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This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase […]

Is throwing a sandwich at someone a felony? Well, that all depends on a few factors. The most important considerations are these: What would normally be rhetorical questions were answered in Washington, D.C. recently. A (now-former) DOJ employee allegedly (well, the video makes it pretty clear there’s nothing “alleged” about it) threw a sandwich at […]

Trump’s quest to stress-test every line in the Constitution continues apace, with his declaration that the government now owns 10% of Intel looking like nothing but a great, big, gigantic taking. Of course, it is also terrible policy. While there are sometimes compelling arguments that companies should be in public hands, like for utilities, where […]

Last week, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton—former National Security Advisor, lifelong Republican, and one of the most establishment figures in American foreign policy. His crime? Writing a book critical of Donald Trump and opposing the president’s surrender summit with Vladimir Putin. The justification? A “national security investigation in search of classified records”—the […]

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You may recall that Donald Trump and his supporters have insisted that he’s the “free speech” President. His first day in office this term, he issued an executive order “restoring free speech” saying that “no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of […]

With Fox being Fox, and CBS having just paid Trump a $16 million bribe and now owned by Trump’s friends the Ellison family, there’s little worry that either network will be doing serious journalism anytime soon. So Trump, over the weekend, redirected his ire at the remaining two “big four” broadcasters, ABC and NBC, for […]

The volume of stories about Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Oklahoma, seems to be increasing. Walters is a Christian Nationalist by name, though the first of those words goes against all of what I learned about Christianity as a Catholic minor and curious adult. While he certainly wants to inject bibles into public schools for […]

Not content to rewrite American history to better serve white people, the Trump administration is now rewriting world history on the fly by recasting terminal human rights violators as “not all that bad, actually” and adding stuff to other human rights reports just because some MAGA people had some bad experiences in a few select […]

The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There’s been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely […]

Even though Trump says it’s about the crime rates, it’s not actually about the crime rates. Just like he used the hallucination that the entirety of Los Angeles was under siege by “violent” protesters to justify sending in the troops, the reality was that any violence was contained to a few small blocks in the […]

Full disclosure: I am on the Bluesky board. Bluesky made a major statement last week when it announced that it would be geoblocking Mississippi IP addresses from accessing its site—making it the first major social media platform to completely block access from a US state. Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team […]

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The man who never expected to be the public face of the Trump administration’s shotgun approach to deportation is, yet again, being given a set of untenable options and expected to pick one of them. And when he refused to accept the bad choice they gave him, they arrested him this morning at his mandated […]

Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input. Of course it doesn’t really work that way: for years we’ve noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Heart of Dawn with a comment about the idea that ICE and the Trump administration are stupid: You don’t abduct people and put them in concentration camps (foreign or domestic) by simply doing something stupid. Don’t let their gross incompetence fool you. They are […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, a judge forbade a Facebook user being sued by a cop from publishing the cop’s name on social media, the DC police union was suing to block the release of the names of officers involved in shootings, and we wrote about how Section 230 protects the ability of […]

When the Techdirt community has had to hear so much about a single state’s education superintendent, you know something has gone horribly wrong. The horribly wrong in this case is Ryan Walters of Oklahoma. Walters appears to be doing some sort of combo-impression of Joseph McCarthy mixed with Donald Trump. In his role running Oklahoma […]

This is the final piece in a series of posts that explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking […]

Earlier this year, an Army helicopter collided with a passenger plane over the Potomac River in Washington, DC. All sixty-seven people aboard both vehicles were killed. While the FAA focused its investigation on the failures that led to this mid-air collision, local investigators in Virginia were somehow far more concerned about identifying who had leaked […]