home state -- was called out by Mike Masnick shortly after its debut last June: There’s no way to look at what the US government is doing here and not think of it more...

Earlier this week we noted how California Democrats fecklessly folded to Paramount's demands and settled the 12-state antitrust lawsuit against Paramount's $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. We also noted how the conditions affixed to the deal are largely pathetic, and generally consist of a lot of performative fluff Paramount itself recommended and California AG...

A theme going on many years here at Techdirt has been the idea that separating content and advertising, as was the traditional model, makes far less sense in the modern era. Audiences are no longer captive in the way they used to be, with many ways to skip advertising. Entertainment vectors are far more plentiful...

Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization. Yet, people’s access to these platforms is increasingly coming under threat from courts and legislatures under the guise of protecting young people online—presenting a significant hindrance to youth organizing. In a major recent example, Meta...

Ever since Trump's return to office, almost every federal law enforcement agency has been ordered to treat illegal immigration as their first priority. This is why the administration is gutting FEMA to direct more dollars to detention and removal efforts. And that's why ICE is now the administration's largest law enforcement budget line item. To...

When Elon first took over Twitter with grand plans to "bring back free speech," I tried to help him run through the standard content moderation learning curve that basically every site created by a clueless tech bro runs through. They all start with "we're the free speech site, we allow everything!" and very quickly someone...

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I love everything about this. I love the way this ICE officer was picked up. I love the fact that his lawyer claims an arrest is the same thing as "surrendering." And I especially love the fact that this officer is in state custody only a day prior to scheduled court appearance to face federal...

There was a four year span where Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr simply couldn't stop hyperventilating about the fact that TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, was Chinese. Carr would appear on cable news pretty much every week to endlessly rant about the potential propaganda, privacy, and NatSec impact of what was (at best) fairly murky Chinese...

Amazon recently debuted a new feature for its Ring cameras that the company is calling Throw Away the Key Encryption (TAKE). The idea is to cut back on the amount of video content available to the company, and thus potentially available to law enforcement. But while it might technically add a speed bump to accessing...

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions...

Satire is dead. But it's been dead since the first Trump administration, back when people were "owning the libs" with a combination of horse dewormers and willfully contracting COVID. Bleach consumption was discussed. It was a whole thing. Not enough of those people died, apparently. We somehow got a second season of Trump and at...

California AG Rob Bonta has caved to what was a relentless, bipartisan pressure campaign to settle the 12 state antitrust lawsuit against Paramount. The AGs sued Paramount last July, arguing (correctly) that the $111 billion deal would largely be anti-competitive, resulting in mass layoffs as the even bigger Larry Ellison-owned company forces labor and consumers...

Apparently autumn is when President Donald Trump feels free to admit to his anti-free speech, anti-free press ways. For a guy who constantly lied about being in support of free speech, despite regularly suing people and news organizations for their speech, he's been remarkably willing to admit to wanting to abuse power to suppress speech...

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