RT, formerly Russia Today, has appeared a few times here on Techdirt. As the long article about RT on Wikipedia explains, the TV channel has morphed from an attempt to create a state-supported international news network along the lines of the BBC or France 24, but one that offered a Russian perspective on the world, […]
Donald Trump just took his war on the free press to a new level of absurdity, filing an FEC complaint against the Washington Post for — wait for it — promoting its own reporting. Apparently, Bezos’ attempt to appease the MAGA crowd with his endorsement cop-out didn’t do the trick. We had warned Jeff Bezos […]
I have no particular interest in the British royal family, but nevertheless I’ll be forever grateful to Princess Kate for telling the world about her cancer. It was probably not easy, nor likely her preference, to be so public at such a difficult moment. But whether she knows it or not, by sharing her story […]
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As we head into the election tomorrow, there has been some general talk about how many people think that Donald Trump is somehow better on things like free speech and the economy. It’s pretty clear that that is wrong. On the economy, it’s evident he has no clue what he’s talking about and his plan […]
I’ve written for years about how U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband. Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, […]
This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to Jeff Bezos shutting down the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. In first place, it’s a simple anonymous summary: Yep. The message he sent is that he will control what is or is not published. In second place, it’s another […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Comcast was putting on an innocent act regarding consumer privacy, while we looked at one Idaho town that was doing broadband competition right. India was looking to get into the mass facial recognition game, while NBC was facing legal threats for reporting on a company’s facial recognition tech […]
If you look around, virtual reality growth projections are all over the map. Most of the folks with money invested in the market see nothing but blue sky ahead. But several core problems remain: virtual reality headsets still make a lot of people sick (anywhere from 40-70% of users), and a huge swath of people […]
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 […]
Quick test: should saying “Hitler, not a good guy” cause you to be banned from your social media account? Seems simple enough. But apparently not for Meta, the largest social media company on the planet. I’ve talked about the Masnick Impossibility Theorem and the idea that content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. […]
Very few states laws can be considered to be “famous.” Almost any state law immediately recognized by people in other states can only be described as “infamous.” The Wiretap Law enacted in Massachusetts is definitely infamous. For years, this statute was abused by law enforcement officers and other state employees to punish or prosecute residents […]
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As we head into next week’s election, it is worth taking a step back and realizing how absolutely ridiculous it is that we spent five or six years with people insisting that Facebook and Twitter absolutely needed to be punished for supposedly engaging in biased content moderation (something they did not do). While any private […]
A new U.S. News And World Report survey of 2,500 Americans across the five most populous U.S. states (PA, TX, NY, CA, and FL) found that U.S. broadband prices continue to soar for most users. Most of the survey’s findings aren’t surprising; broadband access costs are reaching $100 for most users, and Americans continue to […]
This lawsuit could not be more impeccably timed. Whether or not this timing is more fortuitous than impeccable remains to be seen, but there’s no denying the bang-bang-bang effect on display here, even if it may just be coincidental. Last week, a Virginia federal court ruled three hits from Flock ALPR cameras wasn’t enough to […]
Here are two things that are not secrets, but play into this story. First, it’s known that Google and Russia have had an acrimonious relationship for some time. Between various threats from the Russian government to ban Google and/or YouTube here and there, typically because the country doesn’t like Google’s decisions over what content to […]
According to some people (you know the people I mean…), our biggest “crisis” is border security. This one guy — a supposed billionaire with multiple bankruptcies under his belt — claimed he could solve the problem if he ever got elected. He would “build the wall” and make Mexico pay for it. This is stuff […]
Sometimes I love a good “mashup” story hitting on two of the different themes we cover here at Techdirt. This one is especially good: Alaska legislators relying on fake stats generated by an AI system to justify banning phones in schools, courtesy of the Alaska Beacon. It’s a mashup of the various stories about mobile […]
This is something that should have happened years ago, but I guess we can be grateful it’s happening now. And part of the reason it’s finally happening is because of the warrant requirement for obtaining historical cell site location info created by the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision. One of the many ways the government obtains […]
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