Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the fight around Section 230 was heating up with Mark Zuckerberg suggesting it should go away, Tom Wheeler disappointingly getting it all wrong, and the News Media Alliance coming out against it, while Ron Wyden stepped up to explain why modifying it would give more censorship power to […]
The Trump DOJ retribution tour has begun, as Ed Martin, Trump’s interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, launches a series of politically motivated investigations targeting critics of Trump and Elon Musk. Martin, a former talk radio host and “Stop the Steal” supporter with no prosecutorial experience, is transforming what should be an independent […]
The Trump administration’s dumbest saga so far just got a bit more serious, thankfully. For the past couple of weeks, we have been talking about how, after Donald Trump ordered the government to change the name of the continental shelf extending from American land be renamed from the all-encompassing “Gulf of Mexico,” as the whole […]
Republican senators have seen the mass graves. They’ve met Zelensky. They’ve walked through bombed cities and witnessed firsthand the evidence of Russian atrocities. Yet now, faced with Trump’s embrace of Putin and denunciation of Ukraine, they can’t even muster the courage to state simple truths they know from direct personal experience. While Trump openly declares the Ukrainian […]
Across the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already begun increasing enforcement operations, including highly publicized raids. As immigrant communities, families, allies, and activists think about what can be done to shift policy and protect people, one thing is certain: similar to filming the police as they operate, you have the right to film ICE, as […]
While an unelected tech billionaire is effectively orchestrating a coup of the US government, violating federal law with apparent impunity, and disclaiming all responsibility for the chaos he’s causing, the Democrats have identified their top priority: repealing Section 230. You might think — in a moment when democracy itself seems to be unraveling and the […]
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Utah state Rep. Trevor Lee is not going to like this headline. Too bad. It’s accurate, even if he’d like to pretend it isn’t. Trevor Lee is again pushing a bill that would ban government agencies from displaying pride flags, but would allow Nazi and Confederate flags to be displayed in classrooms, so long as […]
Welcome to the golden age of corruption. Last year I warned repeatedly how a concussive series of Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright were poised to dismantle already shaky regulatory authority and corporate oversight, turning most U.S. regulators into the legal and policy equivalent of decorative seasonal gourds. It was the ultimate victory in a […]
For twenty years, a great war has raged. A console war, between the two great powers, Sony and Microsoft. Sure, there were other regional powers in play, such as Nintendo. And it’s true that Sony won nearly every campaign in this war, to varying degrees. But the war raged on right up until this week, […]
Donald Trump spent the four years between presidential terms complaining about a “stolen” election. He — and his enablers — made multiple baseless claims about election fraud and claimed the entire system was rigged against him. His lawyers and supporters suggested voting machines were so insecure that the Venezuelan government itself might have been involved […]
Automation can be helpful, yes. But the story told to date by large tech companies like OpenAI has been that these new language learning models would be utterly transformative, utterly world-changing, and quickly approaching some kind of sentient superintelligence. Yet time and time again, data seems to show they’re failing to accomplish even the bare […]
Last November you might recall that Wired released an excellent report documenting how it was trivial to buy the sensitive and detailed movement data of U.S. military and intelligence workers as they moved around Germany. The culprit, as usual, was a global collection of super dodgy data brokers and adtech firms that see little in the way […]
Long time readers of Techdirt will recall the deluge of posts we did years ago on trademark disputes within the craft beer industry. While trademark issues in that industry certainly haven’t gone entirely away, they are nothing like what was occurring between 2015 and 2020. In that time period, it felt like I was writing […]
The NYPD is proving it’s impossible to fix an entity that doesn’t want to improve. It has engaged in more than a decade of straight-up ignoring court-ordered reforms of its stop-and-frisk program. The program’s original form was declared unconstitutional in 2013. Since then, it has only marginally improved. And much of that improvement is probably […]
You probably saw that one of Donald Trump’s early executive orders was to demand that the Gulf Of Mexico be renamed the Gulf Of America. It’s pointless pseudo-productivity, and an obvious effort to excite his base’s nationalist and racist tendencies. Amoral cowards at Google got right to work making the change in their map products, […]
I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a fairly wild suggestion: if you spend years calling yourself a “free speech absolutist” while decrying “government censorship,” maybe one of your first moves after taking over the government shouldn’t be demanding prison sentences for journalists who report things you don’t like. But that’s […]
Germany’s history informs its current laws. That much is undeniable. But it doesn’t excuse the over-correction applied by legislators in hopes of heading off another Hitler. And it certainly doesn’t excuse prosecutors who are prosecuting “hate speech” in Germany. The country’s hate speech law has been problematic since its inception. Within days of its debut […]
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Here’s a silly thing that happens sometimes: A powerful person says something obviously false, and everyone pretends not to notice. This is the plot of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where an entire kingdom maintains a collective delusion until one child (who, importantly, hasn’t yet learned the sophisticated art of lying to yourself) points out that […]
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