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Any trip down Techdirt's memory lane when it comes to Sony is not going to leave you with a good taste in your mouth. This is a company that has been almost comically protective of all things intellectual property, engaged in all manner of anti-consumer behavior, and is arguably most famous for either using an update to remove features from its gaming console that generated sales of that console or for installing rootkits on people's computers. When it comes to any positive stories about the company, in fact, they mostly have to do with the immense success Sony had in the most recent Console Wars with its PlayStation 4 device.Positive results and gaming aren't a crosstab of coincidence for Sony, it seems. There are couple of converging stories about Sony, one dealing with its revenue and another with its plans for its gaming divisions opening up a bit, that point to positive developments. To set the stage, let's start with the fact that the video game industry is now the biggest revenue generator for Sony.

Any trip down Techdirt's memory lane when it comes to Sony is not going to leave you with a good taste in your mouth. This is a company that has been almost comically protective of all things intellectual property, engaged in all manner of anti-consumer behavior, and is arguably most famous for either using an update to remove features from its gaming console that generated sales of that console or for installing rootkits on people's computers. When it comes to any positive stories about the company, in fact, they mostly have to do with the immense success Sony had in the most recent Console Wars with its PlayStation 4 device.Positive results and gaming aren't a crosstab of coincidence for Sony, it seems. There are couple of converging stories about Sony, one dealing with its revenue and another with its plans for its gaming divisions opening up a bit, that point to positive developments. To set the stage, let's start with the fact that the video game industry is now the biggest revenue generator for Sony.

In a case involving a drug bust utilizing a warrant with erroneous information, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had this to say [PDF] about the use of boilerplate language and typographical errors:

The internet policy world is headed for change, and the change that’s coming isn’t just a matter of more regulations but, rather, involves an evolution in how we think about communications technologies. The most successful businesses operating at what we have, up until now, called the internet’s “edge” are going to be treated like infrastructure more and more. What’s ahead is not exactly the “break them up” plan of the 2019 Presidential campaign of Senator Warren, but something a bit different. It’s a positive vision of government intervention to generate an evolution in our communications infrastructure to ensure a level playing field for competition; meaningful choices for end users; and responsibility, transparency, and accountability for the companies that provide economically and socially valuable platforms and services.We’ve seen evolutions in our communications infrastructure a few times before: first, when the telephone network became infrastructure for the internet protocol stack; again when the internet protocol stack became infrastructure for the World Wide Web; and then again when the Web became infrastructure on which key “edge” services like search and social media were built. Now, these edge services themselves are becoming infrastructure. And as a consequence, they will increasingly be regulated.Throughout its history, the “edge” of the internet sector has - for the most part - always enjoyed a light regulatory yoke, particularly in the United States. Many treated the lack of oversight as a matter of design, or even as necessarily inherent, given the differences between the timetables and processes of technology innovation and legislation. From John Perry Barlow’s infamous “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” to Frank Easterbrook’s “Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse” to Larry Lessig’s “Code is law,” an entire generation of thinkers were inculcated in the belief that the internet was too complex to regulate directly (or too critical, too fragile, or, well, too “something”).We didn’t need regulatory change to catalyze the prior iterations of the internet’s evolution. The phone network was already regulated as a common carrier service, creating ample opportunity for edge innovation. And the IP stack and the Web were built as fully open standards, structurally designed to prevent the emergence of vertical monopolies and gatekeeping behavior. In contrast, from the get-go, today’s “edge” services have been dominated by private sector companies, a formula that has arguably helped contribute to their steady innovation and growth. At the same time, limited government intervention results in limited opportunity to address the diverse harms facing internet users and competing businesses.

The NSA's bulk phone records collection is dead. It died of exposure. And reform. It was Ed Snowden's first leak back in 2013. A few years later, a reform bill prompted by Snowden's leaks revamped the program, forcing the NSA to tailor its requests for phone records from telcos. The NSA used to collect everything and sort through at its leisure. But once the program eliminated the "bulk" from the NSA's bulk collection, the NSA couldn't figure out how to obtain records without getting more than it was legally allowed to take.This recent courtroom win may have come a bit too late to matter much. But it's still a big win. In a case involving material support for terrorists by Somali citizens living in the United States, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has arrived at the conclusion that the NSA's bulk phone records collection is/was illegal.Here's the short summary from the court [PDF]:

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In his post Mike called the NTIA petition for the FCC to change the enforceable language of Section 230 laughable. Earlier I called it execrable. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about it, or Trump's Executive Order that precipitated it, and it has turned into an enormous waste of time for everyone who cares about preserving speech on the Internet because it meant we all had to file comments to create the public record that might stop this trainwreck from causing even more damage.Mike's post discusses his comment. He wrote it from the standpoint of a small businessman and owner of a media website that depends on Section 230 to enable its comment section, as well as help spread its posts around the Internet and took on the myth that content moderation is something that should inspire a regulatory reaction.I also filed one, on behalf of the Copia Institute, consistent with the other advocacy we've done, including on Section 230. It was a challenge to draft; the NTIA petition is 57 pages of ignorance about the purpose and operation of the statute. There was so much to take issue with it was hard to pick what to focus on. But among the many misstatements the most egregious was its declaration on page 14 that:

We've noted for a long time that telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T have been pushing (quite successfully) for massive deregulation of their own monopolies, while pushing for significant new regulation of the Silicon Valley giants whose ad revenues they've coveted for decades. As such, it wasn't surprising to see AT&T come out with a incredibly dumb blog post this week supporting Trump's legally dubious and hugely problematic executive order targeting social media giants. You know, the plan that not only isn't enforceable by the agencies supposedly tasked with enforcing it (the FCC), but that also risks creating a massive new censorship paradigm across the entire internet.As Mike already noted, AT&T's post was a pile of bad faith nonsense, weirdly conflating net neutrality with the ham-fisted attack on Section 230. AT&T just got done deriding the FCC's relatively modest net neutrality rules as "government interference in the internet run amok." Yet here it is, advocating for a terrible plan that attempts to shovel the FCC into the role of regulating speech on social media, authority it simply doesn't have. For those that tracked the net neutrality fight, the intellectual calisthenics required here by folks like AT&T and its favorite FCC officials have been stunning, even for Trumpland:

Open source runs the world. That's for supercomputers, where Linux powers all of the top 500 machines in the world, for smartphones, where Android has a global market share of around 75%, and for everything in between, as Wired points out:

For nearly half a year now, especially when this damned pandemic really took off, we've been bringing you the occasional story of how Nintendo's Animal Crossing keeps popping up with folks finding innovative ways to use the game as a platform. Protesters advocating for freedom in Hong Kong gathered in the game. Sidelined reality show stars took to the game to ply their trade. Very real people enduring very real layoffs used the game's currency as a method for making very real money. As someone who has never played the game, the picture I'm left with is of a game that is both inherently malleable to what you want to do within it and immensely social in nature.So perhaps it was only a matter of time before one of the major Presidential candidates got involved.

Summary:In July 2014, Amazon announced its "Netflix, but for ebooks" service, Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited allowed readers access to hundreds of thousands of ebooks for a flat rate of $9.99/month.Amazon paid authors from a subscriber fee pool. Authors were paid per page read by readers -- a system that was meant to reward more popular writers with a larger share of the Kindle Unlimited payment pool.This system was abused by scammers once it became clear Amazon wasn't spying on Kindle Users to ensure books were actually being read -- i.e., keeping track of time spent on pages of text by readers or total amount of time spent reading. Since Amazon had no way to verify if readers were actually reading the content, scammers deployed a variety of tricks to increase their unearned earnings.Part of the scam relied on Amazon's willingness to pay authors for partially-read books. If only 100 pages of a 500-page book were read, the author still got credit for the 100 pages read by an Unlimited user. Scammers inflated "pages read" counts by moving the table of contents to the end of the book or offering dozens of different languages in the same ebook, relying on readers skipping hundreds of pages into the ebook to access the most popular translation. Other scammers offered readers chances to win free products and gift cards via hyperlinks that brought readers to the end of the scammers' ebooks -- books that sometimes contained thousands of pages.The other part of the scam equation was Amazon's hands-off approach to self-publishing. Amazon has opened its platform and appears to do very little to police the content of ebooks, other than requiring authors to follow certain formatting rules. Amazon is neither a publisher nor an editor, which has created a market for algorithmically-generated content as well as a home for writers seeking a distribution outlet for their bigoted and hateful writing.Once Amazon realized the payout system was being gamed, it altered the way Kindle Unlimited operated. It began removing scammers, notifying authors and customers that it was doing this in response to Unlimited readers' complaints.

There's a lot of talk about tech companies and antitrust these days, and a great deal of the focus falls on Amazon. But is antitrust law really the right approach, or even capable of achieving the results many people want? This week, we're focusing on one specific complaint that comes up a lot, about Amazon being both a marketplace and a seller in that marketplace and gaining various advantages including, supposedly, from the data it has access to. We're joined by Greg Mercer, founder and CEO of Jungle Scout, to talk about whether Amazon really has a data advantage, and how much it really matters.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

To say content moderation has become a hot topic over the past few years would be an understatement. The conversation has quickly shifted from how to best deal with pesky trolls and spammers  —  straight into the world of intensely serious topics like genocide and destabilization of democracies.While this discussion often centers around global platforms like Facebook and Twitter, even the smallest of communities can struggle with content moderation. Just a limited number of toxic members can have an outsize effect on a community’s behavioral norms.That’s why the issue of content moderation needs to be treated as a priority for all digital communities, large and small. As evidenced by its leap from lower-order concern to front-page news, content moderation is deserving of more attention and care than most are giving it today. As I see it, it’s a first-class engineering problem that calls for a first-class solution. In practical terms, that means providing:

Today is the due date for the first round of submissions to the FCC's comment period on the NTIA's laughable petition, which asks the agency to reinterpret Section 230 in response to the President's temper tantrum about Twitter fact checking him. This is clearly outside of its regulatory authority, but it has caved and pandered to the President by calling for comments anyway.There are a ton of individuals and organizations commenting on why nearly everything around this is unconstitutional and/or outside the FCC's legal authority. The Copia Institute is filing a comment along those lines written by Cathy Gellis, and she'll have a post about that later. However, I wanted to file a separate comment from my own personal perspective about Section 230 and the nature of running a small media website that relies heavily on its protections. Because beyond the various filings from lawyers about this or that specific aspect of the law or Constitutional authority, it appeared that there was little discussion of just how illiterate the NTIA petition is concerning how content moderation works. And, tragically, many of the early filers on the docket were people who were screaming that because some content of theirs had been moderated by a social media company, the FCC must neuter Section 230.The key part of my comment is to reinforce the idea that content moderation is impossible to do well and you will always have some people who disagree with the results, and there will also be many "mistakes" because that's the nature of content moderation. It is not evidence of bias or censorship. And, indeed, as my comment highlights, changing Section 230 to try to deal with these fake problems is only likely to lead to the suppression of more speech and the shrinking of the open internet.Also, I talk about the time I wasn't kicked out of a lunch where I sat next to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.You can read my entire comment below.If you would like to file a comment on the proceedings and have not yet done so, while the initial round of comments is due today, there is a second round for "responding" to comments made in the first round, which runs through September 17th.

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In early 2019, law enforcement in Florida wrapped up a supposed "human trafficking" sting centering on Florida spas and massage parlors. By the time prosecutors and cops were done congratulating themselves for helping purge Florida of human trafficking, they appeared to have little more than about 150 bog-standard solicitation and prostitution arrests.But they did land a big fish. Robert Kraft -- the owner of the New England Patriots -- was one of the spa customers caught up in the sting. That was the biggest news. Evidence of actual trafficking never appeared, leaving law enforcement with a big name, a bunch of low-level arrests, and little else.What little law enforcement and prosecutors did have is now gone as well. Upholding a lower court's decision on video evidence captured by hidden cameras, a Florida state appeals court says everything captured on the government's secret cameras was illegally obtained. (via FourthAmendment.com)This conclusion was reached even though investigators obtained warrants for the cameras. Here's the backstory on the video recordings, taken from the decision [PDF]:

A few weeks back we wrote about how FTC chair Joe Simons -- while bizarrely complaining about Section 230 blocking his investigations, despite it never actually doing that -- was actually willing to say that Trump's executive order on social media was nonsense (though not in those words). While the FCC caved and moved forward with its nonsense exploration of Section 230, the FTC has done nothing, because there's nothing for it to actually do.And apparently our narcissist in chief is upset about that. Politico reports that the White House has been interviewing possible replacements for Simons because they want someone who will punish Trump's mythical list of enemies among social media companies (even as those companies have bent over backwards to accommodate his nonsense):

President Trump openly admires authoritarians. It appears he believes he was being elected dictator rather than president, and has been openly bitter about his perceived lack of power ever since. The world leaders he enjoys talking to most -- Vladimir Putin, Mohammad bin Salman, Recep Erdogan -- are all notorious thugs who punish critics, dissidents, and anyone else who steps a little out of line.Trump envies that power. He spends most of his phone time trying to impress a collection of international asshats. And he embarrasses himself (and us by proxy) when speaking about his favorite shitheels in public. Just recently, Trump spent part of his meeting with an American pastor recently freed from a Turkish prison praising the man who had put him there.

The NYPD barely bothers to punish officers who misbehave. This "misbehavior" often includes violations of rights and extrajudicial killings, but it appears the NYPD feels New York's "finest" should be above reproach. Consequently, NYPD internal investigations often conclude no officers should be reproached, allowing them to remain the "finest" even when they're really the worst.A new wrinkle in the law fabric might change that. After years of doing nothing (and after years of the NYPD never bothering to invoke the law), the state repealed "50a," the statute that allowed the NYPD to withhold misconduct records from the public. For several years, the NYPD posted the outcome of internal investigations. Then it decided it was no longer going to do that. First, it blamed the high cost of printer ink. Then it cited the law that allowed it to stop posting reports where the press could access them.Lawsuits followed. And -- as is the case whenever law enforcement opacity is threatened -- the NYPD's unions have intervened. It was too little too late. An injunction was sought and obtained, but ProPublica -- which wasn't a party to the lawsuit over 50a records -- published what it had already received from the NYPD. But the battle continues because future opacity is at stake. Unfortunately, a federal court has decided opacity must win out for the moment.

In January of this year, we discussed how the Illinois Comptroller had decided to opt out of collecting red light camera fees for motorists ticketed by these automated revenue generators. Susan Mendoza said in a statement that while her office was taking this action due to the feds investigating the contractor for the cameras, a company called SafeSpeed, it was also her position that red light cameras were revenue generators with little efficacy at impacting public safety.All very true... but about that federal investigation.

The Trump Administration's decision to send federal agents -- led by the DHS -- to Portland, Oregon to handle civil unrest (prompted by yet another killing of an unarmed Black man by a white police officer) continues to generate litigation.Supposedly sent to protect federal buildings targeted by Portland protesters, the DHS task force -- composed of CBP, ICE, and FPS officers -- rolled into Portland Gestapo-style, sending out unidentified officers to toss people into unmarked vehicles, spiriting them away to undisclosed locations to be subjected to detainment and interrogations that were never documented.The DHS task force redefined riot police to include rioting federal police. Officers attacked press and legal observers with the same enthusiasm they attacked protesters with. Local journalists sued, obtaining a restraining order against federal agents… one the federal agents immediately violated.Another lawsuit has been filed, this one accusing the DHS task force of violating the rights of protesters. The ACLU -- along with a number of other plaintiffs (including the "Black Millennial Movement") claims federal officers are deploying excessive force and engaging in unlawful detainments of participants in the ongoing Portland protests.The complaint [PDF] opens up with a nice little dig at the Administration's unwillingness to properly staff its departments, reminding the court (and readers) the DHS still doesn't have a legally appointed director.

A version of this post appeared on Project Disco: What the Bostock Decision Teaches About Section 230.Earlier this summer, in Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga. the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in favor of an interpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination against LGBT people. The result is significant, but what is also significant – and relevant for this discussion here – is the analysis the court used to get there.What six justices ultimately signed onto was a decision that made clear that when a statute is interpreted, that interpretation needs to be predicated on what the statutory language actually says, not what courts might think it should say.

On Tuesday morning a story began making the rounds indicating that Russian hackers had somehow managed to hack into Michigan's election systems, gaining access to a treasure trove of voter data. Russian newspaper Kommersant was quick to proclaim that nearly every voter in Michigan -- and a number of voters in additional states -- had had their personal information compromised. The report was quickly parroted by other outlets including the Riga-based online newspaper Meduza, which insisted that the breach was simply massive:

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Earlier this year, regulators in Australia announced plans to tax Google and Facebook for sending traffic to news organizations, and then pay those news organization. The draft law literally names Google and Facebook and says that this law only impacts those two companies. The whole thing is bizarre. There are no pretenses here. It's just that old line media companies (many owned by Rupert Murdoch) are jealous of the success of Google and Facebook online, and seem to think they're magically owed money. And that's what the tax would do. It would force Google and Facebook to pay money for the awful crime of sending traffic to news sites without paying them.Nevermind that if they didn't want this traffic they could use robots.txt to block it. Nevermind that companies (including many of these media companies) hire SEO and social media experts to try to get more traffic. These companies feel so entitled to money that they feel that Facebook and Google need to pay them for sending traffic, just because.And Australian regulators seem to think this is a grand idea.A few weeks back Google posted an open letter to Australians noting that this would do a lot more harm than good, and other parts of the draft law would damage the quality of Google's search results (among other things, the law wouldn't let Google make changes to its search algorithms without giving media companies a 4-week notice, which is insane, given that Google tweaks its algorithm multiple times a day).Now Facebook has gone even further, and outright said that if this becomes law, it will no longer allow publishers to share news on its platform in Australia. This is the nuclear option -- similar to what Google did in Spain six years ago when Spain passed a similar law. In that case, Google waited until after the law went into effect to make the announcement and pull the plug.In this case, Facebook is firing a warning shot by saying that's exactly what it will do if this draft bill becomes law:

It wasn't supposed to go this way.AT&T purchased DirecTV in 2015 for $67.1 billion (including debt). The company then gobbled up Time Warner in 2018 for a cool $86 billion. Together, these deals were supposed to cement AT&T as a dominant player in the video advertising wars to come. Instead, they created a convoluted mess that resulted in a mass exodus of pay TV subscribers. In fact, a combination of bungled integration, massive debt, price hikes, and confusing branding have resulted in AT&T losing 7 million subscribers since 2018. That's obviously not the kind of M&A fueled sector domination AT&T executives like Randall Stephenson (since "retired") envisioned.Now AT&T is reportedly trying to offload DirecTV entirely:

One of the more frustrating aspects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been the frankly haphazard manner in which too many folks are tossing around ideas for bringing it all under control without fully thinking things through. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, desperate as I am for life to return to normal. "Give me the option to get a vaccine candidate even though it's in phase 3 trials," I have found myself saying more than once, each time immediately realizing how stupid and selfish it would be to not let the scientific community do its work and do it right. Challenge trials, some people say, should be considered. There's a reason we don't do that, actually.And contact tracing. While contact tracing can be a key part of siloing the spread of a virus as infectious as COVID-19, how we contact trace is immensely important. Like many problems we encounter these days, there is this sense that we should just throw technology at the problem. We can contract trace through our connected phones, after all. Except there are privacy concerns. We can use dedicated apps on our phones for this as well, except this is all happening so fast that it's a damn-near certainty that there are going to be mistakes made in those apps.This is what Albion College in Michigan found out recently. Albion told students two weeks prior to on-campus classes resuming that they would be required to use Aura, a contact tracing app. The app collects a ton of real-time and personal data on students in order to pull off the tracing.

The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has just stripped away the protections granted to journalists and legal observers covering ongoing protests in Portland, Oregon. After journalists secured an agreement from local police to stop assaulting journalists and make them exempt from dispersal orders, the DHS's ad hoc riot control force (composed of CBP, ICE, and Federal Protective Services) showed up and started tossing people into unmarked vans and assaulting pretty much everyone, no matter what credentials they displayed. Shortly after that, a federal court in Oregon granted a restraining order forbidding federal agents from attacking journalists and observers.Not that granting the restraining order did much to prevent federal officers from beating journalists with batons, spraying them with pepper spray, or making sure they weren't left out of any tear gassings. The plaintiffs were soon back in court seeking sanctions against federal violators of the order. The DHS said it couldn't identify any of the officers and stated it had punished no one for violating the order. This prompted the judge to add more stipulations to the order, including the wearing of identification numbers by officers engaging in riot control.Unfortunately for journalists and legal observers, the restraining order is no longer in place. It was rolled back by the Appeals Court in a very short order [PDF] with the court finding that a blanket order protecting journalists and observers from being assaulted makes things too tough for federal cops. (via Courthouse News)

One of the ideas that comes up a lot in proposals to change Section 230 is that Internet platforms should be required to produce transparency reports. The PACT Act, for instance, includes the requirement that they "[implement] a quarterly reporting requirement for online platforms that includes disaggregated statistics on content that has been removed, demonetized, or deprioritized." And the execrable NTIA FCC petition includes the demand that the FCC "[m]andate disclosure for internet transparency similar to that required of other internet companies, such as broadband service providers."

At Free Press, we work in coalition and on campaigns to reduce the proliferation of hate speech, harassment, and disinformation on the internet. It’s certainly not an easy or uncomplicated job. Yet this work is vital if we’re going to protect the democracy we have and also make it real for everyone — remedying the inequity and exclusion caused by systemic racism and other centuries-old harms seamlessly transplanted online today.Politicians across the political spectrum desperate to “do something” about the unchecked political and economic power of online platforms like Google and Facebook have taken aim at Section 230, passed in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act. Changing or even eliminating this landmark provision appeals to many Republicans and Democrats in DC right now, even if they hope for diametrically opposed outcomes.People on the left typically want internet platforms to bear more responsibility for dangerous third-party content and to take down more of it, while people on the right typically want platforms to take down less. Or at least less of what’s sometimes described as “conservative” viewpoints, which too often in the Trump era has been unvarnished white supremacy and unhinged conspiracy theories.Free Press certainly aligns with those who demand that platforms do more to combat hate and disinformation. Yet we know that keeping Section 230, rather than radically altering it, is the way to encourage that. That may sound counter-intuitive, but only because of the confused conversation about this law in recent years.Preserving Section 230 is key to preserving free expression on the internet, and to making it free for all, not just for the privileged. Section 230 lowers barriers for people to post their ideas online, but it also lowers barriers to the content moderation choices that platforms have the right to make.Changes to Section 230, if any, have to retain this balance and preserve the principle that interactive computer services are legally liable for their own bad acts but not for everything their users do in real time and at scale.Powerful Platforms Are Still Powering Hate, and Only Slowly Changing Their WaysOnline content platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are omnipresent. Their global power has resulted in privacy violations, facilitated civil rights abuses, provided white supremacists and other violent groups a place to organize, enabled foreign-election interference and the viral spread of disinformation, hate and harassment.In the last few months some of these platforms have begun to address their role in the proliferation and amplification of racism and bigotry. Twitter recently updated its policies by banning links on Twitter to hateful content that resides offsite. That resulted in the de-platforming of David Duke, who had systematically skirted Twitter’s rules by linking to hateful content across the internet while following some limits for what he said on Twitter itself.Reddit also updated its policies on hate and removed several subreddits. Facebook restricted “boogaloo” and QAnon groups. YouTube banned several white supremacists accounts. Yet despite these changes and our years of campaigning for these kinds of shifts, hate still thrives on these platforms and others.Some in Congress and on the campaign trail have proposed legislation to rein in these companies by changing Section 230, which shields platforms and other websites from legal liability for the material their users post online. That’s coming from those who want to see powerful social networks held more accountable for third-party content on their services, but also from those who want social networks to moderate less and be more “neutral.”Taking away Section 230 protections would alter the business models of not just big platforms but every site with user-generated material. And modifying or even getting rid of these protections would not solve the problems often cited by members of Congress who are rightly focused on racial justice and human rights. In fact, improper changes to the law would make these problems worse.That doesn’t make Section 230 sacrosanct, but the dance between the First Amendment, a platform’s typical immunity for publishing third-party speech, and that same platform’s full responsibility for its own actions, is a complex one. Any changes proposed to Section 230 should be made deliberately and delicately, recognizing that amendments can have consequences not only unintended by their proponents but harmful to their cause.Revisionist History on Section 230 Can’t Change the Law’s Origins or Its VitalityTo follow this dance it’s important to know exactly what Section 230 is and what it does.Written in the early web era in 1996, the first operative provision in Section 230 reads: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”When a book or a newspaper goes to print, its publisher is legally responsible for all the words printed. If those words are plagiarized, libelous, or unlawful then that publisher may face legal repercussions. In the terms of Section 230, they are the law’s “information content provider[s]”.Wiping away Section 230 could revert the legal landscape to the pre-1996 status quo. That’s not a good thing. At the time, a pair of legal decisions had put into a bind any “interactive computer service” that merely hosts or transmits content for others. One case held a web platform that did moderate content could be sued for libel (just as the original speaker or poster could be) if that alleged libel slipped by the platform’s moderators. The other case held sites that did not moderate were not exposed to such liability.Before Section 230 became law, this pair of decisions meant websites were incentivized to go in one of two directions: either don’t moderate at all, tolerating not just off-topic comments but all kinds of hate speech, defamation, and harassment on their sites; or vet every single post, leading inexorably to massive takedowns and removal of anything that might plausibly subject them to liability for statements made by their users.The authors of Section 230 wanted to encourage the owners of websites and other interactive computer services, to curate content on their websites as these sites themselves saw fit. But back then that meant those websites could be just as responsible as newspapers for anything anyone said on their platforms if they moderated at all.In that state of affairs, someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey would have the legal responsibility to approve every single post made on their services. Alternatively, they would have needed to take a complete, hands-off approach. The overwhelming likelihood is that under a publisher-liability standard those sites would not exist at all, at least not in anything like their present form.There’s an awful lot we’re throwing out with the bathwater if we attack not just the abuses of ad-supported and privacy-invasive social-media giants but all sites that allow users to share content on platforms they don’t own. Smaller sites likely couldn’t make a go of it at all, even if a behemoth like Facebook or YouTube could attempt the monumental task of bracing for potential lawsuits over the thousands of posts made every second of the day by their billions of users. Only the most vetted, sanitized, and anodyne discussions could take place in whatever became of social media. Or, at the other extreme, social media would descend into an unfiltered and toxic cesspool of spam, fraudulent solicitations, porn, and hate.Section 230’s authors struck a balance for interactive computer services that carry other people’s speech: platforms should have very little liability for third-party content, except when it violates federal criminal law and intellectual property law.As a result, websites of all sizes exist across the internet. A truly countless number of these — like Techdirt itself — have comments or content created by someone other than the owner of the website. The law preserved the ability of those websites, regardless of their size, to tend to their own gardens and set standards for the kinds of discourse they allow on their property without having to vet and vouch for every single comment.That was the promise of Section 230, and it’s one worth keeping today: an online environment where different platforms would try to attract different audiences with varying content moderation schemes that favored different kinds of discussions.But we must acknowledge where the bargain has failed too. Section 230 is necessary but not sufficient to make competing sites and viewpoints viable online. We also need open internet protections, privacy laws, antitrust enforcement, new models for funding quality journalism in the online ecosystem, and lots more.Taking Section 230 off the books isn’t a panacea or a pathway to all of those laudable ends. Just the opposite, in fact.We Can’t Use Torts or Criminal Law to Curb Conduct That Isn’t Tortious or CriminalHate and unlawful activity still flourish online. A platform like Facebook hasn’t done enough yet, in response to activist pressure or advertiser boycotts, to further modify its policies or consistently enforce existing terms of service that ban such hateful content.There are real harms that lawmakers and advocates see when it comes to these issues. It’s not just an academic question around liability for carrying third-party content. It’s a life and death issue when the information in question incites violence, facilitates oppression, excludes people from opportunities, threatens the integrity of our democracy and elections, or threatens our health in a country dealing so poorly with a pandemic.Should online platforms be able to plead Section 230 if they host fraudulent advertising or revenge porn? Should they avoid responsibility for facilitating either online or real-world harassment campaigns? Or use 230 to shield themselves from responsibility for their own conduct, products, or speech?Those are all fair questions, and at Free Press we’re listening to thoughtful proposed remedies. For instance, Professor Spencer Overton has argued forcefully that Section 230 does not exempt social-media platforms from civil rights laws, for targeted ads that violate voting rights and perpetuate discrimination.Sens. John Thune and Brian Schatz have steered away from a takedown regime like the automated one that applies to copyright disputes online, and towards a more deliberative process that could make platforms remove content once they get a court order directing them to do so. This would make platforms more like distributors than publishers, like a bookstore that’s not liable for what it sells until it gets formal notice to remove offending content.However, not all amendments proposed or passed in recent times have been so thoughtful, in our view, Changes to 230 must take the possibility of unintended consequences and overreach into account, no matter how surgical proponents of the change may think an amendment would be. Recent legislation shows the need for clearly articulated guardrails. In an understandable attempt to cut down on sex trafficking, a law commonly known as FOSTA (the “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act”) changed Section 230 to make websites liable under state criminal law for the knowing “promotion or facilitation of prostitution.”FOSTA and the state laws it ties into did not precisely define what those terms meant, nor set the level of culpability for sites that unknowingly or negligently host such content. As a result, sites used by sex workers to share information about clients or even used for discussions about LGBTQIA+ topics having nothing to do with solicitation were shuttered.So FOSTA chilled lawful speech, but also made sex workers less safe and the industry less accountable, harming some of the people the law’s authors fervently hoped to protect. This was the judgment of advocacy groups like the ACLU that opposed FOSTA all along, but also academics who support changes to Section 230 yet concluded FOSTA’s final product was “confusing” and not “executed artfully.”That kind of confusion and poor execution is possible even when some of the targeted conduct and content is clearly unlawful. But, rewriting Section 230 to facilitate the take-down of hate speech that is not currently unlawful would be even trickier and fundamentally incoherent. Saying platforms ought to be liable for speech and conduct that would not expose the original speaker to liability would have a chilling impact, and likely still wouldn’t lead to sites making consistent choices about what to take down.The Section 230 debate ought to be about when it’s appropriate or beneficial to impose legal liability on parties hosting the speech of others. Perhaps this larger debate on the legal limits of speech should be broader. But that has to happen honestly and on its own terms, not get shoehorned into the 230 debate.Section 230 Lets Platforms Choose To Take Down HatePlatforms still aren’t doing enough to stop hate, but what they are doing is in large part thanks to having 230 in place.The second operative provision in the statute is what Donald Trump, several Republicans in Congress, and at least one Republican FCC commissioner are targeting right now. It says “interactive computer services” can “in good faith” take down content not only if it is harassing, obscene or violent, but even if it is “otherwise objectionable” and “constitutionally protected.”That’s what much hate speech is, at least under current law. And platforms can take it down thanks not only to the platforms’ own constitutionally protected rights to curate, but because Section 230 lets them moderate without exposing themselves to publisher liability as the pre-1996 cases suggested.That gives platforms a freer hand to moderate their services. It lets Free Press and its partners demand that platforms enforce their own rules against the dissemination of hateful or otherwise objectionable content that isn’t unlawful, but without tempting platforms to block a broader swath of political speech and dissent up front.Tackling the spread of online hate will require a more flexible multi-pronged approach that includes the policies recommended by Change the Terms, campaigns like Stop Hate for Profit, and other initiatives. Platforms implementing clearer policies, enforcing them equitably, enhancing transparency, and regularly auditing recommendation algorithms are among these much-needed changes.But changing Section 230 alone won’t answer every question about hate speech, let alone about online business models that suck up personal information to feed algorithms, ads, and attention. We need to change those through privacy legislation. We need to fund new business models too, and we need to facilitate competition between platforms on open broadband networks.We need to make huge corporations more accountable by limiting their acquisition of new firms, changing stock voting rules so people like Mark Zuckerberg aren't the sole emperors over these vastly powerful companies, and giving shareholders and workers more rights to ensure that companies are operated not just to maximize revenue but in socially responsible ways as well.Preserving not just the spirit but the basic structure of Section 230 isn’t an impediment to that effort, it’s a key part of it.Gaurav Laroia and Carmen Scurato are both Senior Policy Counsel at Free Press.

I regret to inform you that AT&T is at it again. For over a decade now, the company has had a weird infatuation with Google. It seems to truly hate Google and has long decided that anything bad for Google must be good for AT&T. Because Google was an early supporter of net neutrality -- a concept that AT&T (stupidly and incorrectly) seems to think is an existential threat to its own business plans of coming up with sneaky ways to spy on you and charge you more -- over a decade ago, AT&T started floating the lame idea that if it's to be held to "net neutrality" Google ought to be held to "search neutrality." Of course, there's a problem with that: there's no such thing as "search neutrality" because the whole point of search is to rank results for you. A "neutral" search would be a useless search that ranks nothing.However, now that the FCC (who knows better) caved in to the bumptious Trump demands to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, AT&T stupidly (and self-destructively) has decided that it's going to comment against Section 230. AT&T top lobbyist Joan Marsh put up a truly spectacularly dumb blog post about how this is "the neutrality debate we need to have" (i.e., about Google and Facebook's treatment of content, rather than AT&T's treatment of network connections):

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There has been plenty of talk about how technology has impacted how we live during the pandemic, but it's interesting to see how that's impacting things beyond the most obvious -- including some interesting cultural changes. Over in the NY Times, reporter Taylor Lorenz, who always has her finger on the beat of the most interesting cultural changes due to technology, has an article about college collaboration houses. That is, because so many colleges are remaining in distance learning to start the school year, thanks to the ongoing pandemic, students are recognizing that just because they don't need to be on campus, it doesn't mean they need to stay at home either:

Last May, a largely overlooked report by OpenSignal detailed how, despite endless hype, U.S. 5G is notably slower than 5G in most other developed countries. Because U.S. regulators failed to make mid-band spectrum (which offers faster speeds at greater range) widely available, many U.S. wireless carriers like Verizon embraced higher millimeter wave spectrum (which has trouble with range and building wall penetration) or low-band spectrum (which offers greater range but at notably reduced speeds). The result of the study was fairly obvious:A new updated report by OpenSignal didn't have any better news. According to the wireless network analysis firm, average 5G download speeds in the US is somewhere around 50 Mbps. And while that's certainly nothing to sneeze at, it's a far cry from carrier hype proclaiming 5G is somehow utterly revolutionary, and it's far from the 200-400 Mbps speeds being seen in many other countries:

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are anonymous commenters on our post about dismantling the police. In first place, it's some thoughts on where to start:

Get your First & Fourth Emojiment gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »Earlier this week, we added two of our popular old designs to our line of face masks in the Techdirt store on Threadless: the First and Fourth Amendments, translated into the language of emojis. Both are available as standard and premium masks and in youth sizes, plus all kinds of other gear: t-shirts, hoodies, phone cases, notebooks, buttons, and much more.And if you haven't in a while, check out the Techdirt store on Threadles to see the other designs we have available, including classic Techdirt logo gear and our most popular design, Nerd Harder. The profits from all our gear help us continue our reporting, and your support is greatly appreciated!

Mere days ago, we were talking about Activision's decision to do a delete and replace for the trailer for the latest Call of Duty game worldwide due to pressure from the Chinese government. That pressure came about over 1 second's worth of footage in the trailer that showed an image from pro-democracy protests in 1989. While only a trailer for an un-released game, the point I attempted to make is that this was a terrible precedent to set. It's one thing to sanitize games, a form of art, for distribution within China. We could spend hours arguing over just how willing companies should be in bowing to the thin-skin of the Chinese government when it comes to art in favor of making huge sums of money, but that's at least understandable. It makes far less sense to apply those changes to the larger world, where China's pearl-clutching sensibilities aren't a thing.And now we're seeing this continue to occur. Kotaku has a quick write up for several changes made to a handful of re-released retro games and this appears to be more of the same. We'll start with the re-release of Baseball Stars 2, a Neo Geo classic.

Summary:On March 15, 2019, the unimaginable happened. A Facebook user -- utilizing the platform's live-streaming option -- filmed himself shooting mosque attendees in Christchurch, New Zealand.By the end of the shooting, the shooter had killed 51 people and injured 49. Only the first shooting was live-streamed, but Facebook was unable to end the stream before it had been viewed by a few hundred users and shared by a few thousand more.The stream was removed by Facebook almost an hour after it appeared, thanks to user reports. The moderation team began working immediately to find and delete re-uploads by other users. Violent content is generally a clear violation of Facebook's terms of service, but context does matter. Not every video of violent content merits removal, but Facebook felt this one did.The delay in response was partly due to limitations in Facebook's automated moderation efforts. As Facebook admitted roughly a month after the shooting, the shooter's use of a head-mounted camera made it much more difficult for its AI to make a judgment call on the content of the footage.Facebook's efforts to keep this footage off the platform continue to this day. The footage has migrated to other platforms and file-sharing sites -- an inevitability in the digital age. Even with moderators knowing exactly what they're looking for, platform users are still finding ways to post the shooter's video to Facebook. Some of this is due to the sheer number of uploads moderators are dealing with. The Verge reported the video was re-uploaded 1.5 million times in the 48 hours following the shooting, with 1.2 million of those automatically blocked by moderation AI.Decisions to be made by Facebook:

If you live in a rural area, or have driven across the country anytime in the last five years, you probably already know the telecom industry's wireless coverage maps are misleading -- at best. In turn, the data they deliver to the FCC is also highly suspect. Regardless, this is the data being used when we shape policy and determine which areas get broadband subsidies, and, despite some notable progress in improving this data in recent years, it's still a major problem. Last year, for example, the Trump FCC quietly buried a report showing how major wireless carriers routinely overstate wireless voice and data availability.Facing massive political pressure from pissed off (and bipartisan) state lawmakers eager for a bigger slice of federal subsidies, the FCC has started taking the basic steps necessary to start to improve things. One of those improvements is a recent proposal (pdf) that would include requiring carriers actually drive around testing their network performance so they can provide more accurate, real-world data. This isn't a huge ask. But T-Mobile and AT&T are fighting back against the proposal, claiming it's "too expensive":

For decades, trust and safety professionals in content moderation, fraud and risk, and safety — have faced enormous challenges, often under intense scrutiny. In recent years, it’s become even more clear that the role of trust and safety professionals are both critically important and difficult. In 2020 alone, we’ve seen an increasing need for this growing class of professionals to combat a myriad of online abuse related to systemic racism, police violence, and COVID-19 — such as hate speech, misinformation, price gouging, and phishing — while keeping a safe space for connecting people with vital, authoritative information, and with each other.Despite the enormous impact trust and safety individuals have towards protecting the online and offline safety of people, the professional community has historically been dispersed, siloed, and informally organized. To date — unlike, say, in privacy — no organization has focused on the needs of trust and safety professionals in a way that builds a shared community of practice.This is why we founded the Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA) and the Trust & Safety Foundation Project (TSF) — something we think is long overdue. TSPA is a new, nonprofit, membership-based organization that will support the global community of professionals who develop and enforce principles and policies that define acceptable behavior online. TSF will focus on improving society’s understanding of trust and safety, including the operational practices used in content moderation, through educational programs and multidisciplinary research.Since we launched in June, we’ve gotten a number of questions about what TSPA and TSF will (and won’t) do. So we thought we’d tackle them right here, and share more with you about who’s included, why we launched now, and what our vision is for the future. You can also hear us talk more about both organizations on episode 247 of the Techdirt podcast. And if you want to know even more, we’re all ears!Q&AQ. How do you define trust and safety? Don’t you mean content moderation?We define trust and safety professionals as the global community of people who develop and enforce policies that define acceptable behavior online.Content moderation is a big part of trust and safety, and the area that gets the most public attention these days. But trust and safety also includes the people who tackle financial risk and fraud, those who process law enforcement requests, engineers who work on automating these policies, and more. TSPA is for the professionals who work in all of those areas.Q. What’s the difference between TSPA and TSF?TSPA is a 501(c)(6) membership-based organization for professionals who develop and enforce principles and policies that define acceptable behavior and content online. Think ABA for lawyers, or IAPP for privacy people, but for those working in trust and safety, who can use TSPA to connect with a network of peers, find resources for career development, and exchange best practices.TSF is a fiscally sponsored project of the Internet Education Foundation and focuses on research.The two organizations are complementary, but have distinct missions and serve different communities. TSPA is a membership organization, while TSF has a charitable purpose.Q. Why are you doing this now?We first started discussing the need for something like this more than two years ago, in the wake of the first Content Moderation at Scale (COMO) conference in Santa Clara. The conference was convened by one of TSPA’s founders and board members, Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, which you can read about right here. After the first COMO get-together It was clear that there was a need for more community amongst people who do trust and safety work.Q. Are you taking positions on policy issues or lobbying?Nope. We’re not advocating for public policy positions on behalf of corporate supporters or anyone else. We do want to help people better understand trust and safety as a field, as well as shed light on the challenges that trust and safety professionals face.Q. Ok, so you launched. Now what?For TSPA, we’re in the process of planning some virtual panel discussions that will happen before the end of the year on various topics related to trust and safety. Topics will range from developing wellness and resilience best practices, to operational challenges in the face of current events like the US presidential election and COVID-19. Longer term, we’re working on professional development offerings, like career advancement bootcamps and a job board.Over at TSF, we partnered with the folks right here from Techdirt to launch with a series of case studies from the Copia Institute that illustrate challenging choices that trust and safety professionals face. We are also hosting an ongoing podcast series called Flagged for Review, with interviews from people with expertise in trust and safety.We’re also looking for founding Executive Director, who can get TSPA and TSF off the ground. Send good candidates our way.Q. Sounds pretty good. How do I get involved?Sign up here so we can share more with you about TSPA and TSF in the coming months as we open our membership and develop our offerings. Follow us on Twitter, too. If you work for one of our corporate supporters, you can reach out to your trust and safety leadership as well to find out more. We’d also love to hear from organizations and people who want to help out, or whose work is complementary to our own. We’re excited to further develop and support the community of online trust and safety professionals.

There was much nonsense spewed at this week's Republican National Convention, and as has been expected given the nonsense narrative about "anti-conservative bias" in big tech, there were plenty of people using the podium to whine about how the big internet companies are working against them. Thanks to the folks at Reason for pointing out how utterly stupid and counterfactual this actually is. Indeed, if you actually wanted to watch the RNC speeches (and I'm not sure why you would), the only place to actually watch them uninterrupted was... on those internet platforms that the speakers swore were trying to silence them.

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Here's quite an example of the Streisand Effect. Buzzfeed investigative reporters have an incredible new series of stories about the massive new prison/concentration camps built in China to house the various Muslim minority populations they've been imprisoning (Uighurs, Kazakhs and others). But what's relevant from our standpoint here at Techdirt is just how they were able to track this information down. As revealed in a separate article, Buzzfeed's reporters effectively used the Streisand Effect. They looked at the maps provided online by the Chinese internet giant Baidu and spotted a bunch of areas that were "blanked out." The reporters noticed that this graying out was deliberate and different than the standard "general reference tiles" that Baidu would show when it didn't have high resolution enough imagery.Once they realized that something must be going on in those spots, they found many more examples that matched in places where the reported complexes were:

The U.S. telecom industry's monopolization problem shows no sign of slowing down.According to the latest data from Leichtman Research, the cable industry is nearing a 70% market share over fixed line broadband. That's thanks to many reasons, not least of which being that most U.S. phone companies have effectively given up on seriously upgrading their aging DSL lines, driving a greater portion of Americans to the only companies actually offering modern broadband speeds: Charter (Spectrum) and Comcast. Phone companies collectively lost another 150,000 subscribers last quarter, while cable providers added about 1,400,000 users in just three months.For the cable industry, this is all a wonderful thing. Less competition from phone companies, combined with a Trump FCC that couldn't care less about the sector's competition problems, means they can get away with charging higher rates than ever for a service that comes (not coincidentally) with some of the worst customer service ratings of any industry in America (seriously stop and think about that for a moment).With COVID-19 making it clear that broadband is an essential utility, users are flocking to cable connections if they want to remain tethered to their jobs, education, and friends. Charter (Spectrum), as a result, saw 850,000 new customers in one quarter alone, a quarterly record for any broadband provider, at any point in U.S. history:

The facts of this case are pretty ugly so let's just dive right into them. As Lenore Skenazy reported for Reason last year, two government employees decided a single incident of a mother leaving her kids in the car was all the reason they needed to swing by the house and strip-search every one of her six children. The oldest was five years old. The youngest were a pair of 10-month-old twins.Holly Curry stopped at a shop to get some muffins and left her six children in the car while she ran in to get them. She was gone for less than 10 minutes. It was only 67 degrees outside. When she came back to her car, two police officers told her she shouldn't leave her kids in the car and wrote up a "JC3 form" -- a hotline-type alert that would be forwarded to Kentucky's Child Protective Services.The next day a CPS investigator showed up. So did a sheriff's deputy. Here's what happened next:

The world may well feel like a terrible place to you right now. A pandemic is sweeping much of the world, with leaders from many countries playing the ostrich, or else treating the victims as though they were mere idiots. Racial tensions and brutal police practices are on full display, with the most surprising aspects being that they continue even as the world is shining a spotlight on the offenders. World leadership appears to be in full retreat, leaving space for truly nefarious actors to shoulder their way into ever more troubling activities.Just last week, the White Sox beat the Cubs in two out of three. These are dark, dark times indeed.But, hark, all ye who may despair, for I bring good tidings. Mere days ago, we talked about a brand war that appeared to be brewing (heh) between grocerer Aldi and Brewdog, a self-styled "punk brewery." It started when Brewdog released a "Punk IPA", fully in line with its branding motif. Aldi then released a beer called "Anti-Establishment IPA", in a similar looking blue can. This led to Brewdog suggesting on Twitter that maybe it should release a "Yaldi" beer. Aldi said "ALD IPA" would be a better name... and Brewdog agreed, rebranding the beer under that name.Notably absent from the whole episode were cease and desist notices from either side, lawyers filing trademark lawsuits, or any legal machinations of any kind. Instead, there was much good-natured ribbing and a fair amount of congenial creativity at play. In the end, Aldi's social media accounts had a laugh at Brewdog taking its suggestion, and even mentioned it might have to save some aisle space for the newly branded beer.Which, in conclusion, appears to be happening.

For as long as cops have been poorly-behaved, people have talked about defunding the police. This talk has gotten louder in recent years and almost deafening in recent weeks as protests over police brutality erupted around the nation in the wake of the George Floyd killing.But what does it mean to defund the police? In most cases, it doesn't mean getting rid of police departments. It means taking some of the millions spent on providing subpar law enforcement and spreading it around to social services and healthcare professionals to steer people trained to react with violence away from people who would be better served with social service safety nets or interventions by people trained to handle mental health crises.Those opposed to defunding police departments (that's most police officials and officers) say it can't be done without ushering in a criminal apocalypse. Police departments demand an inordinate amount of most cities' budgets but law enforcement officials refuse to agree money should be steered away from them even as cities prepare to redirect some calls cops normally handle to other city services.Cops believe they're the "thin blue line" between order and chaos. They believe they're the only thing standing between good people and criminals. But that's just something they say to make themselves feel better about the babysitting and clerical work that consumes most of their working hours. Josie Duffy Rice's excellent article about the long racist history of American law enforcement brings the receipts. What's standing between us and supposed chaos is barely anything at all.

COVID-19 has disrupted almost everything. Most schools in the United States wrapped up the 2019-2020 school year with zero students in their buildings, hoping to slow the spread of the virus. Distance learning is the new normal -- something deployed quickly with little testing, opening up students to a host of new problems, technical glitches, and in-home surveillance.Zoom replaced classrooms, online products replaced teachers, and everything became a bit more dystopian, adding to the cloud of uncertainty ushered in by the worldwide spread of a novel virus with no proven cure, treatment, or vaccine.Schools soon discovered Zoom and other attendance-ensuring options might be a mistake as miscreants invaded virtual classrooms, distributing sexual and racist content to unsuspecting students and teachers. These issues have yet to be solved as schools ease back into Distance Learning 2.0.Then there's the problem with tests. Teachers and administrators have battled cheating students as long as testing has existed. Now that tests are being taken outside of heavily controlled classrooms, software is stepping in to do the monitoring. That's a problem. It's pretty difficult to invade someone's privacy in a public school, where students give up a certain amount of their rights to engage in group learning.Now that learning is taking place in students' homes, schools and their software providers seem to feel this same relinquishment of privacy should still be expected, even though the areas they're now encroaching on have historically been considered private places. As the EFF reports, testing is now being overseen by Professor Big Brother and his many, many eyes. All of this is in place just to keep students from cheating on tests:

As you may have heard, last week Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vax organization "Children's Health Defense" filed a supremely stupid lawsuit against Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and fact checking organizations Poynter and Politifact among others. It was filed early last week and I've wanted to write it up since someone sent it to me a few hours after it was filed, but, honestly, this lawsuit is so incredibly stupid that every time I tried to read through it or write about it, my brain just shut down. I've been incredibly unproductive the last week almost entirely because of this silly, silly lawsuit and my brain's unwillingness to believe that a lawsuit this stupid has been filed. And, as regular readers know, I write about a lot of stupid lawsuits. But this one is special.The basis (if you can call it that) for this lawsuit is that Kennedy is mad that Facebook is blocking the medical disinformation he and his organization publish. Because it's wrong. And dangerous. And stupid. They have every right to do this, of course, so the lawsuit has to come up with the dumbest possible reason to argue as a basis for a lawsuit. We've covered lots of other bad lawsuits about content moderation, but the knots Kennedy and his team tie themselves in to make this argument is truly special (and I don't mean that in a positive way):

As various Republicans in Congress have tried to tap dance around the fact that they're the political party of the batshit crazy QAnon conspiracy theory cult, it's actually nice to see Senator Lindsey Graham -- who had become a consistent Trump kissass over the past few years -- speak up in a Vanity Fair interview and call out QAnon for actually being "batshit crazy." He didn't tiptoe around it like some others: