Five Years Ago This week in 2021, 60 Minutes aired some pure misleading moral panic about Section 230, while Parler (remember Parler?) was desperately seeking attention by pretending it didn’t need Section 230, and Ajit Pai grew a last-minute backbone and refused to move forward with Trump’s 230 attack. Lawmakers were complaining about Comcast’s expanded […]
Rinse, lather, repeat. That is supposed to be the self-serving message on the back of a shampoo bottle, but it can easily be applied to Senator Bill Cassidy’s response to all the bullshit RFK Jr. continues to pull when it comes to vaccines. The last time we saw this was back in October of last […]
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. In this sponsored Spotlight episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, host Ben Whitelaw […]
Fair use is not just an excuse to copy—it’s a pillar of online speech protection, and disregarding it in order to lash out at a critic should have serious consequences. That’s what we told a federal court in Channel 781 News v. Waltham Community Access Corporation, our case fighting copyright abuse on behalf of citizen journalists. Waltham Community […]
If you want to understand how far MAGA Republicans have strayed from any actual “free speech” principles, look no further than this: Congress issued a subpoena to Rolling Stone journalist Seth Harp, because he posted on X a publicly available online biography of someone involved in the illegal and unconstitutional kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. There […]
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This ruling was released in the middle of last month and I really wish I had gotten to it sooner. Let’s not pretend this will change anything about how this administration full of white Christian nationalists will treat detained migrants. And it definitely won’t change anything about how the American government in general treats anyone […]
Late last year, most major U.S. telecoms were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to hack into U.S. communications networks and then spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year completely undetected. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent another year rooting around the ISP networks even after […]
When I get on my little soapbox and begin preaching about the importance of video game preservation, particularly when it comes to publishers shutting down servers required to play the game, I often get as a response a dismissal of games as not important enough to worry about. That sentiment is plainly wrong on many […]
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. In the first Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode of 2026, Mike and Ben […]
Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. The President of the United States stood in his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and announced that America had toppled Venezuela’s government and would now “run” the country indefinitely. Not from the Oval Office. Not in consultation with Congress. From Mar-a-Lago, in front of gilded chandeliers and club members, Donald Trump pointed […]
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Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box […]
Last year we noted how the Trump organization had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. It was barely even a “phone company”; it was just a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service. The centerpiece of this effort was supposed to […]
For those who wish to tell Hilton what they think of them, here is a model letter. Dear Hilton: I, as well as many of my friends and fellow citizens (as social media reflects), initially read with patriotic pride the news that a Hilton franchisee in Minnesota had refused service to ICE personnel—at least initially, […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Dr. Kirk Moore had been on trial for five days, accused of falsifying COVID-19 vaccination cards and throwing away the government-supplied doses. The Utah plastic surgeon faced up to 35 years in prison if the jury found him guilty on charges that included conspiracy to defraud […]
Over the past week, Reuters, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, CNBC, and a parade of other outlets published headlines claiming that Grok—Elon Musk’s LLM chatbot (the one that once referred to itself as “MechaHitler”)—had “apologized” for generating non-consensual intimate images of minors and was “fixing” its failed guardrails. Grok did no such thing. Grok cannot apologize. […]
MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, […]
Whether the Trump administration likes it or not, the right to a fair trial still exists. And even the person the government is now subjecting to what looks a whole lot like a vindictive prosecution is still a beneficiary of this right. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT earlier this year […]
We’ve noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run CBS News for a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power (particularly Trump and Netanyahu), validate and amplify right wing grievance and engagement bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism. Even if […]
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