Here is a brief timeline of events that got us here. Chicago has had a decline in violent crime and murders over the course of the last several years, with 2025 on pace to mark it as the safest year yet in the city. Despite that plain fact, Donald Trump has banged on about how […]
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 […]
This is who we are now. We are the country that makes people who aren’t white leave the country because they’re not white. And this is according to this administration’s own press release, which celebrates the fact that we’re now the inverse of the words engraved at the Statue of Liberty’s base, which read: Give […]
A San Francisco supervisor has proposed that police and other city agencies should have no financial consequences for breaking a landmark surveillance oversight law. In 2019, organizations from across the city worked together to help pass that law, which required law enforcement to get the approval of democratically elected officials before they bought and used new spying technologies. Bit […]
In what may be the most accidentally honest moment of his presidency, Donald Trump just admitted what we’ve been documenting for months: “We took the freedom of speech away.” Yes, that’s literally what he said: For those who’ve been following Trump’s systematic assault on the First Amendment—which we’ve covered extensively at Techdirt—this admission is remarkable […]
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It’s not enough to go after the “worst of the worst.” It was never a sustainable effort, what with migrants committing fewer crimes than natural citizens. The attempt to rid the country of as many non-white people as possible under Trump always had to go bigger. It has become ICE raiding swap meets and Home […]
“Right wing activism organizations posing as consumer rights groups are trying to make it illegal for the federal government to try and help poor, rural Americans afford broadband,” is a sentence I just had to write. Quick background: the $8 billion FCC Universal Service Fund (USF) applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to […]
I’m sure all of you beautiful people thought we were collectively done with former Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters. After he resigned abruptly in late September, nearly in mid-screed mandating that public schools hold a moment of silence for slain conservative operative Charlie Kirk and mandating a chapter of Turning Point USA at all public high […]
We’ve long explored how powerful regional broadband monopolies have dominated America, resulting in spotty access, high prices, slow speeds, and terrible customer service. We’ve also long discussed how the U.S. government has done little to actually fix the problem, ranging from outright coddling monopolies (Trump) to performative fixes (the Biden FCC) that don’t take aim […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken money directly from Chinese investors, according to previously sealed testimony, raising new questions about foreign ownership interests in one of the United States’ most important military contractors. The recent testimony, coming from a SpaceX insider during a court case, marks the […]
So let me get this straight. The same administration that claims fentanyl is such a dire threat that it justifies sweeping tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China is simultaneously pulling federal agents off drug interdiction duties to chase undocumented landscapers in Pennsylvania. The same political movement that built its base partly on QAnon fantasies about […]
The Complete Big Data and Power BI Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn how to effectively sort, analyze, and visualize all of your data. Courses cover Power BI, Power Query, Excel, and Access. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all […]
A brief-ish history of events leading up to this point: Kilmar Abrego Garcia was one of hundreds of migrants rounded up by ICE, denied of their due process rights, and dumped into an infamous torture prison in El Salvador, a country overseen by a man who claims he’s the world’s “coolest dictator.” Abrego Garcia, however, […]
Just so you know: it’s not normal for your country’s voice communications networks to be completely hijacked by scammers and marketers, rendering it almost unusable. That’s literally not something people in most serious countries have to deal with. Yet we’ve largely normalized the fact that Americans are so inundated with unwanted scams and bullshit that […]
The rush to blame video games for all the world’s ills is, of course, nothing new. While some of the more novel examples of this blame-game include current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s claim that video games are the reason the Medicaid is abused (yes, seriously), this nonsense is more commonly trotted out whenever […]
A lot has happened since last week when my post about Des Moines (IA) school superintendent Ian Roberts being arrested by ICE first hit the front page here at Techdirt. A lot of new information has come to light, almost all of it obtained by Des Moines Register journalists, which indicates the arrested man may […]
Support us on Patreon » We’ve written a lot about how AI can empower users when employed the right way, but how this is difficult when a few giant tech firms control the technology. One company that is trying to move in a different direction is DuckDuckGo with its Duck.ai offering. This week, DuckDuckGo founder and […]
Once again, we’re reminded why age verification systems are fundamentally broken when it comes to privacy and security. Discord has disclosed that one of its third-party customer service providers was breached, exposing user data, including government-issued photo IDs, from users who had appealed age determinations. Data potentially accessed by the hack includes things like names, […]
It would be something of an understatement to say that Alphabet, Google’s holding company, is big and successful. Some Wall Street analysts are even predicting it could become the world’s most valuable corporation. Of course, even for business giants, enough is never enough. They always want more: more money, more power. As part of that […]
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