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We recently talked about Donald Trump’s foray into medicine when he declared, sans any actual evidence of course, that autism cannot possibly be caused by anything other than some external source. It was an admittedly odd stance to take for someone who seems to care so deeply about genetics in other areas, but Donald Trump being an inconsistent mess is not remotely newsworthy. The comments were...
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 speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined...
What the fuck is going on at the Pentagon? We’ve talked about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s apparent penchant for exposing attack plans over unsecure, easily hacked messaging apps. But there was also a bit of a scandal in April, when three of his top aides were fired as part of a “leak” investigation.
And now, the Guardian broke a story claiming that Hegseth’s lawyer told other Trump admin...
That summation greatly oversimplifies things, but if all you’re going to read is a headline, it will have to do.
We’ll dig in deeper into the Fifth Circuit’s second attempt to handle content moderation vis-a-vis public libraries, but first, we’ll take a look back to what happened last year.
In middle of book ban bills hitting multiple state legislatures — several of which created new civil...
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that he’s barring visas for foreign nationals who “censor Americans,” declaring that “free speech is among the most cherished rights we enjoy as Americans.”
This is yet another example of the most censorial administration falsely wrapping itself in the cloak of “free speech warriors” to defend censorship. Rubio has spent his tenure as Secretary...
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The critics are out there, saying things like “Techdirt is alarmist!” and “Trump stuff is normal!” and “Tim Cushing’s posts have too many typos!” Well, here’s some news for the haters: everything I said a month ago is actually true, except now it has the weight of the gold standard of identification dragging it down, down, down into the progressively deeper hellhole that is Trump’s second...
U.S. wireless providers are, it should go without saying, very shitty when it comes to consumer privacy and security. After decades of mindless deregulation and competition-killing consolidation, there’s less serious regulatory oversight or competitive pressure than ever for these companies to try harder.
As a result, companies like T-Mobile have been hacked five times in an eight year span....
As HHS and RFK Jr. continue to bumble their way towards making America less healthy, while saying they’re doing the opposite of course, measles cases are still on the rise. The rate of new cases appears to be slowing somewhat, assuming we think the data coming out of the CDC these days is accurate. Given the staff and budget cuts HHS has implemented, I think that is very much an open question.
In...
When your local police department buys one piece of surveillance equipment, you can easily expect that the company that sold it will try to upsell them on additional tools and upgrades.
At the end of the day, public safety vendors are tech companies, and their representatives are salespeople using all the tricks from the marketing playbook. But these companies aren’t just after public money—they...