Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a “Nazis Welcome” sign. By December, when the company doubled down and explicitly said they’d continue hosting and monetizing Nazi newsletters, they’d fully embraced […]
We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the failure to get indictments in supposed ICE assaults: And the fact that prosecutors and grand juries didn’t find evidence of actual assault in so many cases proves ICE’s assault statistics are bullshit. If you read other articles on […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we took a look at tech in the pandemic, from the big ways people were using it to stay connected to the strange details like Fox putting fake videogame crowds in sports broadcasts and how it was finally forcing Hollywood to change some practices. The House Judiciary Committee […]
This isn’t going to stop happening unless governments finally get involved to do their most basic job: protect their citizens. This habit among digital and tech companies of selling a thing only to claw back some of the function of that thing after the purchase is both rampant and, frankly, getting ridiculous. It’s bad enough […]
This series of posts 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 From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle.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 approach that acknowledges the potential of technological […]
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention. Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra […]
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A whole lot of bad faith arguing continues [and is amplified!] now that Donald Trump has somehow regained his position as The Person Most Likely To Abuse His Power While Serving As The Most Powerful Man In The World. [Cut to yearbook photo of an 18-year-old Donald Trump with a magnificent head of hair and […]
There’s $42.5 billion in broadband grants are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents). But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting […]
A week or so ago, Karl Bode wrote about Vice Media’s idiotic decision to disappear several articles that had been written by its Waypoint property concerning Collective Shout. Collective Shout is an Australian group that pretends to be a feminist organization, when, in reality, it operates much more like any number of largely evangelical groups […]
This too will be swept away by this administration’s steady stream of injustices, but it’s still worth highlighting before it’s buried by even worse news later. The mass deportation program enacted by Trump — one that intends to turn ICE into the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency — has already seen innocent foreigners declared […]
Let’s say you’re a federal judge, and you need to write an opinion about a securities case. You could do it the time-tested old-fashioned way: read the briefings, read the relevant caselaw, check your quotes, make sure you’ve got the holdings right. Or you could try one of these new AI tools that everyone’s talking […]
The “worst of the worst” ruse was never taken seriously by anyone, least of all those who performatively repeated it to serve as cover for their hatred and bigotry. The mantra means nothing. The same agency that claims it’s doing “God’s work” is going all out to rob the meek of their inheritance. Because there […]
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Here’s the contradiction at the heart of the internet: everyone complains about content moderation, but no one wants to use an unmoderated platform. Everyone thinks trust & safety professionals are either censorial scolds or corporate lackeys, but everyone expects them to magically solve the inherent problems of human behavior at scale. I spent last week […]
A new study from researchers at X-Lab shows that Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service lacks the capacity to put a serious dent in U.S. broadband. Despite recent efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite a $42 billion subsidy program with an eye on giving Musk billions in taxpayer dollars. The researchers found that given […]
Here we go again. The idea that, at least in the realm of digital goods or IoT devices, we no longer own what we’ve bought has been a long-running theme here at Techdirt. While the practice of pulling back features available upon purchase via firmware updates has been a regular occurrence in the video game […]
For weeks, ICE and DHS have been claiming there’s been an outsized outbreak in violence against ICE officers. The government preferred to use a misleading stat: the percentage. That way it could claim assaults were up 500, 600, 790%(!!!) in successive press releases and Fox News appearances, leading many to believe being an ICE officer […]
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