It’s no secret that Russia has taken advantage of the Internet’s global reach and low distribution costs to flood the online world with huge quantities of propaganda (as have other nations): Techdirt has been writing about Putin’s troll army for a decade now. Russian organizations like the Internet Research Agency have been paying large numbers […]
There’s a certain poetry to Tesla executives discovering that trade wars are, in fact, not good and easy to win. Last week, someone at Tesla sent a detailed letter to the US Trade Representative essentially begging for relief from the very policies their CEO has been championing as he destroys the traditional institutions of government. […]
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Well that was fast. We were just talking about RFK Jr.’s recent comments on the measles outbreak in several southern states, mainly Texas, and how those comments were dangerous. The HHS Secretary, while not specifically denouncing the MMR vaccine, suggested that malnourishment was to blame for severe illnesses and death within the outbreak. But he’s […]
For years, more ham-fisted printer manufacturers have waged a not-so-subtle war on consumers by blocking the ability to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. HP and Canon have both been particularly obnoxious on this front, and continue to engage in the practice despite a growing pile of assorted lawsuits. Brother has historically been one of the […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Rocky with a reply to an unhinged comment about the “debunked” Steele Dossier “funded by Hillary Clinton”: What’s funny here is that you don’t actually know the origin of said dossier or you have conveniently excised that knowledge from your brain, just like do […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the DOJ ended up with a mistrial in its first attempt to prosecute an accused leaker, and also proposed some Section 230 reform ideas that were even dumber than expected, while Match.com was also getting on the anti-230 bandwagon. FBI Director Chris Wray was pitching weakened encryption at […]
As we’ve been following along to some degree with the whole Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni legal mess, the more recent stories have been about Baldoni’s attempt to go after protected creative speech in a Deadpool movie, the choice of waging a PR war before the trial even starts, and the Streisand Effect nature to […]
When 1,700 people pack a room at SXSW (with hundreds more relegated to overflow spaces) to hear about a decentralized social media protocol, it’s clear something interesting is happening. The crowd that showed up for my conversation with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week wasn’t just there for another social media platform — they were […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) now exists in name only. Not only did Trump’s band of Musk-led pillagers dismantle the infrastructure side of the agency by disbanding the CISA group investigating a massive China-based hack of US phone systems, but the administration terminated ongoing election security and disinformation-thwarting efforts by the agency roughly […]
I’m old enough to remember when age verification bills were pitched as a way to ‘save the kids from porn’ and shield them from other vague dangers lurking in the digital world (like…“the transgender”). We have long cautioned about the dangers of these laws, and pointed out why they are likely to fail. While they may be well-intentioned, the growing proliferation of age verification schemes […]
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During the great TikTok moral panic of 2022-2025 we noted repeatedly how it was very weird for the public, press, and lawmakers to singularly hyperventilate about the privacy and propaganda impacts of one specific Chinese-owned app while just completely refusing to do anything about the much broader problems that TikTok (and a thousand other companies) […]
Elon Musk’s companies aren’t having the best couple of weeks, it seems. ExTwitter suffered from several outages this week, some lengthy, while Musk claimed that it was the result of a DDoS attack and hinted that Ukraine might be to blame. The story of SpaceX thus far in 2025 has mostly been one filled with […]
The big deal today is Democrats’ threatened capitulation to the GOP on the continuing resolution to keep the government open—but entirely on Trump’s terms, no matter who it bankrupts (hello, DC police and fire departments!). But the larger point made here stands, because the cowardice on display in this budget showdown is the cowardice that […]
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 roundup of the latest news in online […]
Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for giving me yet another exhibit in my museum of those who fail to understand the Streisand Effect. Meta is so desperate to silence a former employee’s book that it’s doing everything possible to ensure maximum publicity for the allegations within it. You might think that a company like Meta would […]
If there’s anything guaranteed to increase the number of leaks emanating from an entity, it’s letting people know you’re trying to track down leakers. The public sector knows this. The private sector knows this. And yet, the same thing happens again and again: a deterrent appears and everyone treats it like an instigator. Even Trump […]
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Generally speaking, if a judge says this to you, your client is unlikely to succeed in their case: “This may be amusing in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where the Queen of Hearts yells ‘Off with their heads!’ at annoying subjects… but this cannot be the reality we are living under.” That was Judge Beryl Howell yesterday, […]
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