Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton loves to preach about “free speech” and “free markets”—except, apparently, when it comes to his political allies. In a stunningly hypocritical and authoritarian move, Paxton has launched an “investigation” to bully advertisers who have chosen not to support Elon Musk’s troubled ExTwitter platform.
This is a chilling attack on both free speech and free markets....
There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn’t pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despite a parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congress is too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this privacy dysfunction to dodge domestic...
This may seem like the sort of statement usually delivered by an overblown narrator as rockets and lasers go zooming* by, but here goes: In the world of journalism, the future is now! Granted, it's the kind of future that often makes waves in the present and raises at least as many questions as it answers, but if you wanted a bright, problem-free future, you'd have to travel back to the...