Techdirt

In the shadow of Charlie Kirk's assassination, something remarkable seems to be happening that Trump's movement seems completely unable to see. Trapped within their own epistemic bubble, MAGA appears to have fundamentally misread the political moment, interpreting tragedy as total victory over their opponents. The miscalculation is breathtaking in its scope. The White House seems [...]

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In what may be a first in American legal history, a sitting president just had his lawsuit struck down by a federal judge before the defendants even had a chance to respond. Judge Steven Merryday didn't wait for a motion to dismiss. He didn't wait for the defendants to file an answer. Four days after [...]

So look, I'm not one of these people who thinks AI" has no useful applications. Just this week I had an efficient conversation with a Gemini chatbot when trying to cancel a Google subscription. I used ChatGPT to help me fact check my own work debunking false claims made by a different AI (an aggregation [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Heart of Dawn with a comment about Disney pulling Jimmy Kimmel's show: Conservatives absolutely hate cancel culture" right up to the point they are the ones doing it. Hypocrisy is dead to these people. In second place, it's Thad with a comment about Trump [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the first phase of the TikTok fight resolved with Oracle getting a lucrative hosting deal instead of buying the company in a deal driven by Trump-world insiders, while a court refused to block Trump's executive order. At the same time, users were fighting to block the less-discussed part [...]

We've talked a lot about Ryan Walters recently, mostly because he keeps forgetting that the United States Constitution applies to him and his state. Between his attempt to inject Christian theocracy into the public school system while enriching Dear Leader Trump or his fight with his own board members in the wake of some mild [...]

It's been a good while since we've had an old-fashioned copyright troll nonsense story around here, and boy do we have a doozy for you today. Regular Techdirt readers know that we've covered Paul Levy's work for years-the man who the Washingtonian once dubbed the web bully's worst enemy" has been taking down copyright trolls [...]

Techdirt has long lamented how in the modern era, you don't really own" what you buy. That game console, smart lock, or smart refrigerator can quickly become less useful (or completely useless) with a firmware update, bankruptcy, or addition of annoying subscription paywall. The problem is particularly bad when it comes to digital rentals. In [...]

It's fascinating how quickly the tune changes when the shoe's on the other foot. For years, we've been treated to endless screaming about how any effort to identify and counter foreign manipulation on social media was censorship" and a violation of Americans' free speech rights. The same crowd that turned researchers into pariahs and shut [...]

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This isn't anything that actually needed to be done. The federal government has plenty of options at its disposal if it thinks someone is providing material support for terrorism. It's one of things that keeps the FBI loaded up with anti-terrorism dollars, thanks to its ability to radicalize people just so it can arrest them. [...]

We've mentioned repeatedly how the AT&T->Time Warner->Discovery series of media mergers were some of the most destructive and pointless business efforts ever, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs, the cancellation of endless popular programs, higher prices for consumers, and a shittier overall product. One of the men at the heart of this dysfunction has [...]

When you're brought before Congress to testify, you're not supposed to lie. I realize that sounds rather obvious to many of you, but I'll remind you that this is the year of our lord, 2025, and such common sensibilities are not quite as common as they used to be. Even if you're not under oath, [...]

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 [...]

A Canadian tribunal's $72,000 fine against X for refusing to globally remove non-consensual intimate images (NCII) exposes a fundamental tension that courts have been dodging for years: When can one country order worldwide content takedowns, and when should platforms comply regardless of legal compulsion? Unfortunately, almost all the commentary on the case is ignoring those [...]

On Monday, I published a two-part blog post about the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement with Aylo, parent company of Pornhub. The FTC's complaint alleged that Aylo violated federal consumer protection law by allowing child sex abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual pornography (which I'll call NCII) on its various sites, despite claiming it didn't. The [...]

As Mike just got done noting, our major media companies continue to respond to authoritarianism by being pathetic and feckless little shitweasels. First with the ABC and CBS bribery payments to our mad idiot king, and most recently exemplified by ABC's firing of Jimmy Kimmel because he gave Republicans a sad. Who could have imagined [...]

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Last year, there was some talk about how AI-generated wacky images-summed up generally as shrimp Jesus" as an example of one of the most bizarre-were taking over Facebook. It was only a matter of time until this sort of AI slop nonsense went political in some form or another. Starting last Friday, people began to [...]

You might recall that one of the conditions of the FCC's approval of The Ellison family's $8 billion acquisition of CBS was that the agency would install a ombudsman" at the network to ensure CBS journalism was appropriately feckless and deferential to our mad, idiot king. This was particularly ironic given decades of whining by [...]

There are multiple ways into this story, but almost all of the reporting on what's happened claims that Disney pulled talk show host Jimmy Kimmel's show indefinitely" over comments that Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk. But that leads most people to assume that Kimmel said something unkind about Kirk or in some way celebrated his [...]

It appears that the illiberal, transphobic pipe dream of banning all pornography has reached an enterprising group of far-right Christian nationalist Republicans in Michigan who want to impose the moralistic agendas of a small few on the overwhelming majority of the people. Rep. Josh Schriverleads five other lawmakerswith the recent introduction of the Anticorruption of [...]

It's probably too much to ask, but I hope California law enforcement agencies will remember who to direct their hate at if this bill becomes law. It's not the liberals" running the state. It's the Trump administration and its mass deportation efforts. ICE and its actions have always been controversial, but it took a group [...]

Even by Donald Trump's standards for frivolous defamation lawsuits, this one is impressively stupid. On Monday, the president filed yet another lawsuit against the NY Times-this time seeking $15 billion over a book that claims he's not quite as successful a businessman as he pretends to be. The timing is almost comically bad. Trump is [...]

Donald Trump has successfully used xenophobia and fake concerns about propaganda and national security to get what he's long wanted: TikTok (and its fat ad revenues) are poised to be sold off to his right wing billionaire buddies and, inevitably, slowly converted into a right wing propaganda safe space. After endless delays, Trump insiders claim [...]

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Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I've seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to those who disagree with him" as a sign that he was engaging in good faith. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Ezra Klein's silly eulogy [...]

The Washington Post isn't what it used to be. While the paper is still peppered with a few decent journalists trying to do good work, the outlet is being slowly strangled to death by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who is steadily dismantling the last vestiges of the paper's sagging credibility in a desperate bid to [...]

We've all become entirely too familiar with ACIP, the CDC panel that discusses and recommends vaccination schedules across a wide swath of vaccines. The method by which ACIP became part of the general American lexicon traces all the way back to June, when RFK Jr., as head of HHS, fired every single member of the [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election, has been appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in which she'll help oversee the nation's election infrastructure. Honey is a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who [...]

Over the past few months, we've been fulfilling the orders for all the backers who helped us launch One Billion Users, the social media card game, on Kickstarter. Now that process is almost complete (except for a few backers who haven't yet completed their orders and should do so as soon as possible) and we're [...]

Donald Trump's response to political violence this week reveals something more sinister than mere hypocrisy-it's the deliberate construction of a false reality where only certain victims matter and only certain perpetrators exist. After days of raging about left-wing violence" following Charlie Kirk's shooting, Trump was asked about Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated [...]

There's no slippery slope here. The bigoted fiends have already claimed the bottom of the hill for themselves and now they're bringing in the earth-moving equipment in hopes of creating an ideological Mariana's Trench. Thanks to Trump's resurgence, no one in power needs to pretend this is a good-faith effort. All that remains is seeing [...]

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Attorney General Pam Bondi just provided a masterclass in how to completely misunderstand the First Amendment while threatening to abuse government power to silence critics. In response to online criticism of Charlie Kirk following his assassination, Bondi declared: There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after [...]

Fresh off of kissing Trump's ass to gain regulatory approval for Skydance's merger with CBS and Paramount, the billionaire Ellison family is cooking up another terrible idea: quickly merging with whatever's left of Time Warner. You might recall that the AT&T->Time Warner->Discovery mergers were some of the most destructive and pointless business" efforts ever conceived, [...]

Even if you truly believe the company you work for is capable of doing this, perhaps read the room a bit before offering up this sort of insane assertion to a journalist: Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock's cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S. That [...]

What began in Los Angeles and Washington DC is being expanded to any other place the president thinks is being run by people who just aren't subservient enough to the GOP. The next city in line for the Trump Treatment is Memphis, Tennessee, which is (of course) run by a member of the Democratic party, [...]

This is part two of a two-part series about the recent settlement between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Utah Consumer Protection Division (CPD), and Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub. The order (which has now been approved by a federal court) settled allegations that Aylo let child sex abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual intimate [...]

Well, they finally did it. A federal agency finally shattered the precarious base that upholds the edifice of prosecutions for child sex abuse material (CSAM) in America. That agency is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which just entered into a deeply problematic settlement with a major online content platform for doing little to block" CSAM [...]

I am not here to celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. I will not, however, engage in the completely unearned celebration of his life that is happening pretty much everywhere in the wake of his murder. What's happening now would normally be considered inexplicable in any other political climate. But this one is front-loaded to [...]

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As a reminder, I'm on the board at Bluesky, which means you should consider me extremely biased, even as this article isn't really about Bluesky. The writer Jerusalem Demsas wants you to stay on Twitter. In The case for staying on Twitter," she admits the site is effectively overrun by neo-Nazis, but she argues that [...]

Long beforethe great TikTok moral panic of 2021 to 2024, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent a solid decade freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on [...]

This week, we've got a double-win on the insightful side for MrWilson. In first place, it's a comment about walling off the open internet to stop AI: The thing is, everyone is a victim, not just the sites getting hammered. The value of the internet is its openness. You can always route around one obstacle [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we learned about how the White House supposedly blocked Walmart from buying TikTok, and we asked why amidst all the fear around the site, nobody was equally worried about advertising tech and location data sales. GOP Senators released the latest stupid attempt to reform Section 230, the FISA [...]

As you will hopefully recall, that very strange patent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair over the latter's hit game, Palworld, is ongoing. At the heart of that case is a series of overly broad patents for what are generally considered generic game mechanics that also have a bunch of prior art from before their use [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers. President Donald Trump has used it as a justification to target political foes, includinga governoron the Federal Reserve Board,a Democratic U.S. [...]

We've been tracking the growing judicial revolt against the Supreme Court's shadow docket nonsense, from individual district judges getting snarky in footnotes to anonymous judges speaking to reporters. But what happened Thursday at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals crosses into entirely new territory: a full en banc panel of federal judges openly criticizing the [...]