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Updated 2025-11-17 21:30
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Trump Continues To Attack Biden For All The Stuff Trump Officials Did While Trump Was Still President
If there was anyone with any spine, honesty, or morality in the Trump administration, these astounding gaffes would have been headed off. But there's no one left with any of these traits in the White House, so we get the sort of thing we're now seeing with increasing frequency: Trump (deliberately or not) forgetting who [...]
Comcast Happy To Fund Trump’s Ballroom Despite Years Of Being Shit On
Thanks to the government shutdown, federal employees are stuck sitting in long food bank lines just to survive. While President Trump is destroying the White House east wing to install a ballroom nobody asked for. Without any of the sort of approvals or security clearances you'd need to do it properly. Trump falsely claims to [...]
Mexican Government To Tax Violent Video Games It Says Make Kids Violent
The whole blame video games for everything" theme seems to be resurfacing more and more these days. It's a bit strange, as I honestly thought that this bizarre reflex would be waning as each new generation that increasingly grew up with video games came to be adults. But apparently this needs to be reiterated: law [...]
Ring, Flock Safety Join Forces To Expand Law Enforcement Surveillance Networks
I'm not saying this unholy matrimony wouldn't have occurred under any other regime, but it's definitely the sort of thing that plays well with the Oval Office while it's housing Donald Trump. Both Flock Safety and Ring have weathered plenty of negative press, largely because they were doing the sort of thing they're going back [...]
Techdirt Podcast Episode 436: Venture Capital Is Eating The World
Support us on Patreon It was nearly 400 episodes ago when Catherine Bracy joined the podcast for a two part discussion (one, two) to talk about Silicon Valley culture and what investors are willing to fund. Now, more than a decade later, Catherine has released a new book, World Eaters: How Venture Capital Is Cannibalizing [...]
Biden Admin Blessed UN Surveillance Treaty, Trump Admin Gets To Abuse It
The US attended the UN Cybercrime Treaty signing ceremony in Hanoi this weekend, where 72 countries signed on to a Russia-backed framework for global surveillance cooperation. Whether the US actually puts pen to paper (and all the reporting on this is kind of cagey) is almost beside the point-by showing up and legitimizing the proceeding, [...]
Bari Weiss And The Tyranny Of False Balance
Bari Weiss walked into60 Minutesandasked the staff: Why does the country think you're biased?" The question stunned them into awkward silence. And it should have-not because it caught them off guard, but because it reveals everything wrong with what passes for journalistic sophistication in our moment. Let's be precise about what Weiss is doing. She's [...]
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Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino Ordered To Explain Why Personally Violated A Court Order On Force Usage
Gregory Bovino probably only answers to two people. The first person would be himself. If he wants to do it, he does it, no matter what the actual chain of command is. On the morning of Jan. 7, Jesus Ramirez and other day laborers huddled in a Home Depot parking lot in Bakersfield, California, hoping [...]
King Trump Makes It Clear He Wants His BFF Larry Ellison To Own Warner Brothers
Whether it's Jeff Bezos lobotomizing the Washington Post, Elon Musk turning Twitter into a far right propaganda mill, or Larry Ellison buying CBS, CNN, and TikTok, the country's shittiest right wing billionaires aren't being subtle about their quest to dominate what's left of U.S. media. And Trump's FCC is paving the way by destroying whatever [...]
Blame Video Games: Baltimore Ravens Take Players’ Games Away, Lose Anyway
I very much promise that you don't need to know about, or even care about, American football in any way for this post. We should all know at this point that the blame video games" crowd has not gotten any smaller recently and that video games are blamed for just about everything you can think [...]
Are Web Browsers With Integrated Chatbots A Paradigm Shift – Or Just Privacy And Security Disasters Waiting To Happen?
In a further sign of where the generative AI world is heading, OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Atlas, a new web browser built with ChatGPT at its core." It's not the first to do something like this: earlier browsers incorporating varying degrees of AI include Microsoft Edge (with Copilot), Opera (with Aria), Brave (with Leo), The [...]
Trump Says We’re Just Going To Straight Up Murder A Bunch Of People
Be the Duterte you want to see in the world, I guess. That's the new line from Donald Trump, the guy who once told supporters he could personally commit murder and he wouldn't lose any supporters. He said that last time. He's president again, so apparently it's time to see if this adage holds up. [...]
How “Neutrality” And “Free Speech” Become Excuses For Driving Out The People You Claim To Value
Mike Brock's piece on Sequoia Capital last week laid out a pretty damning case study: a well-respected COO complains about a partner's Islamophobic posts, senior leadership invokes institutional neutrality" and declines to act, she resigns, he stays because he made them billions on SpaceX. Brock correctly calls this out as a choice, not neutrality-a calculation [...]
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Billionaire Covers Trump’s Army Tab While The GOP Continues To Keep The Government Shut Down
A lot of GOP politicians align themselves with Christianity, especially the offshoot that believes the richer you are, the more God loves you. (That it tends to dovetail nicely with white Christian nationalism is just a bonus in these Trumpian times.) But somehow they never seem to be able to spend a dime of their [...]
Extremely Innovative: HBO Raises Streaming Prices For The Third Time In Three Years
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector isfalling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth for growth's sake" megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and newannoying restrictions, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a [...]
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is danderbandit with a comment about Trump's assertions regarding the Insurrection Act: 50%? I don't think so! I'm allowed as you know as president, like 50% of the presidents have used the Insurrection Act." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invocations_of_the_Insurrection_Act#:~:text=The%20act%20has%20been%20invoked,the%201992%20Los%20Angeles%20riots. Per that article, the Insurrection Act has been invoked 31 [...]
This Week In Techdirt History: October 19th – 25th
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, hypocrisy was on full display as the GOP went from whining about net neutrality to supporting Trump's attack on social media (which the FCC was too afraid to go on record in support of while also rejecting its own legal arguments about net neutrality), and from defanging the [...]
Cards Against Humanity, SpaceX Settle Lawsuit Over Misused Border Land Parcel
Way back in Trump's first term, back when he was still claiming he was going to build some enormous border wall and get Mexico to pay for it (neither happened), the lovely people over at Cards Against Humanity bought a parcel of land along the boarder with the intention of taking every possible action to [...]
Trump’s Tantrum Over Accurate Reagan Quotes Backfires: Millions Learn Reagan Opposed His Tariff Policy
Donald Trump just cut off all trade negotiations with Canada because an Ontario ad campaign quoted Ronald Reagan accurately. The quotes are real. The context is accurate. But Trump called them fake" and fraudulent," and the Reagan Foundation-the institution literally tasked with preserving Reagan's legacy-backed him up by lying about what their own guy said [...]
How Trump Is Building A Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force
This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city's emergency response system. Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them [...]
Let’s Try This Again: Now You Can Sign Up For Techdirt’s Daily Email Newsletter
On Tuesday, I wrote about how we were upgrading our daily email newsletter-the one we've had for decades but never actually promoted. Thousands of you had signed up just by spotting the little email icon. We figured more might be interested if we actually talked about it. We'd upgraded the tech, written a whole post [...]
Reddit’s ‘AI Scraping’ Lawsuit Is An Attack On The Open Internet
When Reddit sued data scraper" companies and AI firm Perplexity earlier this week, I assumed it was another predictable skirmish over AI training data-the kind of case we've been tracking as companies try to wall off the open internet and set up toll booths. But reading the actual complaint made it clear this is something [...]
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This 3-in-1 Magnetic Wireless Charging Pad integrates three charging modules for cell phones, headphones, and watches-a maximum power of 15W for cell phone charging, 5W for Airpods charging, and 2.5W for Apple Watch charging. Charge three devices at the same time, conveniently and efficiently. To add more, this charging pad can be folded and used [...]
Kristi Noem Lies, Says Stupid Shit While Defending ICE From ‘Demonization’ By Press, Gov’t Officials
Earlier this year, Donald Trump declared (without facts in evidence) that Chicago was a crime-ridden hellhole that could only be saved by sending in the literal troops. This happened during a year which has been one of the safest (in terms of crime rates) in Chicago's recent history. And, of course, actual crime rates were [...]
Very Innovative: Here Come Thousands In CBS Paramount Merger Layoffs
U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only to those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disasterwas the poster child [...]
DC Comics Goes After Another European Org For Using ‘Wonder’ And ‘Mum’ Together Over Trademark
Several years ago, DC Comics opposed the trademark sought by Unilever for the term Wonder Mum" with the UKIPO over its trademarks for Wonder Woman". Now, DC Comics is notoriously draconian when it comes to policing its IP, trademarks included, but this one was fairly ridiculous, as the UKIPO pointed out. There is no actual [...]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: A Tale of Two Internets
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 [...]
Sequoia’s Choice
Sequoia Capitaljust showed us exactly what institutional neutrality" means-when billions are at stake. Sumaiya Balbale-the firm's chief operating officer, aShake Shackboard member, someone well regarded internally and by the start-ups she worked with as an experienced operating executive"-resigned in Augustafter complaining about partner Shaun Maguire's Islamophobic posts. Senior partners declined to discipline him, citing free [...]
No Mandatory Bibles, No Prager U Tests: Oklahoma’s New Superintendent Unwinds The Walters Era
Ryan Walters is no longer the Superintendent of the State of Oklahoma, but he's still at work doing his nonsensical performative shtick. After vacating his government position in the middle of his mandates for schools to carry copies of the Trump Bible and requiring transplant teachers to take a Prager U developed woke-test to get [...]
Warner Brothers Is For Sale (Again): Prepare For More Pointless, Disastrous Media Mergers
I've written a lot about the AOL->AT&T->Time Warner->Discovery mergers simply because I think they perfectly encapsulate the pointless, destructive incompetence at the heart of modern media consolidation, and the cannibalistic nature of Wall Street's obsession with illusory quarterly growth propped up by smoke, mirrors, and complex accounting. Ever since the original AOL Time Warner merger [...]
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DOJ Prosecutor Lindsey Halligan Berates Journalist Via Signal, Tries To Claim Whole Thing Is ‘Off The Record’
The Trump administration is absolutely stuffed full of people who - if they had any self-awareness at all - would be suffering crippling bouts of impostor syndrome. But they don't because they actually think they're the best thing that has happened to the nation they're continue to destroy with their bigotry and incompetence. Pete Hegseth [...]
Student Journalists At Indiana University And Purdue Show More Integrity, Solidarity And Backbone Than Many In The Mainstream Press
Last week, Indiana University administrators fired the school newspaper's (Indiana Daily Student) advisor and ordered students to stop printing the paper. The student journalists say that University administrators didn't like the student paper's decision to increasingly criticize University President Pamela Whitten's decision to coddle the authoritarian Trump administration, or, at best, remain silent as the [...]
Measles Outbreaks Abound Under RFK Jr.’s Inaction
You may be tired of hearing about measles by now, but measles is not tired of infecting Americans. It's worth reminding ourselves that this is a disease that was declared gone in America. Cases and transmission rates were so low in 2000, thanks almost entirely to the widespread promotion and adoption of the MMR vaccine, [...]
Elon Musk Discovers What Hierarchy Actually Means
Elon Musk is having avery bad week. The man who bought Twitter for $44 billion to secure unaccountable power over public discourse is discovering what unaccountable power actually looks like when wielded by someone who understands dominance better than he does. Trump just strippedSpaceXof a government contract and handed it to Jeff Bezos. Musk's response? [...]
More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held By Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged And Detained For Days.
This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn't be concerned. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in [...]
DOJ Purge Continues With Firing Of Prosecutor Who Refused To Go After Trump’s Personal Enemies
The appearance of impropriety" doesn't bother this administration. It prefers open impropriety, having learned the wrong lessons from Trump's first term, where most of his worst impulses were somewhat muted by the adults in the room. There are no adults left. If they haven't been fired, it's because they were never invited to participate in [...]
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Trump Demands $230 Million In Taxpayer Money For Being Prosecuted—And His Own Lawyers Get To Approve It
There are levels of corruption, and then there's whatever the hell this is. Donald Trump is demanding that American taxpayers pay him $230 million for being prosecuted. Which is like getting a speeding ticket and then billing the state for the cost of your traffic lawyer. Except in this case, the traffic lawyer is now [...]
Musk Exploits AWS Outage To Unfairly Slam Signal, Promote His Shittier Chat Software
If Elon Musk probably has a superpower, it isn't his engineering or business savvy. It's probably his rank opportunism. The latest case in point: this week saw a massive outage for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that managed to take many of your favorite websites and services offline. The outage also hampered the workflows of countless [...]
RFK Jr. Is Very Interested In, And Likely Wrong About, Your Teenager’s Sperm Count
Look, folks, I'm sorry, but RFK Jr. is going to force us to talk about sperm. And I'm very much going to try to keep the jokes at an absolute minimum, because, as per usual when Kennedy starts spouting off about something health-related, this isn't actually funny. At this point I don't think it makes [...]
Germany Blocks EU Chat Control Proposal, Noting That Mass Surveillance Of Encrypted Messages Must Not Be Allowed
Just days after we wrote about the EU's renewed push for chat control, Germany has delivered a very important no" vote. During discussions with EU countries last Wednesday, Germany's opposition was decisive enough to kill the proposal's momentum and remove it from this week's agenda for EU justice ministers. But it wasn't just a procedural [...]
Techdirt Podcast Episode 435: An Insider’s View Of Decentralized Social Media
Support us on Patreon As you know, we talk a lot about decentralization and protocols over platforms. When it comes to decentralized social media in particular, one person who has been working on it since the earliest days is developer Rabble, who was around at the very beginning of what would become Twitter and has [...]
State Department Revokes Visas Of Foreigners Who Refused To Pretend Charlie Kirk Is Worth Mourning
The Party of Free Speech Snowflakes is at it again. Despite Charlie Kirk not actually being a member of the administration or, indeed, a political leader of any sort, the Trump Administration continues to act as though one of its own has been assassinated, rather than just another podcaster who happened to be more popular [...]
We’ve Been Doing Newsletters Since Before They Were Cool (Again), And Now We’re Actually Telling You About It
Look, we get it. Your inbox is probably drowning in newsletters right now. Every publication, influencer, and their cousin's dog walker has suddenly discovered the revolutionary concept of... sending you emails with stuff to read. Who could have predicted that people might want content delivered directly to them? Well, actually, we could have. Because we've [...]
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9th Circuit Judge Blasts Colleagues For Enabling Trump’s Unconstitutional Military Invasion Of Portland
Two Trump-appointed federal judges just decided that facts don't matter when the President wants to send the military into American cities. Donald Trump declared Portland a war-ravaged" city requiring military intervention based on a few anti-ICE protests and imagery from five years ago on Fox News that he apparently thought was happening now. The actual [...]
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