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The flood of outrage at the Disney/FCC cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel ultimately forced the company to retreat and put Kimmel back on the air. Disney apparently didn’t much like the wave of folks cancelling their Disney+ streaming video subscriptions in response to the government and a major corporation coordinating a frontal assault on the First Amendment.
Some insiders at Disney indicated that...
The latest generation of AI systems, based on large language models (LLMs), is perceived as the biggest threat in decades to the established copyright order. The scale of that threat can be gauged by the flurry of AI lawsuits that publishers and others have launched against generative AI companies. Since the first of these, reported here on Walled Culture back in January 2023, there have been...
Back in April, RFK Jr. committed publicly to firmly knowing the cause of autism by September of this year. In May, Donald Trump himself weighed in with the already baked conclusion that autism doesn’t “occur naturally” and therefore must have some environmental cause. Both statements were absurd at the time. Autism causes have been studied for decades and RFK Jr. has no magic wand to make the...
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Last week, we published three separate posts that looked at the FTC’s recent settlement with Aylo, the parent company of multiple adult websites including, most famously, Pornhub. Those posts, written by Stanford HAI policy fellow Riana Pfefferkorn, examined the legally complicated but very important issues that arise from the settlement forcing Aylo to scan for CSAM. This...
ICE made the bed and now California law enforcement officers have to lie in it. The flashpoint of ICE backlash occurred in Los Angeles, as Trump’s mass deportation desires manifested itself in the form of masked officers chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots.
As protests ensued, ICE officers continued to operate without face masks and a deliberate dearth of agency insignias. Then...
Trump supporters cycled through increasingly desperate explanations for why the Jimmy Kimmel situation was totally legitimate. First came the absurd “low ratings” defense—because sure, networks routinely cancel shows minutes before taping due to sudden ratings revelations and just hours after the chair of the FCC threatens them with “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” And also, if it...
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To suggest that Donald Trump simply doesn’t care about constitutional rights, political norms, or anyone other than himself is to suggest that he actually understands any of these concepts. That’s giving him far too much credit. What Trump does is pure id, completely unaffected by anything someone his age should have learned long before entering their eighth decade on earth.
Any usual...
You might recall that back when Brendan Carr was an ordinary FCC Commissioner, he was super worried about government overreach. He was so worried, that he would attack literally any effort previous incarnations of the FCC took to hold giant shitty telecom monopolies accountable (net neutrality, basic pricing transparency, efforts to stop racism in broadband deployment) as radical government...
Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it, as the old saying goes. And those who choose not to teach that history, to continue this to its logical conclusion, are actively attempting to repeat it. It’s within that logical framework that I have viewed our many posts on Trump Administration 2.0’s attempt to erase all sorts of history from the American psyche, in particular the...