The trust and safety conversation tends to focus on the huge platforms, and the millions of smaller websites (some still quite big!) get ignored. But those websites have trust and safety needs too, and they use a lot of different tools to meet them. Most of these tools are proprietary, but there’s a growing push […]
We’re increasingly at the mercy of bigots in this country. That’s an upsetting turn of events, considering our history, which includes a long list of enshrined rights as well as the assertion that all people are created equal. Thanks to the aberration that was the Donald Trump presidency, the worst people in the nation suddenly […]
We’ve been covering the multi-pronged ridiculousness around the Missouri/Louisiana “jawboning” cases, regarding whether or not the White House was overstepping the bounds of the 1st Amendment and pressuring private websites to moderate in a manner they deemed appropriate. Again, almost everything about this case is bizarre —and getting more bizarre with each move. Last night, […]
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It’s been eight years since the Authors Guild was thoroughly and totally embarrassed by losing its big lawsuit against Google over the Google Books scanning project. I guess they’re missing the feeling of embarrassment, as they’ve filed what is effectively the same damn suit against OpenAI over that company’s book scanning. Now, I know, some […]
It can’t be said often enough: it’s stunning that we’ve let scammers and scumbags hijack the nation’s top voice communications platform. And that we’ve let marketing and telecom industry lobbyists slowly degrade the authority of the one U.S. regulator capable of actually doing something about it. Every six months or so the FCC comes out […]
Are you familiar with “felony murder?” Let’s talk about it. It’s a handy way to send more people to prison for more years just because they participated in a crime that contained a murder. While I can (sort of) understand the deterrent effect of laws like these, the simple fact is felony murder laws hold […]
Last week, we wrote about a federal district judge in California, Beth Labson Freeman, tossing out California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AB 2273) as unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. The ruling was careful and thorough, which did not surprise me, having sat through the oral arguments on the matter, where it seemed that the judge […]
Last week, it appeared ever so briefly, the UK government might be finally giving up on its desires to legislate at least one end of messaging services’ end-to-end encryption. Having faced resistance from nearly every encrypted service (all of which threatened to exit the UK if anti-encryption mandates were put in place) as well as […]
It is quite incredible to me how, over the last five years or so, the California legislature has pushed over a dozen absolutely horrific, dangerous (and often unconstitutional) laws to completely undermine the very principles of an open internet… and it gets basically no attention at all. Last year, it felt like we at Techdirt […]
Most laws and policies banning drag shows are experiencing swift judicial blowback thanks to their obvious regulation of expressive speech. Some legislators have attempted to work around this expected roadblock to oppression by avoiding any mention of drag shows or drag performers when crafting unconstitutional laws, instead pretending they’re simply strengthening existing obscenity laws. None […]
Most modern companies put a lot of stock into data when making crucial business decisions. As such, they require employees who understand how to work with mass amounts of data, and effectively analyze it to get a holistic view of the company. These skills aren’t just reserved for analysts, they’re valuable for professionals in any […]
There’s a pretty well known scene from The Office, when Michael Scott (played by Steve Carrell) follows his GPS device’s instructions (incorrectly, obviously) and drives into a lake: The writer of that scene says the inspiration was a number of stories of people doing exactly that. In fact, in the earlier days of Techdirt, we […]
While the California legislature often screws up tech policy, they’ve generally been pretty good on broadband. At least in relation to most U.S. states. California was among the first in the country to pass a net neutrality law after the telecom industry got Trumpists to dismantle federal rules. The state also unveiled a major broadband […]
We’ve got one commenter taking both top spots on the insightful side this week, but also… not really. Because in what I believe is a first, our top winner on the insightful side is Samuel Abram commenting on the previous comments post to celebrate a comment from last week, by Stephen T. Stone, that didn’t […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, Ajit Pai was whining about California’s net neutrality effort, while a court ordered the FCC to hand over data on bogus public comments about net neutrality, and Congress failed to invite a single consumer advocate to its upcoming hearings about broadband privacy rules. A Swedish ISP gave us […]
If you only listened to executives from the content industries, you might think that copyright infringement, or online piracy, is and has been a growing threat in dire need of stricter and stricter enforcement measures. But I’ll let you in on a secret: that’s been bullshit for the better part of a decade now. In […]
Law enforcement officers rarely care about enforcing traffic laws. Moving violations may produce a little extra revenue for the city or state, but it doesn’t do much for the officers performing the stops. Pretextual stops? The leveraging of any perceived moving violation in hopes of performing a vehicle search? That’s where the money is, thanks […]
Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means imposing obnoxious new restrictions (see: Netflix password sharing), endless price hikes, and obnoxious and dubious new fees geared toward pleasing Wall Street. […]
Over the last few months, Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino keep trying to claim that exTwitter is actually growing and more used than ever. Yaccarino has talked about “largest usage days” without defining the term, and Elon says it’s “user-seconds per day of phone screentime as reported by iOS & Android” even though that’s not […]
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