This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a reply to someone pushing back on calling the Trump administration fascist: No, it isn’t. Regardless of how you feel about Democrat-led government administrations, Joe Biden didn’t… give a speech to the Navy in which he heavily implied that the United States Armed Forces would soon have to “take care of” (i.e., commit potentially lethal violence against) Republicans…

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Reps. Gabbard and Gosar brought out the ridiculous House companion to one of the Senate's anti-Section 230 bills, while Donald Trump got on board the "repeal 230" bandwagon even though it was copyright that kept getting his content removed. A federal judge made a ridiculous free speech ruling regarding warning people about the presence of cops…

My cancer is back. This is disappointing but not unexpected; of the 2/3 of people who survive their first bout with ovarian cancer, 80% usually have it recur at some point. For me it was sooner than expected, and disheartening because, even if I beat it back this time, it will likely come back again and again at shorter and shorter intervals.

Hello from the free state of Illinois! We just talked about Donald Trump's incurrsion into Chicago and the surrounding area, in which he first sent in a bunch of masked ICE agents to terrorize citizens and immigrants alike, at one point raiding an apartment building with agents repelling from blackhawk helicopters like the reincarnated form of Osama Bin Laden was hiding inside of it.

In July, a California federal court handed down what should have been considered an obvious decision: of course it violates constitutional rights to consider skin color, spoken language, "accent," or place of employment sufficient to support a stop, much less arrest and detainment. In August, the appeals court affirmed that ruling following the government's absolutely expected rejection of that solid decision.

Just when you think corporate content moderation can't get any more absurd, Apple has managed to redefine "protected class" in a way that would make Orwell proud. According to internal correspondence obtained by Migrant Insider, Apple has removed the DeICER app—which allowed users to log sightings of ICE enforcement activity—by invoking guidelines normally reserved for protecting marginalized communities from hate speech.

Microsoft Project 2024 Professional is the ultimate project management tool, designed to help professionals plan, execute, and complete projects with precision and efficiency. With its robust features and user-friendly interface, this software is perfect for project managers, team leaders, and executives who need a reliable solution to manage their projects from start to finish. It's on sale for limited time for $49.97.

America isn't the land of the free. We abandoned that title when we returned Donald Trump to office -- the same person who refused to engage in the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and, immediately upon his return to power, pardoned almost everyone who engaged in an attempted insurrection on his behalf. The so-called "party of free speech" has repeatedly…

When FCC boss Brendan Carr isn't failing embarrassingly to censor comedians who make the President sad, he's taking a hatchet to corporate oversight and consumer protection. From weakening robocall enforcement to killing net neutrality, it's part of Carr's "Delete, Delete, Delete" performance that is attempting to dress up corruption and regulatory capture as streamlined government efficiency. This week, Carr began taking aim at recently passed rules requiring that your broadband ISP be clear about all the sneaky fees and restrictions they impose on your broadband line.

Here is a brief timeline of events that got us here. Chicago has had a decline in violent crime and murders over the course of the last several years, with 2025 on pace to mark it as the safest year yet in the city. Despite that plain fact, Donald Trump has banged on about how my beautiful city is a "war zone" and "crime ridden" and so on.

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, Ben is joined by Thomas Hughes, CEO of…

This is who we are now. We are the country that makes people who aren't white leave the country because they're not white. And this is according to this administration's own press release, which celebrates the fact that we're now the inverse of the words engraved at the Statue of Liberty's base, which read: Give me your tired, your poor…

A San Francisco supervisor has proposed that police and other city agencies should have no financial consequences for breaking a landmark surveillance oversight law. In 2019, organizations from across the city worked together to help pass that law, which required law enforcement to get the approval of democratically elected officials before they bought and used new spying technologies. Bit by bit…

In what may be the most accidentally honest moment of his presidency, Donald Trump just admitted what we've been documenting for months: "We took the freedom of speech away." Yes, that's literally what he said: For those who've been following Trump's systematic assault on the First Amendment—which we've covered extensively at Techdirt—this admission is remarkable not for its content, but for its candor.

The 2025 Adobe Graphic Design Bundle has 3 courses designed to help you learn the essentials of graphic design and how to apply those skills to your projects. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You'll learn all aspects of the design process. It's on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

It's not enough to go after the "worst of the worst." It was never a sustainable effort, what with migrants committing fewer crimes than natural citizens. The attempt to rid the country of as many non-white people as possible under Trump always had to go bigger. It has become ICE raiding swap meets and Home Depot parking lots because that's where the non-whites are at.

"Right wing activism organizations posing as consumer rights groups are trying to make it illegal for the federal government to try and help poor, rural Americans afford broadband," is a sentence I just had to write. Quick background: the $8 billion FCC Universal Service Fund (USF) applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to fund broadband expansion to unserved rural homes, schools, and libraries (of which the U.S.

I'm sure all of you beautiful people thought we were collectively done with former Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters. After he resigned abruptly in late September, nearly in mid-screed mandating that public schools hold a moment of silence for slain conservative operative Charlie Kirk and mandating a chapter of Turning Point USA at all public high schools, the process for…

We've long explored how powerful regional broadband monopolies have dominated America, resulting in spotty access, high prices, slow speeds, and terrible customer service. We've also long discussed how the U.S. government has done little to actually fix the problem, ranging from outright coddling monopolies (Trump) to performative fixes (the Biden FCC) that don't take aim at monopoly power. …

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken money directly from Chinese investors, according to previously sealed testimony, raising new questions about foreign ownership interests in one of the United States’ most important military contractors. The recent testimony, coming from a SpaceX insider during a court case, marks the first time direct Chinese investment in the privately held company has been disclosed.

So let me get this straight. The same administration that claims fentanyl is such a dire threat that it justifies sweeping tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China is simultaneously pulling federal agents off drug interdiction duties to chase undocumented landscapers in Pennsylvania. The same political movement that built its base partly on QAnon fantasies about child trafficking is now disbanding the federal teams that actually investigate child traffickers.

The Complete Big Data and Power BI Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn how to effectively sort, analyze, and visualize all of your data. Courses cover Power BI, Power Query, Excel, and Access. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

A brief-ish history of events leading up to this point: Kilmar Abrego Garcia was one of hundreds of migrants rounded up by ICE, denied of their due process rights, and dumped into an infamous torture prison in El Salvador, a country overseen by a man who claims he's the world's "coolest dictator." Abrego Garcia, however, actually still had some legal representation left in the States.

Just so you know: it's not normal for your country's voice communications networks to be completely hijacked by scammers and marketers, rendering it almost unusable. That's literally not something people in most serious countries have to deal with. Yet we've largely normalized the fact that Americans are so inundated with unwanted scams and bullshit that they don't answer the phone.

The rush to blame video games for all the world's ills is, of course, nothing new. While some of the more novel examples of this blame-game include current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson's claim that video games are the reason the Medicaid is abused (yes, seriously), this nonsense is more commonly trotted out whenever violence is committed, typically for…