We’ve got a double-winner this week, but also a very very slow week overall on the funny side, so this will be a somewhat truncated post. On the insightful side, both top comments are similar thoughts in response to the judge dismissing charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, starting with this first-place winning comment from Huntly: […]
It was just a week or so ago that we were talking about the absurd situation in Knox County, Tennessee, where local government used Tennessee’s book-banning laws to remove the book Roots from school libraries. Yes, this is the book by Alex Haley that spawned the 1970s miniseries of the same name and served as […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. In Baltimore County, Maryland on Oct. 20, 2025, a 17-year-old student named Taki Allen was sitting outside his high school after football practice when an artificial intelligence-enhanced surveillance camera falsely identified the Doritos bag in his pocket as a gun. Within moments police […]
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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]
It’s been less than two weeks since the Justice Department created the obviously illegal and unconstitutional $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off MAGA loyalists and January 6th insurrectionists. There are a variety of lawsuits looking to put a stop to it, and we just wrote about dozens of former federal judges asking the original […]
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Flock Safety has made its bed. It has courted homeowners associations and gated communities since it first arrived on the market, apparently hoping to convert inherent racism into perpetual revenue streams. Then it went to where the real bias has always existed: US law enforcement agencies. It promised to tie their systems in with those […]
Last month the FCC quietly issued a public notice saying the Brendan Carr run agency was demanding that the TV Oversight Management Board (TVOMB) create new TV ratings to alert viewers to “transgender and gender non-binary programming” and “the discussion or promotion of gender identity themes” included in children’s programming. You are to ignore that […]
I’ve written quite a bit about the Stop Killing Games movement, in no small part because I think it’s way more important than most people think. Preserving cultural output is both important and, frankly, a key part of the bargain that is supposed to be copyright law. The fact that we offer video game publishers […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The United States is experiencing one of the steepest declines in violent crime in modern history, including a murder rate at its lowest point in more than a century. Homicides across 35 major American cities fell 21% in 2025, amounting to 922 fewer people killed. Robberies […]
There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn’t pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despite a parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congress is too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this […]
Thirty-five (thirty-five!) former federal judges are asking a current federal judge to reopen the case where Donald Trump sued his own IRS, and then “settled” the case on terms extremely favorable to himself, his family, and his MAGA loyalists. Law schools are famous for coming up with “hypotheticals” to try to test students’ knowledge of […]
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Poll everyone you can. Even the most MAGA never dreamed up this scenario. There’s no single-issue voter whose kink is “surely the people wanting green cards can get that done in their own countries.” Nope, this is Trump’s kink. This is a blatant attempt to juice the deportation numbers to soothe the throbbing bald skull […]
The Trump Organization still hasn’t shipped their promised Trump phone to most customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But rubes patriots who signed up did get something else instead: their private data leaked to the public. According to Techcrunch, the Trump Mobile website openly shared customer emails, addresses, phone numbers, and […]
Alright, this is getting dire. In addition to all of the anti-vaxxer bullshit that has infected HHS thanks to RFK Jr.’s appointment to run the department, we have also made the point recently that an equally big problem is the talent drain occurring at HHS as well. Between the voluntary exits by smart people who […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. In the months leading up to the implementation of Australia’s social media ban in December 2025, there was much discussion about the possible negative consequences. Among these were concerns that teenagers would consume less news. As most young adults use social media for news […]
Michael Dezuanni, Simon Chambers, and Tanya Notley
Like most of the U.S., Western Massachusetts towns and cities have spent decades dealing with expensive, spotty, and slow broadband from private telecom monopolies like Comcast and Verizon. As a result, a lot of these towns and cities have explored building their own community owned fiber networks. Community broadband has been increasingly popular since COVID, […]
Even if you don’t live in California you’ve probably heard about the California primary coming up on June 2 (although early voting has already begun). In particular, you’ve probably heard about it because everyone and their brother has thrown their hat into the ring for governor, and, because it’s a “top-two” primary. Sometimes called a […]
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