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Earlier this year, California passed SB 976, yet another terrible and obviously unconstitutional bill with the moral panicky title “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act.” The law restricts minors’ access to social media and imposes burdensome requirements on platforms. It is the latest in a string of misguided attempts by California lawmakers to regulate online speech “for the...
Surprising exactly nobody, Donald Trump has appointed Brendan Carr to lead the nation’s top telecom and media regulator. As we noted last week, there’s zero daylight between Carr’s policies and the policies of unpopular telecom giants like AT...
Earlier this year, the city of Fontana, California paid a $900,000 settlement to resident Thomas Perez Jr. because a bunch of Fontana PD “investigators” spent 17 hours torturing Perez into confessing to a crime that hadn’t been committed… by anybody.
After discovering his father missing, Perez Jr. — who suffers from several health and mental issues — decided to the do the thing you’re supposed to...
The Complete 2024 Penetration Testing...
Elon Musk’s recent claims that corporate boycotts of social media platforms are criminal reek of hypocrisy, given his own eagerness to join the #DeleteFacebook boycott just a few years ago.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk publicly supported the #DeleteFacebook campaign, even going so far as to remove the official SpaceX and Tesla pages from the platform. Yet now, as the owner...
Culminating a deal that’s been rumored about for the better part of the last twenty years, Dish Network and DirecTV recently consummated a new merger in a doomed bid to try and remain solvent and relevant.
The deal involved DirecTV acquiring Dish for one dollar, in addition to $9.75 billion in Dish’s debt. The deal was to combine Dish’s 8.1 million (and shrinking) subscriber base with DirecTV’s...
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with some pushback on the language we used to describe Marc Andreessen’s hypocrisy and misrepresentation of reality:
Stop giving terrible people the benefit of the doubt
The word you’re looking for is lie, as in ‘When someone says something that they know isn’t true, they’re lying.’
And another conservative says the quiet...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, Biden was spreading myths about Section 230, Microsoft was giving the go-ahead to California’s new privacy law, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Google v. Oracle case about APIs and copyright. A copyright troll lawyer faced sanctions and arrest over some courtroom shenanigans, Universal Music was claiming copyright over one of the first newly public...
We’ve talked several times about GOG in the past. The video game storefront was born over a decade ago, originally built on a platform of making older games compatible with modern systems combined with its insistence that any game sold on its storefront be DRM free. In the years since, GOG began to also be a source for new and AAA games. The DRM-free rule remained, and there were still a ton of...
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...