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This was the way it was always going to end: with Trump turning the Oval Office into the palace of a king. One need look no further than Trump's attempt to invoke the vengeful spirits of the Overlook Hotel by adding a $200 million ballroom to the White House, as though this were the early [...]

When politicians immediately blamed social media for the horrific 2022 Buffalo mass shooting-despite zero evidence linking the platforms to the attack-it was obvious deflection from actual policy failures. The scapegoating worked: survivors and victims' families sued the social media companies, and last year a confused state court wrongly ruled that Section 230 didn't protect them. [...]

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This remains one of the most unintentionally funny things the Trump administration has ever done. Of course, this regime isn't known for its sense of humor, so anything generating a laugh exists despite the regime, rather than because of it. But laugh we will! Trump is throwing billions at ICE, hoping a whole bunch of [...]

Back in June the Trump administration announced it would be launching a new mobile phone company, including a new Trump branded phone they claimed would be made in the U.S." As we noted then, it was all mostly bullshit: the venture was just a flimsy rebranding of an existing MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), which [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Arianity with a comment about how RFK Jr. approaches things: He is literally a eugenicist. If you dig down into his beliefs, he consistently thinks that if you die to something, it's because you were weak" and deserved it. In second place, it's MrWilson [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we looked at how the DHS was surveilling journalists who published leaked documents and how they obtained the encrypted messages of protestors. The FCC was trying to pretend Trump's executive order about social media wasn't ridiculous, and one commissioner who suggested it was unconstitutional was rapidly withdrawn from [...]

Disney spent 18 months negotiating to create a digital version of Dwayne Johnson for the live-action Moana film. Johnson agreed. The technology was ready. Then Disney's lawyers killed the whole thing-not because of privacy concerns or actor rights, but because they worried parts of the film might end up in the public domain. This is [...]

It's funny just how often the actions of so-called strong men" actually show just how scared and fragile they are. And if you want a more specific example of what I'm talking about, you can typically tell when a national government is feeling scared or weak, because that usually comes along with restrictions on a [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Two weeks into President Donald Trump's second presidency, and just days after he pardoned hundreds of Capitol rioters, officials Trump had placed in charge of the Justice Departmentmade a sweeping demand. They wanted the names of the thousands of FBI employees who had played a role [...]

Arrest/ticketing quotas have almost always been found illegal by courts. They used to be commonplace, but courts (at all levels) have generally ruled that quotas pervert incentives so much they encourage open, deliberate abuse of constitutional rights. Enter the Trump administration, which only considers the Second Amendment to be sacrosanct. Trump deputy Chief of Staff [...]

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We've talked plenty about how Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) was always more about performative cruelty than actual efficiency. But a new Senate report reveals just how spectacularly DOGE failed at its supposed core mission while causing immeasurable human suffering in the process. The entire concept blew up more spectacularly than one of [...]

We've well documented how the AOL->AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery series of mergers were among some of the most destructive andpointless business deals" ever conceived by modern man. Just decades of savvy deal-making" that resulted in an increasingly shittier product. The mergers resulted inbottomless layoffs, the closure ofnumerousvaluable andpopular brandsand shows, and much worse product as incompetent, fail-upward [...]

For no less than 25 years now, Techdirt has been writing about how the tax preparation industry, especially Intuit, has spent gobs of money bribing lobbying government to keep relatively low-earners from simple methods for filing their tax returns. The series of posts you can find in that link, particularly those in the last 5-10 [...]

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 [...]