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In all of our conversations surrounding RFK Jr.'s appointment to lead HHS and the legitimization of his anti-vaxxer beliefs as a result, we have understandably been hyper-focused on measles. The reason for that is mostly that this is as stark an example of just how stupid and horrible anti-vaccination misinformation is combined with the horror [...]

Until very recently the only member of Congress excused from not having moved to impeach Trump was Rep. Grijalva, because until someone swore her in there was nothing she could officially do. But for everyone else already sworn into this 119th Congress, there was no excuse. There is no excuse. The refusal to act, to [...]

Imagine a leading American technology firm, the engine of thousands of jobs and critical innovation, besieged by a patent lawsuit. Typical enough, but this time there is a twist: The plaintiff is a shell company with no assets and no products, yet it litigates with the inexhaustible resources of a global superpower. The American company [...]

The abyss. The darkness. The meaningless void that life rebels against. It stares at us. Nietzsche warned about this moment-when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. When the frameworks that make meaning possible collapse, when the principles that make reasoning together conceivable dissolve, when words lose their moorings to [...]

The BBC is now voluntarily suppressing criticism of Donald Trump before it airs-and the reason is obvious: Trump threatened to sue them into oblivion, and they blinked. Historian Rutger Bregman revealed this week that the BBC commissioned a public lecture from him last month, recorded it, then quietly cut a single sentence before broadcast. The [...]

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This isn't as surprising as it should be. After all, we're talking about Emil Bove, who was elevated from being Trump's personal lawyer to a spot in the Third Circuit Appeals Court for his loyalty to the MAGA Cause. Emil Bove did at least spend some time as a government prosecutor, which is more than [...]

We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger processhas been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku byover-compensated executivesclearlyout of [...]

Trump's war on Chicago appears destined to end in a whimper. While he kicked off his invasion of Chicago with memes and a call to arrest J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson, his out of control federal agents have reportedly begun to leave the area. That suburban ICE facility you've heard so much about? Assistant [...]

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 [...]

Yes, as I already wrote about, the indictment against James Comey was already thrown out due to Halligan's improper appointment, but it's also worth covering how badly she fucked up even if she had been appointed legally. These cases were destined for the dustbin no matter what, because Halligan had no idea what she was [...]

Mark Kelly-former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator-stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when I was following orders" was rejected as [...]

The US Patent Office is about to gut the only effective tool we have for killing bad patents-and they're doing it by administrative fiat, without Congress, in a way that would make patent trolling easier than it's been in over a decade. They need to hear from you by Tuesday, December 2nd, or this may [...]

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The DOJ continues to shed talent as those who actually care about doing the job right are either quitting or being fired for refusing to be Trump's vindictive blunt force objects. The problem with shedding this much talent is that you need to replace it with someone capable of fogging a mirror while also being [...]

Trump's right wing billionaire friend Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son, David) recentlyacquired CBSand likelyco-ownership of TikTok. Like Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the goal isn't really subtle: rich, thin-skinned right wingers want to own the entirety of U.S. new and old media, then convert it into a giant propaganda and lazy infotainment bullhorn thatblows [...]

We've talked a lot about measles throughout this year, which is particularly frustrating given that America officially eliminated this disease from its endemic state back in 2000. How we got here is a very simple story: too many people refused to vaccinate themselves and/or their children, giving the virus a foothold which it had been [...]

If you've been following thewave of age-gating lawssweepingacross the countryandthe globe, you've probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing. Age verification, age assurance, age estimation, age gating-they get thrown around interchangeably, but they technically mean different things. And those differences [...]

CNN, like most U.S. cable news networks, professes to provide users access to journalism. Instead, what you'll most consistently find is a sort of generic, ad-slathered, center-right, corporatist drivel with the rough edges (read: truth) sanded off like a Ken doll's genitals to avoid offense. View from nowhere" journalism that doesn't inform so much as [...]

Last week's dismissal of the FTC's antitrust case against Meta-combined with the earlier limited remedies in the Google search case-demonstrates something that should be obvious by now: antitrust is a pathetically weak tool for increasing competition in digital markets. This isn't an argument against competition. Competition in digital markets matters, desperately. But antitrust enforcement is [...]

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has already made a name for himself during Trump's second administration. He began making this name by engaging in an unapproved sweep of the area he controlled in California as Trump was still waiting to be sworn in. Then he was sent to Chicago by a vengeful Trump who wanted [...]

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For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior-particularly foreign influence operations. They've insisted that any attempt to study and limit such operations is [...]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector isfalling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth for growth's sake" megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and newannoying restrictions on customers,undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a comment about Trump's freakout after Democrats told soldiers not to follow illegal orders: What everyone appears to overlook Trump's tantrum here clearly shows that he is perfectly aware that orders he puts out and plans to put out in future are [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we featured a guest post about the many problems with the idea of upload filters, while Poland was trying to get them excluded from the EU Copyright Directive. Twitch was continuing to trip over itself in response to its DMCA apocalypse, and we dug into just how bad [...]

I knew this was coming but this still is absolutely maddening. In all of our coverage of RFK Jr., particularly since his vile appointment and confirmation as head of Health and Human Services, it's been abundantly clear that he's an anti-vaxxer. While that may seem obvious to most of our readers, it's important to note [...]

When the Trump administration gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a massive database ofinformation about Medicaid recipientsin June 2025,privacyandmedical justiceadvocates sounded the alarm. They warned that the move could trigger all kinds of public health and human rights harms. But most people likely shrugged and moved on with their day. Why is that? It's [...]

So we've noted repeatedly how there's a real push afoot to implement statewide right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado,California, andOregon, and [...]

The President of the United States is calling for the execution of six Democratic lawmakers-all military veterans or former intelligence officers-because they reminded US service members of their oath to the Constitution. That's not hyperbole or exaggeration. That's an actual thing that happened yesterday. Donald Trump spent hours on social media demanding that Senators Elissa [...]

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I've expended far too many words stating the obvious: the Trump administration's deportation program isn't interested in removing criminals. It's only interested in removing people who aren't white. That's why it vets visa applicants for anti-American" social media posts while throwing the immigration door wide open for any white people seeking to escape the persecution" [...]

We've noted time and time again that Trump's attack on U.S. cybersecurity defenses and oversight are utterly indistinguishable from a foreign attack. Perhaps with the exception of more lip filler, spray tans, diabetes, bogus efficiency, and fake piety. That's been particularly true for Trump's attack on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has [...]

Ken Paxton's bullshit lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol, built on Trump and RFK Jr.'s bullshit press conference in which they pretended that science says acetaminophen causes autism, is off to a predictably bad start. I had a bit of a laugh shortly after this turd was filed, mainly because Kennedy himself came out after [...]

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.

When Homeland Security SecretaryKristi Noem compared antifato the transnational criminal group MS-13, Hamas and the Islamic State group in October 2025, she equated anonhierarchical, loosely organized movementof antifascist activists with some of the world's most violent and organized militant groups. Antifa is just as dangerous," she said. It's a sweeping claim that ignores crucial distinctions [...]

Donald Trump, who presents himself as a free speech champion, sure loves suing the media for their First Amendment-protected speech. CNN is a favorite target of his though these lawsuits don't do particularly well. Back in 2022, he sued CNN for calling Trump's lies about the results of the 2020 election The Big Lie." Two [...]

Flock Safety" may be the brand name, but this company's earliest sales successes had nothing to with safety. Its target audience was homeowners associations and people running gated communities in upscale neighborhoods. The purpose of the cameras (and, eventually, the attached license plate reader tech) was to make sure people who were plenty safe already [...]

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Donald Trump's FCC boss Brendan Carr is opening a fake new investigation" into PBS, NPR, and BBC in the hopes of suppressing journalistic criticism of the country's increasingly unmoored and unpopular President. Carr first leaked word of the fake investigation to right wing propaganda website Breitbart. In a letter to all three outlets (pages 1, [...]

After four years of hyperventilation about TikTok's impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, and a year after the app was to be banned from app stores via an act of Congress, TikTok remains widely available. The Trump administration insists they hashed out a deal with Bytedance to sell the app to Trump's billionaire buddies [...]

There are lots of ways things play out when it comes to fans of multiplayer video games building out their own host servers to play them. Sometimes fans set those servers up simply because they can do it better and more securely than the publisher... and then the publisher takes them down because of intellectual [...]

You've heard of New York style, Chicago deep dish, Detroit square pans. But Colorado-style pizza? Probably not. And there's a perfectly ridiculous reason why this regional style never spread beyond a handful of restaurants in the Rocky Mountains: one guy trademarked it and scared everyone else away from making it. This story comes via a [...]

When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as chained libraries". Copyright serves a similar purpose today, even though, thanks to the miracle of perfect, zero-cost digital copies, it is possible simultaneously to take an ebook home and [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he'd started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television. He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. What they've done to that [...]

Let's say, hypothetically, you want to gerrymander some congressional districts to help your party win more seats. Here are a couple of options: Which do you choose? If you said obviously option 1," congratulations, you understand the law better than the Trump administration's Department of Justice. Because the Trump administration just got legally smacked down [...]

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This won't matter to Donald Trump or the dozens of administration officials who live to please him. In all likelihood, it will just lead to Trump and his administration smearing one of this nation's allies for being weak on crime and too supportive of people who are being murdered by the US government. But it [...]

Last week we noted how the BBC has been tripping over itself to apologize to Donald Trump for some edits made to a BBC documentary. Admittedly the edits weren't the best idea; they effectively cobbled together two different parts of Trump's January 6 speech 54 minutes apart not to misrepresent, but to make it more [...]

It was only a few weeks ago that we wrote about a trademark dispute in the UK between a deli shop owner and a book publisher over the use of the word sabzi." Kate Attlee is the founder of Sabzi, the name of her deli, while Bloomsbury published a cookbook by Yasmin Khan called Sabzi: [...]