Techdirt

I know that Mark Zuckerberg no longer likes fact-checking, but it's not going to stop me from continuing to fact-check him. I'm going to rate his claimed plans of moving trust & safety and content moderation teams away from California to Texas as not just an obnoxiously stupid political suck-up, but also something that increasingly [...]

Even though the Supreme Court somehow didn't agree, the ban on TikTok remains unconstitutional garbage for all the reasons we've discussed: its impact on the platform itself, the impact on its users, and its impact on other service providers that help it work. The corrupt scramble we've seen to try to keep it going, ever [...]

One of the many new executive orders signed by PresidentDonald Trumpon Monday was the long-hyped creation of the Department of Government Efficiency(DOGE). DOGE is portrayed as a sort of government efficiency and innovation office, but it's primarily flimsy cover for the extraction class as they eliminate corporate oversight, consumer protection, labor rights, and the social [...]

This post was written on Sunday. By the time you read it there may have been 12,492 further unconstitutional TikTok-related hijinks since then, but because this particular kind of unconstitutional violation might well rear its ugly head again, if not with respect to TikTok then with respect to something else, it's still worth pointing out [...]

Whether you're a seasoned traveler, an international business professional, or simply language enthusiast, the Babbel Language Learning Deal is your passport to fluency. Covering a range of topics that are actually valuable on the road and using time-tested strategies proven by academics from Yale University, City University of New York, and Michigan State University, Babbel [...]

Disclosure: I'm on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, even though part of this is cheering on a new entrant looking to build an alternative to Bluesky. There's been some debate over the last year or so regarding Bluesky and how [...]

Last year U.S. broadband giant Verizon faced yet another class action lawsuit for sleazy, misleading fees. This latest $100 million class action alleged that Verizon for years ripped off its customers via a $3 (and up) Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge" that it tacked at the bottom of user bills to help the company falsely [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Stephen T. Stone with a comment about platforms systematically removing a user for making a deck of Most Wanted CEO playing cards: The same people who celebrate this will whine their asses off if someone gets banned from Twitter for saying a racial slur. Can't [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, an excellent piece in the New York Times looked how years of copyright maximalism were killing pop music. AG William Barr was sparring with Apple over the DOJ's ability to crack iPhones, and Devin Nunes was extending his legal threats to fellow congressional representatives. We looked at the [...]

I suppose this was probably inevitable, but boy do I wonder if it's smart. We were just talking about the celebrity drama du jour between Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and Justin Baldoni. The very short version of this is that Lively and Baldoni starred in a movie together, Lively sued Baldoni and made a series [...]

As the we wrote in our amicus brief (which it appears the justices did not read - guess they didn't have time...), if the TikTok ban is blessed, it provides a roadmap for how to avoid the Constitution's prohibition to make no law" abridging free expression. All the government needs to do is declare that [...]

Last year, Kashmir Hill at the New York Timespublished a major storyconfirming that automakers collect all sorts of driver behavior data then sell it to a long list of companies - without making that clear to car owners or getting consent. That includes insurance companies, which are now jacking up insurance rates if they see [...]

Italy remains pretty fucking weird when it comes to all things Italian. From top prosecutors taking aim at vendors who debase" respected Italian art by, say, offering products featuring Michelangelo's David" (mainly the naked bits, which is all of it) or fining government entities (even those engaged in promoting tourism) for using any other language [...]

It seemed pretty obvious from the way the Supreme Court's oral arguments went regarding the TikTok ban that this would be the outcome: a 9-0 per curiam decision saying eh, it's fine to ban TikTok." There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, [...]

Fuse Vint is a retro radio, speaker, and charger all in one! Indulge in the nostalgia of traditional radio broadcasts. Fuse Vint comes equipped with a built-in AM/FM radio tuner. Tune in to your favorite local radio stations and immerse yourself in the charm of traditional frequency-based broadcasting. It also works as a standalone speaker [...]

Remember how Zuckerberg was done with politics"? Remember how he promised that he was going to stop doing what politicians demanded he do? Now it turns out that he not only did his big set of moderation changes to please Trump, but did so only after he was told by the incoming administration to act. [...]

A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itselfon the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuitfor its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company's own repair facilities, driving up costs and [...]

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 NHL keeps doing this kind of crap to itself. Of all the major American sports leagues, I'd say it's pretty clear that the National Hockey League trails all the others in terms of getting things right with the internet. The league finally piggybacked onto the MLB Advanced Media platform several years ago to power [...]

On December 14, James Harr, the owner of an online store calledComradeWorkwear, announced on social media thathe planned to sella deck of Most Wanted CEO" playing cards, satirizing the infamous Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards" introduced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003. Perthe ComradeWorkwear website, the Most Wanted CEO cards would offer a critique [...]

If you only remember two things about the government pressure campaign to influence Mark Zuckerberg's content moderation decisions, make it these: Donald Trump directly threatened to throw Zuck in prison for the rest of his life, and just a couple months ago FCC Commissioner (soon to be FCC chair) Brendan Carr threatened Meta that if [...]

Advance your programming skills and start building responsive apps with the 2025 MERN Full Stack Developer Bundle. The 10 courses cover HTML, Bootstrap, CSS, React, MongoDB, Express, NodeJS, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps [...]

As I noted when the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court handed down its original decision back in 2023, I didn't care much for the plaintiff, but I did care quite a bit about the First Amendment. Less-than-ideal litigants make some pretty good caselaw, and that's how it went here. The plaintiff challenging Oregon's surreptitious recording law [...]

We're still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the TikTok ban case, which is expected to come today or tomorrow. But things are getting increasingly silly. The Biden administration, which actively pushed for the ban and eagerly signed it into law, is now making a last-ditch effort to... keep the app operating, even [...]

There have been very few times I've encountered something in life that feels like it was absolutely made specifically for me. The Deadpool movie series is one of those few things. For my sensibilities, they're just about perfect. And one of my favorite aspects of the films is the fourth-wall-breaking nature of the main character. [...]

We're at the halfway point of January, and that means we're at the halfway point of the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! As in past years, we're celebrating the entry of new works into the public domain by calling on game designers of all stripes and levels of [...]

Mark Lemley is one of, if not the biggest names in IP law. So when Lemley makes a move, it's worth paying attention. And that's exactly what happened this week when he announced that he has fired Meta as a client." There are various lists that come out from time to time about the most [...]

A new Consumer Reports study unsurprisingly finds that popular exercise equipment makers collect way more data on users than is necessary, then sell access to that data to a wide variety of dodgy and largely unregulated data brokers and middle men, who in turn generally play fast and loose with it. Consumer Reports studied ten [...]

Go from absolute zero to GIMP pro with this comprehensive 9 course bundle. Jump into the Complete Master GIMP Design Bundle, and you'll go all the way from installing the GIMP software and configuring it to run on Windows, to producing banners, book covers and even memes that you'll display using Facebook and other social [...]

In what is almost certainly a case of too little, too late, the SEC on Tuesday sued Elon Musk for failing to file a public announcement about his secretive Twitter equity position. The lawsuit, coming nearly three years after Musk's alleged violations, highlights the billionaire's brazen flouting of disclosure rules and the SEC's glacial pace [...]

Even though corrections officers seem to feel these devices will help them more than they will hurt them, the Colorado Department of Corrections has decided it's not going to equip officers with body cameras. This is a pretty terrible outcome, especially since the DOC has spent a couple years and half-million dollars on build-up before [...]

It's no secret that the world of live sports is becoming increasingly complicated due to the fractured nature of broadcast and streaming rights. Between leagues like the NFL making sure their own streaming services aren't terribly useful and that finding any particular game requires Sherlock-ian investigative efforts, these new and complicated deals that major sports [...]

Support us on Patreon We've got another cross-post episode this week! Recently, Mike appeared on The Dynamist podcast from the Foundation for American Innovation for the second entry in a four-part series about copyright and artificial intelligence. He's joined by Alex Winter and Tim Hwang, and host Evan Swarztrauber, for a discussion about how artists, [...]

Great job, US government. You went so overboard with your TikTok is an evil Chinese app" and deciding to ban it that you're pushing kids to go even deeper into the Chinese app ecosystem. The US government's ham-handed attempt to ban TikTok on national security grounds is not only a troubling attack on free speech [...]

This 2-in-1 Keychain Wireless Charger with 2,500mAh battery will charge your Apple Watch 3-5 times on a full charge. Its magnetic design ensures perfect alignment and it works seamlessly with all Apple Watch series. It features Type-C port for versatile charging options for other devices. It's on sale for $19. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store [...]

Hitch yourself to a wagon and see what you get. Area dog-killer/current governor/possible DHS head Kristi Noem boarded the Trump Train when it first passed through town nearly a decade ago. Since then, she's won the loyalty of a bunch of fascist-adjacent dipshits who don't care how much they vote against their own interests, as [...]

As streaming video chipped away at traditional cable TV subscriber bases, most cable giants like Spectrum and Comcast responded byraising pricesand being difficult. When confronted with growing evidence that cord cutting (defined as cutting theTVcord but keeping broadband and streaming TV) was a growing trend, most of these same executives spent years firstdenying cord cutting [...]

This one is from a couple months ago, but I finally had a chance to catch up on some older stories. In late 2023, we wrote about one of the most egregious SLAPP suits we'd ever seen. In a case that seems to defy both law and basic human decency, King Vanga, a Stanford student, [...]

There but for the grace of whatever god goes any of us. Who among us is worthy to judge the actions of someone who has the power to do right, but uses it to do wrong? Apparently, none of us. Not even the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. (h/t Short Circuit) We like to believe [...]

This was inevitable, ever since Donald Trump and the MAGA world freaked out when social media's attempts to fact-check the President were deemed censorship." The reaction was both swift and entirely predictable. After all, how dare anyone question Dear Leader's proclamations, even if they are demonstrably false? It wasn't long before we started to see [...]

On Friday I attended the oral argument in the TikTok ban case in person, seated in the second row behind the table where the government's lawyers were sitting, and only about 15-20 feet away from the justices themselves. There's something kind of profound about being a normal human distance from them, instead of just in [...]

Visual Studio Professional 2022 is a fully featured development environment. Their first 64-bit IDE makes it easier to work with even bigger projects and more complex workloads. Enhance your productivity, write high-quality code, and re-imagine collaboration with an advanced suite of tools and built-in integrations to tackle the most challenging development workflows and deliver innovative [...]

Ohio residents pay for the cops. They pay for the cameras. Now, they're expected to pay for the footage generated by cops and their cameras. Governor Mike DeWine, serving no one but cops and their desire for opacity, recently signed a bill into law that will make it much more expensive for residents to exercise [...]

We've noted for several years how the race to 5G" was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager tosell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it's more of an evolution than a revolution. But that's not what telecom giants [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about Mark Zuckerberg's pathetic deference to Trump: I've said it before, but what's even the point of having that level of wealth if you're just going to debase yourself for somebody like Trump? For what will it profit a man [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the libel tourism of Devin Nunes was continuing to highlight the problems of weak anti-SLAPP laws. A patent troll got smacked down by an appeals court, while there was a twist in Oracle's attacks on Google, and Apple became the latest company to up the ante in abusing [...]

Early last year, streaming company Fubo filed an antitrust lawsuit against Disney, Fox, and Warner Brothers Discovery after the three companies decided to launch their own joint streaming live sports venture. Fubo, in the lawsuit, claims the collective power of the three companies would stifle competition in the sports streaming space, ultimately driving up costs [...]

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 [...]

In a twist that highlights the absurdity of UK libel laws, former Prime Minister Liz Truss is threatening to sue current PM Keir Starmer for saying she crashed the economy" during her chaotic 49 days in office... conveniently forgetting that she made the exact same accusation against an earlier PM herself. That's right, Truss, whose [...]

I don't know what kind of warrant system they're running in Pennsylvania, but it doesn't sound like a good one. Either the system is deliberately broken, or the testifying cops were playing fast and loose with the facts. Whatever the case is, the end result is the loss of the evidence obtained with Schrodinger's Warrant, [...]