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Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that he's barring visas for foreign nationals who censor Americans," declaring that free speech is among the most cherished rights we enjoy as Americans." This is yet another example of the most censorial administration falsely wrapping itself in the cloak of free speech warriors" to defend censorship. [...]

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The critics are out there, saying things like Techdirt is alarmist!" and Trump stuff is normal!" and Tim Cushing's posts have too many typos!" Well, here's some news for the haters: everything I said a month ago is actually true, except now it has the weight of the gold standard of identification dragging it down, [...]

U.S. wireless providers are, it should go without saying, very shitty when it comes to consumer privacy and security. After decades of mindless deregulation and competition-killing consolidation, there's less serious regulatory oversight or competitive pressure than ever for these companies to try harder. As a result, companies like T-Mobile have been hacked five times in [...]

As HHS and RFK Jr. continue to bumble their way towards making America less healthy, while saying they're doing the opposite of course, measles cases are still on the rise. The rate of new cases appears to be slowing somewhat, assuming we think the data coming out of the CDC these days is accurate. Given [...]

When your local police department buys one piece of surveillance equipment, you can easily expect that the company that sold it will try to upsell them on additional tools and upgrades. At the end of the day, public safety vendors are tech companies, and their representatives are salespeople using all the tricks from the marketing [...]

The destructive force that is DOGE still somehow manages to exist, despite it not being (depending on which claim is made and when) an official federal agency and/or overseen by anyone specifically identifiable as the head of DOGE. Until recently, everyone - including Donald Trump - knew (and said as much in public) that DOGE [...]

Federal judges don't normally punctuate their rulings with multiple exclamation points while invoking the Founding Fathers. But then again, no president before has issued executive orders targeting law firms for the clients they represent and the cases they take. In the last week, two George W. Bush-appointed conservative judges delivered brutal constitutional smackdowns of Trump's [...]

The useful lie that alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members are engaging in coordinated violence inside the United States at the direction of the Venezuelan government has been debunked so often it's hardly worth rehashing. Oddly enough, the debunking has come from the federal government, rather than investigative journalists or transparency groups or any [...]

Splunk is a powerful data platform used to gather information from multiple sources and index it for efficient access. You can then use collected data to create visualizations, analytics, and a variety of automated and security-related functions. With its web-style interface, Splunk is easy to use and is utilized by many companies worldwide.The 2025 Complete [...]

The Trump administration has managed to achieve a remarkable legal double standard: ask a court for a specific remedy to address your own violations of an injunction, get exactly what you asked for, then ask for a do-over, and when you don't get it, immediately run to the Supreme Court claiming that remedy is an [...]

If you've been around a while you might recall that Verizon used to be utterly obnoxious when it came to absolutely everything about using your mobile phone. Once upon a time, the company banned you from even using third-party apps (including basics like GPS), forcing you to use extremely shitty Verizon apps. It also used [...]

Here we go again. Late last year we talked about how revisions Japan made to copyright law within the country, predominantly as a gift to the manga and anime industries, was resulting in some absurd arrests. Specifically, the law was amended to pull copyright issues from the civil realm and into a criminal offense, which [...]

Hamilton Vagi, head of Papua New Guinea's National Cyber Security Centre, apparently never learned the first rule of trying to bury embarrassing information: threatening journalists just makes them dig in harder. And quite often leads to Streisanding the very information you were hoping would go away. Back in February, DDoSecrets published around a million emails [...]

Support us on Patreon In something of a followup to our last episode about Elon Musk's playbook, today we're digging deeper into the comparison between Washington and Silicon Valley and what it tells us about DOGE. Johns Hopkins International Affairs professor Henry Farrell has been looking specifically at the concept of blitzscaling", and this week [...]

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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