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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.

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice. In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. Put your hands up," [...]

We've seen some pretty ridiculous attempts by government officials to intimidate judges over the years, but the Department of Justice's new misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg might take the cake for sheer absurdity. As Steve Vladeck breaks down in exhaustive detail, the DOJ is essentially arguing that a federal judge committed misconduct" [...]

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First, the Trump administration gutted the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, probably because it was too concerned about protecting constitutional rights. Whoever still remained was allowed" to do whatever Trump's DOJ (now headed by yet another regrettable Trump pick, Pam Bondi) wanted it to do... like go to bat for the Second Amendment, which has never [...]

The Trump administration is once again warning states that they risk losing billions of dollars in historic infrastructure bill grants - if they attempt to make the taxpayer-subsidized broadband actually affordable. That's the updated guidance coming out of the Trump National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is tasked with coordinating the looming $42.5 billion [...]

One of the more frustrating parts of the RFK Jr. experience is nailing down his views. Part of that is because he tends to keep quite vague about those views, especially when it comes to vaccines, depending on who he is talking to. When he's running an anti-vaxxer organization, his views are specific and clear. [...]

Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible. But in one of thelatest misguided attemptsto protect children online, internet users of all ages in the UK are being forced to prove [...]

Last fall, heavily influenced by Jonathan Haidt's extremely problematic book, Australia announced that it was banning social media for everyone under the age of 16. This was already a horrifically stupid idea-the kind of policy that sounds reasonable in a tabloid headline but crumbles under any serious scrutiny. Over and over again studies have found [...]

The recently passed budget bill throws nearly $200 billion at something that doesn't actually seem to be that much of a problem: undocumented migrants. Law-abiding, hardworking taxpayers are the targets of choice for ICE, which has a 3,000-per-day arrest quota it will never meet, even though it's now spending most of its time raiding large [...]

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Just days after a jury found Tesla partially liable in a fatal Autopilot crash and ordered the company to pay over $200 million, Elon Musk took to Twitter with a bold proclamation: Teslas can drive themselves!" The timing couldn't be worse. Because thanks to a devastating article by Electrek's Fred Lambert that digs deep into [...]

The U.S. right wing has won a generational war against education and informed consensus with the closure of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB), which states it will being shuttering its doors after being unable to survive recent brutal funding cuts by Republicans. After theWhite House falsely deemed NPR and PBS a grift" last April,Republicans [...]

This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout-a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religious right to get anything it doesn't like out of the video game industry-put on a pressure campaign with payment processors, writing in to [...]

As the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues apace, and MAGA grapples with the gaslit reality they live in, the Trump Administration continues to negotiate so-called trade deals, which are negotiated and implemented using pure executive fiat, under emergency powers, under an emergency declaration which has no rational basis, while everyone pretends this isn't an example of [...]

Anyone with the tiniest bit of humanity would have found a better way to mass deportations, if they even felt compelled to do it all. Under Trump, the extra layers of cruelty are an essential part of the package - something that piles the deliberate infliction of misery on top of the thick crust of [...]

Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you'll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they've built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to concentrated political power. This isn't about technology being inherently dangerous-it's about how distorted Wall Street incentives drove [...]

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The Trump administration wants you to know they're very, very tough. So tough, in fact, that they're launching a comprehensive purge of the Naval Academy to eliminate corrosive DEI programs" and restore what they call the warrior ethos." Because nothing says fearless military leadership" like being absolutely terrified of books about civil rights and the [...]

Section 706 of the Telecom Actrequiresthe FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed on a reasonable and timely basis" to everyone. If the answer is no, the law says the FCC must take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications [...]

Trump - perhaps more than other presidents - often feels compelled to present his religious bona fides. Of course, he naturally has none. But as often as evangelical figureheads proclaim him to be (their) God's personal pick for POTUS, even Donald Trump occasionally feels obligated to give something back to a community that has given [...]

Well, well, well. The age assurance" part of the UK's Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you know? It's turned out to be exactly the privacy-invading, freedom-crushing, technically unworkable disaster that everyone with half a brain predicted [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica'sCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Now that he's free, Leonardo Jose Colmenares Solorzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his [...]

We're becoming everything we (perhaps naively) assumed most Americans didn't want America to be: a backwater burg on the world map, overseen by a corrupt sheriff and known mostly for our routine rights violations and unwillingness to treat facts as facts. Bigotry is again the national sport and people bringing inconvenient facts are just fodder [...]

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Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a Nazis Welcome" sign. By December, when the company doubled down and explicitly said they'd continue hosting and monetizing Nazi newsletters, they'd fully embraced [...]

We've noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate AI" into journalism have proven to be acomical mess, resulting in no shortage ofshoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It's thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the failure to get indictments in supposed ICE assaults: And the fact that prosecutors and grand juries didn't find evidence of actual assault in so many cases proves ICE's assault statistics are bullshit. If you read other articles on [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we took a look at tech in the pandemic, from the big ways people were using it to stay connected to the strange details like Fox putting fake videogame crowds in sports broadcasts and how it was finally forcing Hollywood to change some practices. The House Judiciary Committee [...]

This isn't going to stop happening unless governments finally get involved to do their most basic job: protect their citizens. This habit among digital and tech companies of selling a thing only to claw back some of the function of that thing after the purchase is both rampant and, frankly, getting ridiculous. It's bad enough [...]

Thisseries of postsexplores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological [...]

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals" as examples of [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In the early days of President Donald Trump's second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago's immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention. Albert Jesus Rodriguez Parra [...]

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A whole lot of bad faith arguing continues [and is amplified!] now that Donald Trump has somehow regained his position as The Person Most Likely To Abuse His Power While Serving As The Most Powerful Man In The World. [Cut to yearbook photo of an 18-year-old Donald Trump with a magnificent head of hair and [...]

There's $42.5 billion in broadband grants are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents). But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program's guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting [...]

A week or so ago, Karl Bode wrote about Vice Media's idiotic decision to disappear several articles that had been written by its Waypoint property concerning Collective Shout. Collective Shout is an Australian group that pretends to be a feminist organization, when, in reality, it operates much more like any number of largely evangelical groups [...]

This too will be swept away by this administration's steady stream of injustices, but it's still worth highlighting before it's buried by even worse news later. The mass deportation program enacted by Trump - one that intends to turn ICE into the nation's largest federal law enforcement agency - has already seen innocent foreigners declared [...]

Let's say you're a federal judge, and you need to write an opinion about a securities case. You could do it the time-tested old-fashioned way: read the briefings, read the relevant caselaw, check your quotes, make sure you've got the holdings right. Or you could try one of these new AI tools that everyone's talking [...]

The worst of the worst" ruse was never taken seriously by anyone, least of all those who performatively repeated it to serve as cover for their hatred and bigotry. The mantra means nothing. The same agency that claims it's doing God's work" is going all out to rob the meek of their inheritance. Because there [...]

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Here's the contradiction at the heart of the internet: everyone complains about content moderation, but no one wants to use an unmoderated platform. Everyone thinks trust & safety professionals are either censorial scolds or corporate lackeys, but everyone expects them to magically solve the inherent problems of human behavior at scale. I spent last week [...]

A new study from researchers at X-Lab shows that Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband service lacks the capacity to put a serious dent in U.S. broadband. Despite recent efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite a $42 billion subsidy program with an eye on giving Musk billions in taxpayer dollars. The researchers found that given [...]

Here we go again. The idea that, at least in the realm of digital goods or IoT devices, we no longer own what we've bought has been a long-running theme here at Techdirt. While the practice of pulling back features available upon purchase via firmware updates has been a regular occurrence in the video game [...]

For weeks, ICE and DHS have been claiming there's been an outsized outbreak in violence against ICE officers. The government preferred to use a misleading stat: the percentage. That way it could claim assaults were up 500, 600, 790%(!!!) in successive press releases and Fox News appearances, leading many to believe being an ICE officer [...]

The Canadian government is preparing to give away Canadians' digital lives-to U.S. police, to the Donald Trump administration, and possibly to foreign spy agencies. Bill C-2, the so-called Strong Borders Act, is a sprawling surveillance bill withmultiple privacy-invasive provisions. But the thrust is clear: it's a roadmap to aligning Canadian surveillance with U.S. demands. It's [...]

The news org Axios launched in 2017, just as the first Trump administration began, created by some ex-Politico folks, claiming that they would be an antidote to this madness" and talking about how the world needed smarter, more efficient coverage" of important news stories. The reality is that Axios launders rightwing talking points in ugly [...]

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We've finally got a Stalin to call our own. Just like Soviet Russia, homelessness is now basically a criminal offense, thanks to Trump's latest executive order, which pretends it's about crime but actually just wants to put homelessness people in places where other Americans won't be inconvenienced by them. Like most Trump executive orders, it's [...]

One of the bigger Trump election season lies was that Trump 2.0 would be serious about antitrust," and protect blue collar Americans from corporate predation. You'd have to be a turnip to not see that was an aggressive lie, pushed by a lot of folks (even supposed antitrust buster Matt Stoller), who seemed hellbent on [...]