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In mid-November, we talked about yet more chaos occurring under RFK Jr., this time at the FDA. At issue was George Tidmarsh, who joined the FDA in July as the agency's chief drug regulator. Tidmarsh had been accused of using his position to exact a vendetta campaign against a former business partner, Kevin Tang, and [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby the Texas Tribune and the Texas Newsroom and co-published with ProPublica.Republished under the Texas Tribune's republish feature. Months after fighting to keepsecret the emailsexchanged betweenTexas Gov. Greg Abbott's office and tech billionaireElon Musk's companies, state officials released nearly 1,400 pages to The Texas Newsroom. The records, however, reveal little about the [...]

Last week Netflix announced a $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, elbowing out rival acquisition bids (for now) by Comcast/NBC and Paramount/CBS. But the deal still needs regulatory approval from Trump, who has already stated several times that he'd prefer it if his bestie new owner of CBS, right wing billionaire Larry Ellison, comes away [...]

You want to see actual government censorship in action? And have it done by people claiming they're doing it to stop censorship? Check out last week's revelation (originally reported by Reuters) that the US State Department will now start denying H-1B visas for anyone who has anything to do with trust & safety, fact checking, [...]

Now that congressional members on both sides of the aisle have decided it might be worth taking a look at the Defense Department's murder people in boats" program, we're finally learning more than the Trump administration has been willing to share about these extrajudicial killings. The administration's lawyers have cobbled together justifications for these actions [...]

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Elon Musk is now calling for the dissolution of the European Union because it fined him $140 million for violating a law he once said was exactly aligned" with his vision for (what was then called) Twitter. And he's doing it by lying about what the fine is actually for. The EU hit X with [...]

All out of original ideas and facing market growth saturation, we've noted repeatedly how streaming companies are increasingly looking like the stodgy old traditional cable TV giants they once disrupted. That means a lot of pointless mergers, endless price hikes, a steady erosion of quality, and the slow paring back of useful features (like going [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is rkhalloran with a comment about keeping kids safe online: The correct answer is ACTUALLY PARENT YOUR KIDS. This is the digital version of finding nudie mags" under your kid's bed then trying to sue Playboy/Penthouse/... for the kid getting ahold of them (yes I [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Donald Trump got angry about a trend on Twitter and went full force calling for a repeal of Section 230, renewing the effort to slip this into the must-pass military spending bill. Trump promised he was willing to defund the entire military if Congress didn't agree, but Congress [...]

The fucking maniacs did it. We talked yesterday about how newborn vaccinations for hepatitis B were on the agenda for this latest meeting at ACIP, the CDC's immunization advisory panel. You likely know all this already, but RFK Jr. fired all ACIP panel members earlier this year, replacing them with hand-picked anti-vaxxer quack-jobs who are [...]

So Netflix has announced that it's buying Warner Brothers Discovery (including HBO) for a whopping $82.7 billion. As we've well covered, it's the latest in a long series of pointless Warner mergers stretching back to the 2001 AOL acquisition, which all resulted in oodles of chaos, price hikes, layoffs, and generally a steady erosion in [...]

Support us on Patreon Earlier today, we joined in announcing the Resonant Computing Manifesto: a call for restoring a culture of technology that empowers users and enriches their lives. The manifesto was created by a group led by Alex Komoroske, and today Alex joins the podcast for a deeper dive into what resonant computing" means [...]

A cofounder of a Bay Area Stop AI" activist group abandoned its commitment to nonviolence, assaulted another member, and made statements that left the group worried he might obtain a weapon to use against AI researchers. The threats prompted OpenAI to lock down its San Francisco offices a few weeks ago.In researching this movement, I [...]

The Trump administration is so sure it can get away with anything that it's willing to try anything. That misapprehension of the situation has resulted in at least 200 rulings against the administration's anti-immigrant efforts. Still, the regime persists with its attempts to brute force constitutional rights out of existence. Like it or not, MAGA [...]

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Everyone's pissed at the tech industry. And for good reason. The term enshittification is super popular for many valid reasons. Companies that used to provide real value, are now focused on extracting more value from users, rather than improving their products and services. People used to be excited by new innovations. There was a time [...]

Not that long ago, John Oliver's Last Week Tonight did a good bit on why public broadcasting is important. The segment features a lot of insight from UPenn media professor Victor Pickard, whose work on the (many) problems with modern consolidated U.S. corporate media has always been essential reading: But Oliver also walked the talk. [...]

ACIP is meeting this week, which means we all get to clench our sphincters as we await whatever small, medium, or large sized horrors will come out of this panel of clowns. It wasn't always this way. ACIP, and the larger CDC, used to be the world standard when it came to government bodies dedicated [...]

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 roundup of the latest news in online [...]

Despite all the recent hype about AI," the technology still struggles with very basic things and remains prone to significant errors. Which makes it maybe not the best idea to rush the nascent technology into widespread adoption in industries prone to all sorts of deep-rooted problems already (like say, health insurance, or journalism). We've already [...]

A newbillsponsored by Sen. Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT), Sen. Britt (R-AL), Sen. Warner (D-VA), and Sen. Murphy (D-CT) would require AI chatbots to verify all users' ages, prohibit minors from using AI tools, and implement steep criminal penalties for chatbots that promote or solicit certain harms. That might sound reasonable at first, but behind [...]

The Court of Justice of the EU-likely without realizing it-just completely shit the bed and made it effectively impossible to run any website in the entirety of the EU that hosts user-generated content. Obviously, for decades now, we've been talking about issues related to intermediary liability, and what standards are appropriate there. I am an [...]

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A recent shooting involving a former Afghani US counter-terrorism asset who worked with the CIA (!!!) has become the tragedy the Trump administration apparently needed to go from consistently racist" to openly racist." The wounding of two National Guard troops led directly to the president spending the holiday doing what he always does on holidays: [...]

Earlier this year we noted how the Trump administrationhad cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. Even calling it a phone company" was being generous: the branding deal was basically just a licensing agreement and a lazy coat of paint on another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just [...]

Part of what makes it difficult for the importance of so much of what is happening in the Trump administration to break through to the public mind is that it's all chaos, all the time. Moving layers deeper to get at specifics can actually make the problem worse, in fact. Take all of our coverage [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Online influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has millions of young male followers, was facing allegations of sex trafficking women in three countries when he and his brother left their home in Romania to visit the United States. The Tates will be free, Trump is [...]

First, let's dispense with the theater: the question of whether DOGE still exists" as a formal entity completely misses the point. The always-misleadingly-named Department of Government Efficiency" was never really about efficiency. It was Elon Musk's excuse to gain access to the federal government's fundamental systems and wreak havoc, Twitter-style-smashing anything that got in his [...]

Current Third Circuit Appeals Court judge and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove made it clear - on more than one occasion - that DOJ lawyers should tell the courts fuck you" if they tried to shut down any anti-migrant operations. That message apparently reached several receptive ears. Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the [...]

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If you've been following along, you know why independent voices matter right now. The administration has been attacking institutions left and right. News orgs, law firms, philanthropic funders, universities, you name it. Many are capitulating. But not us. Someone needs to step up and keep doing this work without flinching and without compromising. That's where [...]

Last election season you might recall that the Trump administration lied repeatedly and pretended to be really interested in reining in corporate power and shoring up antitrust reform. And while this line was propped up by a lot of useful idiots (like Matt Stoller) who insisted there was common cause to be made with fascists, [...]

I suppose we might all be tiring of the whole the leopard you voted for eventually comes to eat your face" cliche at this point, but when the allegory fits you have to use it. And in this case, it fits so well that it would be comical if not for just how heartbreaking this [...]

One can never predict how a court will rule after oral argument. But I do fear that in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment we are on the precipice of getting yet another major copyright decision from the Supreme Court where the words First Amendment" are not uttered even once-unless, of course, someone like Justice [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: Break our laws, [...]

Last week I wrote about how the US Patent and Trademark Office is pushing a rule change that would effectively neuter the inter partes review (IPR) system that reviews already granted patents to make sure they weren't granted by mistake. Patent tolls and other abusers of the patent system have been screaming about this system [...]

For weeks, we've been told the threat posed by the trafficking of illegal drugs is indistinguishable from an outright declaration of war on the United States by foreign drug cartels. Trump and his toadies insist traffickers are bringing drugs across the border to kill" Americans, which would be an entirely self-defeating business plan no self-respecting [...]

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It was never enough to simply expel migrants as quickly as possible for the Trump administration. A massive conglomerate of federal officers was incapable of hitting Trump advisor Stephen Miller's 3,000 arrests per day quota, no matter how many rights it violated. Any pretense of only going after migrants with criminal records was discarded during [...]

Not content with just filing baseless lawsuits against media companies who say mean things about our historically unpopular president, the Trump administration has unveiled a new lazy wrinkle in its war on journalism and free speech. The White House unveiled a new section of its website last week that claims to be tracking media outlets [...]

A California judge ordered the end of a dragnet law enforcement program that surveilled the electrical smart meter data of thousands of Sacramento residents. The Sacramento County Superior Courtruledthat the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and police violated a state privacy statute, which bars the disclosure of residents' electrical usage [...]

What a difference a near-decade makes. Back in 2017, the main concerns raised by New York City's Civilian Complaint Review Board was that officers were routinely violating the right to record police officers. Sure, there wasn't nearly as much precedent to rely on then (and we're still waiting for the Supreme Court to make this [...]

Remember when you thoughtage verification laws couldn't get any worse? Well, lawmakers inWisconsin,Michigan, andbeyondare about to blow you away. It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy [...]

Twenty years ago, John Jonik released one of the best political cartoons ever regarding attempts to censor and control the internet. In it, a character dressed up as Uncle Sam is placing a gift box labeled Control of Internet Speech" on a counter. Behind it, a man dressed in a suit, labeled Corporate Media" is [...]

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The Trump administration just lies and lies and lies. Those in charge assume they can just bluster their way past the system of checks and balances. For everything else, there's AI generated memes depicting Trump taking a shit on the people he serves. Win-win, I guess. But things haven't exactly been running smoothly for Trump's [...]

Hoping to repay corporate America's feckless support of authoritarianism, the Trump administration is once again attempting to illegally ban all state and federal oversight of corporate power. Both via executive order, and by withholding already awarded grants from states that refuse to play along. The Trump administration has already done generational damage to federal consumer [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about how fascism is happening live on TV: Trump's supporters, like Trump himself, if being honest (ha!) will reply, I don't care, I want this to happen." They've never cared about the Constitution except as a weapon to be used [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Portland, Maine passed a facial recognition ban that said the city can fire employees who violate it, which might have been useful in Seattle where a police detective took Clearview for a spin and possibly violated local laws. The FBI pulled another one of its manufacture-a-terrorist schemes, and [...]