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Well, that didn't last long. Remember back in August when we reported that the UK had supposedly backed down" from its dangerous demand that Apple create encryption backdoors? Remember how the Trump administration (mainly Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance) went around patting themselves on the back for tough-arming the UK into acquiescence? At the time, [...]

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God, what I wouldn't give for another Nixon administration. Sure, it was corrupt and built from the ground up to punish the opposing party for being the opposing party. But that administration was limited and restrained by things like competent oversight, a functioning court system that wasn't constantly undermined by five justices who want to [...]

ABC and Disney's attempt to please our dim idiot king by banning a critical comedian didn't go all that well. The company managed to lose 1.7 million streaming subscribers as customers voted with their wallets to punish the company for taking a giant dump on the First Amendment. This latest effort, you'll recall, came on [...]

Back in 2023, Trader Joe's, the famous grocery chain, decided to sue its own employee union for trademark infringement. At issue was the merchandise that Trader Joe's United sold on its website, which all include a logo for the union that is a modified version of the Trader Joe's logo. Here's an example: Compared with [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations 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. In this week's roundup of the latest news in online [...]

I actually wrote this article yesterday before the government shutdown happened so I don't really discuss that, but it sounds like we may end up going through all this again if the Trump regime goes through with its plans to use the shutdown to fire a bunch more people who are important, but who no [...]

I've spentconsiderable timelately documenting how America's corporate elite have transformed themselves into the exact cartoon villains that Marxists always claimed they were-groveling before authoritarian power, paying tribute to criminal regimes, abandoning every principle they've spent decades claiming to represent. But criticism without constructive alternatives is just intellectual masturbation, so let me offer some practical guidance [...]

We've spent plenty of time talking about various people who are failing to meet this moment, but I will say that a number of district court judges have really been stepping up. The latest example is Reagan-appointed conservative Judge William Young (who had previously-somewhat sarcastically-mocked the Supreme Court's ridiculous abuse of the shadow docket), who [...]

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A lot of money was spent to make this happen. And, for all the money spent and all the logistical problems it created, it had nothing to do with rallying the troops and everything to do with giving the president and his defense secretary yet another place to air their personal grievances. This insanely large, [...]

Well, that happened. Disney's decision to temporarily ban comedian Jimmy Kimmel for no coherent reason came with some very real costs for the Mickey Mouse club. According to journalist Marisa Kabas, Disney lost an estimated 1.7 million subscribers across Hulu, ESPN, and Disney+ due to public backlash and cancellations. Disney and ABC, hand in hand [...]

It's been a little over half a year since RFK Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services and his tenure thus far has been chaotic, to put it mildly. Listing all of the various forms of fuckery that have already occurred under his watch would be a full length post of its [...]

Earlier today we wrote about Trump's extraordinary admission that he was basing military deployment decisions on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. But there's an even more damning story here: how that revelation almost never saw the light of day because of journalistic cowardice. The smoking gun quote came from Trump's phone [...]

Support us on Patreon Last year, Renee DiResta joined us on an episode of the podcast to talk about her book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, all about the people who have crafted a massive fictional narrative about the state of social media and government's involvement in content moderation. Now that [...]

There is a moment in every authoritarian takeover when the business elite must choose between principle and profit, between defending the system that made their wealth possible and accommodating the forces destroying that system. That moment has arrived for America's capitalist class, and they are failing the test so spectacularly that they're validating every Marxist [...]

No matter what Trump says, ICE is never going to be going after the worst of the worst." If White House advisor Stephen Miller wants 3,000 arrests per day, ICE is just going to have to go after anyone who looks foreign, which basically means it's just going after anyone who isn't white. This has [...]

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Who's running the country? That question became terrifyingly urgent this weekend when the President of the United States admitted he was preparing to send US military forces into an American city based entirely on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. Tim Cushing had a story yesterday about Trump's bizarre declaration of war [...]

After years of hyperventilation about TikTok's impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, TikTok is likely being sold to a bunch of Trump's billionaire technofascist buddies who don't believe in privacy and want to use TikTok to spread right wing propaganda. Bang up job all around, especially to all the befuddled Democrats whose hysteria about [...]

Let's do a thought experiment together. I want you to imagine that six months ago, you bought a couch. It's a lovely couch and you put a lot of time and energy into making sure you got the right one. For six months, you've sat on this couch, napped on it, sometimes even slept on [...]

Pretty much everyone who was willing to put justice ahead of Trump is long gone from the DOJ, either having been fired or resigning ahead of an expected firing. Trump has stocked the DOJ with incredibly under-qualified loyalists, overseen by the under-qualified loyalist holding the top spot in the Department, AG Pam Bondi. Bondi has [...]

There's a bit of a trend emerging: when you decide to stand up and fight against Donald Trump and his parade of dim authoritarian sycophants, you usually win. If you fecklessly fold (like CBS, Meta, Columbia, and countless others), these annoying assholes just keep pushing you harder for concessions. That's certainly the lesson from ABC's [...]

Remember all that concerned coverage about an elderly President's cognitive decline? And all those (admittedly overhyped) warnings about deepfake videos tricking the gullible? Well, we now have a President who was apparently fooled by an AI deepfake video of himself to the point that he posted it to Truth Social as if it documented something [...]

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One of the few, small things the US press could do is stop pretending this administration is normal. It isn't. It's motivated solely by cruelty and revenge, in service of imposing its will and white Christian nationalist imperatives on the nation, which is nothing less than fascism. So, when President Trump says he's sending the [...]

Our mad, idiot king recently declared war on Tylenol. Nobody really knows why, exactly. There's only shaky, correlational data to support any link between Tylenol and autism (did you know summertime ice cream consumption leads to an increase in shark attacks?). And even the backers of those studies say telling pregnant mothers to avoid Tylenol [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Heart of Dawn with a comment about the Trump administration's unproven announcements regarding Tylenol and autism: As an autistic person, it infuriates me no end that some people think a life like mine is a fate worse than death. As woman,its also clear that [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we wrote about how the TikTok deal" was a grift from the start, while the blowback from China started to arrive, though TikTok and the DOJ were still fighting it out in court (and a judge issued a preliminary injunction against the WeChat ban). The authors of Section [...]

I recently wrote about the Oklahoma state legislature's plan to build a memorial plaza and statue to honor Charlie Kirk, while mandating signage signifying him as a civil rights leader." That post was labeled as a Part 1" and this post was intended to be Part 2" for reasons we'll get into. We'll have to [...]

A federal judge ruled on Sept. 2, 2025, thatthe Trump administration broke federal lawby sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June in response toprotests over immigration raids. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said that National Guard troops in Los Angeles had received improper training on the legal scope of their [...]

Earlier this month we noted how Disney and ESPN had sued Sling TV for the cardinal sin of actually trying to innovate. Sling TV's offense: releasing new, more convenient day, weekend, or week-long shorter term streaming subscriptions that provided an affordable way to watch live television. These mini-subscriptions, starting at around $5, have already proven [...]

Apparently, it's no longer acceptable to speak ill of the dead. Not that it bothers the dead. But it certainly seems to bother a bunch of people who are still alive and who have nothing better to do with their time but snitch on anyone who doesn't treat Charlie Kirk like an American hero who [...]

Trump has officially given up on any semblance of attempting actual governance and moved to pure man-baby-without-a-nap tantrum mode. His latest countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence" memorandum is basically him screaming EVERYONE WHO DOESN'T LIKE ME IS A TERRORIST!" in official government letterhead. The document has zero legal authority and can't actually do [...]

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For decades, major U.S. wireless providers have collected sensitive customer movement and location data (often down to the meter), then sold it to a long list of random dipshits - usually without bothering to clearly inform customers or get their consent. Five years ago, this resulted in folks likestalkersand peoplepretending to be law enforcementabusing said [...]

While members of Congress waste time grandstanding about censorship" and politicians threaten to jail tech executives for their moderation choices, actual trust & safety teams are quietly doing work that saves lives in active war zones. But you'd never know it from all the political theater. That's why we've partnered with the International Committee of [...]

I have not written at all about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his disgusting murder, so allow me a bit of throat clearing. When I learned of his murder, my reaction was to be both depressed and a bit sick to my stomach. I'm under no illusions about who Kirk was, what he stood [...]

The Supreme Court pulled off another shadow docket masterpiece this week, granting Trump's request to keep FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter fired while simultaneously pretending they haven't already made up their minds about whether presidents can ignore 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent. What makes this particularly brazen is that the Court is allowing Trump to violate [...]

After the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump claimed thatradical leftist groups foment political violencein the U.S., and they should be put in jail." The radical left causes tremendous violence," he said, asserting that they seem to do it in a bigger way" than groups on the right. [...]

The regime that controls the nation and constantly shoves it towards the next constitutional crisis is at it again. And by it," I mean complaining that people aren't nicer to it. Yes, the deliberately antagonistic Trump administration can dish it out, but it definitely can't take it. That has resulted in this latest bit of [...]

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Look, if you want to cut to the chase: the lawyers working for Google and Meta know that the MAGA world is very, very stupid and very, very gullible, and it's very, very easy to tell them something that they know will be interpreted as a victory" while actually signaling something very, very different. You [...]

The Secret Service says it has uncovered what it's calling a network of electronic devices located throughout the New York Tri-state area that were used to conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials." The news was announced, in part, over at the right wing propaganda website run by an overt white supremacist [...]

If we were to play a Techdirt word association game where you say the first thing that comes to your mind when I say Nintendo," the answer had better be intellectual property bully" for most regular readers here. If not, well, I specifically haven't done my job very well. Nintendo is incredibly protective and litigious [...]

We've repeated over and over again that anyone who believes Donald Trump's claims of supporting free speech is either a brainwashed cultist or the dumbest person alive. And now, in his doddering old age, he's becoming ever more brazen and belligerent in his attacks on speech. He's not even trying to put forth a veneer [...]

Brendan Carr is fairly typical of a far right wing zealot, in that he has absolutely no compulsion about lying, constantly, about everything. The latest case in point: Brendan Carr is trying to pretend he didn't abuse FCC power and break the law to try and censor a comedian critical of our mad, idiot king. [...]

Everything's a purge in this administration. The Defense Department - now absurdly referred to by the administration as the Department of War" - is headed by a guy no one really seems to respect and who has the unfortunate habit of ignoring OPSEC 101 at every opportunity. Pete Hegseth is the victim of self-inflicted wounds [...]

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Since we know that FCC Chair Brendan Carr sometimes reads what we write here at Techdirt, I figured I'd post this one just for him and hopes that he watches it, seeing as we know that, thanks to his own mafioso-like tactics, his good friends at Sinclair Broadcasting (along with Nexstar) refused to show Jimmy [...]