By now, calling Elon Musk a free speech absolutist" is a joke. We have so many stories of him suppressing speech, or threatening, or suing people for their speech. At this point, anyone who still claims that Musk supports free speech is either (1) lying, (2) stupid, or (3) employed by him. So, it's little [...]

The truth continues to come out, and not via Truth Social. Everything former Olympian David Hearn might need to pursue a malicious prosecution lawsuit against the Trump DOJ has been leaking more steadily than the botched Lincoln Reflecting Pool repair job itself. This time, it's the contractor admitting its repair job didn't go as planned, [...]

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By now it's old hat to point out that the mainstream media bends over backwards to pretend that Donald Trump is a normal" president. The number of times you could point to the coverage and question how the media would cover things if a Democratic president did anything even remotely similar is impossible to keep [...]

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 restrictionson customers,undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the problems with the latest court ruling against Elon Musk: Heads I win, tails you lose Problematic law is passed: A) Company or individual rushes a legal challenge out so they aren't accused of waiting too long [...]

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There's enshittification, and then there's enshittification. Allow me to give you an example of each. For what we'll call enshittification classic, there's Xbox's Game Pass service. A mere two years ago, Microsoft made all kinds of changes to Game Pass to coincide with a serious slowdown of subscriber adoption. Those changes included doing away with [...]

Whatever wasn't already going poorly for Flock Safety is just going to keep getting worse. Data collected by privacy activist group Secure Justice pointed out what Flock already knows: it's losing customers at an unprecedented rate. More than 214 cities and counties have dropped Flock since 2021. More than 90 of those have done that [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

As we move closer to mid-term elections, the Trump administration continues to lie about election integrity, sowing the seeds for bullshit rigged election" claims should the GOP fail to win the elections Trump wants them to win. There's another reason this administration lies constantly about elections, voters, and anything related to it: Trump still thinks [...]

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Twenty-five years ago today I was woken up by a phone call from a close friend, who, like me, grew up in New York and, like me, was now living in California. She told me that something horrible had happened in New York and to turn on the TV. She said something about a plane [...]

It says nothing good about America how easily Elon Musk convinced the press and public he was a supergenius engineer who could cobble together complicated rocket machinery wearing coveralls in his backyard shed. Hindsight continues to illustrate how Elon Musk's real skill sets are opportunism, taking singular credit for the innovations of real engineers, the [...]

Pick your favorite zombie movie or television show and you'll eventually be confronted with dialogue justifying the killing of the zombies with the idea that they are no longer human. They aren't people, Rick. They're just bodies. We have to stop thinking of them as if they're still alive." - The Walking Dead They're not [...]

There are multiple things this administration is incapable of doing: winning wars, curbing inflation, not acting like Nazis, wearing shoes that fit them, etc. But if there's one thing it's most known for, it's the unwillingness to take a loss and move on. That's why the DOJ is still trying to imprison/jettison into a war-torn [...]

Remember Appin? It's the Indian hack for hire" company that got so upset about Reuters' giant investigation - which detailed how Appin grew into a leading cyberespionage firm" that stole secrets from executives, politicians, military officials and wealthy elites around the globe" - that it convinced an Indian court to make Reuters take the story [...]

Comedian Jimmy Kimmels planned Thursday interview withTexas Senatorial hopeful James Talaricodidn't air on ABCbroadcast TV because network lawyers were worried about Trump FCC censorship and reprisal. Instead, the interview will air on the late-night show's YouTube channel, Kimmel stated during his latest late night Jimmy Kimmel Live monologue: You know, for a lot of years, [...]

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Every government does stuff because it can, not because it needs to. But this current administration has been far more opportunistic than most, doing constitutional recon in areas of unsettled law right up until a court rules that it can't. (In some cases, it continues to do these things despite having lost in court.) While [...]

If you enjoy badly written bipartisan protectionist tech legislation designed primarily to coddle giant U.S. companies under the xenophobia-tinged breathless pretense of privacy and national security, you are really going to enjoy the next twelve to twenty-four months. While the U.S. drowns in corrupt kakistocracy, the Chinese are making significant market inroads in everything from [...]

I want to start this whole thing off with a disclaimer. Nothing in this post should be misconstrued as gloating, as being pleased, or as having a connotation that is anything beyond sadness and the need for change. Nobody is happy to have the obvious confirmed when it comes to a child's death. There is [...]

For the last few months, there has been much talk of AI agents going rogue". This is another of those unhelpful anthropomorphisms that are great for clickbait headlines, but which obscure a multitude of important issues. So far, there have been three major incidents of AI agents evading containment in their software sandboxes" and going [...]

Let's start out with the obvious (and obviously heartbreaking): this is not related to the multiple times ICE officers have murdered people. Those officers still remain at large and the DOJ and DHS have shown absolutely zero interest in following up on those cases. In fact, when any local agency attempts to do so, they're [...]

Here we go again: another case where it's easy to cheer a court ruling against Elon Musk, and unfortunately easy to miss the much more important underlying point - which the judge clearly did. In July, we wrote about how even as awful as Elon Musk is, and as awful as it was that (with [...]

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One of the natural side effects of flooding the zone with hastily hired, poorly trained immigration enforcement officers is an increase in violence and rights violations. Christian Castro may not have been a new ICE hire, but he'd been there long enough to realize the new White House boss had given him and his fellow [...]

In addition to the $111 billion Paramount/Warner Bros merger just being foundationally bad for creatives, labor, and consumers, the Ellison family-owned company's executives just keep demonstrating why they're not really the kind of folks you want dominating the lion's share of U.S. media. That's included calling deal critics antisemitic," cozying up to foreign authoritarians, constantly [...]

The measles outbreak, that began in America nearly two years ago, has only increased in velocity. We recently talked about the deaths of two children in Pennsylvania who both died while infected with measles. I'm altering my language slightly here from that original post in which I described those children as having died of measles [...]

In a handful of known cases, large social media companies have privately pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoenas when the agency tried to unmask anonymous users who tracked immigration activities or criticized the government. As ICE engages ina patternof illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is welcome. Butsocial media companies can do [...]

It would be nice to go a day or two (or three-day weekend!) without being apprised of some new awfulness from this administration. Since that's not going to happen, let's check in with the latest shitshow! And here it is: the Pentagon has enlisted" some X.com influencers to thrust and parry on behalf of the [...]

I am never asking the monkey's paw for a federal government that defends fair use again. For decades on Techdirt, I've talked about the absolute necessity of strong fair use, and have been disappointed over and over again at how little the federal government has fought for fair use. For decades, the rare times when [...]

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A whistleblower report delivered to the DHS Office of the Inspector General makes it clear ICE is willing to hire pretty much anyone who applies for the job. Keeping up appearances (and by appearances," I mean constantly pushing for 1,500-3,000 arrests per day) is tough when you don't have the warm bodies to do all [...]

We've well established how the $111 billion Paramount and Warner Brothers merger is terrible for labor, creatives, consumers, and markets. But the kind of behaviors Paramount leadership have been engaged in to sell the deal also give a pretty clear indication what kind of company we're dealing with, and why they shouldn't be allowed to [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about calls for RFK Jr.'s resignation coming entirely from Democrats: And that's why trying to distill partisan politics down to just team blue" vs. team red" is reductive at best and false equivalence at worst. This and many other life-or-death [...]

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I have mostly stayed away from the whole saga surrounding the drip-drip leaks of Grand Theft Auto 6 content prior to the big reveal on Netflix because, frankly, I am quite wary of giving companies the kind of guerilla marketing wins that sometimes look like this sort of thing. That being said, I really don't [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. You might assume that what you tell a doctor stays between you, your physician and perhaps your insurer. But the reality is more complicated. TheHealth Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal privacy law that governs health information and iscommonly known as [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

There is a flood of lawsuits against social media, from a variety of different parties, all claiming some kind of harm. Would you feel differently about some of those lawsuits if you found out the plaintiffs bringing them were talking amongst themselves about how they were doing it just to become rich? Because we just [...]

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You have to know you're fucking up when your largest and best-paying customer base is increasingly noping out of contract renewals. That more than anything is probably what provoked ALPR maker Flock Safety to start implementing a few guardrails for use. It seemingly had no problem with being the target of negative press for most [...]

Just so we're clear: pre-merger promises (especially in the media and telecom sectors) are absolutely worthless. There's fifty years of indisputable evidence that all of the synergies" and innovative improvements promised on the front end of major media mergers mean absolutely nothing. Especially in a country dead-set on defanging its labor and consumer protection regulators. [...]

To quote the opening line from the court opinion that this post is based upon, Millions of American teenagers have sex." This post is has nothing to do with whether that sort of thing is good or bad, natural or otherwise, nor the moral implications of it all. Whatever you think about that opening line, [...]

At this point all fifty states have considered passing right to repair" law aimed at making it easier and cheaper for consumers (and independent repair shops) to repair their tech. That said, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. And of those states, none have seen any enforcement [...]

If you're worried about the bad optics of working with ICE, the federal government is here to help subsidize your recovery from mass deportation conjunctivitis. If you're worried about the personal negative side effects of buddying up to ICE's masked kidnapping squads, the administration is here to assure cops that it might cover some of [...]

From the very beginning of this recent obsession with identifying everyone online (yes, they like to call it age" verification, but it always ends up as identity verification), we've been pointing out that it was a huge privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Or maybe it wasn't waiting. Maybe it was already happening. This week a [...]

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A little more than a year ago, the Trump administration pushed a novel legal theory in order to juice its migrant arrest stats. It was a two-part process. First, the administration unilaterally declared expansive areas near US military bases to be national defense areas." This meant that areas surrounding bases - like (especially) Fort Bliss [...]