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According to new data from the US Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), streaming video subscription prices jumped a whopping 29 percent year over year. That's compared to the 2.7 percent jump in consumer costs seen more generally across other goods and services. Of course BLS doesn't explain why streaming video prices are [...]

I've been talking about the Stop Killing Games movement for some time now, so important is its mission to me. This collection of volunteers focused on video game and cultural preservation is attempting to whip up public support for legislation to achieve those goals. Currently focused in the EU, the campaign is built primarily on [...]

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 [...]

We always knew the narrative was false. The administration's insistence that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) was somehow an international menace always rang hollow - just another way to disappear brown people into an El Salvadoran torture prison. For months, it's been clear the intelligence doesn't back the claims made by the deliberately stupid [...]

History never repeats exactly the same, which is how it can be hard to recognize when it is indeed repeating-too many little things may be different the second time around for subsequent events to be a perfect twin of the previous. But it's the big things that often reappear in similar ways that are meaningful. [...]

This week, a major trial kicked off in Los Angeles in which hundreds of families sued Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube, accusing the companies of intentionally designing their products to be addictive (though Snap and TikTok both settled on the eve of the trial) . From the Guardian: For the first time, a huge group [...]

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Let's open with a joke: Mr. Bovino said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents were probably more experienced at handling young people than any domestic law enforcement agency." I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children," he said. Not because we want to be, but because we have [...]

Last year we reported how Verizon executives happily agreed to be more racist and sexist in exchange for Trump DOJ and FCC approval of their $20 billion merger with telecom giant Frontier Communications. Verizon embarrassingly said they'd cull race and gender equality initiatives, and try harder moving forward to protect downtrodden white people from the [...]

The travesty that is RFK Jr. in charge of American health and what he's done to the CDC's ACIP committee for vaccines continues to be visited upon all of us. It's really important to keep in mind that during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy lied repeatedly about his stance on vaccines. Supposedly serious senators, like Bill [...]

Minneapolis is once again the focus of debates about violence involving law enforcement after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killedRenee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, in her car. The incident quickly prompted dueling narratives. Trump administration officialsdefended the shooting as justified, whilelocal officials condemnedit. The shooting will also likely promptrenewed scrutiny of [...]

We've covered how there'sa real push afootto implement statewide right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, whileall fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed [...]

This nation is filled with loudmouths who claim the Second Amendment ensures the rest of the amendments are protected. There are a lot of gun owners who bristle at any hint of gun control, even as they insist they might be the only thing protecting us from a hostile government. This noise gets a lot [...]

There's a line buried in Adam Serwer's recent Atlantic piece on the Minneapolis resistance to ICE that deserves to be pulled out, examined, and posted on every lamppost in America: The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. Read that again. It [...]

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First off, there's a chance my headline (which went through several iterations) undersells what's actually going on here. What's detailed below is yet another jaw-dropping act of executive hubris, with the DOJ again deciding it can do whatever the hell it wants when a judge dares to tell it no." A little background: it was [...]

Our shitty autocrats are nothing if not predictable. As we just got done noting, the Trump administration and their right wing extremist billionaire friend have joined forces to wage war on Netflix's attempted acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry wants Warner Brothers (and CNN) as part of his obvious effort to build a new autocrat-friendly propaganda [...]

Before you read this post, I want you to try to recall the stupidest thing you've ever heard someone say. Go ahead and hold that memory in the back of your head. Perhaps by now you're tiring of all of these posts on America's measles problem that we've endured for over a year now. This [...]

ICE has been invading U.S. cities, targeting,surveilling,harassing,assaulting,detaining, andtorturingpeople who are undocumented immigrants. They also havetargeted peoplewithwork permits,asylum seekers,permanent residents(people holding green cards"),naturalized citizens, andeven citizens by birth.ICE has spenthundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance technologyto spy on anyone-and potentially everyone-in the United States. It can be hard to imagine how to defend oneself against [...]

You might recall how Republicans (with help from Democrats) suffered a three year embolism over the national security, privacy, and propaganda problems inherent with TikTok - only to turn around and let Trump sell the platform to his technofascist billionaire friends. Who are now already hard at work preparing to do all of the stuff [...]

Unexpected, but in the most delightful sense of the word - the sort of thing we've rarely seen since January 2025. Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol commander at large" and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to [...]

Disclosure: I'm on the board of Bluesky, which was inspired by my Protocols, Not Platforms" paper. But this post isn't about Bluesky the app. It's about the underlying protocol and what it enables for anyone who wants to build technology (even competitive to Bluesky) that actually respects users. Last month, I helped release the Resonant [...]

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The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded, even those who may nominally support the end goal. Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception, especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn't be expected to solve. Trump has treated multiple American cities like war zones. [...]

For more than fifty yearsthe U.S. right wing has accused academia, journalism or science of having a liberal bias" if it revealsabsolutely anythingthe right wing doesn't like. It's an easy way to quickly discredit any critics of your worldview without having to engage in thinking, introspection, or debate, and it's been on display for longer [...]

In my previous posts about the use of generative AI tools in the video game industry, I have tried to drive home the point that a nuanced conversation is needed here. Predictably, there were many comments of the sort of stratified opinions that I was specifically attempting to avoid, but I always knew they'd be [...]

If you want to understand how little the current administration cares about the First Amendment, look no further than a pre-dawn FBI raid on a journalist's home-conducted in apparent violation of a federal law specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing. Last week, FBI agents showed up at the home of Washington Post [...]

Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. He spent his days caring for American veterans-the men and women who served this country and came home broken in body or mind. He wanted to make a difference in this world. That is what his parents said, in a statement released hours [...]

If you're not aware, America's unholy alliance between U.S. corporations and the right wing grifter economy has an elaborate public messaging and manipulation system that continues to demonstrate its influence and power. The latest case in point: K Street policy and lobbying firms appear to have leveraged a bunch of right wing influencers to launch [...]

First, there's the lies: the immediate, reflexive flurry of posts meant to portray anyone federal immigration officers kill as a threat to public safety. When an officer murdered Renee Good, the administration claimed she was a terrorist who was trying to run over the officer that killed her. Recordings proved this was all a lie. [...]

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Two weeks ago, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good in cold blood. I said then that we had to abolish ICE and impeach Trump & Noem before they incited another murder. As more details have emerged, it's only looked worse. Multiple angles of video showed Good was trying to avoid hitting anyone. Ross, [...]

Last year the fraud-prone Trump organization announced a half-assed wireless phone company. As we noted at the time, calling this a phone company" is generous; it was just a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service. So basically just another lazy [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the idea from DHS that it's un-American to refuse to house federal officers: Except for the fact that we literally have an amendment in our constitution that says nobody has to house soldiers. These people really are [...]

We're nearing the end of January, and you know what that means: we're on the home stretch of the latest installment of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1930! We've already gotten some intriguing submissions, and we expect to get plenty more before the deadline of January 31st, but just because time [...]

Every year, a little after New Years, I do a post about the previous year of Techdirt traffic and comments. You may notice that we skipped last year's for 2024. 2025 was so crazy with everything happening, we just didn't get around to it, and I kept saying I would and then I looked up [...]

We are being led by deeply unserious people. Not only that, but people who are manufacturing cruelty upon their very own constituents. That's how bad this has gotten. This week, the DOJ arrested three people in Minnesota for protesting ICE's goonish activity in a local church, where the pastor there also heads up the local [...]

It will be to the everlasting shame of all Americans that impeachment has not yet been accomplished to formally remove Trump from office. Not in his previous term, and not this one, at least not so far. In fact, this term it has hardly even been attempted. If it weren't for Representative Green honoring his [...]

CBS News still exists, despite a president doing all he can to turn it into his own Baghdad Betty. Journalists are still demanding answers from this administration, even while the Baghdadest Betty of all - Bari Weiss - does everything she can to strip mine the long-running news agency for abusable parts. (That refers to [...]

Register here for our Growing the Open Social Web Un-Workshop. For over three years now, since Elon Musk decided to spend $44 billion turning Twitter into his personal playground, we've been watching the open social web slowly, sometimes painfully, come into its own. Bluesky. Mastodon. The broader ATmosphere and fediverse along with a few other [...]

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Trump's version of ICE has always assumed that if your skin shade is anything darker than right-wing podcaster translucent, your ass needs to be gone from this country. Obviously, that's not how things are supposed to work here in America, which proudly considered itself to be a melting pot (albeit belatedly and after a lot [...]

The hype and madness surrounding 5G has always been pretty wild to watch. On one hand, wireless carriers spent years implying that 5G was some type ofcancer curing miracle technology(it's not). At the same time, oodles of conspiracy theorists, celebrities, and variousgrifterstried to claim 5G was a rampant health menace (it's not). In reality, 5G'snot [...]

It's been nearly a decade since Mike wrote about the strange trademark approval the New England Patriots received on the term Perfect Season." The story rang as odd for several reasons, not the least of which being that the team applied for the mark in 2008 just before that year's Super Bowl and at a [...]

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 [...]

Utah's budding theocracy continues unimpeded as we head into the new year. On top of its other unconstitutional laws (like the oft-challenged social media ban) and legislative proposals, there's its book ban law that has seen it become the first state to actually remove certain books from all public schools across the state. The targeted [...]

Rand Paul is furious. That's because someoneposteda video falsely accusing the Kentucky senator of taking money from Venezuela's Maduro regime. Paul should know that the First Amendment sets a deliberately high bar for defamation of public officials like him. UnderNew York Times v. Sullivan, he must show not just falsity, but that the speaker knew [...]

The thing afforded the highest protections of the Fourth Amendment is a person's home. This isn't even a controversial statement. It has been that way ever since this amendment was ratified. But, under Trump, we're constantly seeing that the administration considers all rights to be privileges - something only granted to people this administration likes. [...]

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We spent a lot of time last year calling out how dangerous it was that Elon Musk and his inexperienced 4chan-loving DOGE boys were gaining access to some of the most secure government systems. We also highlighted how it seemed likely that they were violating many laws in the process. One specific point of concern [...]