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Updated 2025-08-05 23:31
Grok Becomes ‘MechaHitler,’ Twitter Becomes X: How Centralized Tech Is Prone To Fascist Manipulation
This week, Elon Musk's Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, responding with conspiracy theories about Jewish people, and for a brief period telling people to call it MechaHitler." The incident perfectly illustrates why Alex Komoroske's manifesto about the dangers of centralized AI, which we ran less than a month ago, has been making waves. When [...]
Virginia Enacts Stupid, Completely Unworkable ‘Social Media Time Limit’ Law
Lawmakers seem to think they're capable of solving every perceivable social media problem via legislation. Sometimes, the intents are pure but the execution is lacking. In many more cases - especially recently - the intent is to harm social media companies with legislation, all while pretending it's about protecting free speech" or the children" or [...]
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El Salvador Throws DOJ Under The Bus: Tells UN That US Has “Exclusive” Jurisdiction Over Renditioned Detainees
For months, the DOJ has insisted to US courts that it has no jurisdiction over the people it rendered to Salvadoran detention facilities. But when the UN came asking, El Salvador told a very different story: these detainees are exclusively" under US jurisdiction and legal responsibility. The contradiction is so blatant it's almost insulting to [...]
Trump Globally Launches New Truth+ ‘Video Streaming Service’ That’s Just Right Wing Propaganda And Gibberish
Trump recently launched a wireless phone service," which as we mentioned, isn't so much a real phone service as it is a quick licensing agreement and a lazy rebranding of other services. He's also exploiting the presidency by launching a vast array of new, clumsily branded Trump home goods, including a new Trump-branded Instantpot. If [...]
Nestle Petitions To Cancel ‘Seattle Strong’ Coffee Trademark, Arguing It Owns Seattle
Nestle certainly hasn't been shy about engaging in aggressive trademark enforcement in the past, but this one is something different. We've already covered several stories in which a person or company has attempted to trademark the name of a city for a particular market designator. Not use the name of the city in a larger [...]
National Park Visitors Reject Trump Administration’s Bigoted Attempt To Erase History
In Trump's eyes, anything that doesn't make white people appear to be the saviors of the world is something that should be buried. Whatever the phrase fake news" won't make go away is subject to seemingly daily government edicts that declare any recognition of racial diversity or America's racist past (and present) to be un-American [...]
Techdirt Podcast Episode 424: Reclaiming The Internet
Support us on Patreon We've got one more cross-post episode for you this week! A few weeks ago, Mike joined host Aaron Ross Powell on the ReImagining Liberty podcast for a discussion that digs into the the philosophy and principles underlying the push for internet decentralization and protocols over platforms, and why this shift is [...]
The New York Times Runs Interference For A Racist To Manufacture A Fake Scandal About Zohran Mamdani
The New York Times has had a rough few decades when it comes to being manipulated by bad actors. But their latest embarrassment-a complete non-story about NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's college application to Columbia University from 2009-represents a new low in journalistic malpractice that combines hacked materials, racist sources, and a breathtaking willingness to [...]
Denaturalization, Fines, And Denying Reality: Here’s How Trump Is Accelerating Mass Deportation
Trump advisor/subhuman ghoul Stephen Miller wants ICE to be arresting 3,000 people a day. So far, ICE has only managed to top out at 2,200 arrests in a single day, despite going full black ops in neighborhoods and businesses, driving unmarked cars, and leaving nothing exposed on officers' bodies but their lifeless eyes. Stephen Miller [...]
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Who Goes MAGA?
With apologies to Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay in Harper's, Who Goes Nazi?" remains a worthwhile read on the cultural archetypes of who is drawn to fascism, and who would never go down such a path. It felt like it could use a modern updating, however. Update: Just after I finished writing this, it occurred [...]
Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr Ignores The Law, Encourages Prison Telecom Monopolies To Rip Off Inmate Families
However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they're arguably worse in prisons. For decades,journalistsandresearchershave outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resultingsky high rates(upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families. Most of [...]
SCOTUS Porn Ruling A Boon For Age Verification Companies; 40% Of Americans Now Live Under Anti-Porn Age-Gating Laws
The conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled 6-3 in favor of upholding an age verification measure targeting adult content platforms on the internet that the state legislature of Texas adopted during the 2023 legislative session. As a quick reminder, the case isFree Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxtonand featured the parent companies of [...]
ICE Using Repurposed Border Facial Recognition Tech To ID Protesters, Activists, And Migrants On US Streets
The Trump Administration's constant escalation of its mass deportation programs now means ICE, CBP, and other federal agencies must come up with thousands of arrests a day. This never had anything to do with removing criminals from the country and, even if you once believed that might be the case, an unending string of raids [...]
Warning: NY & Minnesota’s Social Media Warning Label Laws Are Unconstitutional
Both New York and Minnesota just passed laws requiring social media platforms to slap warning labels on their sites-warning labels based on zero scientific evidence, likely to be struck down as unconstitutional compelled speech, and designed solely to let politicians pretend they're protecting children" while actually making their lives worse. You'd think lawmakers would learn. [...]
Trump Budget Bill Turns ICE Into A Superpredator
Men in masks kidnapping people off streets or turning businesses into ghost towns is now nothing more than an everyday occurrence in the United States. The Trump administration never actually cared whether or not the people it ejected from the country due to their race, color, or creed were, in fact, criminals. All it ever [...]
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DOGE Cuts Turned A Predicted Disaster Into A Deadly Reality In Texas
On Thursday, literally the day before flash flooding devastated Texas, the Texas Observer published an article warning that Trump's DOGE Cuts Are a Texas-Sized Disaster," explaining how cuts to both the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would likely lead to disaster for Texas. Twenty-four hours later, those [...]
The Washington Post Makes It Easier For Powerful People And Companies To Undermine Its Reporting
You might recall that about half a decade ago news outlets began to whine endlessly about the poor old news comment section. Editors at many outlets didn't like the way the comment section was used to prominently point out errors in stories and challenge newsrooms. They were also often too cheap to invest in moderating [...]
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a reaction to Kilmar Abrego's story of the conditions inside CECOT: We're funding this with taxpayer money. We're living in Omelas, only it's worse and there are millions more being tortured than just one child. There's no walking away though. We have [...]
This Week In Techdirt History: June 29th – July 5th
Five Years Ago This week in 2020... remember Parler? The uncensored free speech social media platform? Well, it was changing its tune and starting to ban users as it embarked on a speedrun of the content moderation learning curve (and we also noted some striking clauses in its terms of service). Twitch and Reddit were [...]
GOP Budget Bill Includes Massive Spectrum Handout To Large Wireless Carriers, Hurting WiFi Speeds
From the massive handout to already-wealthy Americans to the likely fatal cuts to Medicaid, there's plenty to be disgusted by in the GOP Budget bill approved by Congress today. But there's also a lot of little gifts in there to corporations that will likely fly under the radar, including a massive new handout of valuable [...]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Don’t Believe What This Podcast Says About Misinformation
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.
Supreme Court Rejects Jason ‘Pee King Of Facebook’ Fyk’s ‘But Muh Pee Videos’ Appeal
All hail Jason Fyk, one of the most aggrieved failure to monetize piss videos" dudes ever. In fact, he might be the only person angered about his inability to turn pee into cash with third-party content featuring people urinating. Anything that gives me a chance to embed this video (which also served as the ultimate [...]
SCOTUS Refuses To Hear Anti-Vax Group’s Claim That Meta’s Private Actions Are 1A Violations
Back in the summer of 2020, RFK Jr. was leading the Children's Health Defense organization, built on an anti-vaccination platform. The organization sued Facebook/Meta that year, along with several fact-checking organizations, for limiting the reach of, and otherwise fact-checking, its posts due to their inclusion of medical and scientific misinformation. CHD argued, in an incredibly [...]
State Dept. Tells Student Visa Applicants To Set Their Social Media Profiles To ‘Public’ If They Want To Come To The US
Way back in the day of EARLIER THIS YEAR, people could expect to be subjected to warrantless, invasive device searches only at US borders and international airports. Visa applicants, however, just needed to fill out some paperwork and wait for permission to head abroad to find work and/or continue their education. Now, you don't even [...]
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Kilmar Abrego Garcia Details How CECOT Is A Torture Camp
People have referred to CECOT, the Salvadoran gulag, as The Prison that Nobody Leaves." That's one reason (of many) that it was so concerning that the Trump regime was renditioning people there with no due process. Indeed, most had no criminal record at all. This is why there were concerns that it would, in fact, [...]
Institutional Failure: CBS Wimps Out, Pays Trump $16 Million Bribe To Settle Baseless Lawsuit
As predicted, CBS execs have folded like damp cardboard and decided to pay Donald Trump $16 million in an incredible and historic act of cowardice. CBS, seeking FCC regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance, wanted to settle a completely baseless Trump lawsuit falsely alleging that 60 Minutes misleadingly edited an election season [...]
TN Govt. Saves School Children From Smut Like Magic Tree House, Calvin & Hobbes, & A Light In The Attic
Book bans are all the rage these days, as you likely well know. Far too many people, and folks in government more importantly, seem to have read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 not as a lesson in the dangers of new media, but as some sort of instruction manual for how to treat literature. But the [...]
The NO FAKES Act Has Changed – And It’s So Much Worse
A bill purporting to target the issue of misinformation and defamation caused by generative AI has mutated into something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out. The Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act aims to address understandable concerns about generative AI-created replicas" by [...]
Our National Robocall Nightmare Is Getting Worse Under Donald Trump
According to the latest data on robocalls from the YouMail Robocall Index, the scale of the U.S. robocall problem has grown by another eleven percent year over year. U.S. consumers received just over 4.8 billion robocalls in May. We've normalized ceding our primary voice communications platforms to corporations, debt collectors, and scammers, and there's every [...]
Trump’s Immigration Enforcement: Free The Criminals, Jail The Innocent
The Trump administration's immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They're literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And they're doing it all to cover up their own massive legal fuckups. Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We covered this last week when Magistrate Judge [...]
Assaults On ICE Officers Are Up 700%… Which Just Means There Have Been 69 More Assaults Than Last Year
The DHS finally decided to provide the underlying stats for its exponentially increasing claims of sky-high numbers of assaults on ICE officers. Earlier this year, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted assaults were up 413%, which was parroted by acting ICE direction Todd Lyons in his whiny response to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump's questioning of [...]
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Trump’s Last-Minute Legal Maneuver Attempts To Dodge Iowa’s New Anti-SLAPP Law
After Donald Trump won the election, he was still so full of hatred, bile, and spite, that he sued the pollster Ann Selzer as well as the Des Moines Register. Selzer, who has been one of the most trusted names in polling, released a poll slightly before the election that predicted a somewhat shocking victory [...]
Ted Cruz’s Dumb Plan To Punish States That Regulate AI By Withholding Broadband Grants Falls Apart
While the GOP budget bill continues to include no limit of corrupt garbage that will kill millions of Americans (the cuts to Medicaid and rural hospitals being particularly brutal), one key component of the GOP agenda didn't quite make the cut. Ted Cruz had proposed withholding billions of dollars in federal broadband grants for states [...]
Nintendo’s Anti-Consumer Anti-Piracy Measures Also Reduce The Value Of The Switch 2
When it comes to the anti-piracy efforts taken by some of the more aggressive companies out there, such as Nintendo, the most frustrating part of the whole thing for me is just how completely short-sighted those efforts tend to be. Take Nintendo's updated EULA for its Switch consoles, for example. The updated agreement makes several [...]
The Moral Imperative Of Clear Language
I need to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: your refusal to call fascism fascism" is not sophistication-it'scomplicity. When Donald Trump postsexplicit ordersfor REMIGRATION" and Mass Deportation Operations" targeting American cities because they are the core of the Democrat Power Center," that's not controversial immigration policy." That's mass deportation directed against [...]
Trump Launches America’s Newest Concentration Camp, Complete With Tacky Merch
Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous [...]
National Guard Troops Sent To California By Trump Are Just Out There Doing Drug Busts
Martial law? Police state? These are just things the alleged Leader of Free World wants, rather than things a nation founded on rejecting these options should be in the process of instituting. And yet, here we are, barely six months into Trump's return to office, staring down the barrel of both of these related horrors. [...]
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Why Mamdani’s Refusal To Condemn Speech He Never Made Is Good Free Speech Advocacy
At a time when politicians on both sides reflexively call for censorship and speech policing, it's refreshing to see someone actually defend free speech principles-especially when it would be politically easier to cave. That's exactly what New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani did when NBC's Meet the Press tried to pressure him into [...]
Elon Musk’s Starlink Adds $750 Congestion Charge
Republicans are rewriting an infrastructure bill grant program to redirect billions of dollars to Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband service. The claim is that this is necessary because Starlink is the perfect solution for the country's rural broadband users and deserves this money. The reality is that Starlink continues to show that it lacks the [...]
States Need To Mimic Colorado Law Now That HHS Is A Dumpster Fire
At the beginning of this year, the Colorado state legislature introduced HB25-1097, a state law that updated the state's disease control statutes. Eventually signed into law by the Governor in April, the bill does a whole bunch of things related to public health: repealed the state's epidemic response committee, set a schedule for reviewing the [...]
AMC’s Latest Innovation: More Ads At The Movie Theater
During pandemic lockdowns, you might recall how AMC executivesthrew a temper tantrumbecause companies like Comcast/NBC began experimenting with more innovative movie release windows. AMC execs were mad because the pandemic highlighted how the 90-day gap between the time a movie appears in theaters and its streaming or DVD release was exposed as both dated and [...]
The Supreme Court Just Discovered Nationwide Injunctions Are Bad—Right As Trump Needs Them Gone
The Supreme Court just discovered that nationwide injunctions are problematic. How convenient that this revelation came right as Donald Trump returned to office with plans to rule by executive fiat. Last week's big Supreme Court decision in Trump v. CASA was trumpeted in the media as being about birthright citizenship, even though that was only [...]
Surveillance (Against The) State: Doorbell Cam Owners Are Tipping People Off About ICE Raids
The cops certainly had fun partnering with Ring, the surveillance camera company now owned by Amazon. Ring handed out free cameras to cops, who handed out these cameras to citizens with the implicit expectation that they'd have warrantless access to camera footage whenever they wanted it. It didn't quite work out that way. Lots of [...]
Musk’s ‘Priority #1’ Disaster: CSAM Problem Worsens While ExTwitter Stiffs Detection Provider
One of Elon Musk's first promises" upon taking over Twitter was that fighting child exploitation was priority #1." He falsely implied that the former management didn't take the issue seriously (they did) and insisted that he would make sure it was a solved problem on the platform he now owned. Of course, while he was [...]
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