How should we feel when an AI journalist operation falsely accuses someone of murder? How about if the person falsely accused is a public figure? I know there are some questions lately about where liability should land when an AI system hallucinates, but here it seems pretty clear who is at fault: a nonsense peddling […]
A couple of years ago, private prison giant CoreCivic decided it had had enough. It went to court to secure an order blocking noted First Amendment lawyer Daniel Horwitz from talking about it. Horwitz was then currently engaged in multiple lawsuits against the private prison company, the most prominent being his representation of the family […]
The Premium Python Programming PCEP Certification Prep Bundle has 12 courses to help you become an expert Python coder. Courses cover everything from app creation to AI and machine learning. It’s on sale for $35. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps […]
There is a widely believed but totally false claim by Trumpists that the “Biden administration” told Twitter to “censor” the NY Post article about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop four years ago. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump himself accused the Biden administration of doing as much: Of course, in 2020 Donald […]
A favorite tactic of U.S. corporations looking to dismantle consumer protection reforms (or anything they don’t like, really) is to create entirely fake consumer groups custom-built to confuse voters and journalists. Such groups are usually used in combination with think tanks and other pseudo-objective organizations to muddy the waters, confuse constituents, and mislead the press […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is DisgruntledAnonymous with a comment on our post about Elon Musk seizing people’s Twitter accounts to promote Donald Trump: This just solidified my decision to delete and deactivate my accounts (primary and burner) on that site. I would advise those who haven’t fallen into the […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Deupty AG Jeffrey Rosen was complaining about companies like Facebook offering encryption, while FBI Director Chris Wray was deploying straw men arguments about the tech, and the DOJ was conflating the content moderation debate with the encryption debate. We learned more about ICE’s massive surveillance network, and the […]
You all know the playbook when it comes to shady copyright shakedown outfits that work with or for pornography companies. Groups like Malibu Media and others built an infamous reputation for using the legal system to extract IP address-based information on customers whom they then claim downloaded porn illegally, they then mail settlement offers to […]
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 […]
A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuit for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company’s own repair facilities, driving up costs and […]
While we still lament the fact that the DMCA’s Section 512(f) has no real teeth to punish people for filing bogus DMCA takedown notices, at least some companies are still trying to use it against the most egregious offenders. Last year, Google went after two people in Vietnam, who Google accused of creating at least […]
Get ready for some more unexpected uses of the world’s most controversial facial recognition tech. Clearview has amassed a 10-billion-image database — not through painstaking assembly but by sending its bots out into the open web to download images (and any other personal info it can find). It then sells access to this database to […]
Project Management is global. This is one of those professions similar to being an accountant, where your skills and talents can be applied to any industry in any place. The 10-course Complete PMP Training Bundle provides a comprehensive training path for all things project management, including the most update to date courses including PMP 6th […]
Jonathan Haidt’s incredibly well-timed decision to surf on the wave of a moral panic about kids and social media has made him a false hero for many parents and educators. In my review, I noted that his book, “The Anxious Generation,” is written in a way that makes adults struggling with the world today feel […]
One foundational belief of the “right to repair” movement is that consumers should actually own the technology they pay for. Unfortunately that’s increasingly not the case when it comes to carmakers, who are utterly insistent on not only charging people a flat retail price for a vehicle — but are also increasingly charging you additional […]
If there’s anything that’s going to severely reduce the number of pretextual stops performed by cops, it probably won’t be the handful of traffic stop reform efforts being made by legislators. It’s going to be the continued legalization (or decriminalization) of marijuana possession. One of law enforcement’s favorite tricks is to pull over a car […]
When it comes to how you include religious texts in public school classrooms and libraries, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Want those texts of various world religions in place for secular teaching of topics they pertain to? All good! But picking one particular religion’s iconography and injecting it into public schools […]
Back before T-Mobile merged with Sprint you might recall that academics, consumer groups, and beat reporters like myself warned that the deal would immediately result in less competition, higher prices, and a whole bunch of layoffs. Captured Trump regulators ignored those worries, but it didn’t take long before the deal’s critics were proven indisputably correct […]
What if the reason we’re so worried about teens on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat is because we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the digital world? What if we’re confusing the everyday risks of growing up online with the specter of unavoidable harm? No one is better at covering the moral panic about “the kids these […]
The spectacular collapse of the Mayor Adams’ administration is still in progress. Pretty much everyone with ties to the ex-cop, current mayor has either been informed of an ongoing investigation or managed to infer that following multiple raids by the FBI. The mayor’s handpicked police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned shortly after these raids occurred, most […]
stLouIST