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Like far too many states in the current Trump era, Oklahoma has also decided the Constitution is meaningless and that whatever the government wants, it can have. In this case, it means mandating every school classroom contain a Bible that must be taught" from, as well as expanding the concept of social studies" to include [...]

Have I mentioned lately that the U.S. no longer has functional federal consumer protection and corporate oversight thanks to Donald Trump? And how that should probably be more of a story across journalism? Last fall you might recall that the FTC created a popular new rule that barred corporations from making it annoying or difficult [...]

I've been an MLB.TV evangelist for some time now. My deep love for the game of baseball has led me to subscribe to baseball's streaming service, still probably the best in sports, for over a decade now. While the local blackouts are still a nuisance, I really do love the ability to stream almost any [...]

It's not every day you watch a company faceplant so theatrically in public, but Cloud Innovation's latest stunt deserves a slow clap. Cloud Innovation, which you'd probably never heard of unless you're neck-deep in African IP registry battles (stay tuned), just managed to make a legal play whose end result should be calling a lot [...]

I recently sat through this hour-longinterviewbetweenNew York Timesopinion columnist Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel. It was honestly a somewhat hypnotic experience for me. And on reflection, deeply disturbing. Not because Thiel said anything overtly monstrous-quite the opposite. He was thoughtful, articulate, intellectually sophisticated. He demonstrated genuine insight into technological stagnation, political decay, and civilizational risk. [...]

This week, Elon Musk's Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, responding with conspiracy theories about Jewish people, and for a brief period telling people to call it MechaHitler." The incident perfectly illustrates why Alex Komoroske's manifesto about the dangers of centralized AI, which we ran less than a month ago, has been making waves. When [...]

Lawmakers seem to think they're capable of solving every perceivable social media problem via legislation. Sometimes, the intents are pure but the execution is lacking. In many more cases - especially recently - the intent is to harm social media companies with legislation, all while pretending it's about protecting free speech" or the children" or [...]

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For months, the DOJ has insisted to US courts that it has no jurisdiction over the people it rendered to Salvadoran detention facilities. But when the UN came asking, El Salvador told a very different story: these detainees are exclusively" under US jurisdiction and legal responsibility. The contradiction is so blatant it's almost insulting to [...]

Trump recently launched a wireless phone service," which as we mentioned, isn't so much a real phone service as it is a quick licensing agreement and a lazy rebranding of other services. He's also exploiting the presidency by launching a vast array of new, clumsily branded Trump home goods, including a new Trump-branded Instantpot. If [...]

Nestle certainly hasn't been shy about engaging in aggressive trademark enforcement in the past, but this one is something different. We've already covered several stories in which a person or company has attempted to trademark the name of a city for a particular market designator. Not use the name of the city in a larger [...]

In Trump's eyes, anything that doesn't make white people appear to be the saviors of the world is something that should be buried. Whatever the phrase fake news" won't make go away is subject to seemingly daily government edicts that declare any recognition of racial diversity or America's racist past (and present) to be un-American [...]

Support us on Patreon We've got one more cross-post episode for you this week! A few weeks ago, Mike joined host Aaron Ross Powell on the ReImagining Liberty podcast for a discussion that digs into the the philosophy and principles underlying the push for internet decentralization and protocols over platforms, and why this shift is [...]

The New York Times has had a rough few decades when it comes to being manipulated by bad actors. But their latest embarrassment-a complete non-story about NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's college application to Columbia University from 2009-represents a new low in journalistic malpractice that combines hacked materials, racist sources, and a breathtaking willingness to [...]

Trump advisor/subhuman ghoul Stephen Miller wants ICE to be arresting 3,000 people a day. So far, ICE has only managed to top out at 2,200 arrests in a single day, despite going full black ops in neighborhoods and businesses, driving unmarked cars, and leaving nothing exposed on officers' bodies but their lifeless eyes. Stephen Miller [...]

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With apologies to Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay in Harper's, Who Goes Nazi?" remains a worthwhile read on the cultural archetypes of who is drawn to fascism, and who would never go down such a path. It felt like it could use a modern updating, however. Update: Just after I finished writing this, it occurred [...]

However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they're arguably worse in prisons. For decades,journalistsandresearchershave outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resultingsky high rates(upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families. Most of [...]

The conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled 6-3 in favor of upholding an age verification measure targeting adult content platforms on the internet that the state legislature of Texas adopted during the 2023 legislative session. As a quick reminder, the case isFree Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxtonand featured the parent companies of [...]

The Trump Administration's constant escalation of its mass deportation programs now means ICE, CBP, and other federal agencies must come up with thousands of arrests a day. This never had anything to do with removing criminals from the country and, even if you once believed that might be the case, an unending string of raids [...]

Both New York and Minnesota just passed laws requiring social media platforms to slap warning labels on their sites-warning labels based on zero scientific evidence, likely to be struck down as unconstitutional compelled speech, and designed solely to let politicians pretend they're protecting children" while actually making their lives worse. You'd think lawmakers would learn. [...]

Men in masks kidnapping people off streets or turning businesses into ghost towns is now nothing more than an everyday occurrence in the United States. The Trump administration never actually cared whether or not the people it ejected from the country due to their race, color, or creed were, in fact, criminals. All it ever [...]

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On Thursday, literally the day before flash flooding devastated Texas, the Texas Observer published an article warning that Trump's DOGE Cuts Are a Texas-Sized Disaster," explaining how cuts to both the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would likely lead to disaster for Texas. Twenty-four hours later, those [...]

You might recall that about half a decade ago news outlets began to whine endlessly about the poor old news comment section. Editors at many outlets didn't like the way the comment section was used to prominently point out errors in stories and challenge newsrooms. They were also often too cheap to invest in moderating [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a reaction to Kilmar Abrego's story of the conditions inside CECOT: We're funding this with taxpayer money. We're living in Omelas, only it's worse and there are millions more being tortured than just one child. There's no walking away though. We have [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020... remember Parler? The uncensored free speech social media platform? Well, it was changing its tune and starting to ban users as it embarked on a speedrun of the content moderation learning curve (and we also noted some striking clauses in its terms of service). Twitch and Reddit were [...]

From the massive handout to already-wealthy Americans to the likely fatal cuts to Medicaid, there's plenty to be disgusted by in the GOP Budget bill approved by Congress today. But there's also a lot of little gifts in there to corporations that will likely fly under the radar, including a massive new handout of valuable [...]

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.

All hail Jason Fyk, one of the most aggrieved failure to monetize piss videos" dudes ever. In fact, he might be the only person angered about his inability to turn pee into cash with third-party content featuring people urinating. Anything that gives me a chance to embed this video (which also served as the ultimate [...]

Back in the summer of 2020, RFK Jr. was leading the Children's Health Defense organization, built on an anti-vaccination platform. The organization sued Facebook/Meta that year, along with several fact-checking organizations, for limiting the reach of, and otherwise fact-checking, its posts due to their inclusion of medical and scientific misinformation. CHD argued, in an incredibly [...]

Way back in the day of EARLIER THIS YEAR, people could expect to be subjected to warrantless, invasive device searches only at US borders and international airports. Visa applicants, however, just needed to fill out some paperwork and wait for permission to head abroad to find work and/or continue their education. Now, you don't even [...]

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People have referred to CECOT, the Salvadoran gulag, as The Prison that Nobody Leaves." That's one reason (of many) that it was so concerning that the Trump regime was renditioning people there with no due process. Indeed, most had no criminal record at all. This is why there were concerns that it would, in fact, [...]

As predicted, CBS execs have folded like damp cardboard and decided to pay Donald Trump $16 million in an incredible and historic act of cowardice. CBS, seeking FCC regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance, wanted to settle a completely baseless Trump lawsuit falsely alleging that 60 Minutes misleadingly edited an election season [...]

Book bans are all the rage these days, as you likely well know. Far too many people, and folks in government more importantly, seem to have read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 not as a lesson in the dangers of new media, but as some sort of instruction manual for how to treat literature. But the [...]

A bill purporting to target the issue of misinformation and defamation caused by generative AI has mutated into something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out. The Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act aims to address understandable concerns about generative AI-created replicas" by [...]

According to the latest data on robocalls from the YouMail Robocall Index, the scale of the U.S. robocall problem has grown by another eleven percent year over year. U.S. consumers received just over 4.8 billion robocalls in May. We've normalized ceding our primary voice communications platforms to corporations, debt collectors, and scammers, and there's every [...]

The Trump administration's immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They're literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And they're doing it all to cover up their own massive legal fuckups. Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We covered this last week when Magistrate Judge [...]

The DHS finally decided to provide the underlying stats for its exponentially increasing claims of sky-high numbers of assaults on ICE officers. Earlier this year, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted assaults were up 413%, which was parroted by acting ICE direction Todd Lyons in his whiny response to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump's questioning of [...]

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After Donald Trump won the election, he was still so full of hatred, bile, and spite, that he sued the pollster Ann Selzer as well as the Des Moines Register. Selzer, who has been one of the most trusted names in polling, released a poll slightly before the election that predicted a somewhat shocking victory [...]

While the GOP budget bill continues to include no limit of corrupt garbage that will kill millions of Americans (the cuts to Medicaid and rural hospitals being particularly brutal), one key component of the GOP agenda didn't quite make the cut. Ted Cruz had proposed withholding billions of dollars in federal broadband grants for states [...]

When it comes to the anti-piracy efforts taken by some of the more aggressive companies out there, such as Nintendo, the most frustrating part of the whole thing for me is just how completely short-sighted those efforts tend to be. Take Nintendo's updated EULA for its Switch consoles, for example. The updated agreement makes several [...]

I need to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: your refusal to call fascism fascism" is not sophistication-it'scomplicity. When Donald Trump postsexplicit ordersfor REMIGRATION" and Mass Deportation Operations" targeting American cities because they are the core of the Democrat Power Center," that's not controversial immigration policy." That's mass deportation directed against [...]

Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous [...]

Martial law? Police state? These are just things the alleged Leader of Free World wants, rather than things a nation founded on rejecting these options should be in the process of instituting. And yet, here we are, barely six months into Trump's return to office, staring down the barrel of both of these related horrors. [...]

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At a time when politicians on both sides reflexively call for censorship and speech policing, it's refreshing to see someone actually defend free speech principles-especially when it would be politically easier to cave. That's exactly what New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani did when NBC's Meet the Press tried to pressure him into [...]