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Five Years Ago This week in 2021, we looked at how state laws around community broadband were harming communities during the pandemic, just as one Congressional representative introduced a new such law to do so nationwide. Minneapolis joined the list of cities banning facial recognition tech, while it was revealed that CBP's use of the [...]

The Trump administration's project for erasing the parts of American history they find inconvenient continues unabated. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hit the occasional roadblock. In January, the administration removed portions of an exhibit at the former Philadelphia home of George Washington that made reference to 9 slaves he owned that spent time at [...]

We are calling on technology companies like Meta and Google to stand up for their users by resisting the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) lawless administrative subpoenas for user data. In the past year, DHShas consistently targeted people engaged in First Amendment activity. Among other things, the agency has issued subpoenas to technology companies to [...]

It's all well and good that we have a system of laws and rules in place. For the most part, the bumpers on the bowling lane help keep a lot of stuff on the field of play (to mix metaphors), even if powerful politicians would rather have the rules apply to everyone else but them. [...]

I seem to recall a years-long freakout among MAGA folks about the Biden administration pressuring social media companies to remove content. You may have heard about it. Anyway. In unrelated news FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), has filed suit against Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on behalf of [...]

Trump couldn't accept the fact that he lost the 2020 election. So he stood idly by (if you believe his narrative) or urged on (if you believe your own eyes and ears) his supporters to raid the Capitol building to seize the election from the electorate. If that meant killing his own vice president, so [...]

The Academy of Game Art Bundle teaches you the basics of how to create video game art. You'll learn how to use Inkscape to create logos, 2D backgrounds, pre-defined modules, UI designs, and characters. A course on using DragonBones will teach you how to animate your characters as well. The bundle is on sale for [...]

We've written a few times now about how the GOP's free speech warriors" have been waging an absolutely absurd campaign against NewsGuard, a company whose entire business model is... expressing opinions about the reliability of news sources. You know, speech. The kind of thing that's supposed to be protected by that First Amendment thing the [...]

One recurring theme of this era: folks who actually choose to stand up to this bumbling kakistocracy of hateful failsons usually tend to win if they stick together. Those that prematurely bend the knee in abject cowardice (like say, CBS, countless law firms, or numerous university administrators) will hopefully be remembered for it. It happened [...]

Remember how Donald Trump was going to drain the swamp" as president? The idea, spilling out from his first campaign for president, was that Washington was horribly corrupt, that politicians and unelected government stooges were making money from their positions of power, and that even politician's families were in on the grift. The only reason [...]

The good folks over at Adafruit are raising the alarm about a new New York State 3D printing law that could greatly imperil the public's freedom to tinker and could generally make life way more annoying for the schools, libraries, hospitals, small businesses, hobbyists, and garages that utilize 3D printers. New York's 2026-2027 executive budget [...]

Wikipedia celebrated its25thbirthdaylast month. Given the centrality of Wikipedia to so much activity online, it is hard to remember (or to imagine, for those who are younger) a time without Wikipedia. The latest statistics are impressive: That's testimony to the global nature of Wikipedia. But there's something else, not mentioned there, that is of great [...]

Warning: This article discusses suicide and some research regarding suicidal ideation. If you are having thoughts of suicide, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or visit this list of resources for help. Know that people care about you and there are many available to help. When someone dies by [...]

Earlier this month, the FBI decided it was going to help Donald Trump steal back the election he's claimed for half-a-decade was stolen from him. The state whose Secretary of State was asked directly by the outgoing president in January 2021 to find 11,780 votes" was raided by Trump 2.0, who still somehow thinks he [...]

The Complete Big Data and Power BI Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn how to effectively sort, analyze, and visualize all of your data. Courses cover Power BI, Power Query, Excel, and Access. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all [...]

Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain-in under 120 characters-that they were related to DEI." That's what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE [...]

We've noted how Bari Weiss' tenure at CBS (or what's left of it) isn't really going very well. Hired by Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison to turn what's left of CBS into a right wing extraction class-friendly agitprop mill, Weiss has been accosted on all sides for her clumsy mismanagement, ham-fisted enabling of government censorship, uninteresting [...]

Dr. Vinay Prasad is currently the FDA's top vaccine regulator. He's also one of many medical goons hand-picked by RFK Jr. to help lead his decidedly anti-vaxxer movement. In fact, the last time we discussed Prasad, it was over his selective censorship attempts at avoiding public criticism for his anti-vaxxer nonsense. If you show clips [...]

Surveillancetechnologyvendors, federal agencies, and wealthy private donors have long helped provide local law enforcement free" access to surveillance equipment that bypasses local oversight. The result is predictable: serious accountability gaps and data pipelines to other entities, includingImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that expose millions of people to harm. The cost of free" surveillance tools - [...]

I've talked on Techdirt about just a few of my AI-related experiments over the past few years, including how I use it to help me edit pieces, which I still write myself. I still have no intention of letting AI write for me, but as the underlying technology has continued to level up, every so [...]

The ICE surge in Minneapolis, Minnesota was instigated by a far-right click bait artist and encouraged by the president's portrayal of Somali immigrants as garbage" people from a garbage" country. And those were some of the nicer words Trump used to describe the people his agencies would be hunting down first. Several weeks later, a [...]

Yesterday we noted how CBS fecklessly tried to prevent Stephen Colbert from broadcasting an interview with Texas Democratic State Representative James Talarico. Which, as you've probably already seen, resulted in the interview on YouTube getting way more viewers than it would have normally, and Texas voters flocking to Google to figure out who Talarico is: [...]

The Luminar Neo Bundle includes a one time purchase of the software, an introductory course on how to use it, and 6 add-ons. Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different [...]

For the last five years, we had to endure an endless, breathless parade of hyperbole regarding the so-called censorship industrial complex." We were told, repeatedly and at high volume, that the Biden administration flagging content for review by social media companies constituted a tyrannical overthrow of the First Amendment. In the Missouri v. Biden (later [...]

Last week, Denver-area engineer Scott Shambaugh wrote about how an AI agent (likely prompted by its operator) started a weird little online campaign against him after he rejected its code inclusion in the popular Python charting library matplotlib. The owner likely didn't appreciate Shambaugh openly questioning whether AI-generated code belongs in open source projects at [...]

The current measles shitstorm in South Carolina has been burning for several months now, dating all the way back to October of 2025. What started with a bunch of counties that were undervaccinated for measles began spiraling out of control at the start of 2026. The federal tracker for measles cases is at best woefully [...]

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations-including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit-are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine [...]

Support us on Patreon Two weeks ago, we ran a bit of an AMA experiment, with a call on Bluesky for fans of Techdirt to ask Mike any questions they might have. We got lots of great responses and now, as promised, Mike is delivering the answers on this week's episode of the podcast! You [...]

If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go." -Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, September 8, 2025 From that one line, which Anil Kalhan dubbed Kavanaugh Stops," we see story after story of just how disconnected from [...]

The right wing extremist takeover of CBS continues to go just about how you thought it might. CBS is under fire yet again, this time for forcing Stephen Colbert's The Late Show" to cancel a scheduled appearance with Texas Democratic State Representative James Talarico because it might upset our full-diapered president. Colbert acknowledged the cancellation [...]

To completely understand computer security, it's vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It's also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized [...]

We've been covering Australia's monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an immediate mess, how a gambling ad agency helped push the whole thing, and how two massive studies involving 125,000 kids found the entire [...]

Here we go again. The Trump FTC has threatened Apple and CEO Tim Cook with a fake investigation claiming that Apple News doesn't do a good enough job coddling right wing, Trump-friendly ideology. The announcement and associated letter pretends that Apple is violating Section 5 of the FTC Act (which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about MAGA doing things for the children": If conservatives stopped thinking about children so much, the children would be better off and much safer. In second place, it's an anonymous comment inserting a little optimism into the fear that Section [...]

Five Years Ago As you probably know, we marked the 30th anniversary of Section 230 this week, so it's not surprising that this same week in 2021 we were celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special online event where we were joined by Chris Cox and Ron Wyden. We also wrote about the many reasons [...]

Back in 2023, we talked about a strange trademark dispute out of the UK concerning oat-based milk products. Specifically, Oatly, a large producer of oat milk, applied for a trademark in the UK for its slogan, Post Milk Generation." Dairy UK, a lobbying organization representing dairy farmers in the country, opposed the trademark in the [...]

Copyright owners increasingly claim more draconian copyright law and policy will fight back against big tech companies. In reality, copyright gives the most powerful companies even more control over creators and competitors. Today's copyright policy concentrates power among a handful of corporate gatekeepers-at everyone else's expense. We need a system that supports grassroots innovation and [...]

A California police department is none too happy that its license plate reader records were accessed by federal employees it never gave explicit permission to peruse. And, once again, it's Flock Safety shrugging itself into another PR black eye. Mountain View police criticized the company supplying its automated license plate reader system after an audit [...]

Last fall, I wrote about how the fear of AI was leading us to wall off the open internet in ways that would hurt everyone. At the time, I was worried about how companies were conflating legitimate concerns about bulk AI training with basic web accessibility. Not surprisingly, the situation has gotten worse. Now major [...]

The Trump administration has fired one of the few remaining members of the administration that had even a passing interest in antitrust enforcement. DOJ antitrust boss Gail Slater has been fired from the administration after having repeated contentious run ins with key officials. It's the final nail in the coffin of the log-running lie that [...]

The Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock is meticulously engineered to reduce the cable clutter and streamline your daily routine. Featuring 2 dedicated wireless charging surfaces, you can power up your phone and AirPods easily. In addition, you can charge your Apple Watch with the built-in charger mount. Stylish and compact, the dock is perfect for [...]

Judge Boasberg got his vindication in the frivolous complaint" the DOJ filed against him, and now he's calling out the DOJ's bullshit in the long-running case that caused them to file the complaint against him in the first place: the JGG v. Trump case regarding the group of Venezuelans the US government shipped off to [...]

U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disasterwas the poster child [...]

At some point, we, as a society, are going to realize that farming copyright enforcement out to bots and AI-driven robocops is not the way to go, but today is not that day. Long before AI became the buzzword it is today, large companies have employed their own copyright crawler bots, or employed those of [...]

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 [...]

For thirty years, internet users have benefited from a key federal law that allows everyone to express themselves, find community, organize politically, and participate in society.Section 230, which protects internet users' speech by protecting the online intermediaries we rely on, is the legal support that sustains the internet as we know it. Yet as Section [...]

Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. Among the more notable exchanges was when Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked some of Jeffrey Epstein's victims who were in the audience to stand up and indicate whether Bondi's DOJ had ever contacted them about their experiences. None of them had heard from the Justice [...]

The DHS and its components want to find non-white people to deport by any means necessary. Of course, necessary" is something that's on a continually sliding scale with Trump back in office, which means everything (legal or not) is necessary" if it can help White House advisor Stephen Miller hit his self-imposed 3,000 arrests per [...]

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You may have heard last week that actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt went to Washington DC and gave a short speech at an event put on by Senator Dick Durbin calling for the sunsetting of Section 230. It's a short speech, and it gets almost everything wrong about Section 230. Watch it here: Let me first say [...]