Bad people make good case law. That’s just how our criminal justice system works. And so it is here in this decision, which flows from criminal charges that, in turn, flow from proactive efforts meant to thwart the sharing of child sexual abuse material. In this case, Ryan Maher was convicted of CSAM possession. Having […]
When it comes to Section 230, we’ve seen a parade of embarrassingly wrong takes over the years, all sharing one consistent theme: the authors confidently opine on the law despite clearly not understanding it. Each time I think we’ve hit bottom with the most ridiculously wrong take, along comes another challenger. This week’s is a […]
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Like a bunch of other states run by people who hate the people they serve (except for the people who harbor the same hatred), Tennessee has decided it should get into the book-banning business — years after literal Nazis made this sort of thing politically untenable. Or so we thought. Now, before the pedants step […]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a giant U.S. telecom monopoly has been ripping off a federal program designed to help the country’s low income residents. AT&T last week quietly struck a $2.3 million consent decree with the FCC for falsely inflating the number of people it was helping under a COVID-era program designed […]
For half a decade now, we have followed along with the war that Nintendo decided to wage on its own fans’ celebration of what is admittedly great music coming from Nintendo games. Starting in 2019, Nintendo has continuously ramped up its war efforts, particularly against YouTubers and their accounts. It started with the takedowns of […]
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 […]
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