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This hasn't been a good week for those who believed that Donald Trump would bring in the best, most competent" people around. Fresh off the revelation that a bunch of the top cabinet and security officials were accidentally sharing classified info with a journalist using Signal on their private phones (rather than, you know, secure [...]

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Trump - just like the last time he was in office - is still pretending his bigoted anti-immigrant policies are only in place to ensure the US can rid itself of dangerous foreign criminals. But no one really believed that last time. And with his return to the Oval Office, any pretense of fairness or [...]

If you hadn't noticed, consolidated corporate media hasn't been meeting the challenges of the current moment very well. There's generally two reasons: one, these media outlets tend to reflect the interests of generally white, older, male, right wing ownership, which broadly thinks authoritarianism is a fair price to pay for some tax cuts, deregulation, and [...]

The reemergence of measles, a disease once declared officially eradicated in the United States, didn't start with the second Trump presidential term. It didn't even begin with Trump's first term. Instead, it started through an unholy alliance between far-right, often religious groups that have pitched the vaccines as either unnecessary or dangerous combined with a [...]

You probably recall Ajit Pai, Trump's first FCC boss. Pai took a mindless hatchet to broadband consumer protection and media consolidation limits with no shortage of scandal. Like that time he turned a blind eye as the telecom industry used dead and fake people to generate fake support for shitty policies (like killing net neutrality). [...]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just made a move that will protect bad patents at the expense of everyone else. In amemo released February 28, the USPTO further restricted access to inter partes review, or IPR-the process Congress created to let the public challenge invalid patents without having to wage million-dollar court battles. [...]

For years, we've been hearing breathless warnings about a campus free speech crisis" from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler's vetoes. This kind of campus activism - while occasionally messy [...]

The beatings will apparently continue, whether or not morale improves. The Trump Administration's latest move from far-right towards open fascism involves, unsurprisingly, the gutting of more government components tasked with ensuring the federal government doesn't treat civil rights like privileges only afforded to those who can afford them... or anyone else willing to lick the [...]

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When the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg revealed this week that senior White House officials had accidentally added him to their Yemen bombing planning session on Signal, he did something remarkable: he actually protected operational security better than the officials themselves did. While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others now insist Nobody was texting war plans," the [...]

When Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr was selected last November, I was quick to point out that the U.S. press was completely disinterested in what this meant for stuff like broadband consumer protection. Outlets at the time were quick to push quotes about what a nice guy" Carr was. Few could be bothered to mention [...]

Were it not so obviously the product of something nefarious, it would be entertaining to watch how private companies react to the Trump administration's declaration of the end of all things DEI. The truth is that Trump's reach for this sort of thing simply doesn't extend past the federal government, legally speaking. That doesn't mean [...]

Imagine an internet where every website faced an impossible choice: either carefully review every single post before it goes live (making them essentially TV stations), or allow absolutely everything with zero moderation. This nightmare scenario wasn't hypothetical - it was exactly what the infamous Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy ruling threatened to create, before Section 230 [...]

It took us a little longer than usual this year (we've been swamped with other projects including the Kickstarter for our new card game) but the time has finally arrived: we've chosen the winners in our seventh annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! There were so many great entries this year, and [...]

Few moments better illustrate the GOP's descent into constitutional incoherence than Senator John Curtis'sappearanceonMeet the Pressthis weekend. In a display of breathtaking historical illiteracy wrapped in pseudo-constitutional rhetoric, Curtis characterized President Trump's threats to impeach a federal judge who ruled against his deportation orders as-wait for it-what our founders intended." This statement deserves to be [...]

If you're going to plan military operations over Signal, you probably shouldn't accidentally add a journalist to the chat. And if you're going to do government business over Signal specifically to avoid federal record-keeping laws, you definitely shouldn't get caught doing it. Yet here we are: A day after we learned that top Trump administration [...]

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Lots of lies are told about immigrants to stoke the always-smoldering fires of bigotry in this country. Trump and his fellow Republicans have told most of them. They claim immigrants commit more crimes than legal residents, something that has never been true. They claim immigrants are lazy, something anyone who's ever worked with any immigrants [...]

Instead of doing things like protecting consumers or market competition, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent his first few months in office abusing agency authority to threaten companies that refuse to kiss the Trump administration's ass. A cornerstone of those efforts has been to leverage merger approvals to get companies to support core administration [...]

In Mike's thorough post yesterday on the topic of the Trump administration's naked contempt for judicial oversight, the main theme and takeaway from it was a simple one: this authoritarian regime would much rather waste everyone's time trying to play procedural and semantic games with the courts than actually participate in honest deliberations with them. [...]

Like clockwork, lawmakers are once again rallying around the idea of eliminating Section 230. That Republicans are leading this charge is hardly surprising-repealing Section 230 is explicitly laid out in the Project 2025 playbook. But what's surprising, and increasingly reckless, is the willingness of Democratic lawmakers to join forces with Republicans in dismantling one of [...]

Support us on Patreon In the digital age, attention is a resource - but if we can have a little slice of yours, we've got a great conversation about that very subject for you to listen to. This week, Mike is joined by journalist Chris Hayes to discuss his new book, The Siren's Call: How [...]

There comes a moment in every collapsing democracy when absurdity and menace fuse into something uniquely destabilizing-a phenomenon I'm tempted to call malignant farce." We've reached that moment. The President of the United States, after invoking a 1798 wartime law to mass-deport migrants to a third country,now claimshe didn't do it. Other people handled it," [...]

Be the deep state" you want to see in the world. That's the new FBI under conspiracy theorist/Trump acolyte Kash Patel's leadership." Instead of being the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it will become the Federal Bureau of Investigating People Trump Doesn't Like. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear journalists are getting their phone records [...]

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Look, I know you've probably already seen yesterday's absolutely stunning story from Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic. The one where Trump administration officials somehow managed to add a journalist to their Signal group chat while planning out their bombing of the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The one that reads like a plot point rejected from [...]

Last October,Trump sued CBSclaiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been deceitfully edited" to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). AsMike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense. CBS/Paramount is looking for [...]

Historically, stories we've covered here about the collision between the beer brewing industry and trademarks have largely been born of the creative nature of the craft beer industry specifically. Far different from the bland trade dress and naming conventions of the macro-brewing industry, the craft industry blended its beer-making with colorfully named brews and artistic [...]

The acceleration of institutional breakdown in America has reached a point where we must confront a sobering reality: the constitutional system, as designed, may no longer possess the internal mechanisms to save itself. When judges face impeachment threats for ruling against the administration, when court orders are openly defied, and when Fox News hostsdeclarethat a [...]

Speaking as someone who has covered a whole lot of extremely weird legislating in service of that notoriously under-protected class of citizens (you know: cops), I have to say this is one the most batshit insane things I have ever seen offered up for a vote at any level of government. Even taking into account [...]

In a moment of clarity after initially moving forward a deeply flawed piece of legislation, the French National Assembly has done the right thing: it rejected a dangerous proposal that would have gutted end-to-end encryption in the name of fighting drug trafficking. Despite heavy pressure from the Interior Ministry,lawmakers voted Thursday night(article in French) to [...]

Trump seems very interested in speed-running the martial law curve. His previous term in office saw him suggesting the military should help quell anti-police violence protests around the nation, as well as participating in his undeclared war on immigration by aiding in the policing of our southern border. With Trump taking office for a second [...]

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I think lots of people know the kind of person who thinks they're more clever than they really are. The kind of person who thinks that they can outwit the system by playing stupid games. The kind of person who thinks that this kind of beating the system is because they're smart. This kind of [...]

Now that subscriber growth has slowed, streaming TV giants have taken the predictable turn of making their services shittier and more expensive to deliver Wall Street (impossibly) unlimited quarterly revenue growth. That means higher prices,annoying new surcharges, greater restrictions, more layoffs, more cut corners, worse customer service, more limited catalogs, lower quality engagement-bait content, and [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bloof with a response to the latest accusation that Bluesky is a liberal echo chamber: Sorry republicans, you don't get to use the N-word and still get invited to parties, that's not how life works. You made the marketplace of ideas' a thing to [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020... oh, right. The COVID-19 pandemic dominated our coverage, as it sparked a huge variety of news: patent lawsuits to block testing that morphed into claims of royalty-free licenses that turned out to be bogus, ISPs dropping usage caps and entertainment giants embracing faster home video release windows, YouTube [...]

The only silver lining in just how stupid this supposed anti-DEI purge of government records has become is that it appears the stupids doing the stupid are now finally starting to realize just how stupid it has become. Stemming from one of Trump's many executive orders, one which instructed the government to essentially purge its [...]

At the exact moment when Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are actively dismantling democratic institutions and working to silence critics, a group of Democratic Senators have decided to collaborate with Trump's supporters to make it easier to censor speech online. As reported in The Information (paywalled), several Democratic Senators are teaming up with some [...]

This didn't work last time. But neither did a lot of things the first Trump administration tried. This time, though, the federal government is at war with itself, attacked from all sides by the rabid DOGE in its midst. Given that novel development, the chances of information damaging to the Trump administration being leaked to [...]

It is nearly impossible to keep up with all the litigation challenging all the terrible, if not also lawless and unconstitutional, things the Trump Administration is doing. But one group of cases is particularly interesting: the cases involving Musk and DOGE. In part because they are the lawless mercenaries Trump has been sending to do [...]

In what may be one of the most shameful displays of institutional cowardice we've seen, law firm Paul Weiss has completely capitulated to Donald Trump's ridiculously unconstitutional executive order targeting the firm. This cave-in comes mere days after another targeted firm, Perkins Coie, successfully obtained a court order blocking an almost identical order. The contrast [...]

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Update: After the NY Times reported this story last night, Donald Trump denied that Musk would be getting the China war plan, and now the NY Times is reporting that, while that was the original plan, it was scrapped because of the public outcry The Wall Street Journal is similarly reporting that the nature of [...]

I think the Biden FCC under the leadership of Jessica Rosenworcel engaged in a lot of regulatory theater that made for good press clippings, but was ultimately hollow. While indisputably better than the corrupt and bizarre authoritarian zealotry we're seeing now under Brendan Carr, the Biden FCC routinely failed to take direct aim at the [...]

Last month a BBC study found that AI" assistants are terrible at providing accurate news synopses. The BBC's study found that modern language learning model assistants introduced factual errors a whopping 51 percent of the time. 19 percent of the responses introduced factually inaccurate statements, numbers and dates," and 13 percent either altered subject quotes [...]

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.

Editor's note: Mike Masnick is on the board of Bluesky, and took no part in editing or reviewing this piece. Here it is: the dumbest take to date on Bluesky v. xTwitter. There's been plenty of stupid offered up before by bitter xTwitter users who are trying to pretend they're not still splashing around in [...]

Let me start this off with a brief confession: while I'm not particularly into conspiracy theories in general, the JFK assassination is an outlier for me. I've been fascinated with JFK since I was a child and I don't believe the official version of the story is the entire story, at a minimum. That throat [...]