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Five Years Ago This week in 2021, 60 Minutes aired some pure misleading moral panic about Section 230, while Parler (remember Parler?) was desperately seeking attention by pretending it didn't need Section 230, and Ajit Pai grew a last-minute backbone and refused to move forward with Trump's 230 attack. Lawmakers were complaining about Comcast's expanded [...]

Rinse, lather, repeat. That is supposed to be the self-serving message on the back of a shampoo bottle, but it can easily be applied to Senator Bill Cassidy's response to all the bullshit RFK Jr. continues to pull when it comes to vaccines. The last time we saw this was back in October of last [...]

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 [...]

Fair use is not just an excuse to copy-it's a pillar of online speech protection, and disregarding it in order to lash out at a critic should have serious consequences. That's what wetold a federal courtinChannel 781 News v. Waltham Community Access Corporation, our case fighting copyright abuse on behalf of citizen journalists. Waltham Community [...]

If you want to understand how far MAGA Republicans have strayed from any actual free speech" principles, look no further than this: Congress issued a subpoena to Rolling Stone journalist Seth Harp, because he posted on X a publicly available online biography of someone involved in the illegal and unconstitutional kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. There [...]

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This ruling was released in the middle of last month and I really wish I had gotten to it sooner. Let's not pretend this will change anything about how this administration full of white Christian nationalists will treat detained migrants. And it definitely won't change anything about how the American government in general treats anyone [...]

Late last year, most major U.S. telecoms were the victim ofa massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed tohack into U.S. communications networks and then spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year completely undetected. The Salt Typhoon" hack was so severe, the intruders spent another year rooting around the ISP networkseven after [...]

When I get on my little soapbox and begin preaching about the importance of video game preservation, particularly when it comes to publishers shutting down servers required to play the game, I often get as a response a dismissal of games as not important enough to worry about. That sentiment is plainly wrong on many [...]

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 the first Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode of 2026, Mike and Ben [...]

Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. The President of the United States stood in his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, andannouncedthat America had toppled Venezuela's government and would now run" the country indefinitely. Not from the Oval Office. Not in consultation with Congress. From Mar-a-Lago, in front of gilded chandeliers and club members, Donald Trump pointed [...]

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Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box [...]

Last year we noted how the Trump organizationhad cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. It was barely even a phone company"; it was just a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service. The centerpiece of this effort was supposed to [...]

For those who wish to tell Hilton what they think of them, here is a model letter. Dear Hilton: I, as well as many of my friends and fellow citizens (as social media reflects), initially read with patriotic pride the news that a Hilton franchisee in Minnesota had refused service to ICE personnel-at least initially, [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Dr. Kirk Moore had been on trial for five days, accused of falsifying COVID-19 vaccination cards and throwing away the government-supplied doses. The Utah plastic surgeon faced up to 35 years in prison if the jury found him guilty on charges that included conspiracy to defraud [...]

Over the past week, Reuters, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, CNBC, and a parade of other outlets published headlines claiming that Grok-Elon Musk's LLM chatbot (the one that once referred to itself as MechaHitler")-had apologized" for generating non-consensual intimate images of minors and was fixing" its failed guardrails. Grok did no such thing. Grok cannot apologize. [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, [...]

Whether the Trump administration likes it or not, the right to a fair trial still exists. And even the person the government is now subjecting to what looks a whole lot like a vindictive prosecution is still a beneficiary of this right. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador's infamous CECOT earlier this year [...]

We've noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run CBS Newsfor a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power (particularly Trump and Netanyahu), validate and amplify right wing grievance and engagement bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism. Even if [...]

The Trump administration's war on vaccines continues, it seems. We've already written extensively about all the bullshit RFK Jr. is pulling when it comes to public health around vaccines. From his dismantling the CDC's ACIP committee and rebuilding it full of anti-vaxxer allies, pulling public funding for research on new and better RNA vaccines, to [...]

One of the most common refrains we hear from age verification proponents is that online ID checks are nothing new. After all, you show your ID at bars and liquor stores all the time, right? And it's true that many places age-restrict access in-person to various goods and services, such as tobacco, alcohol, firearms, lottery [...]

I've criticized Chuck Schumer plenty over the years, generally for being bad on tech policy, but also for not understanding the moment we're living through. Yes, he's the leader of a minority party with zero power, but that doesn't mean he's powerless. Yet he acts as if he is. And if he can't figure that [...]

Donald Trump and his authoritarian friends have successfully destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the closest this country has gotten to having a useful and effective publicly-funded media. The CPB this week voted to officially shut down, just months after Republicans passed a massive billionaire tax cut plan that stripped the organization of more [...]

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Given the recent Supreme Court ruling that (surprisingly!) said Trump did not have the executive power to commandeer National Guard troops to aid and abet law enforcement/deportation efforts in Illinois, this ruling [PDF] from the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court was, perhaps, inevitable. If it's illegal to do it in Illinois, it's equally illegal in California [...]

American right wing propaganda companies are beginning to fight among themselves as a shrinking number of dodgy media companies vie for domination of the Trump-coddled U.S. propaganda market. Newsmax, a right wing propaganda organization pretending to be a cable news company, is upset at the fact that Nexstar Media Group and TEGNA, two right wing [...]

I've come to really appreciate the term Trump derangement syndrome." I've found it incredibly useful, primarily because whenever I hear someone use the phrase unironically, I am comfortable assessing that the conversation with that person will be unproductive and can be ended. It's a rhetorical device, and not a particularly good one, that is trotted [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. It was a chilly afternoon in January, just a week after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, when I met Yineska, a Venezuelan mother who had been living in the United States for nearly two years. Trump's election, she told me, had put her [...]

New York Governor Kathy Hochul just signed a law that's going to get expensive fast. The state's new social media labeling requirement-S4505, courtesy of state Senator Andrew Gounardes-forces websites to slap unscientific warnings on their services claiming that features like algorithmic feeds and push notifications cause addiction. It's compelled speech based on contested science, which [...]

It's hilarious that a single Salvadoran migrant has made the Trump administration look so pitiful. During one of its first purge efforts, the administration deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia and another 100-plus migrants to El Salvador's infamous CECOT prison. Since then, the administration has done nothing but lose when it comes to Abrego Garcia. He not [...]

By now it's pretty clear that right wing, billionaire, Trump ally Larry Ellison bought CBS to convert what was left of the news division into lazy agitprop that blows smoke up the ass of wealth and power. Leading the charge is CBS News boss Bari Weiss, an unqualified contrarian Substack troll who recently vividly demonstrated [...]

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If you needed proof that Trump's war on drugs" is pure theatrical bullshit designed to justify geopolitical adventurism and the transactional nature of how he views absolutely everything, look no further than the past two months of his foreign policy. Two months ago, Donald Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras who [...]

For the past month, we've been running our fundraising drive to support Techdirt's reporting as we move into this new year - a year we believe is going to need our uncompromising coverage more than ever. Now that drive is coming to a close: today is the last day that you can get your hands [...]

It's that time again! Instead of our usual look at the top comments of the week, it's time to celebrate the most highly voted comments of the year at Techdirt. As usual we'll be looking at the top three winners in the Insightful and Funny categories, as well as some outliers that rose to the [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020-2021, we published a series of posts on Trump's Presidential Commission On Law Enforcement, starting with a look at its tone that everyone but cops are to blame for the terrible state of policing, followed by its repeated calls for anti-encryption legislation, and its conclusion that doing the same [...]

At the beginning of the month, we kicked off a fundraising drive to help sustain the independent, uncompromising coverage that we always try to offer at Techdirt. We also decided to try a new experiment that we hope to turn into an annual tradition: offering up a limited edition commemorative coin for our biggest supporters. [...]

As you hopefully know by now, we are once again hosting our annual game jam celebrating the works that enter the public domain in 2026, a.k.a. today! This year, that means we enter a new decade, as works originally published in 1930 finally exit copyright protection and become free to remix, repurpose, and build on. [...]

Look, I get it. The world is a mess. Important institutions are crumbling. It feels like both the tech and political worlds are collaborating to squeeze all remaining humanity out of all of us. Cynicism is ascendant. Nihilism is the new black. And yet: I remain optimistic. Not the naive, everything-will-work-out-fine kind of optimism. The [...]

I certainly don't expect the wider Techdirt readership to care all that much about NFL football or, more specifically a single local team like the Chicago Bears. So, to that end, here's a hopefully educational preamble to this post that will provide you with the context you need. If you were to make a list [...]

Before she was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison to turn CBS into a right wing propaganda and safe space, Bari Weiss tried her best to create a fake propaganda-fueled college in Austin. If you recall, Weiss (alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) helped create the University of Austin in 2021 under the pretense they [...]

Over the summer, the Supreme Court's conservative majority upended decades of traditional First Amendment standards to say that Texas could put in place an age verification law if that law was intended to keep kids away from porn. As we argued at the time, the ruling had all sorts of problems, but even leaving those [...]

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America continues to be made great again. Or so says the collective of fascist buffoons currently holding federal positions of power. The Trump administration has made a lot of noise about bringing the rule of law" back to America - something that supposedly went missing during Biden's term. The alleged lawlessness covers everything from rational [...]

For years we had to listen to a bipartisan roster of lawmakers insist that TikTok was one of the greatest national security threats to ever face the nation. In reality, they were mostly just interested in protecting Facebook from a short-form video company it couldn't out innovate. And ultimately, it was about transferring TikTok ownership [...]

This administration is in the midst of failing the American people in so many ways, of course, but if you need one stark example of that failure then you can find it in measles. When I wrote this post way back in March of this year, it was our first Techdirt post done on the [...]

Nothing this administration does is subtle. Nothing about its anti-migrant purge has been anything less than brutish. As if to drive the point home that the bigots were running the shop, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the stripping of due process from people whose only crime was usually just a civil [...]

Donald Trump has an enemies list. Not a secret one, either. It's actually been published at the official White House website. But he has plenty of enemies beyond that. And ever since his return to office, he's been engaged in acts of vengeance. Federal agencies have been purged of anyone who isn't a MAGA loyalist. [...]

Last week, I pointed out that part of the reason for running our current fundraiser (donate $100 or more and you'll get our first commemorative challenge coin) is to show that it is possible to have a successful media business model that doesn't involve annoying its community into paying. Apparently that struck a nerve. A [...]