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This week, Stephen T. Stone takes both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it’s a preemptive comment on our post about five Section 230 cases that made online communities better:
Three reminders for the inevitable trolls:
The First Amendment allows these platforms to moderate third-party speech as they see fit; Section 230 is what gives them the necessary protection from legal...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, people were jumping on the bandwagon of fearmongering about Huawei, while we pointed out that the real security threat is the internet of things. Another federal magistrate said that compelled production of passwords and biometrics violates the Fifth Amendment, ICE spent another $820,000 on cellphone cracking tools, and we filed a FOIA lawsuit against ICE. A new...
The last time we saw German-based grocer Aldi get into a trademark tiff over an alcohol product, it was with Brew Dog in the UK and it was one of the most good-natured trademark “disputes” on the record. While that whole thing was refreshing to see, not every company chooses to approach things in a human and awesome way.
Which brings us to Thatchers, based in Somerset, England. Thatchers makes a...
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 round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben...
ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) tends to treat the Constitution as some ticky-tack policy its officers can safely ignore.
That’s not to say ICE believes the Constitution does not exist. It probably at least realizes it exists. After all, it’s a US federal agency. What it firmly believes is that the Constitution provides no protection for the people it targets. As far as it seems to be...
Another day, another dumb lawsuit against TikTok.
We’ve seen school districts and parents suing TikTok on the basis of extremely weird claims of “kids used TikTok, some bad stuff happened to kids, TikTok should be liable.”
But in the past year, it seems that a bunch of state AGs have decided to sue TikTok as well. I’ve lost track, but in the last year or so, I believe Arkansas, Indiana, Utah,...
None of this makes sense. At least, not when you attempt to reconcile what’s being said with the university’s actions. It makes more sense later. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
A non-profit called the Atlanta Police Foundation, which claims to be interested in building a better relationship between Atlanta’s police and the people they police, decided to go the other direction recently by...
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Public libraries are supposed to be places for communities to gather and learn, with an important focus on being a place for kids to gain access to information. But thanks to a moral panic in the GOP about “indoctrination” in libraries, it seems that at least one library has decided to shut its door to children.
A public library in a tiny Idaho mountain community announced on Facebook that it is...
Earlier this year you probably saw the story about how a political consultant used a (sloppy) deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn’t particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had much of an actual impact.
But it clearly spooked the government, which was already nervously watching AI get...