In all of our conversations surrounding RFK Jr.'s appointment to lead HHS and the legitimization of his anti-vaxxer beliefs as a result, we have understandably been hyper-focused on measles. The reason for that is mostly that this is as stark an example of just how stupid and horrible anti-vaccination misinformation is combined with the horror that is measles infections. This disease was essentially…

Until very recently the only member of Congress excused from not having moved to impeach Trump was Rep. Grijalva, because until someone swore her in there was nothing she could officially do. But for everyone else already sworn into this 119th Congress, there was no excuse. There is no excuse. The refusal to act, to even start to pound the drum on impeachment…

Imagine a leading American technology firm, the engine of thousands of jobs and critical innovation, besieged by a patent lawsuit. Typical enough, but this time there is a twist: The plaintiff is a shell company with no assets and no products, yet it litigates with the inexhaustible resources of a global superpower. The American company is forced to spend millions on defense, all while fighting in the dark, unaware that the true adversary funding the assault is a sovereign wealth fund controlled by a geopolitical rival.

The abyss. The darkness. The meaningless void that life rebels against. It stares at us. Nietzsche warned about this moment—when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. When the frameworks that make meaning possible collapse, when the principles that make reasoning together conceivable dissolve, when words lose their moorings to reality and power becomes the only truth—that’s when the abyss stares back.

The BBC is now voluntarily suppressing criticism of Donald Trump before it airs—and the reason is obvious: Trump threatened to sue them into oblivion, and they blinked. Historian Rutger Bregman revealed this week that the BBC commissioned a public lecture from him last month, recorded it, then quietly cut a single sentence before broadcast. The deleted line? Calling Trump "the most openly corrupt president in American history." Bregman…

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This isn't as surprising as it should be. After all, we're talking about Emil Bove, who was elevated from being Trump's personal lawyer to a spot in the Third Circuit Appeals Court for his loyalty to the MAGA Cause. Emil Bove did at least spend some time as a government prosecutor, which is more than can be said about several other people Trump has turned into administration officials.

We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of their depths…

Trump's war on Chicago appears destined to end in a whimper. While he kicked off his invasion of Chicago with memes and a call to arrest J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson, his out of control federal agents have reportedly begun to leave the area. That suburban ICE facility you've heard so much about? Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Johnson in a hearing Tuesday said there are currently only four people being held at the Broadview facility, a drastic reduction that comes weeks after detainees there testified they had been crammed into rooms filled with more than 100 people for multiple days.

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 sponsored Spotlight episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, host Ben Whitelaw speaks with George Vlasto, head of the Trust & Safety division at…

Yes, as I already wrote about, the indictment against James Comey was already thrown out due to Halligan's improper appointment, but it's also worth covering how badly she fucked up even if she had been appointed legally. These cases were destined for the dustbin no matter what, because Halligan had no idea what she was doing. Late last week just one example of that insanity came out in court.

Mark Kelly—former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator—stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when “I was following orders” was rejected as defense for war crimes. The Trump Administration opened a federal investigation into him for saying this.

The US Patent Office is about to gut the only effective tool we have for killing bad patents—and they're doing it by administrative fiat, without Congress, in a way that would make patent trolling easier than it's been in over a decade. They need to hear from you by Tuesday, December 2nd, or this may become reality. Patent trolling was really holding back all sorts of innovation in the 2000s.

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The DOJ continues to shed talent as those who actually care about doing the job right are either quitting or being fired for refusing to be Trump's vindictive blunt force objects. The problem with shedding this much talent is that you need to replace it with someone capable of fogging a mirror while also being a MAGA loyalist. When attrition outpaces the appointment process, things get sloppy.

Trump’s right wing billionaire friend Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son, David) recently acquired CBS and likely co-ownership of TikTok. Like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the goal isn’t really subtle: rich, thin-skinned right wingers want to own the entirety of U.S. new and old media, then convert it into a giant propaganda and lazy infotainment bullhorn that blows smoke up their asses…

We've talked a lot about measles throughout this year, which is particularly frustrating given that America officially eliminated this disease from its endemic state back in 2000. How we got here is a very simple story: too many people refused to vaccinate themselves and/or their children, giving the virus a foothold which it had been deprived for nearly a quarter of a century.

If you've been following the wave of age-gating laws sweeping across the country and the globe, you've probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing. Age verification, age assurance, age estimation, age gating—they get thrown around interchangeably, but they technically mean different things. And those differences matter a lot when we're talking about your rights, your privacy, your data, and who gets to access information online.

CNN, like most U.S. cable news networks, professes to provide users access to journalism. Instead, what you’ll most consistently find is a sort of generic, ad-slathered, center-right, corporatist drivel with the rough edges (read: truth) sanded off like a Ken doll's genitals to avoid offense. “View from nowhere” journalism that doesn’t inform so much as it tries to present a sanitized, corporate-friendly, apolitical platter of feckless infotainment mush.

Last week's dismissal of the FTC's antitrust case against Meta—combined with the earlier limited remedies in the Google search case—demonstrates something that should be obvious by now: antitrust is a pathetically weak tool for increasing competition in digital markets. This isn't an argument against competition. Competition in digital markets matters, desperately. But antitrust enforcement is slow, cumbersome, and nearly blind to how fast these markets actually move.

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has already made a name for himself during Trump's second administration. He began making this name by engaging in an unapproved sweep of the area he controlled in California as Trump was still waiting to be sworn in. Then he was sent to Chicago by a vengeful Trump who wanted to see as many people in the state harmed for no other reason than he didn't like the politicians running the state and the city.

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For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior—particularly foreign influence operations. They've insisted that any attempt to study and limit such operations is actually just "censorship" with various forms of cover, whether academic or operational.

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a comment about Trump's freakout after Democrats told soldiers not to follow illegal orders: What everyone appears to overlook Trump’s tantrum here clearly shows that he is perfectly aware that orders he puts out and plans to put out in future are illegal. Otherwise why would he bother?