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Today, the Supreme Court made it pretty clear that websites have First Amendment rights to do content moderation as they see fit, but decided to send the cases challenging laws in Florida and Texas back to the lower courts to be litigated properly, effectively criticizing the litigation posture of the trade groups, NetChoice and CCIA, [...]

You might recall that way back" in 2007 Comcast here in the U.S. was caught throttling BitTorrent uploads and subsequently lying about it. Since BitTorrent was popular, hoovering up network resources, and posed a threat to traditional cable TV, Comcast execs thought their best approach would be to make an entire file transfer system less [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come to our post about the media's widespread misrepresentation of the Supreme Court's ruling in the Murthy case. In first place, it's Drew Wilson, who shares our frustration with this kind of thing: In second place, it's Rocky with a response to the claim that Mike [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, an Australian court ruled that media companies could be held liable for Facebook comments on their news stories, the Indian government used a national security law to block Twitter accounts all over the world, and the EU Intellectual Property Office released an utterly ridiculous propaganda film. Josh Hawley's [...]

For a long time we've been pointing out just how dangerous it is to turn over school discipline problems to cops. Sure, there are reasons schools might need a police response to an incident, but putting cops on staff has allowed administrators to abdicate their duties and turn incidents that could be resolved by educators [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

Law enforcement will always get more than a fair shake from the Fifth Circuit. No circuit is more apt to award immunity or otherwise refuse to punish officers for coloring outside of the constitutional lines. And that apparently includes officers' dogs, who probably enjoy a fair shake as much as anyone. Who's a good boy?!? [...]

As more and more governments try to pass more and more laws requiring age verification, some of us keep pointing out that age verification will cause a ton of harm. For all the talk of how it's necessary to protect the children," the only way to verify ages is to collect a ton of private [...]

This is one of the stupidest things ever in terms of public records lawsuits. And that's saying a lot, considering how often this site has covered public records lawsuits. This traces back to April of last year. Ben Camacho, a Los Angeles journalist who contributes to sites like Knock LA, sent out a records request [...]

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It's just like adults to be constantly diagnosing the wrong thing in trying to save the children." Over the last couple of years there's been a mostly nonsense moral panic claiming that the teen mental health crisis must be due to social media. Of course, as we've detailed repeatedly, the actual research on this does [...]

You might recall that Elon Musk claims tohate taxpayer subsidies. They should all be deleted." Except for the subsidies given to his companies (sometimes for doing nothing), of course. Back in 2020, Musk's satellite broadband venture, Starlink, gamed a Trump-era FCC subsidy program to try and grab $886 million in taxpayer dollars. It was a [...]

The Supreme Court on Wednesday was 1-and-1, with one good decision, in Murthy v. Missouri, and one doozy in Snyder v. US, where it somehow read a statute criminalizing corruption to... not actually criminalize corruption. But this post is about the one that, happily, the Court got right. Not just because it got the result [...]

Meta is actually making moves to live up to its promise to integrate Threads into the open ActivityPub standard used by a variety of fediverse" platforms such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. It's a fundamental boost to the concept of protocols over platforms, but it's still not entirely clear how open" Meta is really going to [...]

Well, we'll see how long ShotSpotter/SoundThinking will keep making that New York money. The outlook is not good. A lot of this will depend on how well the NYPD can defend the useless product it's spending millions on, but at the end of the day, the city still holds the purse strings and it has [...]

In the wake of a Supreme Court case built on grifters peddling nonsense evidence, it's only fitting that some media reporting is buying into the same fantasy-land narrative at the heart of the case. You would hope that professional journalists would do better, but apparently that's too difficult. Earlier this week, we covered the Murthy [...]

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You just can't tell Florida no," which is a bit ironic. The state obviously feels it can say no" to all sorts of things, even if doing so means violating the Constitution. Another dumbass bill written by dumbass legislators and signed into law by the state's dumbass governor, Ron DeSantis, continue to bleed money from [...]

Paramount (CBS) Corporation this week simply erased decades of music journalism in the blink of an eye. Last year the company shut down MTV News and fired all its staff as part of a strategic realignment." This week, without warning, the company deleted the entirety of the MTV News archives, erasing decades of music journalism [...]

[screaming at my mute laptop screen]: WHO GOT TO YOU This isn't the first time I've felt this way. In 2022, the Fifth Circuit got a decision very right. It said it was very fucking definitely a rights violation to arrest a journalist for publishing information she had received from a law enforcement source. Rather [...]

Techdirt has been covering the disgraceful attempts by the EU to break end-to-end encryption - supposedly in order to protect the children" - for two years now. An important vote that could have seen EU nations back the proposal was due to take place recently. The vote was cancelled - not because politicians finally came [...]

There have been a bunch of lawsuits over the last couple of years from traditional content industries suing AI providers, claiming copyright infringement. We're still a long way from figuring out how all of these lawsuits will shake out. We've made it clear that we're skeptical of these lawsuits, largely because you would have to [...]

The murder of Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich ignited a massive wave of conspiracy theories. The murder is still unsolved, but was considered by law enforcement to be the violent outcome of an attempted robbery. Despite the lack of supporting evidence, a bunch of right-wing conspiracy theorists began suggesting Rich was murdered because of [...]

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Actual free speech survives for yet another day as the Supreme Court has rejected a bunch of fantasy-land nonsense in a case in which Trumpists were absolutely positive they'd caught the government censoring" speech on social media. But every time we looked at the actual evidence, all we saw was lizard people" level conspiracy theory [...]

If there's been one recurring theme during the AI" (read, language learning models) revolution, it's that the tech sector and greedy financiers are prematurely rushing undercooked technology to market. We've seen it broadly across industries, whether it's fabulism-prone fake journalists, automated health insurance systems with 90% error rates, or Google telling people to eat rocks [...]

The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court is one of the better circuits when it comes to holding the government accountable for the violence it inflicts on citizens. It's pretty much the polar opposite of the Fifth Circuit, which can't seem to forgive cops quickly enough. This lawsuit, springing from the shooting and killing of Francis Calonge [...]

The recent publication of Griner v. King seems to have just about everything: an iconic meme (Success Kid!), a troll-ish politician, charges of political censorship, and an application of the latest big Supreme Court opinion on fair use, Warhol v. Goldsmith. Oh my! But the most important thing for friends of fair use to know [...]

We weren't planning to do a series, but after our last two episodes with Alice Marwick and then Candice Odgers, things have lined up nicely for a trifecta of episodes about the current moral panic around kids and social media. This week, we're joined by Dr. Devorah Heitner, an expert on kids and technology and [...]

Does Elon Musk control all of his companies as if they're a single entity where he can shift resources between them with no restrictions? Certainly, there has been a lot of reporting to that effect over the years, and now that might have some legal consequences, though perhaps not the ones you'd expect. Media Matters [...]

Yet another attempt to mandate broken encryption has been disrupted. The Australian government has long held the belief that broken encryption would be a net win for citizens. Or, at the very least, it's pretty sure it will be a huge win for law enforcement, which won't have to deal with encrypted communications or devices. [...]

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The Julian Assange saga has finally reached its absurd conclusion with a plea deal. But while Assange may be heading home to Australia, the implications for press freedom remain as dire as ever. The U.S. government has successfully criminalized a core function of journalism - working with sources to obtain and publish information in the [...]

When it comes to China, the U.S. likes to pretend its business policies are well-crafted, logic-driven decisions based on the welfare of the markets and the public, but very often that's simply not the case. We've already noted how the TikTok ban is an unconstitutional mess that doesn't have the public's support, in large part [...]

I'm going to quote at length from this decision because the things said by the officer who killed one person and wounded two others said so many amazing (in the pejorative sense) things while explaining and defending his actions. (h/t FourthAmendment.com) Now, the Fifth Circuit often chooses to side with cops. That's just the way [...]

To be clear: SpaceX's Starlink service can be a game changer for those completely out of range of broadband access. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $120 a month subscription cost and up front hardware costs. But contrary to what [...]

A case about First Amendment retaliation reached the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court last March. It involved Sylvia Gonzalez, a recently elected city council member who was unhappy with her current representation - that being mainly city manager Ryan Rapelye. Her first act as an elected official was to create a petition calling for Rapelye's removal [...]

We live in the age of performative lawmaking. Something must be done! This is something. We will do it. Who cares about the tradeoffs, nuances, or the evidence? Throw all that out the window and DO SOMETHING. And if you're going to DO SOMETHING why not make it big, bold, and already proven ineffective? At [...]

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We didn't really need more precedent assuring us our rights don't mean anything at the borders, but we got it anyway. Within 100 miles of any US border (and that includes international airports), courts have generally ruled that rights are optional. If they seem to be getting in the way of securing" the border, they [...]

Last December I wrote afeature for The Vergeexploring the FCC's long overdue effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not onlyrefused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas(despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they've provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantlymore money [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Rico R. with a comment about the Surgeon General's call for a warning label on social media: In second place, it's an anonymous comment about the fictional crime wave: There's another factor underlying this A lot of the people wailing about a historic crime wave" [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we reiterated the all-important point that there is no legal distinction between a platform" and a publisher", and explained why the freedom to decide what content to facilitate is essential to Section 230, while the Supreme Court signaled its recognition that social media sites don't have to allow [...]

When school students are tested, those overseeing the tests seemingly are willing to do whatever it takes to prevent cheating, even if it means utilizing extremely intrusive spyware to lower the risk of dishonesty. Students are just supposed to take this in stride, but the lessons they'll often learn of just how little respect school [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

Definitely loving all of this. And right up front (just in case the defendant thinks she can rob Peter Techdirt to pay Paul Eric Posey), I'll make it clear this post will be filled with colorful expression, hyperbole, highly opinionated takes on the lawsuit, and... possibly... archaic slang. A lot of people (especially the most [...]

If ExTwitter is the bastion of free speech, you would think that it would allow for the publishing of newsworthy documents revealing a politician's funding briefings, right? Apparently not when that politician is politically aligned with Elon Musk, whose commitment to open discourse appears to be about as floppy as the Cybertruck's giant windshield wiper. [...]

New York Governor Kathy Hochul's response to the horrifying shootings in Buffalo in 2022 was not to look for ways to limit access to guns or improve mental health care. It was not to look into why law enforcement ignored the threats that the shooter had made, which they were aware of. It was not [...]

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