Five Years Ago This week in 2019, an Australian court ruled that media companies could be held liable for Facebook comments on their news stories, the Indian government used a national security law to block Twitter accounts all over the world, and the EU Intellectual Property Office released an utterly ridiculous propaganda film. Josh Hawley’s […]
For a long time we’ve been pointing out just how dangerous it is to turn over school discipline problems to cops. Sure, there are reasons schools might need a police response to an incident, but putting cops on staff has allowed administrators to abdicate their duties and turn incidents that could be resolved by educators […]
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 week’s round-up of the latest news in online […]
Law enforcement will always get more than a fair shake from the Fifth Circuit. No circuit is more apt to award immunity or otherwise refuse to punish officers for coloring outside of the constitutional lines. And that apparently includes officers’ dogs, who probably enjoy a fair shake as much as anyone. Who’s a good boy?!? […]
As more and more governments try to pass more and more laws requiring age verification, some of us keep pointing out that age verification will cause a ton of harm. For all the talk of how it’s necessary to “protect the children,” the only way to verify ages is to collect a ton of private […]
This is one of the stupidest things ever in terms of public records lawsuits. And that’s saying a lot, considering how often this site has covered public records lawsuits. This traces back to April of last year. Ben Camacho, a Los Angeles journalist who contributes to sites like Knock LA, sent out a records request […]
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It’s just like adults to be constantly diagnosing the wrong thing in trying to “save the children.” Over the last couple of years there’s been a mostly nonsense moral panic claiming that the teen mental health crisis must be due to social media. Of course, as we’ve detailed repeatedly, the actual research on this does […]
You might recall that Elon Musk claims to hate taxpayer subsidies. They should all be “deleted.” Except for the subsidies given to his companies (sometimes for doing nothing), of course. Back in 2020, Musk’s satellite broadband venture, Starlink, gamed a Trump-era FCC subsidy program to try and grab $886 million in taxpayer dollars. It was a […]
The Supreme Court on Wednesday was 1-and-1, with one good decision, in Murthy v. Missouri, and one doozy in Snyder v. US, where it somehow read a statute criminalizing corruption to… not actually criminalize corruption. But this post is about the one that, happily, the Court got right. Not just because it got the result […]
Meta is actually making moves to live up to its promise to integrate Threads into the open ActivityPub standard used by a variety of “fediverse” platforms such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. It’s a fundamental boost to the concept of protocols over platforms, but it’s still not entirely clear how “open” Meta is really going to […]
Well, we’ll see how long ShotSpotter/SoundThinking will keep making that New York money. The outlook is not good. A lot of this will depend on how well the NYPD can defend the useless product it’s spending millions on, but at the end of the day, the city still holds the purse strings and it has […]
In the wake of a Supreme Court case built on grifters peddling nonsense evidence, it’s only fitting that some media reporting is buying into the same fantasy-land narrative at the heart of the case. You would hope that professional journalists would do better, but apparently that’s too difficult. Earlier this week, we covered the Murthy […]
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You just can’t tell Florida “no,” which is a bit ironic. The state obviously feels it can say “no” to all sorts of things, even if doing so means violating the Constitution. Another dumbass bill written by dumbass legislators and signed into law by the state’s dumbass governor, Ron DeSantis, continue to bleed money from […]
Paramount (CBS) Corporation this week simply erased decades of music journalism in the blink of an eye. Last year the company shut down MTV News and fired all its staff as part of a “strategic realignment.” This week, without warning, the company deleted the entirety of the MTV News archives, erasing decades of music journalism […]
[screaming at my mute laptop screen]: WHO GOT TO YOU This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way. In 2022, the Fifth Circuit got a decision very right. It said it was very fucking definitely a rights violation to arrest a journalist for publishing information she had received from a law enforcement source. Rather […]
Techdirt has been covering the disgraceful attempts by the EU to break end-to-end encryption — supposedly in order to “protect the children” — for two years now. An important vote that could have seen EU nations back the proposal was due to take place recently. The vote was cancelled — not because politicians finally came […]
There have been a bunch of lawsuits over the last couple of years from traditional content industries suing AI providers, claiming copyright infringement. We’re still a long way from figuring out how all of these lawsuits will shake out. We’ve made it clear that we’re skeptical of these lawsuits, largely because you would have to […]
The murder of Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich ignited a massive wave of conspiracy theories. The murder is still unsolved, but was considered by law enforcement to be the violent outcome of an attempted robbery. Despite the lack of supporting evidence, a bunch of right-wing conspiracy theorists began suggesting Rich was murdered because of […]
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