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The White House Correspondents Association has justcapitulatedto pressure from the Trump administration by removing comedian Amber Ruffin from its annual dinner. Their stated reason? To ensure the focus is not on the politics of division." This seemingly minor capitulation reveals something profound about how democracy dies-not through dramatic confrontation, but through a thousand small surrenders [...]

Support us on Patreon If you're a Techdirt reader, you're probably familiar with Senator Ron Wyden. In January, he released his new book It Takes Chutzpah, offering up a call for political boldness that feels even more relevant with every day that passes. This week, Senator Wyden joins Mike on the podcast to talk about [...]

Remember when government officials discussing sensitive information over unsecured channels was treated as a national crisis worthy of endless investigations? Apparently, those days are over. While Hillary Clinton's email server spawned years of investigations and Attorney General Pam Bondi is still trying to rehash it, the White House wants us to simply forget about top [...]

Anything that doesn't jibe with Donald Trump's white male-centric worldview must go. Whatever is deemed woke" - no matter its basis in factual history - must be excised. If tossing aside DEI means pretending blacks, women, and other non-white, non-male people never contributed anything to this country, so be it. If stroking off the far [...]

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The U.S. government just demonstrated exactly why due process matters. In what should be a shocking admission, the Trump administration revealed in court that it had made a bit of an oopsie (they call it an administrative error") - one that resulted in trafficking a Maryland father with protected legal status to a Salvadoran prison. [...]

We've long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included $42.5 billion for broadband dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. Managed by the NTIA and individual states, we've also noted how this money has taken a long time to get to the states for some good reasons. Namely they wanted to avoid the [...]

A whole new level of constitutional wtf-ness has emerged from the Indiana state Appeals Court. Here's how John Wesley Hall sums it up on FourthAmendment.com: If you're riding a bus and drugs are found on one, are all subject to search. The answer can't be yes, but it is here. Exactly. The answer cannot be [...]

It appears that Mariah Carey got a very late Christmas present this year. Several years ago, Carey was sued by Andy Stone over Carey's hit holiday song, All I Want For Christmas Is You. The whole lawsuit was a complete mess. The fact it was filed in a Louisana court made no sense. The suit [...]

Imagine you had pretty much unlimited power over the government and wanted to save taxpayers' money. You could: Or you could do what Elon Musk did with DOGE: declare everything wasteful, start firing people at random, and claim you're saving billions through pure destruction. It's long been clear that Elon has never considered Chesterton's Fence [...]

Thefootageis hard to watch-not because it's shocking, but because it isn't. Because we've seen this coming. Because we'vewrittenit down. Because it's what happens when performance fully replaces governance, and people are asked to believe that DOGE" and efficiency" and Musk" now constitute anew political grammar. Rep. Victoria Spartz stands in front of her constituents at [...]

America's largest law firms are facing an existential choice that will define not just their legacies, but potentially the future of constitutional democracy: fight against clearly unconstitutional executive orders designed to destroy the ability of anyone to fight back, or surrender to authoritarianism. While that might sound hyperbolic, the evidence shows that it's absolutely true. [...]

Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Trusted by top-tier organizations like NASA, Calvin Klein, and TripAdvisor, Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking [...]

There is a disquieting update to my last post about a district court victory in Does 1-26 v. Musk that had enjoined DOGE, given its likely unconstitutional exercise of power, particularly in the context of its dismemberment of USAID. The Fourth Circuit has now stayed enforcement of that injunction, which raises a few issues worth [...]

The FCC runs an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called theUniversal Service Fund. Started by Reagan and expanded by Bush Jr., the program was historically a bipartisan thing, until the extremist Trump administration came to town. Driven by a fake right wing [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is frankcox with a comment about the horrifying abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk: Masked abductors? The people doing this are obviously ashamed of themselves because they are wearing masks to prevent anyone from identifying them. That adds another level of terror to this sort of thing. [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the pandemic news continued. Some people were attempting to leverage it to call for longer patent terms, while we were calling for loosening the intellectual property reins, and the DOJ was using it to justify indefinite detention of arrested people. Libraries were looking to become pandemic broadband havens [...]

Clearview saw an opening in the facial recognition market and took full advantage of it. While most tech firms offered face-matching tech of dubious accuracy, Clearview went further, matching its AI to the billions of records it has harvested for free from the open internet. (And while this effort certainly wasn't free, it definitely was [...]

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 fallout over several Trump administration officials, all of them high-ranking, discussing military operations of a sensitive nature in a Signal chat and inadvertently welcoming a journalist to that chat is ongoing. The administration's attempts to hand-wave this all away as unimportant doesn't appear to be getting much traction, thankfully. The entire episode is a [...]

Is it a flag on your porch? A sense of pride during the national anthem? A particular vision of freedom or prosperity? Perhaps it's a story you tell yourself about who we are and what we stand for. Whatever it means to you, I want you to hold that meaning close as you read what [...]

This hasn't been a good week for those who believed that Donald Trump would bring in the best, most competent" people around. Fresh off the revelation that a bunch of the top cabinet and security officials were accidentally sharing classified info with a journalist using Signal on their private phones (rather than, you know, secure [...]

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Trump - just like the last time he was in office - is still pretending his bigoted anti-immigrant policies are only in place to ensure the US can rid itself of dangerous foreign criminals. But no one really believed that last time. And with his return to the Oval Office, any pretense of fairness or [...]

If you hadn't noticed, consolidated corporate media hasn't been meeting the challenges of the current moment very well. There's generally two reasons: one, these media outlets tend to reflect the interests of generally white, older, male, right wing ownership, which broadly thinks authoritarianism is a fair price to pay for some tax cuts, deregulation, and [...]

The reemergence of measles, a disease once declared officially eradicated in the United States, didn't start with the second Trump presidential term. It didn't even begin with Trump's first term. Instead, it started through an unholy alliance between far-right, often religious groups that have pitched the vaccines as either unnecessary or dangerous combined with a [...]

You probably recall Ajit Pai, Trump's first FCC boss. Pai took a mindless hatchet to broadband consumer protection and media consolidation limits with no shortage of scandal. Like that time he turned a blind eye as the telecom industry used dead and fake people to generate fake support for shitty policies (like killing net neutrality). [...]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just made a move that will protect bad patents at the expense of everyone else. In amemo released February 28, the USPTO further restricted access to inter partes review, or IPR-the process Congress created to let the public challenge invalid patents without having to wage million-dollar court battles. [...]

For years, we've been hearing breathless warnings about a campus free speech crisis" from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler's vetoes. This kind of campus activism - while occasionally messy [...]

The beatings will apparently continue, whether or not morale improves. The Trump Administration's latest move from far-right towards open fascism involves, unsurprisingly, the gutting of more government components tasked with ensuring the federal government doesn't treat civil rights like privileges only afforded to those who can afford them... or anyone else willing to lick the [...]

The 2025 Canva Bundle has six courses to help you learn about graphic design. From logo design to business cards to branding to bulk content creation, these courses have you covered. It's on sale for $25. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals [...]

When the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg revealed this week that senior White House officials had accidentally added him to their Yemen bombing planning session on Signal, he did something remarkable: he actually protected operational security better than the officials themselves did. While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others now insist Nobody was texting war plans," the [...]

When Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr was selected last November, I was quick to point out that the U.S. press was completely disinterested in what this meant for stuff like broadband consumer protection. Outlets at the time were quick to push quotes about what a nice guy" Carr was. Few could be bothered to mention [...]

Were it not so obviously the product of something nefarious, it would be entertaining to watch how private companies react to the Trump administration's declaration of the end of all things DEI. The truth is that Trump's reach for this sort of thing simply doesn't extend past the federal government, legally speaking. That doesn't mean [...]

Imagine an internet where every website faced an impossible choice: either carefully review every single post before it goes live (making them essentially TV stations), or allow absolutely everything with zero moderation. This nightmare scenario wasn't hypothetical - it was exactly what the infamous Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy ruling threatened to create, before Section 230 [...]

It took us a little longer than usual this year (we've been swamped with other projects including the Kickstarter for our new card game) but the time has finally arrived: we've chosen the winners in our seventh annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! There were so many great entries this year, and [...]

Few moments better illustrate the GOP's descent into constitutional incoherence than Senator John Curtis'sappearanceonMeet the Pressthis weekend. In a display of breathtaking historical illiteracy wrapped in pseudo-constitutional rhetoric, Curtis characterized President Trump's threats to impeach a federal judge who ruled against his deportation orders as-wait for it-what our founders intended." This statement deserves to be [...]

If you're going to plan military operations over Signal, you probably shouldn't accidentally add a journalist to the chat. And if you're going to do government business over Signal specifically to avoid federal record-keeping laws, you definitely shouldn't get caught doing it. Yet here we are: A day after we learned that top Trump administration [...]

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Lots of lies are told about immigrants to stoke the always-smoldering fires of bigotry in this country. Trump and his fellow Republicans have told most of them. They claim immigrants commit more crimes than legal residents, something that has never been true. They claim immigrants are lazy, something anyone who's ever worked with any immigrants [...]

Instead of doing things like protecting consumers or market competition, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent his first few months in office abusing agency authority to threaten companies that refuse to kiss the Trump administration's ass. A cornerstone of those efforts has been to leverage merger approvals to get companies to support core administration [...]

In Mike's thorough post yesterday on the topic of the Trump administration's naked contempt for judicial oversight, the main theme and takeaway from it was a simple one: this authoritarian regime would much rather waste everyone's time trying to play procedural and semantic games with the courts than actually participate in honest deliberations with them. [...]

Like clockwork, lawmakers are once again rallying around the idea of eliminating Section 230. That Republicans are leading this charge is hardly surprising-repealing Section 230 is explicitly laid out in the Project 2025 playbook. But what's surprising, and increasingly reckless, is the willingness of Democratic lawmakers to join forces with Republicans in dismantling one of [...]

Support us on Patreon In the digital age, attention is a resource - but if we can have a little slice of yours, we've got a great conversation about that very subject for you to listen to. This week, Mike is joined by journalist Chris Hayes to discuss his new book, The Siren's Call: How [...]

There comes a moment in every collapsing democracy when absurdity and menace fuse into something uniquely destabilizing-a phenomenon I'm tempted to call malignant farce." We've reached that moment. The President of the United States, after invoking a 1798 wartime law to mass-deport migrants to a third country,now claimshe didn't do it. Other people handled it," [...]

Be the deep state" you want to see in the world. That's the new FBI under conspiracy theorist/Trump acolyte Kash Patel's leadership." Instead of being the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it will become the Federal Bureau of Investigating People Trump Doesn't Like. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear journalists are getting their phone records [...]

The Ultimate Python and Artificial Intelligence Bundle has 9 courses to help you take your Python and AI knowledge to the next level. You'll learn about data pre-processing and visualization, artificial neural networks, how to use the Keras framework, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated [...]

Look, I know you've probably already seen yesterday's absolutely stunning story from Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic. The one where Trump administration officials somehow managed to add a journalist to their Signal group chat while planning out their bombing of the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The one that reads like a plot point rejected from [...]

Last October,Trump sued CBSclaiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been deceitfully edited" to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). AsMike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense. CBS/Paramount is looking for [...]

Historically, stories we've covered here about the collision between the beer brewing industry and trademarks have largely been born of the creative nature of the craft beer industry specifically. Far different from the bland trade dress and naming conventions of the macro-brewing industry, the craft industry blended its beer-making with colorfully named brews and artistic [...]