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For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech's fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech. According to a March 2025report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or [...]

When five Supreme Court Justices recuse themselves from a single case, that's news. When they do it because most of them have book deals with the same publisher, that's potentially a problem. Last week's Monday order list included this unusual admission: five Justices recused from Baker v. Coates, a silly plagiarism case involving Ta-Nehisi Coates [...]

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Earlier this month, the federal government - multiple wings of it - went apeshit when dealing with routine oversight of ICE detention facilities. Three New Jersey Congressional reps (of the federal variety) made an unannounced visit to inspect an ICE detention center run by inappropriately gleeful private prison contractor, GeoGroup. As the Congressional reps tried [...]

Last yearTrumplicans killeda popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC'sAffordable Connectivity Program(ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak. At the time, the GOP claimed they weresimply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the head of ICE saying journalists should stop asking questions about ICE officers. In first place, it's Justinfinity with a comment about the fear of officers being targeted: That's especially wild when held up next to the very common [...]

We've now arrived at the end of our series of posts about the winners of this year's public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, Best Adaptation, the honorable mentions, and the Best Digital Game. Today, we wrap things up with a look at [...]

We talked about the celebrity fight du jour between actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively when it started, as it seemed for all the world like your typical Streisand Effect story. What began as a workplace harassment complaint of sorts, with Lively initially alleging several instances of inappropriate workplace behavior by Baldoni, has now exploded [...]

Eight men were put on a plane from Texas, bound for South Sudan - a country the State Department warns Americans not to travel to because of crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict." None of these men were from South Sudan. The Trump administration shipped them there anyway, in direct violation of a federal court order. [...]

The timing here is incredible. The very same day that the FTC's public inquiry" into big tech censorship" closes, that very same FTC opens an investigation not into big tech," but rather Media Matters. Yes, the very same Media Matters that Elon Musk has been trying to silence through the censorial abuse of the court [...]

This is exactly what it looks like: the actions of an administration infested by vindictive thugs. Former South Dakota governor and current DHS boss Kristi Noem returned to South Dakota to get her ego stroked a bit by Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota. While Noem was picking up a fake degree and presumably [...]

Lawmakers continue to propose new bills that would require social media companies and app stores to segment users by age and obtain parental consent for minors. Laws like Utah's newApp Store Accountability Actand an identically namedpiece of federal legislationare being pushed across the country. Other bills, such as theRhode Island Social Media Regulation Act, would [...]

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DHS announced yesterday that Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, stripping the university of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification. The timing is particularly brazen: around the same time, a federal judge in California had blocked DHS from a separate scheme to mass-revoke thousands of student visas based on fifteen minutes of review. [...]

Back in March, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr announced he was investigating" Verizon because the company hadn't scaled back its diversity and inclusion efforts quickly enough for the bigots in the Trump administration. Despite the investigation being completely baseless, Verizon was quick to comply, yanking materials related to its fleeting efforts to diversify its workforce [...]

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 [...]

I really used to love our series of posts on how companies and content creators can build more revenue and loyalty with their customers through what we called the Connect with Fans and a Reason to Buy" philosophy. Shortened to Cwf+RtB," the idea is that by treating fans in an awesome and human way, concerns [...]

You can't say that Elon Musk hasn't gotten his money's worth after spending $277 million to help buy Donald Trump an election victory (that's not including the $44 billion Musk spent on turning Twitter into a right wing propaganda mill). The end of the numerous investigations into labor, environmental, and consumer fraud abuses alone have [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. One of Elon Musk's employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his billionaire boss while simultaneously helping to dismantle the federal agency that regulates two of Musk's biggest companies, according to court records and afinancial disclosure reportobtained by ProPublica. [...]

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FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson begged Donald Trump for his job by promising he would end Lina Khan's politically motivated investigations." And, yet, one of his first orders of business upon getting the job was to... kick off a politically motivated investigation regarding big tech censorship," which he (falsely) claimed was potentially illegally targeting conservative speech [...]

Last week we noted how Trump illegally declared he was killing the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act. The law, passed as part of the infrastructure bill, was slated to bring millions in new broadband grants and digital literacy tools to Americans of all kinds long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. The [...]

I would love to say that it feels like the era of RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary is starting to come to an end, but that would be optimistic in the extreme. Still, I think we're starting to see the edges fray a bit and it's no surprise as to why. Kennedy has overseen budget, [...]

Every so often, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court will surprise you with a well-reasoned decision that cuts against the grain of its usual pro-cop, pro-censorship, pro-conservative values" output. This one, brought to us by Raffi Melkonian, unfortunately isn't one of those exceptions. This one is more aligned with the rule. This potential class-action lawsuit, brought [...]

Within the next decade, generative AI could join computers and electricity as one of themost transformational technologiesin history, with all of the promise and peril that implies. Governments' responses to GenAI-including new legal precedents-need to thoughtfully address real-world harms without destroying the public benefits GenAI can offer. Unfortunately, the U.S. Copyright Office's rushed draftreporton AI [...]

The rushed adoption of half-cooked automation in America's already broadly broken media and journalism industry continues to go smashingly, thanks for asking. U.S. media companies have long been at the forefront of managerial dysfunction. More recently, that mismanagement has taken the form of wave after wave of AI" scandals, ranging from getting busted for using [...]

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So powerful. And yet, sooooo sensitive. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump asked a simple question: why are so many ICE agents covering their faces when disappearing people from US city streets? Pointing to the extremely disturbing arrest of Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk over her criticism of her university for its Israel-Palestine conflict stance, Bump [...]

At a time when mainstream media continues to struggle with calling out Trump's censorial power grabs for what they are, John Oliver just devoted an entire segment to exposing what Techdirt readers already know: Donald Trump's administration has been waging a direct and sustained assault on free speech and the First Amendment, with FCC chairman [...]

We've talked about how, in the digital space at least, the concept of ownership" has undergone a massive philisophical shift. It used to be that you would go out somewhere, buy a thing, and own that thing. When the product is digital, however, or if it is connected to the internet and subject to firmware [...]

Afew weeks ago, the UK's regional and national daily news titles ran similar front covers, exhorting the government there to Make it Fair." Thecampaign Web siteexplained: Tech companies use creative content, such as news articles, books, music, film, photography, visual art, and all kinds of creative work, to train their generative AI models. Publishers and [...]

Our Secretary of Homeland Security, tasked with overseeing the detention of thousands of people, doesn't understand one of the most fundamental protections against unlawful imprisonment in our legal system. And we're not talking about some obscure technical detail - we're talking about habeas corpus, a basic right that's been around since the Magna Carta. Kristi [...]

The DEA may not be an early adopter of forward-looking policies, but it certainly leads the pack when it comes to shedding accountability like a teen ditching an ill-fitting sports coat the instant a family portrait session has wrapped up. Federal law enforcement agencies definitely trailed the trends when it came to body cam use [...]

Here's a question about the First Amendment and social media companies that used to just be in the realm of crazy law school hypotheticals: What makes social media sites state actors" subject to constitutional constraints? For years, we heard from some that merely talking to government officials was enough - at least according to Vivek [...]

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For years, the DHS has been expanding its intrusive surveillance of anyone attempting to enter this country. (It has also expanded this to include people leaving the country.) The current onboarding procedure for US entry includes demands for account passwords and deep dives into devices carried by migrants, visitors, asylum seekers, and anyone else CBP [...]

There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn't pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despitea parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congressis too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this [...]

It's no secret that Nintendo is among the most draconian actors when it comes to intellectual property. Techdirt is rife with posts on the various ways the company has been a royal and overreaching pain in the ass on anything with even the most modest concern over copyrights, trademarks, or patents. From attempting to unmask [...]

It's not enough to simply go after anyone looking kinda Venezuelan these days. DHS components have an unquenchable thirst for arrest stats, especially now that Trump's second Oval Office stay has removed any remaining discretion and restraint from border control actions. Installing Trump supplicant Kristi Noem to the top spot in the DHS has only [...]

In a brazen attempt to avoid oversight, Elon Musk's DOGE team is now trying to audit" the very agency tasked with auditing them. On Friday, NOTUS reported that DOGE officials showed up at the Government Accountability Office - Congress's independent watchdog - to attempt their signature hostile takeover routine. There's just one small problem: DOGE [...]

President Trump's attack on public broadcasting has attracted plenty of deserved attention, but there's a far more technical, far more insidious policy change in the offing-one that will take away Americans' right to unencumbered access to our publicly owned airwaves. The FCC is quietlycontemplatinga fundamental restructuring ofallbroadcasting in the United States, via a new DRM-based [...]

They may claim they care about the children, but the Republican push for age verification laws, book bans, and the general censorship of anything not specifically straight and (preferably) white is all about preventing adults from accessing content these lawmakers don't personally care for. The kids are merely useful leverage for legislators pushing for the [...]

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Since the start of the Trump administration, many of our biggest concerns about how MAGA would attack free speech have not only proven true, but have turned out to be understated. Nearly all parts of the administration are seeking to silence critical speech. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed free speech warriors" who signed the infamous Harper's Letter [...]

Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime for decades in theUSandEU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of Big Tech" paying Big Telecom" billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. It's what started the net neutrality wars. More recently, it has evolved into claims that we need to tax streaming companies to help [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Stephen Miller suggesting the suspension of habeas corpus: Remember: Once they suspend the civil rights of non-citizens, they'll only ever need to declare someone a non-citizen to justify black-bagging an American citizen off the street and sending [...]

We're nearing the end of our series of posts about the winners of this year's public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, Best Adaptation, and the honorable mentions, and this week we're looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: Cocoanut Hotel by [...]

If you're from Texas or its surrounding states, you've probably heard of Buc-ee's. The gas station and convenience store chain is a staple of the area and has a well-known branded logo that looks like this. I recently came across a settlement that was the result of a trademark suit Buc-ee's initiated back in November [...]

The Supreme Court has delivered a clear rebuke to the Trump administration's attempt to weaponize the Alien Enemies Act, issuing a slightly more detailed ruling that follows up on last month's midnight emergency order. That emergency ruling came as the administration was literally loading detainees onto buses headed to airports, racing to deport them before [...]

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is back in the Senate. Sponsors are claiming-again-that the latest version won't censor online content. It isn't true. This bill still sets up a censorship regime disguised as a duty of care," and it will do what previous versions threatened: suppress lawful, important speech online, especially for young people. [...]