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Since we know that FCC Chair Brendan Carr sometimes reads what we write here at Techdirt, I figured I'd post this one just for him and hopes that he watches it, seeing as we know that, thanks to his own mafioso-like tactics, his good friends at Sinclair Broadcasting (along with Nexstar) refused to show Jimmy [...]

The flood of outrage at the Disney/FCC cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel ultimately forced the company to retreat and put Kimmel back on the air. Disney apparently didn't much like the wave of folks cancelling their Disney+ streaming video subscriptions in response to the government and a major corporation coordinating a frontal assault on the First [...]

The latest generation of AI systems, based on large language models (LLMs), is perceived as the biggest threat in decades to the established copyright order. The scale of that threat can be gauged by the flurry of AI lawsuits that publishers and others have launched against generative AI companies. Sincethe first of these, reported here [...]

Back in April, RFK Jr. committed publicly to firmly knowing the cause of autism by September of this year. In May, Donald Trump himself weighed in with the already baked conclusion that autism doesn't occur naturally" and therefore must have some environmental cause. Both statements were absurd at the time. Autism causes have been studied [...]

Support us on Patreon Last week, we published three separate posts that looked at the FTC's recent settlement with Aylo, the parent company of multiple adult websites including, most famously, Pornhub. Those posts, written by Stanford HAI policy fellow Riana Pfefferkorn, examined the legally complicated but very important issues that arise from the settlement forcing [...]

ICE made the bed and now California law enforcement officers have to lie in it. The flashpoint of ICE backlash occurred in Los Angeles, as Trump's mass deportation desires manifested itself in the form of masked officers chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As protests ensued, ICE officers continued to operate without face [...]

Trump supporters cycled through increasingly desperate explanations for why the Jimmy Kimmel situation was totally legitimate. First came the absurd low ratings" defense-because sure, networks routinely cancel shows minutes before taping due to sudden ratings revelations and just hours after the chair of the FCC threatens them with we can do this the easy way [...]

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To suggest that Donald Trump simply doesn't care about constitutional rights, political norms, or anyone other than himself is to suggest that he actually understands any of these concepts. That's giving him far too much credit. What Trump does is pure id, completely unaffected by anything someone his age should have learned long before entering [...]

You might recall that back when Brendan Carr was an ordinary FCC Commissioner, he was super worried about government overreach. He was so worried, that he would attack literally any effort previous incarnations of the FCC took to hold giant shitty telecom monopolies accountable (net neutrality, basic pricing transparency, efforts to stop racism in broadband [...]

Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it, as the old saying goes. And those who choose not to teach that history, to continue this to its logical conclusion, are actively attempting to repeat it. It's within that logical framework that I have viewed our many posts on Trump Administration 2.0's attempt [...]

Updating the updating: I started writing this post last Tuesday, but put it on hold when everything happened last Wednesday, and rewrote it this weekend to post today, only now as I was getting ready to post it, seeing that Disney has reinstated Jimmy Kimmel, so... yeah. I'm only making a minor update to deal [...]

It's a story as old as law enforcement itself: when protesters start protesting, it's often the cops who decide it's time for everything to get violent, rather than those engaged in protests. We saw a LOT of this during the protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. Whatever [...]

In the shadow of Charlie Kirk's assassination, something remarkable seems to be happening that Trump's movement seems completely unable to see. Trapped within their own epistemic bubble, MAGA appears to have fundamentally misread the political moment, interpreting tragedy as total victory over their opponents. The miscalculation is breathtaking in its scope. The White House seems [...]

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In what may be a first in American legal history, a sitting president just had his lawsuit struck down by a federal judge before the defendants even had a chance to respond. Judge Steven Merryday didn't wait for a motion to dismiss. He didn't wait for the defendants to file an answer. Four days after [...]

So look, I'm not one of these people who thinks AI" has no useful applications. Just this week I had an efficient conversation with a Gemini chatbot when trying to cancel a Google subscription. I used ChatGPT to help me fact check my own work debunking false claims made by a different AI (an aggregation [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Heart of Dawn with a comment about Disney pulling Jimmy Kimmel's show: Conservatives absolutely hate cancel culture" right up to the point they are the ones doing it. Hypocrisy is dead to these people. In second place, it's Thad with a comment about Trump [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the first phase of the TikTok fight resolved with Oracle getting a lucrative hosting deal instead of buying the company in a deal driven by Trump-world insiders, while a court refused to block Trump's executive order. At the same time, users were fighting to block the less-discussed part [...]

We've talked a lot about Ryan Walters recently, mostly because he keeps forgetting that the United States Constitution applies to him and his state. Between his attempt to inject Christian theocracy into the public school system while enriching Dear Leader Trump or his fight with his own board members in the wake of some mild [...]

It's been a good while since we've had an old-fashioned copyright troll nonsense story around here, and boy do we have a doozy for you today. Regular Techdirt readers know that we've covered Paul Levy's work for years-the man who the Washingtonian once dubbed the web bully's worst enemy" has been taking down copyright trolls [...]

Techdirt has long lamented how in the modern era, you don't really own" what you buy. That game console, smart lock, or smart refrigerator can quickly become less useful (or completely useless) with a firmware update, bankruptcy, or addition of annoying subscription paywall. The problem is particularly bad when it comes to digital rentals. In [...]

It's fascinating how quickly the tune changes when the shoe's on the other foot. For years, we've been treated to endless screaming about how any effort to identify and counter foreign manipulation on social media was censorship" and a violation of Americans' free speech rights. The same crowd that turned researchers into pariahs and shut [...]

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This isn't anything that actually needed to be done. The federal government has plenty of options at its disposal if it thinks someone is providing material support for terrorism. It's one of things that keeps the FBI loaded up with anti-terrorism dollars, thanks to its ability to radicalize people just so it can arrest them. [...]

We've mentioned repeatedly how the AT&T->Time Warner->Discovery series of media mergers were some of the most destructive and pointless business efforts ever, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs, the cancellation of endless popular programs, higher prices for consumers, and a shittier overall product. One of the men at the heart of this dysfunction has [...]

When you're brought before Congress to testify, you're not supposed to lie. I realize that sounds rather obvious to many of you, but I'll remind you that this is the year of our lord, 2025, and such common sensibilities are not quite as common as they used to be. Even if you're not under oath, [...]

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 [...]

A Canadian tribunal's $72,000 fine against X for refusing to globally remove non-consensual intimate images (NCII) exposes a fundamental tension that courts have been dodging for years: When can one country order worldwide content takedowns, and when should platforms comply regardless of legal compulsion? Unfortunately, almost all the commentary on the case is ignoring those [...]

On Monday, I published a two-part blog post about the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement with Aylo, parent company of Pornhub. The FTC's complaint alleged that Aylo violated federal consumer protection law by allowing child sex abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual pornography (which I'll call NCII) on its various sites, despite claiming it didn't. The [...]

As Mike just got done noting, our major media companies continue to respond to authoritarianism by being pathetic and feckless little shitweasels. First with the ABC and CBS bribery payments to our mad idiot king, and most recently exemplified by ABC's firing of Jimmy Kimmel because he gave Republicans a sad. Who could have imagined [...]

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Last year, there was some talk about how AI-generated wacky images-summed up generally as shrimp Jesus" as an example of one of the most bizarre-were taking over Facebook. It was only a matter of time until this sort of AI slop nonsense went political in some form or another. Starting last Friday, people began to [...]

You might recall that one of the conditions of the FCC's approval of The Ellison family's $8 billion acquisition of CBS was that the agency would install a ombudsman" at the network to ensure CBS journalism was appropriately feckless and deferential to our mad, idiot king. This was particularly ironic given decades of whining by [...]

There are multiple ways into this story, but almost all of the reporting on what's happened claims that Disney pulled talk show host Jimmy Kimmel's show indefinitely" over comments that Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk. But that leads most people to assume that Kimmel said something unkind about Kirk or in some way celebrated his [...]

It appears that the illiberal, transphobic pipe dream of banning all pornography has reached an enterprising group of far-right Christian nationalist Republicans in Michigan who want to impose the moralistic agendas of a small few on the overwhelming majority of the people. Rep. Josh Schriverleads five other lawmakerswith the recent introduction of the Anticorruption of [...]

It's probably too much to ask, but I hope California law enforcement agencies will remember who to direct their hate at if this bill becomes law. It's not the liberals" running the state. It's the Trump administration and its mass deportation efforts. ICE and its actions have always been controversial, but it took a group [...]

Even by Donald Trump's standards for frivolous defamation lawsuits, this one is impressively stupid. On Monday, the president filed yet another lawsuit against the NY Times-this time seeking $15 billion over a book that claims he's not quite as successful a businessman as he pretends to be. The timing is almost comically bad. Trump is [...]

Donald Trump has successfully used xenophobia and fake concerns about propaganda and national security to get what he's long wanted: TikTok (and its fat ad revenues) are poised to be sold off to his right wing billionaire buddies and, inevitably, slowly converted into a right wing propaganda safe space. After endless delays, Trump insiders claim [...]

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Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I've seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to those who disagree with him" as a sign that he was engaging in good faith. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Ezra Klein's silly eulogy [...]

The Washington Post isn't what it used to be. While the paper is still peppered with a few decent journalists trying to do good work, the outlet is being slowly strangled to death by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who is steadily dismantling the last vestiges of the paper's sagging credibility in a desperate bid to [...]

We've all become entirely too familiar with ACIP, the CDC panel that discusses and recommends vaccination schedules across a wide swath of vaccines. The method by which ACIP became part of the general American lexicon traces all the way back to June, when RFK Jr., as head of HHS, fired every single member of the [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election, has been appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in which she'll help oversee the nation's election infrastructure. Honey is a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who [...]

Over the past few months, we've been fulfilling the orders for all the backers who helped us launch One Billion Users, the social media card game, on Kickstarter. Now that process is almost complete (except for a few backers who haven't yet completed their orders and should do so as soon as possible) and we're [...]

Donald Trump's response to political violence this week reveals something more sinister than mere hypocrisy-it's the deliberate construction of a false reality where only certain victims matter and only certain perpetrators exist. After days of raging about left-wing violence" following Charlie Kirk's shooting, Trump was asked about Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated [...]

There's no slippery slope here. The bigoted fiends have already claimed the bottom of the hill for themselves and now they're bringing in the earth-moving equipment in hopes of creating an ideological Mariana's Trench. Thanks to Trump's resurgence, no one in power needs to pretend this is a good-faith effort. All that remains is seeing [...]

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Attorney General Pam Bondi just provided a masterclass in how to completely misunderstand the First Amendment while threatening to abuse government power to silence critics. In response to online criticism of Charlie Kirk following his assassination, Bondi declared: There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after [...]

Fresh off of kissing Trump's ass to gain regulatory approval for Skydance's merger with CBS and Paramount, the billionaire Ellison family is cooking up another terrible idea: quickly merging with whatever's left of Time Warner. You might recall that the AT&T->Time Warner->Discovery mergers were some of the most destructive and pointless business" efforts ever conceived, [...]