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Right wing broadcasters are having a very good time under Brendan Carr, who has looked to destroy all remaining media consolidation limits to let them merge. Such companies, like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, don't do journalism so much as they do soggy, right wing propaganda and infotainment, usually with endless fear mongering about drugs, homelessness, [...]

I'm going to trust that most of our audience will have some idea of what McCarthyism was in the 1950s. To summarize very briefly, it was an anti-communist campaign that spread into becoming equally anti-leftist throughout the country, with a specific focus on driving the supposed communist influences out of major media in America, such [...]

We've been saying for years now that Jonathan Haidt's crusade against social media and kids is a moral panic dressed up in academic robes, and that the evidence simply does not support the sweeping claims he's been making. A new piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff drives that point [...]

Support us on Patreon In the conversation about online speech, most of the attention tends to fall on the big social media platforms, while other intermediaries get overlooked - especially payment processors and other financial intermediaries. But that very thing is the focus of a new book coming out next week, Rainey Reitmans Transaction Denied. [...]

On January 10th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Joe Rogan and put on quite a performance. He talked about how the Biden administration had pressured Meta to take down content. He detailed how the Biden administration had apparently pressured Meta to take down content - how officials called and screamed and cursed - and [...]

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Before we get to the lie exposed here, let me just offer a correction of my own. As many, many, far too many people pointed out in my last post on ICE being sent to airports, people do actually guard airport exits. My assumption was based on my own experience on wishing to remain in [...]

We've repeatedly noted how the Ellison family's acquisition of Warner Brothers (after their recent acquisitions of CBS and a part of TikTok) would be very bad for a long list of reasons. The gargantuan debt load will result in unprecedented layoffs and price hikes. And the Saudi funding, and Larry's anti-democratic interests, raise no limit [...]

All the way back in August of 2025, RFK Jr. made the extraordinary decision to fire his own CDC Director, Susan Monarez, after only a few weeks on the job. Kennedy claimed at the time that he fired Monarez because she told him affirmatively that she wasn't trustworthy. That was obviously laughable and Monarez herself [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Martha Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship to become the only woman journalist to land on Normandy Beach on D-Day. She carried stretchers before writingher harrowing accountof the invasion. The New Yorker'sfamously epicurean writerA.J. Liebling subsisted on military rations and came [...]

As if we needed any more evidence showing just how deep and thoroughly corrupted the Trump administration is. It's an endless cycle of self-serving actions, pushed forward by bigots, grifters, and loyalists who sold off what was left of their souls and spines when Trump took office. It's an endless cycle of perverse self-involvement performed [...]

Call me crazy, but I don't think an official government app should be loading executable code from a random person's GitHub account. Or tracking your GPS location in the background. Or silently stripping privacy consent dialogs from every website you visit through its built-in browser. And yet here we are. The White House released a [...]

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Call me a sicko, but I'm almost always happy when a top-level government official's communications get hacked. That's because - in almost every case - either the official seems to be a bit shady, or holds a high-level position in an agency involved in some shady stuff. I mean, it's not like hackers are targeting [...]

Republicans spent three years suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok, but have suddenly gone mysteriously quiet now that $25 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison's $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. They're also suddenly quiet about Larry buying up huge sections of [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a rebuke to someone defending the Fifth Circuit's ruling about whether a cop could sue Twitter: By the logic of the Fifth Circuit's rulings, Donald Trump can and should be held responsible for the actions of the rioters on the [...]

Last week, we announced the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1930! Now it's time to begin our series of spotlight posts, examining each of the winners in a bit more detail, and we're kicking things off today with a look at the winner of Best Adaptation: I am [...]

We've been talking a lot of about the use of artificial intelligence lately, for obvious reasons. Many of those conversations have revolved around the video game industry and I've been fairly vocal about pushing back against the all AI is bad everywhere forever" dogma that I see far too often. There are plenty of folks [...]

The expression, to make a federal case out of something" usually describes making a bigger deal out of something than it should be. But in the case of Anthropic and Hegseth, Trump, and the Department of Defense*, this federal case is actually quite simple: what the government defendants did to Anthropic is beyond the bounds [...]

Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck" themselves and then sued them for the crime of taking his advice? A federal judge has now dismissed that lawsuit - with prejudice - confirming what anyone with a passing familiarity with antitrust law already knew: companies deciding they don't want their brands plastered next to [...]

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that warrants were needed to obtain cell site location info (CSLI). That decision dealt with law enforcement's warrantless acquisition of 127 days of location data from a cell service provider. As the court saw it, the government was leveraging access to this data to turn cell phones (which has [...]

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Last week, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri got into a heated exchange during a Senate hearing with Stanford's Daphne Keller. Schmitt, who, as Missouri's Attorney General, originally filed the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, was berating Keller over Stanford's supposed role in helping the Biden administration censor social media during the 2020 election (see if you [...]

When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby kid David) hired trolling blogger Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of balanced, fact-based news," independent, principled journalism," and a unique entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision" that would completely modernize the network and reach the everyday Americans" traditionally ignored by mainstream [...]

Even at the best of times, the hallmark of RFK Jr.'s Health & Human Services is chaos. Whether it's misinformation on vaccines and other public health matters, his unique ability to exit very smart people from public health agencies, or his desire to upend established government health protocols, it's a constant frenzy when Kennedy is [...]

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 [...]

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That's effectively what's begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive-the world's largest digital library-has preserved newspapers since it went onlinein the mid-1990s. The Archive's mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible [...]

For years, certain folks on the left kept insisting they wanted to bring back the Fairness Doctrine - the old FCC policy that required broadcasters to present both sides" of controversial issues. Many of us in the tech policy world kept explaining why that was a terrible idea, one ripe for abuse and fundamentally at [...]

This judge ain't fucking around. Earlier this month, we covered New Jersey federal judge Zahid Qurashi's response to the actions of Trump's DOJ, which begins with lots of illegal appointments of prosecutors and runs right through these prosecutors' inability to defend the administration's actions. To wit: The Government's handling of Petitioner's detention is emblematic of [...]

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First things first: Meta is a terrible company that has spent years making terrible decisions and being terrible at explaining the challenges of social media trust & safety, all while prioritizing growth metrics over user safety. If you've been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know we've been critical of the company for [...]

FCC boss Brendan Carr spends an awful lot of time pretending to be a tough guy, threatening any broadcasters that aren't suitably deferential to our mad, idiot king. Carr's had giant temper tantrums over comedians who make jokes, daytime and late night talk shows that refuse to kiss Republican ass, and any remaining journalists who [...]

It's somewhat stunning to realize that the United States has been operating with Surgeon Generals that are merely acting" in the role or performing the duties of" since January 20th of 2025. The last Senate-confirmed SG was Dr. Vivek Murthy. The current nominee from the Trump/Kennedy team is Dr. Casey Means. This nomination has been [...]

I think we can all agree that nobody seems to be taking the business of governing ourselves terribly seriously. I say we can all agree on this because I think we all know that Donald Trump is a deranged, narcissistic criminal. We know this. Even those of you who nominally support him - because you [...]

Last week we covered how the government successfully convinced Judge Colleen McMahon to order the plaintiffs in the DOGE/National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) lawsuit to claw back" the viral deposition videos they had posted to YouTube - videos showing DOGE operatives Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh stumbling through questions about how they used ChatGPT [...]

By any means, necessary or not: that's how this administration gets its bigoted version of immigration enforcement done. The surges targeting cities and states that Trump doesn't feel are loyal enough are a double-edged sword. They punish states run by Democratic party members simply for being run by Democratic party members. And they flood courts [...]

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I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturally). Some friends I had met on Usenet were students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and told me [...]

Taking a break from attacking the First Amendment, FCC boss Brendan Carr this week engaged in a strange bit of performance art: his FCC announced that they'd be effectively adding all foreign-made routers to the agency's covered list," in a bid to ban their sale in the United States. That is unless manufacturers obtain conditional [...]

The polarization over any and all uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning continues. And, to be clear, I very much understand why this is all so controversial. Any new technology that has the chance to be transformative will also necessarily be disruptive and that causes fear. Fear that is not entirely unfounded, no matter [...]

As many of theAI stories on Walled Cultureattest, one of the most contentious areas in the latest stage of AI development concerns the sourcing of training data. To create high-quality large language models (LLMs) massive quantities of training data are required. In the current genAI stampede, many companies are simply scraping everything they can off [...]

Support us on Patreon Last month, Mike participated in the Cato Institutes Section 230 at 30 event to mark the 30th anniversary of the passage of Section 230. The event featured a series of fireside chats and panels that went deep on the past, present, and future of the all-important law, and you can watch [...]

All the people who have always brushed off concerns about surveillance tech, please come get your kids. And then let someone else raise them. Lots of people are fine with mass surveillance because they believe the horseshit spewed by the immediate beneficiaries of this tech: law enforcement agencies that claim every encroachment on your rights [...]

The Washington Post just published a deeply reported story about the Trump administration's campaign to expand free speech" in Europe. That headline alone should tell you something about how the story is framed - it takes the administration's self-description at face value, as though we're watching some noble effort to export the First Amendment across [...]

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Exhaustion" is a legal term. It means plaintiffs need to explore the rest of their options before asking a court to handle their case or ask a higher court to handle a case the lower court has declared not quite exhausted enough. Exhaustion" is also a human term. And that's where we are with this [...]

All modern major U.S. media mergers follow the same trajectory. Executives pump out a bunch of pre-merger lies about job creation and innovation that are parroted by a lazy access press, followed by the rubber stamping by corrupt regulators, followed by oodles of price hikes, layoffs, and quality erosion caused by panicked efforts to pay [...]

I've obviously talked a great deal about how RFK Jr. and his activity as the Secretary of HHS has been a massive health liability for the American public. The implementation of his batshit anti-vaxxer stances have, of course, grabbed most of the headlines here, especially given the recent pushback he received from the courts, but [...]

Two years ago, Congress passed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America" Act (RISAA) that included nominal reforms toSection 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill unfortunately included some problematic expansions of the law-but it also included a relatively big victory for civil liberties advocates: Section 702 authorities were only extended for two [...]

This was extremely wild shit to be happening anywhere, much less in the land of the First Amendment. No sooner had Donald Trump decided it was time to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War than the head of DoD operations decided it would be sorting news agencies by level of subservience. [...]