For no less than 25 years now, Techdirt has been writing about how the tax preparation industry, especially Intuit, has spent gobs of money bribing lobbying government to keep relatively low-earners from simple methods for filing their tax returns. The series of posts you can find in that link, particularly those in the last 5-10 […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s 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.
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice. In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. “Put your hands up,” […]
We’ve seen some pretty ridiculous attempts by government officials to intimidate judges over the years, but the Department of Justice’s new misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg might take the cake for sheer absurdity. As Steve Vladeck breaks down in exhaustive detail, the DOJ is essentially arguing that a federal judge committed “misconduct” […]
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First, the Trump administration gutted the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, probably because it was too concerned about protecting constitutional rights. Whoever still remained was “allowed” to do whatever Trump’s DOJ (now headed by yet another regrettable Trump pick, Pam Bondi) wanted it to do… like go to bat for the Second Amendment, which has never […]
The Trump administration is once again warning states that they risk losing billions of dollars in historic infrastructure bill grants — if they attempt to make the taxpayer-subsidized broadband actually affordable. That’s the updated guidance coming out of the Trump National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is tasked with coordinating the looming $42.5 billion […]
One of the more frustrating parts of the RFK Jr. experience is nailing down his views. Part of that is because he tends to keep quite vague about those views, especially when it comes to vaccines, depending on who he is talking to. When he’s running an anti-vaxxer organization, his views are specific and clear. […]
Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible. But in one of the latest misguided attempts to protect children online, internet users of all ages in the UK are being forced to prove […]
Last fall, heavily influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s extremely problematic book, Australia announced that it was banning social media for everyone under the age of 16. This was already a horrifically stupid idea—the kind of policy that sounds reasonable in a tabloid headline but crumbles under any serious scrutiny. Over and over again studies have found […]
The recently passed budget bill throws nearly $200 billion at something that doesn’t actually seem to be that much of a problem: undocumented migrants. Law-abiding, hardworking taxpayers are the targets of choice for ICE, which has a 3,000-per-day arrest quota it will never meet, even though it’s now spending most of its time raiding large […]
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Just days after a jury found Tesla partially liable in a fatal Autopilot crash and ordered the company to pay over $200 million, Elon Musk took to Twitter with a bold proclamation: “Teslas can drive themselves!” The timing couldn’t be worse. Because thanks to a devastating article by Electrek’s Fred Lambert that digs deep into […]
The U.S. right wing has won a generational war against education and informed consensus with the closure of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB), which states it will being shuttering its doors after being unable to survive recent brutal funding cuts by Republicans. After the White House falsely deemed NPR and PBS a “grift” last April, Republicans […]
This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout—a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religious right to get anything it doesn’t like out of the video game industry—put on a pressure campaign with payment processors, writing in to […]
As the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues apace, and MAGA grapples with the gaslit reality they live in, the Trump Administration continues to negotiate so-called trade deals, which are negotiated and implemented using pure executive fiat, under emergency powers, under an emergency declaration which has no rational basis, while everyone pretends this isn’t an example of […]
Anyone with the tiniest bit of humanity would have found a better way to mass deportations, if they even felt compelled to do it all. Under Trump, the extra layers of cruelty are an essential part of the package — something that piles the deliberate infliction of misery on top of the thick crust of […]
Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you’ll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they’ve built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to concentrated political power. This isn’t about technology being inherently dangerous—it’s about how distorted Wall Street incentives drove […]
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The Trump administration wants you to know they’re very, very tough. So tough, in fact, that they’re launching a comprehensive purge of the Naval Academy to eliminate “corrosive DEI programs” and restore what they call the “warrior ethos.” Because nothing says “fearless military leadership” like being absolutely terrified of books about civil rights and the […]
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