Techdirt

Back in October, Meta announced that its new Instagram Teen Accounts would feature content moderation guided by the PG-13 rating." On its face, this made a certain kind of sense as a communication strategy: parents know what PG-13 means (or at least think they do), and Meta was clearly trying to borrow that cultural familiarity [...]

Opusonix is the workflow-first platform built for music producers and engineers who are tired of endless email chains and scattered files. By centralizing feedback, versions, and tasks in one structured workspace, it helps you cut email traffic by up to 90% so you can focus more on creating and less on chasing approvals. From time-coded [...]

Trump's do everything all at once approach to immigration enforcement is starting to go off the rails. Trump's plainly stated hatred of shithole countries" and their inhabitants manifested in early wins for his bigoted remove the brown people" programs. Then Stephen Miller (the man who answers the what if a lightbulb had eyebrows and was [...]

Last election season the Trump campaign lied to everyone repeatedly about how his second administration would rein in big tech," and be a natural extension of the Lina Khan antitrust movement. As we noted at the time,that was always an obvious fake populist lie, but it was propped up anyway by a lazy U.S. press [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In late 2024, the federal government's cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft's biggest cloud computing offerings. The tech giant's lack of proper detailed security documentation" left reviewers with a lack of confidence in assessing the system's overall security posture," according to an [...]

Because South Dakota governor Larry Rhoden is forever obligated to serve Kristi Noem and Kristi Noem is forever obligated to serve Donald Trump, he and his GOP buddies are making America MAGA again, starting with his home turf. Non-citizens have never really disrupted voting. But they're the convenient scapegoat for a party that's justifiably worried [...]

Last week, the European Parliament voted to let a temporary exemption lapse that had allowed tech companies to scan their services for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) without running afoul of strict EU privacy regulations. Meanwhile, here in the US, West Virginia's Attorney General continues to press forward with a lawsuit designed to force Apple [...]

Last month Walled Culture wrote about an important case at the Court of Justice of the European Union, (CJEU), the EU's top court, that could determinehow VPNs can be usedin that region. Clarification in this area is particularly important because VPNs are currently under attack in various ways. For example, last year, the Danish government [...]

The Modern No-Code Creator Bundle is an extensive online curriculum specifically developed to enable individuals to construct professional websites, applications & automated workflows without the necessity of writing any code. It has five courses, covering leading no-code platforms and tools like ChatGPT, Mendix, and Tabnine. It is ideally suited for novices and non-technical professionals, empowering [...]

This is big. This is going to cause a whole lot of problems for the administration in the hundreds of ICE-related lawsuits it's defending itself against. It's a Perry Mason moment, albeit one that implicates the entity delivering it, rather than the other way around. (h/t Chris Geidner on Bluesky) As we are all painfully [...]

Right wing broadcasters are having a very good time under Brendan Carr, who has looked to destroy all remaining media consolidation limits to let them merge. Such companies, like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, don't do journalism so much as they do soggy, right wing propaganda and infotainment, usually with endless fear mongering about drugs, homelessness, [...]

I'm going to trust that most of our audience will have some idea of what McCarthyism was in the 1950s. To summarize very briefly, it was an anti-communist campaign that spread into becoming equally anti-leftist throughout the country, with a specific focus on driving the supposed communist influences out of major media in America, such [...]

We've been saying for years now that Jonathan Haidt's crusade against social media and kids is a moral panic dressed up in academic robes, and that the evidence simply does not support the sweeping claims he's been making. A new piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff drives that point [...]

Support us on Patreon In the conversation about online speech, most of the attention tends to fall on the big social media platforms, while other intermediaries get overlooked - especially payment processors and other financial intermediaries. But that very thing is the focus of a new book coming out next week, Rainey Reitmans Transaction Denied. [...]

On January 10th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Joe Rogan and put on quite a performance. He talked about how the Biden administration had pressured Meta to take down content. He detailed how the Biden administration had apparently pressured Meta to take down content - how officials called and screamed and cursed - and [...]

No coding experience? This is the course for you. Whether you've dabbled in HTML or never touched a single line of code in your life, the Complete Web Developer Bootcamp will prepare you to take on programming jobs big and small. From basic CSS styling to popular frameworks like Bootstrap, this training will help you [...]

Before we get to the lie exposed here, let me just offer a correction of my own. As many, many, far too many people pointed out in my last post on ICE being sent to airports, people do actually guard airport exits. My assumption was based on my own experience on wishing to remain in [...]

We've repeatedly noted how the Ellison family's acquisition of Warner Brothers (after their recent acquisitions of CBS and a part of TikTok) would be very bad for a long list of reasons. The gargantuan debt load will result in unprecedented layoffs and price hikes. And the Saudi funding, and Larry's anti-democratic interests, raise no limit [...]

All the way back in August of 2025, RFK Jr. made the extraordinary decision to fire his own CDC Director, Susan Monarez, after only a few weeks on the job. Kennedy claimed at the time that he fired Monarez because she told him affirmatively that she wasn't trustworthy. That was obviously laughable and Monarez herself [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Martha Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship to become the only woman journalist to land on Normandy Beach on D-Day. She carried stretchers before writingher harrowing accountof the invasion. The New Yorker'sfamously epicurean writerA.J. Liebling subsisted on military rations and came [...]

As if we needed any more evidence showing just how deep and thoroughly corrupted the Trump administration is. It's an endless cycle of self-serving actions, pushed forward by bigots, grifters, and loyalists who sold off what was left of their souls and spines when Trump took office. It's an endless cycle of perverse self-involvement performed [...]

Call me crazy, but I don't think an official government app should be loading executable code from a random person's GitHub account. Or tracking your GPS location in the background. Or silently stripping privacy consent dialogs from every website you visit through its built-in browser. And yet here we are. The White House released a [...]

StackSkills Premium is your destination for mastering today's most in-demand skills wherever and whenever your schedule allows. Now, with this exclusive limited-time offer, you'll gain access to 1000+ StackSkills courses for just one low annual fee! Whether you're looking to earn a promotion, make a career change, or pick up a side hustle to make [...]

Call me a sicko, but I'm almost always happy when a top-level government official's communications get hacked. That's because - in almost every case - either the official seems to be a bit shady, or holds a high-level position in an agency involved in some shady stuff. I mean, it's not like hackers are targeting [...]

Republicans spent three years suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok, but have suddenly gone mysteriously quiet now that $25 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison's $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. They're also suddenly quiet about Larry buying up huge sections of [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a rebuke to someone defending the Fifth Circuit's ruling about whether a cop could sue Twitter: By the logic of the Fifth Circuit's rulings, Donald Trump can and should be held responsible for the actions of the rioters on the [...]

Last week, we announced the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1930! Now it's time to begin our series of spotlight posts, examining each of the winners in a bit more detail, and we're kicking things off today with a look at the winner of Best Adaptation: I am [...]

We've been talking a lot of about the use of artificial intelligence lately, for obvious reasons. Many of those conversations have revolved around the video game industry and I've been fairly vocal about pushing back against the all AI is bad everywhere forever" dogma that I see far too often. There are plenty of folks [...]

The expression, to make a federal case out of something" usually describes making a bigger deal out of something than it should be. But in the case of Anthropic and Hegseth, Trump, and the Department of Defense*, this federal case is actually quite simple: what the government defendants did to Anthropic is beyond the bounds [...]

Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck" themselves and then sued them for the crime of taking his advice? A federal judge has now dismissed that lawsuit - with prejudice - confirming what anyone with a passing familiarity with antitrust law already knew: companies deciding they don't want their brands plastered next to [...]

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that warrants were needed to obtain cell site location info (CSLI). That decision dealt with law enforcement's warrantless acquisition of 127 days of location data from a cell service provider. As the court saw it, the government was leveraging access to this data to turn cell phones (which has [...]

The 2026 Microsoft Office Pro Bundle has 8 courses to help you master essential Office skills. Courses cover Access, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and more. It's on sale for $21.25 using the code MARCH15 at checkout. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps [...]

Last week, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri got into a heated exchange during a Senate hearing with Stanford's Daphne Keller. Schmitt, who, as Missouri's Attorney General, originally filed the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, was berating Keller over Stanford's supposed role in helping the Biden administration censor social media during the 2020 election (see if you [...]

When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby kid David) hired trolling blogger Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of balanced, fact-based news," independent, principled journalism," and a unique entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision" that would completely modernize the network and reach the everyday Americans" traditionally ignored by mainstream [...]

Even at the best of times, the hallmark of RFK Jr.'s Health & Human Services is chaos. Whether it's misinformation on vaccines and other public health matters, his unique ability to exit very smart people from public health agencies, or his desire to upend established government health protocols, it's a constant frenzy when Kennedy is [...]

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 [...]

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That's effectively what's begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive-the world's largest digital library-has preserved newspapers since it went onlinein the mid-1990s. The Archive's mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible [...]

For years, certain folks on the left kept insisting they wanted to bring back the Fairness Doctrine - the old FCC policy that required broadcasters to present both sides" of controversial issues. Many of us in the tech policy world kept explaining why that was a terrible idea, one ripe for abuse and fundamentally at [...]

This judge ain't fucking around. Earlier this month, we covered New Jersey federal judge Zahid Qurashi's response to the actions of Trump's DOJ, which begins with lots of illegal appointments of prosecutors and runs right through these prosecutors' inability to defend the administration's actions. To wit: The Government's handling of Petitioner's detention is emblematic of [...]

The Ultimate AWS Data Master Class Bundle has 9 courses to get you up to speed on Amazon Web Services. The courses cover AWS, DevOPs, Kubernetes Mesosphere DC/OS, AWS Redshift, and more. It's on sale for $34 with the code MARCH15 at checkout. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A [...]

First things first: Meta is a terrible company that has spent years making terrible decisions and being terrible at explaining the challenges of social media trust & safety, all while prioritizing growth metrics over user safety. If you've been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know we've been critical of the company for [...]

FCC boss Brendan Carr spends an awful lot of time pretending to be a tough guy, threatening any broadcasters that aren't suitably deferential to our mad, idiot king. Carr's had giant temper tantrums over comedians who make jokes, daytime and late night talk shows that refuse to kiss Republican ass, and any remaining journalists who [...]

It's somewhat stunning to realize that the United States has been operating with Surgeon Generals that are merely acting" in the role or performing the duties of" since January 20th of 2025. The last Senate-confirmed SG was Dr. Vivek Murthy. The current nominee from the Trump/Kennedy team is Dr. Casey Means. This nomination has been [...]

I think we can all agree that nobody seems to be taking the business of governing ourselves terribly seriously. I say we can all agree on this because I think we all know that Donald Trump is a deranged, narcissistic criminal. We know this. Even those of you who nominally support him - because you [...]

Last week we covered how the government successfully convinced Judge Colleen McMahon to order the plaintiffs in the DOGE/National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) lawsuit to claw back" the viral deposition videos they had posted to YouTube - videos showing DOGE operatives Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh stumbling through questions about how they used ChatGPT [...]

By any means, necessary or not: that's how this administration gets its bigoted version of immigration enforcement done. The surges targeting cities and states that Trump doesn't feel are loyal enough are a double-edged sword. They punish states run by Democratic party members simply for being run by Democratic party members. And they flood courts [...]

Geekey is an innovative, compact multi-tool like nothing seen before. It's truly a work of art with engineering that combines everyday common tools into one sleek little punch that delivers endless capability. Geekey features many common tools that have been used for decades and proven essential for everyday fixes. It's on sale for $19.55 with [...]

I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturally). Some friends I had met on Usenet were students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and told me [...]

Taking a break from attacking the First Amendment, FCC boss Brendan Carr this week engaged in a strange bit of performance art: his FCC announced that they'd be effectively adding all foreign-made routers to the agency's covered list," in a bid to ban their sale in the United States. That is unless manufacturers obtain conditional [...]

The polarization over any and all uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning continues. And, to be clear, I very much understand why this is all so controversial. Any new technology that has the chance to be transformative will also necessarily be disruptive and that causes fear. Fear that is not entirely unfounded, no matter [...]