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Five Years Ago This week in 2021, we wrote about how critics of Section 230 should rethink their position considering their biggest allies were Senators Hawley and Cruz, while former FCC boss Tom Wheeler was continuing to misunderstand and misrepresent Section 230 and the challenges of content moderation. Amazon's decision to kick Parler off its [...]

I'm going to start this post off with two rhetorical questions. My position is simple: anyone answering yes" to either of those questions is out of the conversation when I'm involved. Dogmatic approaches like those aren't right, they're not smart, they're not helpful, and they will never produce any progress or interesting discussion. They're a [...]

AI can be useful. But so many people seem to feel it's nothing more than an unpaid intern you can lean on to do all the work you don't feel like doing yourself. (And the less said about its misuse to generate a webful of slop, the better.) Like everyone everywhere, police departments are starting [...]

Alexander Rhodes, the founder of the pornography addiction self-help group NoFap and repeat plaintiff, sued the parent company of Pornhub, Aylo, along with the University of California Los Angeles, two scientists, and an academic publisher for defamation. Filed in a court of common pleas in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and since removed to federal court by [...]

We've said it before, and we'll keep saying it because apparently it needs repeating: Donald Trump is not a free speech president. He just plays one on TV while doing the exact opposite behind the scenes. And in front of the scenes. And basically everywhere. Over and over and over again. Nora Benavidez at Free [...]

The DOJ can't indict a ham sandwich these days. That old saying doesn't ring as true as it used to now that most of the DOJ's work is just vindictive prosecutions. It's not just cases being tossed because DOJ prosecutors weren't legally appointed to their positions. This dates back to the early parts of last [...]

The Complete Superstar Photographer Bundle has 11 courses to help take your photography skills to the next level. Two course start you off with the basics of photography and how to take advantage of your DSLR camera. Other courses focus on lighting and posing techniques, how to photograph landscapes, food, portraits, and groups, night photography [...]

With the current mess that the US is in, there has been plenty of talk of what comes after" and how to think about the big structural changes needed to prevent another authoritarian from taking over and abusing all the levers of power for corruption and self-enrichment. There are many different issues to address, but [...]

Last May we noted how Verizon was lobbying the Trump administration to eliminate rules making it easier to switch mobile providers (and bring your phone with you). And as usual with the pay-to-play Trump administration, the Trump FCC is tripping over itself to give Verizon what it wants. The Trump FCC says it is eliminating [...]

Welcome to year two of the unmitigated disaster that is RFK Jr. being in charge of Health and Human Services and its child agencies. To call Kennedy an anti-vaxxer is not remotely controversial any longer, and probably never was. To state that he's a corrupt peddler of misinformation from which he has, likely still is, [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

The Supreme Court released a few decisions this week. All of them are important for the parties involved, and ultimately for everyone, but not to the immediate degree that some of the other pending cases are (like the tariffs case). But one of the decisions is worth calling out, not for the decision itself, but [...]

Ever since Trump took office and turned over immigration enforcement to someone who killed pets more often than she's experienced moments of joy, the world has been shrinking. It America vs. everyone else at this point, with the Trump administration adding hefty amounts of imperialism to its heady blend of white Christian fascism. To be [...]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it's processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch - whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, [...]

So let me get this straight. The United States government spent years championing a ban on TikTok, rushed it through the Supreme Court with claims of grave national security threats, got a 9-0 ruling blessing government censorship of an entire platform used by 170 million Americans... and now it's the US State Department thinking that [...]

The Trump empire is nothing if not predictable. Last year we noted repeatedly how the Trump administration and Larry Ellison (owner of CBS) would be joining forces to try and stop Netflix's $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry, if you're not aware, is attempting to buy up what's left of America's soggy-ass corporate media [...]

Meet the new year, same as the old year, at least as far as America's measles problem goes. We talked a lot about this disease last year, and for good reason. In RFK Jr.'s first year as Secretary of HHS, America managed to suffer its worst measles infection count since 1991. A direct product of [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The original version has even more horrifying photographs and videos of agents engaging in this kind of behavior. Immigration agents have put civilians' lives at risk using more than their guns. An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold,wrapping his arm around the [...]

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a new budget under the current administration, and they are going on a surveillance tech shopping spree. Standing at$28.7 billion dollars for the year 2025 (nearly triple their 2024 budget)and at least another $56.25 billion over the next three years, ICE's budget would be the envy of many [...]

If you missed it, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run" CBS News. And by run" CBS news, I mean destroying what little journalism was left at the media giant and creating an alternate-reality safe space for right wing billionaires and their increasingly radical [...]

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Last week, we wrote about how ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight. We wrote about how the Trump administration immediately began lying about it despite multiple video angles showing exactly what happened. We wrote about how the media called documented murder [...]

We've always known the ultimate goal was to subject everyone to biometric collections, whether it's at border crossings or international airports. At some point, the tech will move inland and become an annoying part of traveling from Point A to B because national security or whatever the fuck. The acceleration was a bit more limited [...]

Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history. I can imagine it's a fact that Donald Trump doesn't like very much. He might even be embarrassed over it. But it's a fact that remains no matter what the fragile ego in chief [...]

Since earliest days of computer games, people have tinkered with the software to customize their own experiences or share their vision with others. From the dad who changed the game's male protagonist to a girl so his daughter could see herself in it, to the developers who got their start in modding, games have been [...]

I made the mistake of opening up X yesterday to look something up, and the very first post that appeared in my feed was a perfect, almost pedagogical example of how the game of disinformation telephone" gets played. Let's walk through it, because understanding how this works is important. The game works like this: Someone [...]

Trump's binge-and-purge approach to handling the DOJ definitely isn't working out for him. The administration has been steadily pushing prosecutors out for failing to be MAGA enough, especially when it comes to Trump's steady stream of vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions. Not only are prosecutors finding themselves trumped (pun intended) by grand juries when trying to [...]

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The Trump administration has spent months shrieking about EU censorship" while actively censoring people themselves. While I've long been a critic of parts of the DSA, Americans-particularly MAGA officials-keep crying wolf over the DSA's non-censorial aspects, then turn around and abuse their own power to silence speech they dislike. They seem to get a thrill [...]

ICE activity has increased exponentially since Trump's return to office, bringing with it an exponential increase in rights violations committed by federal officers. Multiple lawsuits have been filed and, without exception, courts have safeguarded the rights of people to peacefully protest and document federal officers as they perform their duties. Meanwhile, the people running DHS [...]

The story of Netflix these past several years has been a fairly consistent one, told primarily across a few main pillars. The company has begun hitting subscriber adoption issues as it raised prices, raised them some more, and then raised them even further, all as the company attempts to gobble up more live content, largely [...]

Whatever the stated reasons for doing this, we all know what this really is: another effort from the Trump regime to put as much distance between it and accountability. Even before DHS head Kristi Noem decided it's now suddenly legal to force congressional oversight to notify ICE of impending inspections, her agency was making public [...]

I support the protests. I want to say this out loud. Isupportthem. If you support the protests, you should tell everyone you know that you support them. Some of us have jobs, commitments, health conditions, or other circumstances that prevent us from marching with our fellow citizens in the streets. But for those of us [...]

ICE killed a US citizen in broad daylight for the apparent crime of not being sufficiently intimidated when surrounded by ICE officers. Renee Good was shot by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who selectively leaked his recording to a right-wing news outlet in apparent hopes of shoring up the administration's swiftly crumbling narrative. The wagons are [...]

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The murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross has certainly created quite the divide between the reality-based majority of the population who doesn't want masked unaccountable federal law enforcement goons invading cities they have no business being in and shooting people for saying dude, I'm not mad at you" and trying to [...]

We've noted more than a few times how Microsoft's use of AI in journalism has been an embarrassing mess. Microsoft's steadily deteriorating MSN websites have been criticized for years for the lazy use of AI slop, resulting in numerous false headlines, fake stories, and low-quality engagement trash. Like Google and others, the pursuit of impossible [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a comment about the murder of Renee Good by ICE: In second place, it's That One Guy with a comment about culpability for Trump's actions: An entire congress and military worth of collaborators As horrible as Trump is never forget... The republican [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2021, 60 Minutes aired some pure misleading moral panic about Section 230, while Parler (remember Parler?) was desperately seeking attention by pretending it didn't need Section 230, and Ajit Pai grew a last-minute backbone and refused to move forward with Trump's 230 attack. Lawmakers were complaining about Comcast's expanded [...]

Rinse, lather, repeat. That is supposed to be the self-serving message on the back of a shampoo bottle, but it can easily be applied to Senator Bill Cassidy's response to all the bullshit RFK Jr. continues to pull when it comes to vaccines. The last time we saw this was back in October of last [...]

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 sponsored Spotlight episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, host Ben Whitelaw [...]

Fair use is not just an excuse to copy-it's a pillar of online speech protection, and disregarding it in order to lash out at a critic should have serious consequences. That's what wetold a federal courtinChannel 781 News v. Waltham Community Access Corporation, our case fighting copyright abuse on behalf of citizen journalists. Waltham Community [...]

If you want to understand how far MAGA Republicans have strayed from any actual free speech" principles, look no further than this: Congress issued a subpoena to Rolling Stone journalist Seth Harp, because he posted on X a publicly available online biography of someone involved in the illegal and unconstitutional kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. There [...]

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This ruling was released in the middle of last month and I really wish I had gotten to it sooner. Let's not pretend this will change anything about how this administration full of white Christian nationalists will treat detained migrants. And it definitely won't change anything about how the American government in general treats anyone [...]

Late last year, most major U.S. telecoms were the victim ofa massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed tohack into U.S. communications networks and then spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year completely undetected. The Salt Typhoon" hack was so severe, the intruders spent another year rooting around the ISP networkseven after [...]

When I get on my little soapbox and begin preaching about the importance of video game preservation, particularly when it comes to publishers shutting down servers required to play the game, I often get as a response a dismissal of games as not important enough to worry about. That sentiment is plainly wrong on many [...]

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 the first Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode of 2026, Mike and Ben [...]

Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. The President of the United States stood in his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, andannouncedthat America had toppled Venezuela's government and would now run" the country indefinitely. Not from the Oval Office. Not in consultation with Congress. From Mar-a-Lago, in front of gilded chandeliers and club members, Donald Trump pointed [...]

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