Techdirt

This isn’t going to stop happening unless governments finally get involved to do their most basic job: protect their citizens. This habit among digital and tech companies of selling a thing only to claw back some of the function of that thing after the purchase is both rampant and, frankly, getting ridiculous. It’s bad enough when a company goes fully kablooey, has to shut down all their backend servers and gear, and renders their products useless. That sucks, there are ways around it, and it shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s quite different than perfectly healthy companies selling a product that has features and capabilities out of the box, only to claw back those capabilities and either shut them down or stick them behind some subscription paywall.

And that latter of those examples is what is happening again, this time from Futurehome, which makes a series of smarthome IoT products.

Launched in 2016, Futurehome’s Smarthub is marketed as a central hub for controlling Internet-connected devices in smart homes. For years, the Norwegian company sold its products, which also include smart thermostats, smart lighting, and smart fire and carbon monoxide alarms, for a one-time fee that included access to its companion app and cloud platform for control and automation. As of June 26, though, those core features require a 1,188 NOK (about $116.56) annual subscription fee, turning the smart home devices into dumb ones if users don’t pay up.

“You lose access to controlling devices, configuring; automations, modes, shortcuts, and energy services,” a company FAQ page says.

You also can’t get support from Futurehome without a subscription. “Most” paid features are inaccessible without a subscription, too, the FAQ from Futurehome, which claims to be in 38,000 households, says.

That would be potentially nearly a decade of a bought product working one way, only to have its core functionality tucked behind a subscription paywall on the whim of the company. This is one of those situations that, and I don’t care what country you live in, should elicit the common sense reaction of: this shouldn’t be fucking legal. But, due to the apathy of government and the steady erosion of anything remotely representing true consumer protection, this sort of thing is happening more and more frequently.

And it’s not as though all of this functionality requires support from backend company assets, either. Some do, sure, but some of the features that suddenly don’t work appear to have nothing to do with centralized corporate servers or services.

In response, a Reddit user, according to a Reddit-provided translation of the Norwegian post, said:

I can understand to some extent that they have to do it for services that have ongoing expenses, like servers (even though I actually think it’s their problem, not mine, that they didn’t realize this was a bad idea when they sold me the solution), but a local function that only works internally in the equipment I’ve already paid for shouldn’t be blocked behind a paywall.

So what’s the explanation here? Simple: money! Futurehome recently went through bankruptcy and is blaming that situation for why it needs to suddenly create a cash percolator among the customers that already bought its products with the expectations of the functionality with which they were sold. As always, the company has insisted the subscription fees will allow it to remain solvent and, as the evergreen promise goes, “fund product development, and provide high-quality support.” We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends.

As you’d expect, some people are attempting to figure out how to make Futurehome products work without the subscription. Perhaps as a result of that, Futurehome shut down its own user forum in June. In addition, the CEO is complaining about how the company now has to invest time and resources to fight its own customers’ attempts to make the products they bought work like they did at the time of purchase.

Futurehome has fought efforts to crack its firmware, with CEO Øyvind Fries telling Norwegian consumer tech website Tek.no, per a Google translation, “It is regrettable that we now have to spend time and resources strengthening the security of a popular service rather than further developing functionality for the benefit of our customers.”

But is it as regrettable as your own customers suddenly finding out the thing they bought won’t work anymore because your company didn’t business well enough?

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This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological evolution while safeguarding the rights of creators and ensuring AI’s development serves the broader interests of society. You can read the first, second, third, and fourth posts in the series.

In April 2007, Janez Potočnik, then European Commissioner for Science and Research, introduced the concept of the Fifth Freedom: the “freedom of knowledge.” His vision was simple but ambitious—enhance Europe’s ability to remain competitive through knowledge and innovation, the cornerstones of prosperity. Fast forward to today, the momentum for this Fifth Freedom is building once again, with both the Letta Report and the Mission Letter of the new EU Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation emphasizing its significance.

But how does this freedom of knowledge intersect with creativity and copyright?

AI, Learning, and the Limits of Copyright

Machine learning (ML) systems learn in a way strikingly similar to humans—by observing and copying. This raises an important question: should ML systems be allowed to freely use copyrighted materials as part of their learning process? The answer is not just about technology; it goes to the heart of what copyright law aims to protect.

Traditionally, copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. This is an important distinction because it allows others to take inspiration, innovate, and build upon ideas without infringing on someone else’s creative output. When an ML system is trained, it doesn’t care about specific creative choices—like the lighting or composition of a photo. It just wants to learn the underlying pattern, such as recognizing a stop sign. Similarly, a natural language model uses written text not because it appreciates the author’s unique writing style, but because it needs to learn the structure of language.

Humans also do this all the time. We often replicate expressions when learning, but our goal is not to plagiarize someone’s unique creative touch—it’s to grasp the idea behind it. This concept is embedded in many legal precedents. For instance, in the American Geophysical Union v. Texaco case, photocopying was used not for the beauty of the prose, but simply as a convenient way to access scientific ideas. Similar issues arise in cases about software interoperability, functional objects like clothing designs, and even in disputes over yoga routines. Copyright should protect creative expression—not the ideas, facts, or functional elements that underpin them.

Why This Matters for Machine Learning

This distinction is particularly important for ML. If we allow copyright law to get in the way of machines learning from data for purely non-expressive purposes, we’re potentially hampering technological advancement. Allowing ML systems to copy for learning—without trying to replicate the creative aspects of the original work—is essential for innovation. This is not just a matter of advancing technology but also of staying true to the spirit of copyright law, which is meant to balance the interests of creators and the public good.

However, as Professor Lemley has pointed out from a U.S. law perspective, the freedom for ML to learn should have limits. If an ML system is being trained to create a song that mimics the style of Ariana Grande, it’s no longer just about learning—it’s about copying a creative expression. In such cases, the question of whether it qualifies as fair use becomes much tougher. Yet, even here, it’s crucial that copyright doesn’t end up controlling unprotectable elements like a musical genre or a broad artistic style.

Finding the Balance: Innovation and Protection

The concept of the Fifth Freedom—freedom of knowledge—cannot thrive if copyright is used to restrict learning and innovation. We need a balanced approach: one that protects the hard work of creators, while ensuring that copyright doesn’t stifle the fundamental right to learn, innovate, and build upon existing knowledge. This is especially relevant now, as AI and machine learning shape the future of creativity and the knowledge economy in Europe. If we get this balance right, we can ensure that both creativity and innovation continue to flourish in the digital age.

Caroline De Cock is a communications and policy expert, author, and entrepreneur. She serves as Managing Director of N-square Consulting and Square-up Agency, and Head of Research at Information Labs. Caroline specializes in digital rights, policy advocacy, and strategic innovation, driven by her commitment to fostering global connectivity and positive change.

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Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited hateful content.

LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct*. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.*

Similarly, the platform removed “race or gender identity” from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively “disparaging another member’s […] perceived gender”, not mentioning race or gender identity anymore.

The move is particularly cowardly because LinkedIn made the change with zero public announcement or explanation. When pressed by a reporter at The Advocate, the company offered the classic corporate non-answer: “We regularly update our policies” and insisted that “personal attacks or intimidation toward anyone based on their identity, including misgendering, violates our harassment policy.”

But here’s the thing: if your policies haven’t actually changed, why remove the explicit protections? Why make it harder for users and moderators to understand what’s prohibited? The answer is as obvious as it is pathetic: LinkedIn is preemptively capitulating to political pressure in this era of MAGA culture war.

This follows the now-familiar playbook we’ve seen from Meta, YouTube, and others. Meta rewrote its policies in January to allow content calling LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” and portraying trans identities as “abnormal.” YouTube quietly scrubbed “gender identity” from its hate speech policies, then had the audacity to call it “regular copy edits.” Now LinkedIn is doing the same cowardly dance.

What makes this particularly infuriating is the timing. These companies aren’t even waiting for actual government threats. They’re just assuming that sucking up to the Trump administration’s anti-trans agenda will somehow protect them from regulatory scrutiny. It’s the corporate equivalent of rolling over and showing your belly before anyone even raises their voice.

And it won’t help. The Trump administration will still target them and demand more and more, knowing that these companies will just roll over again.

And let’s be clear about what deadnaming and misgendering actually are: they’re deliberate acts of dehumanization designed to erase transgender people’s identities and make them feel unwelcome in public spaces. When platforms explicitly protect against these behaviors, it sends a message that trans people belong in these spaces. When they quietly remove those protections, they’re sending the opposite message. They’re saying “we don’t care about your humanity, and we will let people attack you for your identity.”

LinkedIn’s decision is especially disappointing because professional networking platforms should be spaces where people can present their authentic selves without fear of purely hateful harassment. Trans professionals already face discrimination in hiring and workplace environments. The last thing they need is for LinkedIn to signal that it’s open season for harassment on its platform.

The company is trying to argue that it still prohibits harassment and hate speech generally. But vague, general policies are much harder to enforce consistently than specific examples. When you remove explicit guidance about what constitutes anti-trans harassment, you make it easier for bad actors to push boundaries and harder for moderators to draw clear lines.

This is exactly the wrong moment for tech companies to be weakening protections for vulnerable communities. Anti-trans rhetoric and legislation have reached fever pitch, with the Trump administration making attacks on transgender rights a central part of its agenda. This is when platforms should be strengthening their commitment to protecting people from harassment, not quietly rolling back safeguards.

Sure, standing up for what’s right when there’s political pressure to do otherwise is hard. But that’s exactly when it matters most. These companies have billions in revenue and armies of lawyers. If anyone can afford to take a principled stand, it’s them.

Instead, we’re watching them fold like cheap suits at the first sign of political headwinds. They’re prioritizing their relationships with authoritarian politicians over the safety of their users. And they’re doing it in the most cowardly way possible: quietly, without explanation, hoping no one will notice.

The message this sends to transgender users is clear: you’re expendable. Your safety and dignity are less important than our political calculations. And that message isn’t just coming from fringe platforms or obvious bad actors—it’s coming from mainstream services owned by some of the world’s largest companies.

This isn’t just bad for transgender users. It’s bad for everyone who believes that online spaces should be governed by consistent principles rather than political opportunism. When platforms start making policy decisions based on which way the political winds are blowing, they undermine their own credibility and the trust users place in them.

Hell, for years, all we heard from the MAGA world was how supposedly awful it is when platforms make moderation decisions based on political pressure.

Where are all of those people now?

The irony is that these companies are probably making themselves less safe, not more. By signaling that they’ll cave to political pressure, they’re inviting more of it. Authoritarians don’t respect weakness—they exploit it.

LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and the rest need to understand: there’s no appeasing the anti-trans mob. No matter how many protections you strip away, it will never be enough. Stick to your principles and protect your users regardless of political pressure.

But instead of showing backbone, these companies are racing to see who can capitulate fastest. It’s a disgraceful display of corporate cowardice at exactly the moment when courage is most needed.

We all deserve better than watching supposedly values-driven companies abandon their principles the moment it becomes politically inconvenient to maintain them.

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This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.

Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.

More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.

He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.

That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.

I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.

Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.

I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.

As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.

The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.

We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.

On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.

The result is a database we published last week including profiles of 238 of the men Trump deported to a Salvadoran prison.

From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.

Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.

We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”

While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.

Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that’s my priority.”

It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.

Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.

Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.

We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.

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A whole lot of bad faith arguing continues [and is amplified!] now that Donald Trump has somehow regained his position as The Person Most Likely To Abuse His Power While Serving As The Most Powerful Man In The World. [Cut to yearbook photo of an 18-year-old Donald Trump with a magnificent head of hair and a half-smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.]

Stolen valor even then.

Let that image burn its way into your psyche as I head off to rant and rail against the irritants in the commentary flow, who not only fuck shit up for the rest of us, but also think (one way or the other) that facts shouldn’t mean as much as their personal feelings.

Those of you who tune in regularly know that I don’t care for Trump. Never have. Never will. And I am not only flabbergasted he’s managed to be elected twice, but consider this unwelcome second coming to be a leading indicator of this nation’s willingness to go fascist on main, rather than just another anomaly we’ll hopefully soon be footnoting in American history.

The weird thing is that my extremely caustic takes on Trump have provoked two equally strident and stupid responses.

On the more persistent end, there’s a commenter out there who seems to believe I’m cutting Trump a blank check on rights violations by referring to his current term as an “administration,” rather than a regime.

Well, if I may be so bold (and who’s going to stop me!), fuck right off. I’ll call it a “regime” on the regular if Trump somehow manages to get the nation’s top court to approve of a third term, which would probably result in Franklin Roosevelt rolling over in his grave, if only he weren’t so incapacitated by his presumably lingering polio.

Speaking of polio, let’s not forget Mr. Measles, the guy currently running the Dept. of Health and Human Services into the deeper, darker parts of worldwide life expectancy charts. Hey, hitting 80 is no longer an expected outcome in the Free World. If you’re lucky, you’ll die of rape-related pregnancy complications in the Federal Republic of Texas as doctors do nothing they can to prevent a child from being born into abject poverty and abuse, even if it means killing the mother to give this kid a shot at shooting up his school.

On the other hand, I have commenters complaining I’m “too biased” when I cover issues related to the hateful ratfucking bigots currently running this country.

Please enjoy my apology to these weirdos, who seem to think encroaching fascism should be covered “fairly” — something composed and performed by punkish victims of every housing crisis over the last 20 years, Japanther:

And that’s the weird thing about this so-called “discourse.” Some people want you to be angrier. Other people want you to be less angry.

But they’re both wrong. You can’t always get what you want, as every cover band has ever said when covering the Rolling Stones past 11 pm. (The “Satisfaction” crowd has already left to drive home the babysitter. The crowd that remains may still want some crowd-pleasers, but just as equally they want the stuff that makes them feel bad.)

You get this instead, sickos:

And that’s how it goes here at Techdirt. You may be pleased by certain posts — or perhaps all posts. But your pleasure isn’t the impetus for the post’s creation. We obviously hope you’ll be pleased by our posts (a hopefulness that covers everyone from the other Tim to Mike to Karl to Glyn to Cathy to every other writer who allows us to publish their stuff under the Techdirt logo), but your personal pleasure is not what drives the creation of content, despite the fervent belief of certain commenters.

What we do is what we want to do. And while I’m always willing to accept criticism over factual and/or legal inaccuracies in my posts (how else would I learn?!), I’m extremely opposed to vibes-based criticism of my work. If you have facts, bring them. But don’t expect any writer here to neuter their posts just because it didn’t appeal to people who think other terms should be used just so they might feel a little more comfortable reading the content.

That’s the way it works here. We don’t write because we want to please everyone. We write because WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY. If you want “both sides” writing, you’ve got everything from the NYT editorial board to the back of mayonnaise packets to give you what you want. But if you’re showing up here specifically to bitch about perceived biases, you’re in the wrong place. The bias exists. And it is SPECTACULAR.

Don’t bring vibes to a fact fight. Get in or get out, but don’t expect Techdirt to bend a writer’s will to satisfy particularly lazy and argumentative commenters. We write what WE BELIEVE. For everything else, there’s… I don’t know… most of the rest of internet?

Don’t be these people, whether you’ve bought into the Krassensteins or the weird concept that reporting on events that affect your life should be an affect-less drone you can tune out until you feel like adding your particular bitching to a site’s comment section. Either way, you’re just performative but somehow feel you’re justified in attacking people who have been doing this for real for years before it even mattered to you.

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There’s $42.5 billion in broadband grants are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents).

But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable to poor people, and to ensure that Elon Musk gets billions in new broadband subsidies for his expensive and increasingly congested satellite broadband company, Starlink.

The rewrites delayed the underlying grant program, forcing many states to revamp their plans for the already earmarked funds. That includes a new bidding process. Unsurprisingly, in states like Tennessee and Colorado, Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper and Elon Musk’s Starlink are now poised to dominate the bidding process, resulting in a lot of taxpayer funds likely going toward satellite services… instead of fiber:

“SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper flooded the Tennessee office with applications, submitting more than twice as many broadband grant applications as fiber builders, while requesting on average about 10 times less in funding – at least according the application areas.”

Republicans revamped the program to make billionaires happy. Though they claim they revamped the program because they were looking to cut costs. But we’ve noted repeatedly how these Low-Earth orbit satellite broadband efforts have massive problems that make them ill-suited to tackling America’s digital divide at any serious scale.

Starlink has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand is expensive and not guaranteed.

One recent study found that Starlink struggles to deliver the FCC’s already flimsy definition of broadband – 100 megabits per second (Mbps) down, 20 Mbps up – in any areas where Starlink subscribership exceeds 6 households per square mile. In many areas, these capacity constraints are causing Starlink to issue “congestion” charges as high as $750.

So yes, it’s technically cheaper for taxpayers to fund expensive, congested satellite broadband service, but it results in slower, more expensive service that can’t actually deliver on the promises it’s going to be making. Republicans don’t really care about that, and later on, after the subsidies have been doled out and public is frustrated by the substandard result, they’ll just ignore the problem they caused.

The other problem is money directed to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is money directed away from a lot of locally owned municipal and cooperative broadband providers that have been recently using taxpayer money to deploy “future proof”, symmetrical gigabit fiber for prices as low as $60 a month.

Many states had only just started funding these promising emerging competitors, but the Trump revamp of this BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment) program means that if the Trump administration doesn’t like your proposal (it doesn’t reward Musk, it tries to help the poor, or it funds community broadband access) your state could lose millions or billions in funds, permanently.

Another problem: the Trump administration’s lower standards means that companies like Comcast that had originally been encouraged to deploy fiber, are now deploying slower (but still as expensive for consumers) cable broadband service. From Tennessee:

“In the initial round of funding, Comcast applied for funding for 27 project areas. In the Benefit of the Bargain round, Comcast applied to serve 39 project areas. The key difference is that, in the initial round, Comcast proposed to serve these areas with fiber broadband and is now proposing to serve them with cable broadband at a lower cost.”

Fiber providers may have higher up front construction costs, but they’re fixing the problem permanently and properly. As opposed to throwing the lion’s share of taxpayer money at a technology that literally and technically can’t accomplish what’s being asked of it. And, in at least one case, into the lap of a company owned and run by an overt white supremacist with a head full of conspiracy theories.

Ideally, you want taxpayer money going primarily to fiber. After that, to stuff like fixed wireless and 5G wireless. After that, you fill in the gaps with LEO satellite service. LEO satellite service shouldn’t be the primary choice. But because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, that logic’s flying right out the window, and most of the funding is now poised to get dumped into the laps of Trump’s favorite billionaires.

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This too will be swept away by this administration’s steady stream of injustices, but it’s still worth highlighting before it’s buried by even worse news later.

The mass deportation program enacted by Trump — one that intends to turn ICE into the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency — has already seen innocent foreigners declared “gang members,” college students arrested for opinion pieces they wrote for the school paper, and streets, businesses, homeless shelters, and courtrooms invaded by people in masks everyone is just supposed to assume work for the US government and have the legal authority to do the things they’re doing.

Due process rights have been universally ignored, along with a whole lot of other constitutional rights, ranging from free speech protections to warrant requirements for ICE officers.

Now, there’s this: another inexplicable — and apparently unending — violation of constitutional rights the US has extended to foreign-born residents and visitors for most of its history as an independent nation.

Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist imprisoned in a south Georgia immigration detention center after being arrested covering a “No Kings Day” protest in June, is being “punished for his journalism”, first amendment rights groups said.

“The charges were dropped, yet he remains detained by Ice,” said José Zamora, the regional director for the Americas at the Committee to Protect Journalists, during a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Georgia capitol with Guevara’s attorneys and family. “Let’s be clear, Mario is being punished for his journalism. He is now the only journalist in prison in the US in direct retaliation for his reporting.”

And there it is: Guevara was arrested for reporting on a “No Kings Day” protest — the nationwide protests that pissed in Trump’s birthday Cheerios so hard he immediately walked back earlier comments suggesting he’d no longer target the hardworking migrants employed by so many of his big business supporters.

Everything happening to journalist Mario Guevara right now is extremely vindictive, which is extremely on-brand for the Trump administration and the dozens of local law enforcement agencies willing to be even worse than they are already just to score some brownie points with the current regime.

Guevara was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of “pedestrian in roadway” while documenting a “No Kings” protest in Doraville, Georgia. When he was arrested, he was streaming his coverage to more than 1 million Spanish-speaking followers on Facebook.

Law enforcement officers (after a lot of fucking him around) seized his phone and tossed him into a nearby ICE detention center — one currently “supported” by “mass deportations give us a money boner” private prison firm, GEO Group. This all happened despite the arresting agency dropping the charges against Guevara.

Rather than allow Guevara — who is apparently in this country legally while his green card process continues — to return to the streets, another law enforcement agency stepped in to keep him locked up.

Though charges from the protest were quickly dropped, the sheriff of nearby Gwinnett county laid a second set of unrelated misdemeanor traffic charges shortly after Guevara’s arrest. The Gwinnett county solicitor subsequently dropped those charges as well, but not before Gwinnett’s sheriff’s office seized his cell phone with a search warrant.

Given that the charges brought (and dropped) against Guevara by the Gwinnett County sheriff’s office were traffic-related, there cannot possibly be any probable cause to support the seizure of his phone, much less his continued detention at the ICE facility in Folkston, Georgia.

According to Guevara’s lawyer, no agency — federal or local — is capable or willing to explain what happened to his phone, nor whose possession it’s in when (or if) he’s given a chance to retrieve it.

“Everybody’s saying we don’t see a warrant in the system,” Diaz said, describing his office’s inquiries with the sheriff and other agencies. “So, one of two things happened. Some other agency that hasn’t contacted us took it – US attorney’s [office], Ice, somebody else has it – or the phone was just plain stolen.

The rationale for this phone seizure — as well as Guevara’s continued detention (which included a brief stay in general population at an Atlanta federal prison) — appears to be nothing more than “Because fuck you, that’s why.” That’s the standard operating procedure for ICE, something that’s only become more common and more emboldened under Trump and his compliant band of bigots.

All of this will likely stay buried by ICE and its local enablers for as long as possible. And there’s no guarantee anyone involved with this will actually comply with any order from any court involved in the litigation that will inevitably follow Guevara’s release. The administration has made it clear it doesn’t believe courts have the power to stop it from doing whatever it wants. And that attitude is certainly going to spread to every local law enforcement agency that aids and abets the administration’s unconstitutional activities.

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A week or so ago, Karl Bode wrote about Vice Media’s idiotic decision to disappear several articles that had been written by its Waypoint property concerning Collective Shout. Collective Shout is an Australian group that pretends to be a feminist organization, when, in reality, it operates much more like any number of largely evangelical groups bent on censoring any content that doesn’t align with their own viewpoints (which they insist become your viewpoints as well). The point of Karl’s post was to correctly point out that Collective Shout’s decision to go after the payment processors for the major video game marketplaces over their offering NSFW games shouldn’t be hidden from the public in the interest of clickbait non-journalism.

But that whole thing about Collective Shout putting on a pressure campaign on payment processors is in and of itself a big deal, as is the response to it. Both Steam and itch.io recently either removed or de-indexed a ton of games they’re labeling NSFW, chiefly along guidelines clearly provided by the credit card companies themselves. Now, Collective Shout will tell you that it is mostly interested in going after games that depict vile actions in some ways, such as rape, child abuse, and incest.

No Mercy. That’s the name of the incest-and-rape-focused game that was geo-blocked in Australia this April, following a campaign by the local pressure group Collective Shout. The group, which stands against “the increasing pornification of culture”, then set its sights on a broader target – hundreds of other games they identified as featuring rape, incest, or child sexual abuse on Steam and itch.io. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us,” said the group of its latest campaign.

The move was effective. Steam began removing sex-related games it deemed to violate the standards of its payment processors, presenting the choice as a tradeoff in a statement to Rock Paper Shotgun: “We are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam.”

Itch.io followed that up shortly afterwards with its de-indexing plan, but went further and did this with all NSFW games offered on the platform. Unlike Steam, itch.io was forthcoming as to their reasoning for its actions. And they were remarkably simple.

“Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform,” Corcoran said. “To ensure that we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our payment partners and take immediate steps towards compliance.”

Digital marketplaces being unable to collect payment through trusted partners would be, to put it tersely, the end of their business. Those same payment processors can get predictably itchy about partnering with platforms that host content that someone out there, or many someones as part of a coordinated campaign, may not like for fear that will sully their reputation. And because these are private companies we’re talking about, their fear along with any of their own sense of morality are at play here. The end result is a digital world filled with digital marketplaces that all exist under an umbrella of god-like payment processors that can pretty much dictate to those other private entities what can be on offer and what cannot.

And, as an executive from Appcharge chimed in, the processors will hang this all on the amount of fraud and chargebacks that come along with adult content, but that doesn’t change the question about whether payment processors should be neutral on legal but morally questionable content or not. Because, as you would expect, the aims of folks like Collective Shout almost certainly don’t end with things like rape and incest.

It’s possible that Collective Shout’s campaign highlighted a level of operational and reputational risk that payment processors weren’t aware of, and of a severity they didn’t expect. “I’m guessing it’s also the moral element,” Tov-Ly says. “It just makes sense, right? Why would you condone incest or rape promoting games?”

Tov-Ly is of the opinion that payment processors offer a utility, and should have no more role in the moral arbitration of art than your electricity company – meaning, none at all. “Whenever you open that Pandora’s box, you’re not impartial anymore,” he says. “Today it’s rape games and incest, but tomorrow it could be another lobbying group applying pressure on LGBT games in certain countries.”

We’ve already seen this sort of thing when it comes to book and curriculum bans that are currently plaguing far too much of the country. When porn can mean Magic Treehouse, the word loses all meaning.

What is actually happening is that payment processors are feeling what they believe is “public pressure”, but which is actually just a targeted and coordinated campaign from a tiny minority of people who watched V For Vendetta and thought it was an instruction manual. Well, the public has caught wind of this, as have game publishers that might be caught up in this censorship or whatever comes next, and coordinated contact campaigns to payment processors to complain about this new censorship are being conducted.

Gilbert Martinez had just poured himself a glass of water and was pacing his suburban home in San Antonio, Texas while trying to navigate Mastercard’s byzantine customer service hotline. He was calling to complain about recent reports that the company is pressuring online gaming storefrontslike Steam and Itch.io to ban certain adult games. He estimates his first call lasted about 18 minutes and ended with him lodging a formal complaint in the wrong department.

Martinez is part of a growing backlash to Steam and Itch.io purging thousands of games from their databases at the behest of payment processing companies. Australia-based anti-porn group Collective Shout claimed credit for the new wave of censorship after inciting a write-in campaign against Visa and Mastercard, which it accused of profiting off “rape, incest, and child sexual abuse game sales.” Some fans of gaming are now mounting reverse campaigns in the hopes of nudging Visa and Mastercard in the opposite directions.

If noise is what is going to make these companies go back to something resembling sanity, this will hopefully do the trick. We’re already seeing examples of games that are being unjustly censored, described as porn when they are very much not. Not to mention instances where nuance is lost and the “porn” content is actually the opposite.

Vile: Exhumed is a textbook example of what critics of the sex game purge always feared: that guidelines aimed at clamping down on pornographic games believed to be encouraging or glorifying sexual violence would inevitably ensnare serious works of art grappling with difficult and uncomfortable subject matter in important ways. Who gets to decide which is which? For a long time, it appeared to be Steam and Itch.io. Last week’s purges revealed it’s actually Visa and Mastercard, and whoever can frighten them the most with bad publicity.

Some industry trade groups have also weighed in. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) released a statement stating that “censorship like this is materially harmful to game developers” and urging a dialogue between “platforms, payment processors, and industry leaders with developers and advocacy groups.” “We welcome collaboration and transparency,” it wrote. “This issue is not just about adult content. It is about developer rights, artistic freedom, and the sustainability of diverse creative work in games.”

This is the result of a meddling minority attempting to foist their desires on everyone else, plain and simple. Choking the money supply is a smart choice, sure, but one that should be recognized in this case for what it is: censorship based on proclivities that are not widely shared. And if there really is material in these games that is illegal, it should obviously be done away with.

But we should not be playing this game of pretending content that is not widely seen as immoral should somehow be choked of its ability to participate in commerce.

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The “worst of the worst” ruse was never taken seriously by anyone, least of all those who performatively repeated it to serve as cover for their hatred and bigotry.

The mantra means nothing. The same agency that claims it’s doing “God’s work” is going all out to rob the meek of their inheritance.

Because there simply aren’t enough criminals to satisfy Trump ghoul-in-chief Stephen Miller’s 3,000 arrests per day quota, ICE and the DHS are now targeting anyone seeming vaguely foreign, no matter how much reality the Trump administration has to ignore and how many rights it needs to violate to accomplish this.

Rather than find dangerous criminals, Trump’s hate squad is going after taxpayers, productive workers, poor people in need of medical assistance, and literally anyone who looks brown enough to be detained for possible removal.

Migrants are more respectful of US laws than natural-born, whiter citizens. They also do the jobs most people fortunate enough to be born here won’t do. There’s a vacuum being created that will never be filled as long as people like Trump are in charge.

ICE has been behaving like a rogue agency for years now, but has been given explicit permission to go wild now that Trump’s back at the helm. That’s why things like this — incidents that have no (non-World War II) parallel prior to Trump’s second term in office — are making headlines almost daily across the nation:

Wilder had just concluded a session in the batting cages with a group of new kids. He saw six ICE agents approach. “I thought they were speaking about baseball,” he said. “And then I heard, ‘Where are you from? Where are your parents from?’ ” Four had face masks. All had guns and tasers.

Why were they questioned? “Our kids are from Washington Heights and Dyckman and the South Bronx and parts of Queens,” Wilder said. “They are Black and Latino. They come from the projects. Kids who love baseball who can’t afford baseball.” He went on, “We also have Milo. Milo is a white kid who actually is from Harlem and is proud of it, too.” All were American citizens.

That’s NYC youth baseball coach Youman Wilder relating his recent run-in with ICE officers. I’m sure the officers saw an opportunity to round up a bunch of kids without being subjected to invocations of rights or other objections from their parents. Unfortunately for them, they ran into Wilder, who refused to allow ICE to intimidate these kids into an ICE detention center.

ICE, of course, issued a statement that is just as meaningless as its untargeted operations all across the nation:

(A spokesperson said that ICE had not conducted any recent “enforcement activity” in the vicinity of the park.)

Of course it didn’t. This wasn’t actually “enforcement activity.” This was just some ICE officers hoping to luck into a few detentions. It wasn’t an operation. It was a crime of opportunity. So, it obviously can’t be called “enforcement activity,” especially when the officers decided to back down once they encountered a slight bit of resistance. This is an empty statement, one as hollow as the souls of everyone standing behind it.

That’s why ICE has been spotted roaming around homeless shelters, schools, libraries, and even a Puerto Rican history museum — despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are, in full fact, natural born American citizens!

And the deflection above makes even less sense when you take a look at the directive Trump’s DHS rescinded to make way for the oppression of some of the most powerless people in this nation, especially if they aren’t recognizably white.

Issued January 20, 2025 — literally the same day Trump was sworn in for the second time — this memo rescinds a directive issued by then-DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas less than four years earlier. What got rolled back by Trump’s DHS were blanket protections for areas mostly filled with children or people seeking help from medical providers or other government agencies.

The list of “protected areas” ICE should not be engaging in untargeted enforcement efforts included schools, daycares, healthcare facilities, places of worship, playgrounds, youth centers, day care providers, foster care operations, social service providers, disaster relief centers, funerals, weddings, and people attending/participating in protected First Amendment activity like protests or rallies.

And, of course, this is where the current version of ICE is looking to pick people off. While most of its efforts have focused on places of employment (again, an extremely dubious use of resources), it has expanded to cover a lot of places that might have seemed a bit too close to the lines drawn by this previous guidance to be considered an acceptable risk.

It’s not that ICE is any better or worse in terms of personnel since Trump took office. It’s that those overseeing ICE operations have gotten worse and somehow have found enough people in the ICE ranks willing to send officers into places that previously would have been considered off-limits, if not actually morally repugnant to ICE officers supposedly tasked with finding “the worst of worst” migrants to deport.

And if there are a lot of ICE officers who disagree with the new tactics, it’s on them to exit the department before they become a further part of the problem. Standing by while others engage in evil doesn’t absolve you of their sins. It just makes you complicit in them. And if you’re the sort of thug who actually thinks it’s a good idea to accost kids playing baseball, you’re a terrible human being who should never have been allowed to wield as much power as you do. You’re no soldier in God’s army and you sure as shit aren’t worthy of living in the nation that employs you.

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Here’s the contradiction at the heart of the internet: everyone complains about content moderation, but no one wants to use an unmoderated platform. Everyone thinks trust & safety professionals are either censorial scolds or corporate lackeys, but everyone expects them to magically solve the inherent problems of human behavior at scale.

I spent last week at TrustCon, the premier annual conference for the trust and safety industry (you can see our live podcast, Ctrl-Alt-Speech, here), listening to people trying to square this impossible circle.

The trust & safety space is a strange one in that I think it’s one of the least understood but most important industries that impacts tools most people use every day. So many people misunderstand the role of trust & safety professionals often (falsely) thinking that they are censors (they are not) or that they have some magical ability to stop bad things on the internet (they do not).

As Alex Feerst wrote for us a few years ago, trust and safety is largely made up of caring people who really, really are trying to make the internet a better place, figuring out the best way to create rules for specific platforms that encourage good/helpful/useful behavior and minimize bad/dangerous/risky behavior. Every platform has different rules and incentive structures, but every platform that hosts third party speech needs to have some sort of rules, with some sort of enforcement mechanisms.

This is true elsewhere as well. City council meetings have rules. Your home owners association has processes. The book club you’re in has some guidelines. The idea is that in a society where groups form for common purposes, there always need to be some sort of principles to help people get along without causing damage. And each group can create their own rules and their own enforcement—some may be stricter than others, but people get to decide which sites and which services with which rules and enforcement they feel most comfortable with, and use those.

A ton of trust & safety people legitimately care about making services work better and be safer for everyone. For all the talk of how they’re “censors,” a huge percentage of them come out of human rights and free speech work. For all the talk of how they’re holding back progress, a ton of them are there because they believe in the power of the internet to make the world better and are trying to help.

And yet many people believe that trust & safety people are something they are not. There are those, like Marc Andreessen (who as a board member for Meta and many other internet companies absolutely should know better), who believe that trust & safety is “the enemy of progress.” Or there are those, like Jim Jordan, who falsely believe that those keeping the internet safe are engaged in a vast conspiracy of censorship for merely enforcing the rules on private platforms.

But there are also those who seem to imagine too much power in the hands of trust & safety professionals and expect them to fix the inherent problems of humanity and society, something they could never do in the first place. We see regulators who think that companies need to be forced into doing things because their CEOs don’t care—but all that really tends to do is limit the ability of trust & safety folks to craft better, more creative solutions to the problems that human users bring to any service. Because as more government mandates come down from on high, the more those companies are forced to start checking boxes to show “compliance” rather than letting trust & safety experts actually figure out what works best.

It is a thankless task, but a necessary task. It’s not about censorship or holding back progress. Quite the opposite. It’s about making the wider internet safer for more people so that more people can benefit from the internet.

And my takeaway from TrustCon is that it’s being made much, much harder by those who don’t understand it.

One interesting thing I heard from multiple people was how the success of Jonathan Haidt’s “Anxious Generation” book had been a huge disaster for the entire field of trust & safety on multiple levels. I heard it from a couple different people on the first day and it took me a bit by surprise. After all, the book has been out for over a year, and while I have written about how it’s full of garbage cherry picked and misleading research that has done real damage in terms of the public, the media, and policymakers’ beliefs about child safety online, I had not considered as much the impact on actual online safety.

As I learned from talking to folks in the field, the success of the book harmed safety efforts in multiple ways:

The book has cemented the false narrative that social media is inherently harmful to all kids, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary (the evidence suggests social media is very helpful for some kids, neutral for most, and only harmful for a very small number—and often the harm is because of other, untreated, issues).This means that so much effort has been put towards the backwards, impossible, and harmful goal of blocking kids entirely from social media, which means it has taken away from actual interventions that help. That is, it has resulted in less work on better safety tools for kids and better education of how to use the tools in an age appropriate way, with almost all of the efforts being focused on questionable and privacy-destroying age verification.The narrative also further cements the idea that there is no role for thoughtful trust & safety interventions, assuming that a pure abstinence approach is the only possible approach.

In many ways, it’s an almost exact replica of failed “abstinence only” efforts around drugs, alcohol, and sex. We’re making the same damn mistake all over again, and so many people are willing to trust it because it’s in a best-selling book.

But there was a larger through-line in some of the discussions, which revolved around how the general “worldview” has changed on trust and safety, with attacks coming from across the broad political spectrum. You have some places, including the EU, the UK, and Australia, where governments haven’t bothered to understand the natural trade-offs of trust & safety and seem to think they can regulate the internet to safety. Meanwhile, books like Haidt’s have convinced policymakers that the solution to online harms is keeping kids off platforms entirely, rather than building better safety tools and better educating kids how to use services appropriately.

That’s a fool’s errand.

At the other extreme, you have the MAGA VC world who falsely believe that trust & safety is about censorship and is evil and shouldn’t exist at all. And, in the US, those people currently have tremendous power, leading to nonsense from companies like Meta and X to falsely imply that they can remove safeguards and guardrails and nothing will go wrong. So far, that hasn’t worked out too well, mainly because it’s based on a totally faulty understanding of how all this works.

The end result is… not great.

Trust & safety professionals I spoke to at TrustCon kept talking about how this environment has done tremendous damage to their ability to actually keep things safe. I heard Daphne Keller’s piece about how regulators were turning trust & safety into a compliance function so many times at TrustCon, I think it was the unofficial article of the conference.

This gets to the heart of what I heard over and over: trust & safety professionals want to create better, safer services online, but feel trapped between impossible demands. Regulators want them to solve problems that can’t be solved through content moderation. Politicians attack them as censors. Best-selling authors like Jonathan Haidt blame them for harming children when they’re desperately trying to help, pushing everyone toward the failed “abstinence-only” approach of blocking kids from platforms entirely rather than building age-appropriate safety tools.

It’s an impossible situation to deal with, especially for a bunch of people who mostly, legitimately, are just trying to get people to play nice online in order to enjoy the wonder that is a global communication network.

Making this worse, some commentators are drawing exactly the wrong lessons from this crisis. Dean Jackson’s “realist’s perspective” on trust & safety concludes that only “state power” can realistically fix things—missing that regulations are already making trust & safety harder by forcing compliance theater over actual safety work.

A realist assessment of the current moment suggests that one force capable of moving tech titans in a better direction—perhaps the only force short of a mass consumer movement—is state power.

This echoes what I heard about Haidt’s influence: his book’s success has convinced everyone that social media is inherently harmful to all kids, sucking resources away from nuanced interventions that might actually help. Instead of building better safety tools and a better overall ecosystem, everyone’s fixated on impossible age verification schemes. It’s abstinence-only education for the internet age. It’s creating “trust and safety theater” rather than actually building up either trust or safety.

We talked about this on the podcast, where I noted I find Dean one of the more thoughtful journalists on this beat, but I felt this piece missed the mark. The piece is nuanced and certainly discusses the tradeoffs here, but seems to view the current state—where trust & safety is viewed so negatively across the board—as a kind of permanent state, and concludes that the only real way to deal with this is via state power telling the companies what to do.

It strikes me as an odd conclusion that we need “state power” to make a better internet, when one of the big takeaways from the conference was how regulations are consistently making it more difficult for trust & safety folks to do their job well, and are instead focused on regulatory compliance—checking boxes to keep regulators happy, rather than implementing systems and policies that actually keep people safer online.

This impossible situation helps explain why Casey Newton’s similar critique of the industry—that trust & safety leaders are, effectively, cowering and unwilling to speak up—also misses the mark. Newton wants them to quit their jobs and write op-eds defending their work. But why would they?

Look what happened to Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust & safety, when he spoke truthfully about his work: he was lied about, doxxed, and driven from his home. That’s the reward you get for public honesty in this space.

Newton’s frustration is understandable, but his solution—public martyrdom—ignores the basic risk assessment these professionals do for a living. When regulators, politicians, and pundits are all attacking you from different angles, going public just paints a bigger target on your back. And for what benefit? Better to keep your head down, check whatever boxes keep the wolves at bay, and try to actually make things better from within the constraints you’re given.

It’s not ideal, but it’s the kind of thing that people who care will do in these wild and ridiculous times.

I will note that many of the sessions at TrustCon this year (way more than in the past) were off-limits to the media. TrustCon lanyard badges indicate if you’re in the media or not (every year they accidentally give me a different lanyard, and I remind them that I’m press and should be given the press lanyard). It sucks a bit for me, because it means I don’t get to go to those sessions, but given the state of everything, it’s totally understandable.

Trust & safety folks are legitimately working to make the services you and I rely on better. It’s an impossible task. You and I will disagree with decisions made on every platform. I guarantee you that people who work at these platforms will also disagree with some of the decisions made because there are no right answers. There are, as one friend in trust & safety likes to say, “only least bad options.” All options are bad.

But making the “least bad” decision still involves careful thought, deliberation, and understanding of tradeoffs. TrustCon is an opportunity to share those difficult discussions and to think through the tradeoffs and considerations. And given how the press so frequently misrepresents those tradeoffs, it’s not the least bit surprising to me that many sessions decided to keep them out.

So what’s the solution? Stop expecting magic from people doing impossible work.

Trust & safety professionals aren’t going to solve humanity’s problems. They can’t make perfect content moderation decisions at the scale of billions. They can’t eliminate all harmful content without also eliminating lots of legitimate speech. These are not bugs in the system—they’re features of trying to moderate human behavior at internet scale.

Instead of attacking them from all sides, we need to create space for them to make the least bad choices available. That means regulators who understand the natural tradeoffs involved rather than demanding impossible outcomes. It means politicians who don’t scapegoat them for broader social problems. And it means recognizing that while their work is imperfect, the alternative—no moderation at all—is far worse.

The internet isn’t broken because trust & safety is doing a bad job. It’s strained because we’ve asked them to solve problems that can’t be solved through content moderation alone. Until we acknowledge that basic reality, we’ll keep making their impossible job even harder.

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Here we go again. The idea that, at least in the realm of digital goods or IoT devices, we no longer own what we’ve bought has been a long-running theme here at Techdirt. While the practice of pulling back features available upon purchase via firmware updates has been a regular occurrence in the video game console space, it’s also reared its ugly, anti-consumer head in the realm of everything from smart home devices, emotional support robots (yes, seriously), and even exercise equipment.

It seems like a simple concept that everyone should be able to agree to: if I buy a product from you that does x, y, and z, you don’t get to remove x, y, or z remotely after I’ve made that purchase. How we’ve gotten to a place where companies can simply remove, or paywall, product features without recourse for the customer they essentially bait and switched is beyond me.

But it keeps happening. The most recent example of this is with Echelon exercise bikes. Those bikes previously shipped to paying customers with all kinds of features for ride metrics and connections to third-party apps and services without anything further needed from the user. That all changed recently when a firmware update suddenly forced an internet connection and a subscription to a paid app to make any of that work.

As explained in a Tuesday blog post by Roberto Viola, who develops the “QZ (qdomyos-zwift)” appthat connects Echelon machines to third-party fitness platforms, like Peloton, Strava, and Apple HealthKit, the firmware update forces Echelon machines to connect to Echelon’s servers in order to work properly. A user online reported that as a result of updating his machine, it is no longer syncing with apps like QZ, and he is unable to view his machine’s exercise metrics in the Echelon app without an Internet connection.

Affected Echelon machines reportedly only have full functionality, including the ability to share real-time metrics, if a user has the Echelon app active and if the machine is able to reach Echelon’s servers.

Want to know how fast you’re going on the bike you’re sitting upon? That requires an internet connection. Want to get a sense of how you performed on your ride on the bike? That requires an internet connection. And if Echelon were to go out of business? Then your bike just no longer works beyond the basic function of pedaling it.

And the ability to use third-party apps is reportedly just, well, gone.

For some owners of Echelon equipment, QZ, which is currently rated as the No. 9 sports app on Apple’s App Store, has been central to their workouts. QZ connects the equipment to platforms like Zwift, which shows people virtual, scenic worlds while they’re exercising. It has also enabled new features for some machines, like automatic resistance adjustments. Because of this, Viola argued in his blog that QZ has “helped companies grow.”

“A large reason I got the [E]chelon was because of your app and I have put thousands of miles on the bike since 2021,” a Reddit user told the developer on the social media platform on Wednesday.

Instead of happily accepting that someone out there is making its product more attractive and valuable, Echelon is instead going for some combination of overt control and the desire for customer data. Data which will be used, of course, for marketing purposes.

There’s also value in customer data. Getting more customers to exercise with its app means Echelon may gather more data for things like feature development and marketing.

What you won’t hear anywhere, at least that I can find, is any discussion of the ability to return or get refunds for customers who bought these bikes when they did things that they no longer will do after the fact. That’s about as clear a bait and switch type of a scenario as you’re likely to find.

Unfortunately, with the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection being run by just another Federalist Society imp, it’s unlikely that anything material will be done to stop this sort of thing.

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A new study from researchers at X-Lab shows that Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service lacks the capacity to put a serious dent in U.S. broadband. Despite recent efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite a $42 billion subsidy program with an eye on giving Musk billions in taxpayer dollars.

The researchers found that given the limited nature of satellite physics, the more people that use Starlink, the slower the network is going to get. That’s not a surprise to users who have increasingly seen slowdowns on the network over the last four years, resulting in speeds that often don’t even meet the FCC’s fairly weak definition for broadband (100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up).

The researchers estimated that pushing the network past any more than 6.7 Starlink customers per square mile results in significant slowdowns that will get worse. That’s why, they note, it’s a terrible idea for the Trump administration to redirect infrastructure bill grant money from more reliable (often fiber-based and locally owned) ISPs and instead give it to Elon Musk:

“Many State Offices are concerned that Starlink proposals may be the lowest bid and alternative proposals may not be within the 15% window for consideration. What this analysis presents is that across many geographic areas Starlink may not be a qualified bidder as it may be unable to attain the required 100/20 Mbps service level (and, in deploying Starlink services, may actually degrade pre-existing users’ services to the point that they no longer receive minimal broadband speeds).”

Techdirt has been noting for years how Starlink is a niche service. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand will be challenging if not impossible.

Some Wall Street analysts have been talking about the Starlink capacity crunch since at least 2001 (and mostly getting ignored). Those same analysts have raised questions about whether Starlink can meet its satellite launch goals in order to meet projected targets (spoiler: no).

But Starlink has also been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. And the service is also too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. It’s getting even more expensive as Starlink applies up to $750 “congestion charges” in areas where it knows it can’t meet demand.

This is all before you get to the fact the company’s CEO is an overt white supremacist who basically purchased his own authoritarian U.S. government before his ego ruined the fun.

So yeah, Starlink is a good option if you’re in the middle of nowhere with no other access, can afford it, and have no qualms about doing business with a white supremacist.

It’s not so great if you care about the environment, like to shop ethically, are on a fixed budget, or want to use taxpayer money to ensure widespread broadband availability. Still, because many Republicans still worship at the feet of Elon Musk, they tend to view Starlink as almost akin to magic, helping them justify throwing billions in undeserved subsidies at their billionaire benefactor.

The first Trump FCC tried to give Musk nearly a billion dollars in subsidies to deliver Starlink to some traffic medians and airport parking lots. The Biden FCC reversed the funding, stating (correctly) that Starlink’s bid gamed the system and they weren’t sure that Starlink could consistently meet program speed requirements.

That rollback by the Biden FCC resulted in no limit of crying and teeth-gnashing by Elon Musk and Republicans, who have since dedicated themselves to throwing billions more at the billionaire.

There’s always waste in these programs. But some of the money being directed toward Elon Musk’s congested and expensive satellite service is money directed away from popular community-owned and operated fiber providers, or many local small businesses with a genuine, vested interest in bettering the local communities they serve. In short, it has the very real potential to actually make U.S. broadband worse. Under the pretense that we’re fixing the problem for good.

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

The news org Axios launched in 2017, just as the first Trump administration began, created by some ex-Politico folks, claiming that they would be “an antidote to this madness” and talking about how “the world needed smarter, more efficient coverage” of important news stories.

The reality is that Axios launders rightwing talking points in ugly short form vignettes that not only hide nuance, but reveal how their version of “neutral, objective” coverage actually means normalizing Donald Trump’s madness.

Two recent examples show how this works in practice. Last week, we wrote about how Tulsi Gabbard was trying to mislead the public into believing President Obama had “faked” Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.

We went into great detail about how she misrepresented documents she had declassified to imply things they did not say. From the documents, it was entirely clear that (as multiple bipartisan research efforts had determined) Russians had tried to influence the election via social media, but had not been able to hack election infrastructure to change votes. Gabbard conflated the two things, using reports of the failure to attack election infrastructure to pretend it meant that there was no intent to influence the election.

So how did Axios cover this story? By focusing on how MAGA folks played their role in buying into Gabbard’s false narrative, talking about how they were calling for Obama’s arrest for treason.

The entire framing of the article is all about people who are believing the misrepresentations Gabbard made, and it literally takes 25 paragraphs (I counted… twice) before they add in a “reality check” admitting that Gabbard is lying:

Meanwhile, Gabbard’s accusation of Obama-era “treason” hinges on a claim that no serious investigation ever made: that Russia hacked and altered vote tallies in 2016.

I fail to see how this is “smarter, more efficient” coverage when it uses Gabbard’s misleading and dangerous framing for the first 24 paragraphs of the article, before adding in the kinda important fact check down towards the end of the article.

Doing it this way reinforces the false MAGA narrative and framing, and leaves people with the impression that there must be some sort of legitimate reason for the accusations.

But the more damning example came the same day. Two of Axios’ founders, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, published a column claiming that Trump was “winning” in his accomplishments while seeming genuinely perplexed why his approval ratings were at historic lows.

The column opens in a hilariously disconnected-from-reality manner:

President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways. Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation.

Yet poll after poll suggests most Americans aren’t impressed. In fact, they seem tired of all the winning.

This isn’t just bad reporting—it’s active propaganda dressed up as analysis. Here’s how that same paragraph could easily be rewritten by someone whose brain hadn’t been pickled in a MAGA brainwash stew:

President Trump has failed to do basically anything to make American’s lives better, while focusing almost all of his attention on culture war nonsense that decidedly is making lives worse. Massive tax cuts for the wealthy paid for by slashing Medicaid, sending the military in to our cities to silence protestors, kidnapping students and farmworkers, increasing the cost of most goods through foreign import taxes, breaking his promise to avoid costly military entanglements in the Middle East, and generally destroying American good will throughout the globe.

Trump promised a ton of shit he hasn’t accomplished: lower prices on day one. An end to the war in Ukraine. An end to fighting in Israel/Gaza. Oh, and the release of the Epstein files.

This kind of analysis only makes sense if you’ve completely bought into Trump’s own framing of success, and believe that his culture war conspiracy theory claptrap were actual real issues.

The mass deportations his base celebrates for their performative cruelty frequently target asylum seekers who did, in fact, follow the law, not the “criminals” Fox News obsesses over. The fact that Trump shipped many of them to foreign gulags without any due process seems to have escaped VandeHei’s and Allen’s notice. The tariffs that supposedly brought money into US coffers did so by raising taxes on everyday items—because, contrary to Trump’s claims, American consumers pay those tariffs.

Yes, he cut taxes. But mainly for the extremely wealthy, while stripping Medicaid from those who need it most.

And that doesn’t even touch on how he destroyed things like funding for cancer research, has made public health in the US a joke leading to a revival of measles, how he is pardoning criminals, and much, much more.

This is the Axios formula: adopt Trump/MAGA framing wholesale, present it as “neutral” analysis, then act bewildered when Americans reject policies that a cowed Congress rubber-stamped. They’re grading on a curve with a rubric set by the MAGA faithful.

Judd Legum, over at Popular Information, calls out how Axios has “rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity” and it’s quite true. Legum documents how VandeHei and Allen repeatedly invoke “neutrality” and “objectivity” while pushing transparently MAGA-friendly analysis.

Indeed, VandeHei and Allen have political opinions and express them publicly. VandeHei simply redefines his right-wing ideology as patriotism. “The American miracle rests on untamed democracy, the animal spirits of capitalism, the magic of unrestrained innovation, and the soft power of a vigilant and vibrant free press,” VandeHei wrote in a December 2, 2024, Axios column. “I’m a believer in — and beneficiary of — all four.”

On January 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated for the second time, VandeHei and Allen wrote, “Think of the U.S. government as a once-dominant, lean, high-flying company that grew too big, too bloated, too bureaucratic, too unimaginative.” The piece says Trump has a vision to remake government that “binds Trump with leading innovators.” The pair wrote that an “optimistic scenario” is that the second Trump presidency could “jar lawmakers and the public into realizing how a slow, bloated, bureaucratic government handcuffs and hurts America in the vital race for AI, new energy sources, space and overall growth.” They stated it is “correct” to believe “America’s government is so vast, so complex, so indebted that it makes fast, smart growth exponentially more complicated.”

VandeHei and Allen then outlined a plan for fixing the federal government’s problems — “cut workforce,” “cut costs,” “break stuff,” and “ignore the whiners.” While this is presented as a common-sense approach that a CEO would take, it essentially parrots the plans from the early days of the Trump administration.

Legum further notes that the “Trump is winning” article incredibly only quotes (anonymously, of course) from Trump insiders:

Notably, in the piece, Allen and VandeHei cite conversations with “Trump advisers,” “a longtime Trump aide,” and “Trump aides” concerning Trump’s record over the first six months. There is no mention of views expressed by Trump’s critics or even anyone not working for Trump.

The old “liberal mainstream media” narrative was always mostly bullshit—most mainstream outlets bent over backwards to seem “balanced,” even to the point of platforming the most disingenuous nonsense peddlers. But now we’re seeing the real thing: a media ecosystem where rightwing and MAGA-friendly outlets dominate the conversation.

Fox News dominates cable news by far. Tons of people get their news from blatantly pro-Trump right-wing podcasters. There are tons of openly pro-MAGA news organizations out there. And even the supposed “liberal” mainstream media seems to bend over backwards to normalize Trumpism and MAGA nonsense. The NY Times and the Washington Post go out of their way to de-crazify anything Trump does. ABC and CBS have both paid Trump bribes and promised to be more MAGA-friendly. Same with Facebook and Twitter on the social media side.

Into this landscape steps Axios, insisting it’s the grown-up in the room. When Legum pressed them on their obvious bias, they offered this laughable response:

Axios provides essential clinical reporting drawn from conversations with top leaders and experts. The analysis — never opinion — in these columns reflects that, and we stand by our journalism.

Call it what it is: stenography masquerading as journalism. Taking insider talking points and presenting them as “clinical reporting” isn’t analysis—it’s propaganda with better fonts.

Axios represents everything wrong with how media has responded to Trump: the pretense of objectivity while actively normalizing authoritarianism, the elevation of access over accuracy, and the complete abdication of journalism’s fundamental responsibility to challenge power rather than fluff its ego.

In the end, there’s nothing “neutral” about laundering fascist talking points through slick presentation and insider access. That’s not journalism—it’s complicity.

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

For weeks, ICE and DHS have been claiming there’s been an outsized outbreak in violence against ICE officers. The government preferred to use a misleading stat: the percentage. That way it could claim assaults were up 500, 600, 790%(!!!) in successive press releases and Fox News appearances, leading many to believe being an ICE officer was perhaps the most dangerous job in America.

Unbelievably, it was Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin that finally revealed the actual numbers behind the panicky percentage claims. A 690% increase in assaults meant nothing more than this: ICE officers had been “assaulted” 69 more times since the beginning of this year as compared to the same six-month period last year.

Now, there’s even more bullshit to unpack. “Assault” means something else to law enforcement officers who want to claim they’ve been assaulted than it means to them when they’re filling out paperwork for assaults reported by citizens. According to ICE and other law enforcement officers, “assault” means anything from getting handed a beating to simply being inadvertently bumped when “interacting” with regular people while performing their public duties.

That’s exactly what happened in Ontario, California, when a masked officer claiming to be an ICE officer attempted to enter a private area of a private building — namely, the inner rooms of a surgery center. Employees of the surgery center demanded identification and a warrant — something well within their rights. In response, they got refusals and one employee got an ICE forearm to their throat.

Supposedly, there’s an assault in here but all I see is someone instinctively reacting to an assault by an ICE officer — one in which the employee did nothing more than place a hand on the officer’s arm in hopes of dissuading the officer from further assaulting their coworker:

DHS has arrested two medical personnel at a surgical center in California for demanding that the officers trespassing in their building identify themselves & provide a warrant, accusing them of another…. wait for it… ASSAULT. The case shows how DHS lies relentlessly to violate the Constitution

— David Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) 2025-07-27T13:55:16.100Z

While the officer was probably salty that the staff managed to separate him from the person he had illegally entered private property to pursue, having someone stand between you and your illegal acts is not engaging in assault. Instead, it’s you — the federal officer — who is both ignoring the constitutional limits on your power as well as refusing to respect the protections extended to the people you actually serve: the general public.

Once this recording began circulating on social media, the Trump administration reacted like it always does: by piling lies on top of lies before scattering some criminal charges on top of its mountain of bullshit. David Bier’s thread on Bluesky unpacks all of it extremely well, but let’s hit some of the high points.

First, there’s the government’s bullshit, which was, of course, delivered by DHS head Kristi Noem’s second-in-command, Tricia McLaughlin:

In a statement to KTLA about Tuesday’s incident at the surgery center, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said:

“ICE officers conducted a targeted enforcement operation to arrest two illegal aliens. Officers in clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests approached the illegal alien targets as they exited a vehicle. One of the illegal aliens, Denis Guillen-Solis who is from Honduras, fled on foot to evade law enforcement. He ended up near the Ontario Advanced Surgical Center where hospital staff assaulted law enforcement and drug the officer and illegal alien into the facility. Then, the staff attempted to obstruct the arrest by locking the door, blocking law enforcement vehicles from moving, and even called the cops claiming there was a ‘kidnapping.’”

First off, it’s not “obstruction” to prevent someone from engaging in an illegal act, even if that person claims to be a federal officer. Even federal officers are not allowed to engage in warrantless searches of private areas not open to the general public.

As for “clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests,” don’t make me choke on my own bitter laughter. Anyone with a couple hundred dollars of equipment can crank out an embroidered patch at home that contains the same letter and then attach it to anything they’ve picked up from the local military surplus outlet. ID cards, badges, and warrants might be just as easy to fake, but that still doesn’t explain why this alleged officer refused to provide any of those things when asked to, as though all that was needed was an embroidered patch and the willingness to violate the Constitution.

There’s even more bullshit in this response, but those are the things that can be immediately gleaned from the officer’s actions, the surgical center employees’ response, and the DHS’s belated attempt to paper over a clearly illegal act one of its employees attempted to carry out.

The government is now pressing assault charges against two of the surgical center employees. That affidavit [PDF] directly contradicts the claims made by the soulless cretin currently employed as the assistant secretary of the DHS.

McLaughlin claimed this was a “targeted enforcement operation” seeking a known criminal. The charging documents say otherwise, as KTLA points out in its follow-up reporting:

According to an affidavit filed in the case, the confrontation began after two immigration officers conducting roving immigration enforcement operations in Ontario followed a truck carrying three adult men. The vehicle pulled into the parking lot of a local surgery center, and two of the men fled on foot when approached by agents.

There it is: ICE was just driving around looking for people who looked foreign and then sprung into action when the officers came across a few Hispanic-looking men. There’s nothing illegal about fleeing a non-consensual stop, but the ICE officer who followed the man into the surgical center apparently thought otherwise.

And that’s where the affidavit begins to fall apart. The government claims “exigent circumstances” (namely “hot pursuit”) completely nullified the Fourth Amendment. But the government is wrong. It doesn’t do that automatically in all cases and it especially doesn’t do it when the only suspected crime isn’t a violent offense. Fleeing from an officer isn’t always probable cause for further pursuit and/or arrest. Neither does looking sorta Mexican while doing it, as a federal court in California forcefully pointed out recently.

Even if you ignore those two factors, you’re left with the suspected “crime” of being in the country illegally, which is actually a civil law violation. And civil law violations don’t justify the abuse of warrant exceptions like “hot pursuit.”

The government probably won’t drop these charges because it’s too invested in pushing the narrative that ICE is beset on all sides by assailants. But it would be the smart thing to do because it’s going to have to explain why these officers chose to ignore the Constitution en route to being “assaulted” by people unwilling to be pushed around by thugs pretending to be interested in anything resembling actual law and order. And for the rest of us, we have another data point indicating that the exponential increase in “assaults” on ICE officers is likely just a whole lot of stuff like this where people are reacting normally to masked officers who choose to behave like rogue agents.

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

Let’s say you’re a federal judge, and you need to write an opinion about a securities case. You could do it the time-tested old-fashioned way: read the briefings, read the relevant caselaw, check your quotes, make sure you’ve got the holdings right. Or you could try one of these new AI tools that everyone’s talking about. Just feed it a prompt like “write me a securities opinion with lots of citations about scienter” and see what happens.

What could go wrong?

Well, you might end up like Judge Julien Xavier Neals of the District of New Jersey, who just had to withdraw his entire opinion after a lawyer politely pointed out that it was riddled with fabricated quotes, nonexistent case citations, and completely backwards case outcomes. The kind of errors that have a very specific signature—the same signature that’s gotten lawyers sanctioned for over a year now.

Now, there are a few possible explanations here. Maybe Judge Neals was having the worst research day in judicial history and just happened to make multiple errors that perfectly mimic AI hallucinations through pure coincidence. Maybe there’s some other explanation for why a federal judge would confidently cite cases for propositions they directly contradict.

Or maybe—and this is just a thought—Judge Neals used the same AI tools that have been getting lawyers in trouble for over a year, and somehow expected a different result.

The particularly puzzling part is that courts have been sanctioning lawyers for exactly these AI hallucination mistakes since 2023. If you’re a federal judge, you’ve probably seen some of these cases come across your desk. You know what AI hallucinations look like. You know they’re a problem. So what’s the excuse here?

Let’s catalog the damage, shall we? According to the complaint letter from lawyer Andrew Lichtman, Neals’ opinion included:

Multiple quotes attributed to cases that don’t actually contain those quotesThree cases where he got the outcomes completely backwards (motions that were granted described as denied, and vice versa)A case supposedly from the Southern District of New York that doesn’t exist there (probably confused with a similar case from New Jersey)Quotes attributed to defendants that they never actually made

The fake quotes are particularly telling. They sound perfectly legal-ish: “classic evidence of scienter,” “false statements in their own right,” “the importance of the product to the company’s financial success supports the inference of scienter.” These are exactly the kind of plausible-sounding but ultimately fabricated language that large language models love to generate.

Now, if you’re thinking “this sounds familiar,” you’re right. We’ve been covering lawyers getting hammered for AI-generated fake cases since 2023. Just recently, three lawyers got kicked off a case for citing five hallucinated cases. The pattern is always the same: cases that sound real, citations that kind of make sense, but turn out to be complete fiction when you actually check.

And you’re supposed to check.

The legal profession has been learning this lesson the hard way. Courts have been clear: if you use AI tools, you’d better verify everything. But apparently that memo didn’t make it to the federal bench in New Jersey.

You might recall that Judge Kevin Newsom on the Eleventh Circuit actually wrote a thoughtful opinion about how AI tools could be useful in legal practice. He went into detail on all the ways that using a tool like this only makes sense in a very narrow set of circumstances: not for drafting an opinion, but for trying to query the common understanding of a word or phrase.

It’s almost like Neals read that opinion and thought, “You know what? I bet I can do better.”

But here’s the really concerning part: this stuff doesn’t stay contained. Other lawyers in a separate case had already cited Neals’ now-withdrawn opinion as persuasive authority. Those made-up quotes and backwards case outcomes were starting to burrow their way into the legal record, creating fake precedent that could influence future cases.

Neals’ June 30 opinion has already influenced a parallel case also playing out in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey. That case also centers on allegations by shareholders that a biopharma company—in this instance, Outlook Therapeutics Inc.—lied to them about a product.

Citing Neals’ decision as a “supplemental authority,” lawyers for Outlook shareholders argued against the company’s motion for dismissing the class action.

This is the nightmare scenario that legal tech experts have been warning about. When a private lawyer cites fake cases, it gets caught pretty quickly by opposing counsel or judges. But when a federal judge publishes fake legal standards in an official opinion? Other lawyers assume it’s reliable. They cite it. Courts rely on it. The hallucinations metastasize through the system.

In that other case, lawyers for Outlook had to also alert the judge that the CoreMedix decision “contains pervasive and material inaccuracies,” which is a nice term for “judicial AI slop.” But, still, what a world in which you need lawyers to waste time telling judges that the cases opposing counsel are citing may be real cases… but are based on a ruling by a judge who appears to have used AI.

Bloomberg notes that there’s “no mention of AI in the complaints the attorneys have directed at Judge Neals.” Which, sure, maybe the judge was just having a really, really bad day and happened to make multiple errors that perfectly mimic AI hallucinations through pure coincidence.

But come on. Everyone in this story—the judge, the lawyers, the reporters—knows exactly what this looks like. They’re just too polite to say it.

Look, we get it. AI tools are tempting. They can draft reasonable-sounding legal language faster than you can type. But as we’ve seen over and over again, they’re also perfectly happy to make stuff up with complete confidence. That’s why verification isn’t optional—it’s literally the bare minimum of professional competence.

This isn’t really a story about one judge making some mistakes. It’s about the broader pattern of people in positions of authority not understanding the tools they’re using.

The technology isn’t going away. AI tools will probably become more sophisticated, and they’ll certainly become more ubiquitous. But that doesn’t change the fundamental responsibility to verify what they produce. Lawyers learned this lesson the expensive way—through sanctions, being kicked-off cases, and professional embarrassment. Apparently, some judges are going to have to learn it too.

The fact that he had to withdraw the entire opinion suggests these weren’t minor errors that could be fixed with a quick correction. According to the lawyers who complained, the opinion contained “pervasive and material inaccuracies.” That’s not a typo—that’s a fundamental breakdown in the basic duty to get the facts right.

So what happens next? Maybe Judge Neals will issue a corrected opinion—one where he actually reads the cases he cites and verifies that the quotes are real. Maybe he’ll quietly implement some verification procedures in his chambers. Or maybe he’ll just hope everyone forgets this happened.

But the broader lesson is pretty clear: if you’re going to use AI tools to help with legal work, you’d better understand their limitations. They’re great at generating plausible-sounding text. They’re terrible at accuracy. And if you’re a federal judge whose opinions carry the weight of law, that’s probably something you should have figured out before hitting “publish.”

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

We’ve finally got a Stalin to call our own. Just like Soviet Russia, homelessness is now basically a criminal offense, thanks to Trump’s latest executive order, which pretends it’s about crime but actually just wants to put homelessness people in places where other Americans won’t be inconvenienced by them.

Like most Trump executive orders, it’s got Orwell all over it:

“Ending Crime And Disorder On America’s Streets”

What’s the crime and disorder so troubling it needs yet another executive order that further expands the power of US law enforcement past the troubling amount it already possesses? Tough to say, since it’s the president saying it, and he’s never been great with words. Even with ghostwriters, this is barely coherent:

Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.  The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded.  The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.  Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes.  An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions.  The Federal Government and the States have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.

Yep. Drink that all in. DID YOU VOTE FOR THIS, REGRETFUL TRUMP VOTERS?

The first sentence does a lot of conflation in service of the ultimate goal. It also does the usual bloodlust thing where it pretends US crime rates are the worst they’ve ever been while not-so-slyly insinuating the (made-up) crime problem is the result of too much compassion towards the less-fortunate.

The conflation is followed by stats that aren’t supported by any citations. And that’s followed by two compounded assertions (again, without citations to supporting facts) that most homeless people are both (1) addicted to hard drugs, and (2) suffering from mental health conditions.

The final claim is the lousiest, at least in this context. Trump claims the government has wasted billions of dollars trying to “address” homelessness while never bothering to examine the root causes. Trump expects you to just sort of ride that wave of bullshit into the next paragraph — one that reveals Trump will also spend billions of dollars without addressing the root causes of homelessness!

Brace yourself. It gets ugly almost immediately.

Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.  Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens.  My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.

Hell yeah, we’re bringing back involuntary commitment! (Maybe the draft will be next!) It’s time to exhume John Kellogg and see if he can’t enema the homelessness out of the homeless. Or, more likely, we’ll just see whether it’s possible to torture the homeless out of people in federal institutions that are only indistinguishable from prisons by the orderlies’ willingness to be even more inhumane than the average screw.

It’s clear Trump prefers the indefinite discomfort of the unhoused to the momentary “disorder and fear” he claims routinely bother citizens who actually have houses and acceptable levels of substance abuse. It’s unclear where all of these unhoused people will be forcibly housed because the man who laid the groundwork for this hateful brand of conservatism basically burned that system to the ground during his eight years in office.

(Trust me, there are also a lot of eugenics enthusiasts behind this resurrection of forcible commitment because throwing “subpar” humans into inhumane circumstances has always put the lead in their pencil. This administration has no shortage of people with a head full of bad wiring willing to push people out the Overton window for the next four years, knowing there’s a pardon in their future if they happen to go a bit too Special-K during this particular purge.)

First against the wall en route to the padded room:

(i)    enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use;

(ii)   enforce prohibitions on urban camping and loitering;

(iii)  enforce prohibitions on urban squatting;

Legalize weed all you want but it’s still a federal crime, so get used to being abused, pot smokers who look possibly unable to pay rent. As to anyone else not fortunate enough to have a roof over your head, you’ll soon have one, even though it won’t actually be anyplace anyone would willingly call “home.”

This is just ground work, which is ghastly considering how awful it already is. There’s an undercurrent that suggests anyone not living in the way the Trump government wants them to probably has mental health issues. Nothing in this order suggests the erection of affordable multi-family housing might reduce homelessness. Nothing in the order suggests expanding the social service safety net might prevent more people from becoming homeless. That vacuum is instead filled with presumptions about the inherent dangerousness of homeless people, which allows the administration to justify them being detained en masse and tossed into whatever federal institution is still semi-operable.

The only mention of funds being allocated are directed solely towards”removal” efforts targeting homeless people. The only mention of addressing mental health issues is a series of restrictions that threaten to remove even more funding from existing social programs if they can’t demonstrate (using getting-set-up-for-failure metrics) what they do actually reduces homelessness.

Most specifically, the administration says there will be no additional funds allocated for actually providing housing for people currently without homes.

These actions shall include, to the extent permitted by law, ending support for “housing first” policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency.

“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” says the Trump administration, which first takes your boots because you’re probably just using them to stash drugs and then your bootstraps because you might try to hang yourself with them.

Now that Trump has decided it’s okay to lock up the homeless for being homeless while pretending it’s all about providing (forcibly applied) mental health care, it’s only a matter of time before he moves on to the rest of the people he thinks are sick in the head, ranging from transgender people seeking psychiatric assistance to political opponents he routinely publicly disparages as insane, stupid, or otherwise mentally deficient.

This is undiluted evil from an administration that’s no longer even willing to pretend its ultimate goal is to secure their existence and a future for whatever children are considered white enough to be given an opportunity to thrive in the former Land of the Free — a downhill slope greased with the blood of the less fortunate, overseen by an administration that is nothing more than a bunch of greasy, overfed thumbs pressing down on the scales of justice.

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

One of the bigger Trump election season lies was that Trump 2.0 would be “serious about antitrust,” and protect blue collar Americans from corporate predation. You’d have to be a turnip to not see that was an aggressive lie, pushed by a lot of folks (even supposed antitrust buster Matt Stoller), who seemed hellbent on insisting that fascists and authoritarians are not that different from folks like Lina Khan.

As it turns out, that was all bullshit. Trump’s second term has taken an absolute hatchet to federal regulatory autonomy via court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators. His “antitrust enforcers” make companies grovel for merger approval by promising to be more racist and sexist, or pledging to take a giant steaming dump on U.S. journalism and the First Amendment (waves at CBS).

There are still some actual populists buried within the Trump administration who might care about this stuff, but corruption ensures they have no actual power. For example, the Trump FCC and DOJ just rubber stamped T-Mobile’s $5 billion acquisition of most of U.S. Cellular, all-but guaranteeing the U.S. wireless industry gets even more consolidated, and less competitive.

Even the Trump DOJ’s approval statement clearly acknowledges that the added consolidation will be harmful:

“Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, a Trump nominee who was confirmed by the Senate in March, said in a 900-word statement that the deal and two related transactions “will consolidate yet more spectrum in the Big 3’s oligopoly, which controls more than 80 percent of the mobile wireless spectrum in the country.” She said the top three carriers—T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon—control more than 90 percent of the mobile subscriptions in the United States.”

You might recall that the appointment of Slater to the DOJ antitrust division was heralded as a super important sign that Trump was going to be serious about antitrust, according to statements made by guys like Matt Stoller not six months ago:

“This is a very powerful statement that Trump wants to take on Big Tech,” wrote Matt Stoller of Trump’s pick of Slater in a post on X. Stoller, who runs an anti-monopoly podcast and is a fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, added in his newsletter, “while it won’t be like Joe Biden’s, it seems [Trump] is going to continue some significant parts of the anti-monopoly revival.“

In this case, U.S. Cellular’s spectrum is being carved up between the three major U.S. wireless companies, with T-Mobile getting the lion’s share. Slater’s own DOJ statement clearly indicates the DOJ investigation into the deal found ample things to be worried about:

“The investigation nevertheless raised concerns about competition in the relevant markets for mobile wireless services and the availability of wireless spectrum needed to fuel competition and entry.”

Yet when push comes to shove, Slater either lacks the courage or the ability to actually stop additional mergers in U.S. telecom, which is the poster child for the very real-world harms of such mindless consolidation. As usual, the deal is dressed up as “necessary” to save the acquired company from irrelevance; the same lie the first Trump admin used to approve the T-Mobile Sprint merger.

The result of that deal was the U.S. wireless market immediately stopping all price competition among the remaining three major providers. There’s a lot of effort put into pretending that the U.S. wireless market is vibrant and competitive, but it only takes a trip overseas — where 5G is faster and prices are lower — to realize that the whole thing is an elaborate con that’s been normalized.

With the other hand, the Trump administration has lobotomized all regulatory authority, ensuring that it’s impossible to hold wireless giants accountable for ripping customers off or violating their privacy. This is the grand Trump 2.0 antitrust renaissance we were promised; much more of the same cronyism and corruption, while supposed antitrust pseudo-populist enablers stand around with a silly look on their face.

MAGA authoritarians aren’t real populists. They’re not serious about anything beyond their own wealth, power, and bigotry. Trump authoritarianism is the textbook definition of corruption, any deal with the regime is destined to go badly for people who live in the real world, and any official or policy expert who couldn’t see all of this coming a mile away should never be taken seriously again.

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The Canadian government is preparing to give away Canadians’ digital lives—to U.S. police, to the Donald Trump administration, and possibly to foreign spy agencies.

Bill C-2, the so-called Strong Borders Act, is a sprawling surveillance bill with multiple privacy-invasive provisions. But the thrust is clear: it’s a roadmap to aligning Canadian surveillance with U.S. demands.

It’s also a giveaway of Canadian constitutional rights in the name of “border security.” If passed, it will shatter privacy protections that Canadians have spent decades building. This will affect anyone using Canadian internet services, including email, cloud storage, VPNs, and messaging apps.

A joint letter, signed by dozens of Canadian civil liberties groups and more than a hundred Canadian legal experts and academics, puts it clearly: Bill C-2 is “a multi-pronged assault on the basic human rights and freedoms Canada holds dear,” and “an enormous and unjustified expansion of power for police and CSIS to access the data, mail, and communication patterns of people across Canada.”

Setting The Stage For Cross-Border Surveillance

Bill C-2 isn’t just a domestic surveillance bill. It’s a Trojan horse for U.S. law enforcement—quietly building the pipes to ship Canadians’ private data straight to Washington.

If Bill C-2 passes, Canadian police and spy agencies will be able to demand information about peoples’ online activities based on the low threshold of “reasonable suspicion.” Companies holding such information would have only five days to challenge an order, and blanket immunity from lawsuits if they hand over data.

Police and CSIS, the Canadian intelligence service, will be able to find out whether you have an online account with any organization or service in Canada. They can demand to know how long you’ve had it, where you’ve logged in from, and which other services you’ve interacted with, with no warrant required.

The bill will also allow for the introduction of encryption backdoors. Forcing companies to surveil their customers is allowed under the law (see part 15), as long as these mandates don’t introduce a “systemic vulnerability”—a term the bill doesn’t even bother to define.

The information gathered under these new powers is likely to be shared with the United States. Canada and the U.S. are currently negotiating a misguided agreement to share law enforcement information under the US CLOUD Act.

The U.S. and U.K. put a CLOUD Act deal in place in 2020, and it hasn’t been good for users. Earlier this year, the U.K. home office ordered Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts. That security risk caused Apple to stop offering U.K. users certain advanced encryption features, , and lawmakers and officials in the United States have raised concerns that the UK’s demands might have been designed to leverage its expanded CLOUD Act powers.

If Canada moves forward with Bill C-2 and a CLOUD Act deal, American law enforcement could demand data from Canadian tech companies in secrecy—no notice to users would be required. Companies could also expect gag orders preventing them from even mentioning they have been forced to share information with US agencies.

This isn’t speculation. Earlier this month, a Canadian government official told Politico that this surveillance regime would give Canadian police “the same kind of toolkit” that their U.S. counterparts have under the PATRIOT Act and FISA. The bill allows for “technical capability orders.” Those orders mean the government can force Canadian tech companies, VPNs, cloud providers, and app developers—regardless of where in the world they are based—to build surveillance tools into their products.

Under U.S. law, non-U.S. persons have little protection from foreign surveillance. If U.S. cops want information on abortion access, gender-affirming care, or political protests happening in Canada—they’re going to get it. The data-sharing won’t necessarily be limited to the U.S., either. There’s nothing to stop authoritarian states from demanding this new trove of Canadians’ private data that will be secretly doled out by its law enforcement agencies.

EFF joins the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, OpenMedia, researchers at Citizen Lab, and dozens of other Canadian organizations and experts in asking the Canadian federal government to withdraw Bill C-2.

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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President Trump wanted a war on Latin Americans and found an obliging partner in El Salvador, currently headed by President Nayib Bukele. Bukele has managed to bring down El Salvador’s homicide rate since he became president, but it’s more due to routine rights violations than any social programs Bukele managed to squeeze in between sieges of major cities. (Then there’s the fact that Bukele did the Donald Trump thing and fired prosecutors and investigators digging into allegations of corruption…)

President Bukele is tough on crime (that doesn’t directly serve his purposes), which is probably why Trump likes him so much and asked him to serve as a primary offloading ramp for the migrants Trump and his administration hate with a passion that’s only surpassed by their ineptitude.

Consequently, plenty of people wrongfully (or ignorantly) determined to be “foreign gang members” by the Trump administration and its extremely happy (to the point of near-orgasm) private prison contractors have been sent to what’s commonly known as CECOT in El Salvador.

CECOT stands for “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo,” which — as any person with a half-assed grasp on Spanish could guess — would indicate it’s a maximum security prison meant to hold convicted terrorists. But it’s obviously not limited to terrorists. As of this time last year, the prison held more than 14,000 inmates. Those numbers have swelled now that the Leader of the Free World is sending as many Latino-looking people as possible to CECOT, utilizing a super-charged ICE (and super-charged funding) and an extremely dangerous, dubious invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.

CECOT has been a human rights hellhole for years. Before Trump’s subversion of the State Department with the installation of bootlicker/doormat Marco Rubio as the nominal Head of State, it had this to say about El Salvador and its most notorious prison, a report that notably follows President Bukele’s elevation to the top spot in El Salvador’s government:

Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, forced disappearances; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including censorship and threats to enforce criminal laws to limit expression; serious government corruption; lack of investigation and accountability for gender-based violence; significant barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services; and crimes involving violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.

Given that, there’s no reason to disbelieve the personal accounts of the extremely small number of people who managed to secure their release from this third-party hellhole, one that now currently serves as the destination of choice for ICE-enabled deportations. Yes, the “Land of the Free” is aiding and abetting extrajudicial deportations that subject people only suspected of violating US civil law to all of this:

Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.

“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.

Humiliation and dehumanization at scale… followed by more of the same once they arrived at CECOT:

In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar.

And that’s just the stuff El Salvador government employees did to these detainees. And somehow, these prison guards managed to seem more threatening and violent than the thousands of alleged “terrorists” and MS-13 gang members these deportees were forced to share space with.

Of course, the DHS could not possibly give less of a fuck about what happens to brown people targeted by this administration’s racist policies. Instead, the diarrheatic mouthpiece of the DHS, Kristi Noem’s second-in-command, insists this is nothing more than another Trump administration success story every American should be proud to post to their own X accounts, like the DHS does when it wants to go full Lebensraum:

Asked to respond to some of the allegations in the accounts, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said the U.S. had deported “nearly 300 Tren de Aragua and MS-13 terrorists” to CECOT, “where they no longer pose a threat to the American people.”

“Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

To be sure, the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about crime victims. That’s why it has pardoned pro-Trump criminals and enabled multiple states to force victims of incest and rape to bring the offspring of their assailants to term. That’s why it has cut social services funding, even though it’s been demonstrated time and time again that a social safety net does more to reduce crime than throwing more money at cops. And that’s why ICE has just seen its funding quadrupled, despite most Americans (including Trump voters) actually being opposed to this regime’s mass deportation programs.

One direct quote from a victim of the bigoted evil now d/b/a “Donald Trump 2024-???” sums it up for all of us, even those lucky enough to be the fortunate(?) sons of the United States of America:

“This is hell,” Suárez recalled the prison director saying, “and you’re never going to get out.”

That’s the reality here on the home front. This administration has undone so much good and instituted so much evil (all the while being directly or indirectly supported by the top court in the land) that any successor to the Resolute Desk is going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy undoing this damage before they can even get to the very important business of improving life for all Americans, not just the white guys with bad hairdos, nonexistent jawlines, and the insane belief that the problem with America is its intricate blend of nationalities, rather than the extremely shitty people that inevitably manage to stumble into positions of power.

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Last week Trump’s FCC lackey, Brendan Carr, quickly set about rubber stamping approval for the $8 billion CBS Skyance merger, now that CBS execs paid their $16 million bribe to the king.

One of the key merger conditions to net approval was the installation of a sort of FCC “bias ombudsman,” who’ll be installed at CBS to ensure that the new network is appropriately feckless when it comes to criticizing our buffoonish orange king. Making the rounds on right wing propaganda networks last week, Carr ironically insisted this was necessary in order to restore trust in U.S. journalism:

“They made commitments to address bias and restore fact-based reporting. I think that’s so important,” Carr told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly on his show Thursday night. “I mean, look, the American public simply do not trust these legacy media broadcasters. And so, if they stick with that commitment, you know, we’re sort of trust-but-verify mode, that’ll be a big win.”

CBS was technically bought by the billionaire Ellison family, close supporters and friends of Donald Trump. So the idea the network wasn’t already poised to kiss Republican ass without a babysitter is fairly laughable. The Ellisons are already making moves to buy right wing bullshitter Bari Weiss’ Free Press and put Weiss in an “advisor” role at CBS News, which speaks for itself.

Carr then confirmed that the FCC is installing a staffer whose entire job is to make sure a major U.S. news network is nice to our sensitive baby king:

“One of the things they’re going to have to do is put in an ombudsman in place for two years,” Carr said. “So basically a bias monitor that will report directly to the president. So that’s something that’s significant that we’re going to see happening as well.”

This is amazing if you’re old enough to remember how Republicans whined for decades about the “Fairness Doctrine,” a long since-discarded set of FCC guidance (which was never really enforced) that required broadcasters to at least try to be “fair and balanced” in their news coverage.

The idea was never very well thought out or implemented, and wouldn’t have fixed any of our modern media problems today anyway (consolidation under billionaire ownership, rampant propaganda), because it only applied to broadcast, not cable. Even if you could craft useful rules, the U.S. government is the last institution you want determining what news outlets can or can’t say, as is being demonstrated now.

The rule died in 1987 and the Republicans still whine and gnash their teeth about it to this day. They’ve spent an entire generation holding it up as a symbol of government oppression of free speech (again, even though it didn’t exist long, never worked, and never saw serious enforcement). Now the same party has directly installed a government babysitter at one of the nation’s biggest news conglomerates.

It’s a cliche, but Republicans claiming to “solve bias” while at the same time ensuring CBS is biased is positively Orwellian. MAGA likes to throw “Orwellian” around a lot, despite having clearly never actually read 1984, and has absolutely no idea that they’ve become the devils they pretended to despise.

On the bright side: CBS is going to be run by David Ellison, the nepobaby son of Larry Ellison. There’s no real indication David has absolutely any idea what he’s doing. These major mergers are already always ripe for disaster, given that the huge new debt created usually has to be offset by massive layoffs and a notable reduction in product quality (see, for example, the Time Warner Discovery merger).

That creates a sort of self-cannibalizing downward spiral for media executives who then lack the staff, funds, creativity, or credibility to meaningfully compete in the modern attention economy.

And with the internet eating major broadcasters’ lunch, it’s very likely that the Ellison family paid billions of dollars for a network whose fortunes are headed to the toilet, and whose viewers are headed elsewhere. They have the potential to create a right wing propaganda bullhorn that rivals Fox News; but it’s just as likely their disastrous management turns the network of Walter Cronkite into a sad, historical footnote.

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It’s been a while since we checked in on Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Superintendent and all around assbag fascist. If you’ve read any of our previous posts featuring Walters, you know that he loves himself two things, and in this order of importance: Donald Trump and god. You can tell this because, while it was always very important for him to get teachers fired for showing such pornographic material to kids as well as — checks notes — books about race, he followed that up by attempting to install not only a Christian bible in every school, but specifically the Trump endorsed bible, thereby enriching a president of a secular nation through religious texts. And if you don’t understand why that is a problem, well, then you’ve missed a very fundamental aspect of what it means to be an American.

But again, the point remains, Walters loves him some jesus and hates pornography. Nevermind that his definition of pornography appears to be warped purely by ideology. Nevermind that what he calls pornography often is plainly not so. Walters is on a holy mission to worsen his state’s school system, which might just require divine intervention since Walters already presides over the state ranked 48th out of 50 in education.

So how did a recent board meeting go about addressing Oklahoma’s schools? Let’s ask Board member Becky Carson what showed up on the conference room display.

I was like, “What am I seeing?” I kind of was in shock, honestly. I started to question whether I was actually seeing what I was seeing… I was like, “Is that woman naked?” And then I was like, “No, she’s got a body suit on.” And it happened very quickly, I was like, “That is not a body suit.” And I hate to even use these terms, but I said, “Those are her nipples.” And then I was looking closer, and I got a full-body view…

I was so disturbed by it, that I was like—very loudly and boastfully, like I was a parent or a teacher—I said [to Walters], “What is on your TV? What am I watching?” He was like, “What? What are you talking about?” He stood up and saw it. He made acknowledgment that he saw it. And I said, “Turn it off. Now.” And he was like, “What is this? What is this?” So he acknowledged it was inappropriate just by those words. And he was like, “I can’t get it to turn off. I can’t figure out how to turn it off.” And I said, “Get it turned off.” So he finally got it turned off, and that was the end of it. He didn’t address it. He didn’t apologize. Nothing was said.

Now, as far as porn goes, this all seems fairly tame thus far, of course. But I’m still going to call it pornography because, after all, these are many of the same people who somehow think Magic Treehouse is pornography. To borrow a Gene Wilder line, “You know… morons.”

But relatively tame or not, this isn’t a story that is going away. And it’s not going away primarily because of a combination of rabid Republican bible-thumpers in the state legislature demanding to know if Walters was thumping something other than his bible, and Walters’ own incredibly defensive response to the whole thing.

State House Speaker Kyle Hilbert (R) is already suggesting that Superintendent Ryan Walters, the state’s hard-right head of education—the man who wants to put Bibles in every classroom—”unlock and turn over all relevant devices and fully cooperate with an investigation.”

Making the whole thing even wilder is the behavior of Walters, who was running the meeting and whose staff is now pumping out official press releases with gloriously deranged headlines like “Response to the Most Absurd, False, and Gutter Political Attack from a Desperate, Failing Establishment.”

According to his press release, Walters said that “any suggestion that a device of mine was used to stream inappropriate content on the television set is categorically false. I have no knowledge of what was on the TV screen during the alleged incident, and there is absolutely no truth to any implication of wrongdoing.”

He added, “I will not be distracted. My focus remains on making Oklahoma the best state in the nation, in every category.”

Oh, calm down, Scooter. Your job is to make Oklahoma the best state in the category of education, and you’re not doing a particularly good job of that. And this defensive reaction, while not proof of any wrong doing, certainly does have a smell to it. Perhaps one of desperation. Perhaps of inevitability. All I know is that when you start breaking out the “political attacks from failing establishment” lines right away, and against state representatives within your own party, well, something doesn’t smell right.

So we’ll see if Walters will turn over his devices to the law enforcement, which is reportedly doing an investigation. A refusal to do so would be telling, to put it mildly. After all, Walters has demanded the firing of individual teachers for much, much less than this.

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We’ve noted repeatedly how the U.S. is dominated by regional telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast that have spent decades working tirelessly to crush regional broadband competition, and have also spent millions of dollars to crush state and federal regulatory oversight. The result is a patchwork of monopolies that don’t try very hard on availability, price, customer service, and speed.

Increasingly, communities that are left stuck under substandard monopoly access are taking matters into their own hands. Like Michigan residents Samuel Herman and Alexander Baciu, profiled by Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica, who used their expertise in construction to build their own fiber broadband provider:

“All throughout my life pretty much, I’ve had to deal with Xfinity’s bullcrap, them not being able to handle the speeds that we need,” Herman told Ars.”

Now locals can get much faster broadband at much lower prices, which is almost always the case when it comes to locally-owned broadband alternatives. Herman and Baciu’s new provider, PrimeOne, offers locals symmetrical 500Mbps for $75, 1 Gbps for $80, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. Prices well ahead of what most Americans pay even in major tech-centric cities like Seattle.

Unlike Comcast, there are no pesky usage caps (though Comcast does finally appear to be taking some inconsistent steps back from the practice).

We’ve noted how the frustration with substandard broadband during COVID lock-downs in particular resulted in a massive surge in community-owned networks, whether it’s a cooperative, city-owned utility, municipally-owned network, or public-private partnership between locals and a regional provider.

Locally-owned providers not only statistically offer better, faster, cheaper service, as residents of the communities they’re often more directly accountable when something goes wrong. It’s a trend big ISPs like Comcast obvious don’t like, resulting in all sorts of dodgy behaviors ranging from lawsuits and state bans to the use of fake local consumer groups to try and scare locals away from the idea.

The Trump administration’s approach to U.S. broadband has generally been to destroy what’s left of consumer protection oversight, illegally dismantle laws trying to improve broadband access, and rewrite remaining government programs to the benefit of billionaire benefactor Elon Musk. The GOP has also repeatedly tried to ban communities from building their own broadband networks.

Some states have made community-owned and operated broadband a centerpiece of their broadband efforts, and were poised to use a large chunk of the looming $42.5 billion in federal infrastructure bill broadband grants to help fund this sort of access. But those efforts are also increasingly in question as the Trump NTIA attempts to de-prioritize fiber, and re-prioritize kissing Elon Musk’s ass.

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Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of “certain kinds of adult-only content.” The news rippled across tech and gaming news media, even for adult entertainment industry journalists like myself. But if it weren’t for the reporting of Ana Valens (which Vice then deleted) then we wouldn’t know the source of this “pressure.”

Collective Shout, a far-right anti-pornography group from Australia, has claimed credit as one of the key organizers in the recent campaign against Steam. And it was Collective Shout’s Melinda Tankard Reist who took the victory lap on X, claiming victory over “pedo gamer fetishists.” The group also claimed responsibility for the campaign against indie gaming storefront Itch.io. Many reports indicate that the Itch.io campaign placed critically acclaimed game titles in controversy.

Despite this, Reist’s supposed tactics of signing “open letters” to the chief executive officers of the world’s credit card companies, payment processing platforms, and financial institutions are not new ones. Collective Shout learned it from another far-right anti-pornography group based here in the United States: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). NCOSE is the same group that has published its so-called “Dirty Dozen” list each year, attempting to shame mainstream companies for engaging in “sexual exploitation.” But NCOSE and Collective Shout provide a glaringly broad definition of that term to describe anything that is even remotely out of line with their worldviews. Those organizations and other anti-pornography campaigners have used tactics like these in ways that led to rippling censorship across various platforms, verticals, and genres.

The anti-pornography movement has proven effective in pressure campaigns targeting payment and banking partners for companies and individuals who produce controversial subject material.

We saw this with Pornhub and the moral panic that journalist Nicholas Kristof kicked off against the platform in December 2020. Credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard turned the screws on Aylo, referred to as MindGeek at the time, due to the unbalanced reporting of a washed-up Pulitzer Prize winner whose unrequited hubris presents him as a carceral feminist with a White savior complex. This caused a crisis for content creators and producers who use an adult tube site like Pornhub.com for distribution and monetization. Kristof and his confederates were able to whip up so much moral panic that it forced MindGeek to rebrand and be acquired by a private equity firm featuring sex work academics, law enforcement officials, and lawyers on the board of an ownership group called Ethical Capital Partners. That’s the power of moral panic.

Using present-day numbers, the market capitalization of Mastercard is said to be half a trillion dollars–nearly $512 billion. Visa has a market capitalization of about $686 billion. Visa and Mastercard are the leading credit card networks based on market share, with Visa accounting for over $6 trillion in purchase volume in 2024. Considering the insane amounts of money flowing through these credit card networks, Visa and Mastercard could’ve dealt a death blow to the entire Aylo conglomerate before their makeover and reorganization.

Add the dimension that thousands of adult content creators at the time were actively enrolled in Pornhub’s model and revenue-sharing programs, the loss of payment partners like the two credit card companies could have been catastrophic. This is especially true if Pornhub did shut down due to Mr. Kristof’s columns in the New York Times opinion section in the five-ish years since.

Major players in the payments and financial industries are flush with great power. That power can be and has been used to censor forms of expression that are otherwise legally protected. In the vertical of sexual expression and sexual labor, the power exercised exceeds levels that could be considered unaccountable and inscrutable. There is extremely well-documented evidence – anecdotally, journalistically, academically, and legally – that speaks to this inscrutability: banks backing OnlyFans almost forcing the platform to ban porn, debanking of adult content creators, and the financial-related closures of independent small businesses that deal with sexual subjects.

To culminate this, the approach of Collective Shout allegedly pressuring the executives of firms like Visa, Mastercard, Discover, JCB, and others speaks to the love affair anti-pornography and far-right censorship campaigners have with the existing establishments in key financial sectors. It is a love affair that is incestuous by its very nature. This “incestuous love affair,” as I describe, is clear: the anti-pornography movement and the financial services sector have long been engaged in a relationship where one uses its morality as a weapon and the other uses virtue capitalism as a means to enforce censorship. All of this is in the name of supposedly protecting public decency.

This all came full circle with Operation Choke Point under the Obama White House, and attacks on sexual expression have increased with the administrations of Trump 1 and Trump 2. President Donald Trump’s policies and his bullshit “federalism” arguments for weakening civil liberties for us all have resulted in a patchwork of inconsistency across the fifty states as it relates to issues such as age verification, privacy rights, and freedom of speech. The example of the Collective Shout group speaks to deeply seated prejudices against millions of people who simply wish to express themselves freely online – whether it’s adult entertainment or a racy video game.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

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The Trump administration’s war on higher education has reached new levels of authoritarian absurdity. Not content with merely investigating George Mason University and its president Gregory Washington for his diversity efforts, the Department of Justice has now decided to investigate the faculty members who dared to support him.

Yes, you read that correctly. Federal agents are now demanding drafts of faculty resolutions, private communications between professors, and correspondence with the president’s office—all because the Faculty Senate had the audacity to pass a resolution supporting their university’s leadership.

Welcome to the Trump administration’s version of “protecting free speech,” which involves… attacking free speech.

Here’s what happened: When the DOJ opened its investigation into George Mason over alleged discrimination in diversity programs, faculty members did what faculty members do—they discussed the situation and passed a resolution supporting their president and the university’s diversity efforts. The resolution was non-binding, carried no legal force, and would typically attract little notice beyond the campus newspaper.

But these aren’t normal times for higher education, and the Trump administration apparently views faculty solidarity as a federal offense.

In a Friday letter to the university’s Board of Visitors, Harmeet Dhillon from the Justice Department’s civil rights division announced the government would be demanding:

Drafts of the faculty resolutionAll written communications among Faculty Senate members who drafted itAll communications between those faculty members and President Washington’s office

The justification? The resolution praised Washington’s efforts to ensure faculty demographics mirror student demographics—language that, as Faculty Senate President Solon Simmons pointed out, was actually a direct quote from a strategic document adopted by the university’s own Board of Visitors.

Solon Simmons, a sociologist who is president of the Faculty Senate, called the government’s inquiry “flabbergasting.”

“None of us has any idea why the Department of Justice is so interested in a matter of local academic shared governance,” Dr. Simmons wrote in an email.

Dr. Simmons said Ms. Dhillon’s letter was inaccurate. The language the Justice Department took exception to was not used to praise Dr. Washington’s efforts, he said. Rather, it was a direct quote from a strategic document adopted by the Board of Visitors.

“An outcome the Board committed to was to ‘faculty and staff demographics that mirror student demographics,’” Dr. Simmons said. “It is not our language, it is theirs.”

So the federal government is investigating faculty members for quoting the university’s board-approved strategic plan in support of their president. Let that sink in.

The hypocrisy here is suffocating. This is the same administration whose supporters spent years screaming about “cancel culture” and the supposed suppression of conservative voices on campus. The same crowd that claims to be the true defenders of free speech and academic freedom.

Where are they now? Where are the usual suspects who rage about faculty being silenced or pressured for their political views?

Apparently, free speech only matters when it’s speech they agree with. When faculty exercise their academic freedom to support diversity efforts or defend their university leadership, suddenly that becomes grounds for federal investigation.

This has absolutely nothing to do with enforcing civil rights law—it’s about intimidation. The message is clear: if you’re a faculty member who supports diversity initiatives or even stands up to defend colleagues under attack, the federal government might come for you next.

There is no free speech and certainly no academic freedom when this is the way the US government is reacting.

Of course, the DOJ knows it doesn’t have the power to simply ban faculty from expressing certain views, so instead it’s weaponizing federal investigations to make supporting those views professionally and personally costly.

It’s all about the chilling effects, which are very real.

This isn’t happening in isolation. Two other Virginia university presidents who supported diversity efforts have already lost their jobs this year under similar pressure. James E. Ryan resigned from the University of Virginia, and Cedric T. Wins was pushed out of Virginia Military Institute.

All this seems to have emboldened Trump’s cronies to go on the attack against any university they deem not to be toeing the MAGA ideological line.

The pattern is becoming clear: identify university leaders who support diversity initiatives, gin up investigations and pressure campaigns, then use the resulting chaos to justify their removal. Faculty who dare to support these leaders get swept up in the dragnet for the crime of supporting their university presidents.

What’s particularly galling is how this turns basic principles of university governance on their head. Faculty senates exist to provide shared governance and faculty input on university matters. Passing resolutions—even purely symbolic ones—is literally part of their job.

But now the federal government is treating the exercise of shared governance as potential evidence of discrimination. They’re demanding to see the sausage-making process of faculty deliberation, chilling the kind of open discussion that’s essential to academic freedom.

Faculty members said they were concerned that a pileup of investigations would be used to justify toppling him, as happened with Dr. Ryan.

“We’re worried it’s going to be high noon on Friday,” said Tim Gibson, an associate professor at George Mason and the president of the Virginia state conference of the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group.

The federal government, he said, is rolling out “a new model of how universities are to be governed — it’s much more top-down from the federal government.”

That’s not how American universities are supposed to work. Academic freedom depends on faculty being able to discuss, debate, and yes, even support their institutional leadership without fear of federal retaliation.

For years, we’ve been told that the greatest threat to campus free speech was overzealous administrators and “woke” faculty suppressing conservative voices. That was always a massive exaggeration based on a few stray incidents. But here we have the federal government literally investigating faculty members for expressing support for their university’s leadership and diversity efforts.

This is what actual government censorship looks like. This is what real threats to academic freedom actually are. And it’s telling that many of the loudest voices claiming to defend campus free speech have suddenly gone silent.

Take Bari Weiss and her The Free Press, which built its entire brand around defending campus free speech and academic freedom. Weiss literally started what she calls a “university” (though unaccredited) based on her claims that traditional institutions were failing to protect these values.

Where is The Free Press on this story of actual government investigation into faculty speech? Nowhere to be found. Instead, their front page is dominated by attempts to rehabilitate Tulsi Gabbard’s completely misleading claims about Obama-era intelligence assessments—including Josh Hammer repeating the blatantly false claim that the government pressured Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, something the Twitter Files actually disproved.

When push comes to shove, it turns out the “academic freedom” crowd is awfully selective about which academic freedom they’re willing to defend.

The Trump DOJ’s investigation into George Mason faculty isn’t about civil rights enforcement—it’s about using federal power to intimidate and silence academic voices that don’t align with the administration’s ideological preferences.

And the “academic freedom” and “free speech on campus” people are completely silent on it.

That’s not just an attack on higher education. It’s an attack on the fundamental principles of free speech and academic freedom that these same officials claim to champion.

Obviously, the Trump and MAGA folks are no strangers to blatant hypocrisy. But the way they keep getting away with it is when people let this hypocrisy slide without comment.

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I know it often seems like it’s bad news all the time on the Techdirt channel. And I’m sorry it’s that way. I wish we weren’t dealing with a daily deluge of new awfulness from the current president and his enablers.

But that’s what’s happening so that’s how it ends up looking here, as well as anywhere else election conspiracy theorists aren’t routinely asked to “comment” or “respond” to the latest wave of evil emanating from the White House.

On that note, let’s all enjoy this bit of winning, even if it will do little to deter Trump from being the frothy madman so many of his supporters clearly prefer him to be.

It has been said a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. This phrase exposes the reality of nearly every grand jury, which — unlike a regular jury — doesn’t need to decide whether or not someone is guilty, but rather whether or not someone can be semi-credibly accused of committing a crime. Hence the ability of most grand juries to speed run the criminal justice curve in record time. And, also hence, a grand jury’s ability to pin a crime on an inanimate object.

Despite having everything in their favor, local-level government prosecutors can’t even talk bored grand jury members into hanging felonies on their latest ham sandwiches. That isn’t making those with a bit more paycheck on the line happy, as the LA Times reports. In a city that has seen uninterrupted protests against ICE — protests that resulted in the (illegal) deployment of National Guard troops and Marines to the city — a federal prosecutor apparently lost his entire shit following a string of shutouts pitched by local grand juries.

US Attorney Bill Essayli is under pressure, to be sure, what with an entire administration full of bigots and delusional conspiracy theorists demanding 3,000 migrant arrests a day and enough exaggerated “violent protest” to justify the rollout of martial law in “democrat” states.

He cracked. And he did it publicly, although he probably didn’t know it at the time. Engage your schadenfreude engines, kiddos. Let’s have a little fun at other (awful) people’s expense:

A prosecutor had the irate Trump administration appointee on speakerphone outside the grand jury room, and his screaming was audible, according to three law enforcement officials aware of the encounter who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The grand jury had just refused to indict someone accused of attacking federal law enforcement officers during protests against the recent immigration raids throughout Southern California, two of the federal officials said.

[…]

On the overheard call, according to the three officials, Essayli, 39, told a subordinate to disregard the federal government’s “Justice Manual,” which directs prosecutors to bring only cases they can win at trial. Essayli barked that prosecutors should press on and secure indictments as directed by U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, according to the three officials.

Yeah, if I’m someone who wants to have a career as a prosecutor or lawyer, I’m not going to throw my lot in with Bondi and her DOJ. It’s career suicide, unless you’re a true believer, or someone who (more plausibly, unfortunately) believes this nation is headed towards decades of open authoritarianism. Essayli might be a true believer. His subordinates — no matter their current MAGA level — couldn’t talk rational people into accepting irrational charges.

According to this report, 38 charges against protesters have been filed by the federal government. So far, prosecutors have only secured seven indictments. Some cases have been no-billed. Others have been booted down to misdemeanors, which means neither the federal government nor the federal grand jury need to be involved any further.

Essayli was apparently hoping a lot of high level federal charges would bring protesters to heel. Instead, he’s the heel screaming performatively into a phone, demanding underlings bring him all the heads he’s asked for, even if those heads are no longer available.

Here’s what his office said in response to a request for comment. And it speaks for itself, even (or especially) because it says nothing at all:

A statement provided by his office on Tuesday accused The Times of spreading “factual inaccuracies and anonymous gossip,” but offered no specifics or further comment in response to questions.

Once again, the easiest way to determine whether or not something is true is to ask this administration about it. If it replies with a blanket statement containing phrases like “fake news” or “factual inaccuracies” without providing contradicting facts of its own, it’s safe to assume the reports being not-even-really-denied by the Trump administration are largely, if not completely, true.

Anyway, I just thought you might enjoy this secondhand description of a federal prosecutor losing his shit on main because the government’s bullshit was too much for even complacent, compliant grand juries to swallow. And there will be more failures in the future because a lot of America — the America this administration pretends doesn’t exist — is sick to death of this insanely swift descent into fascism. It’s one thing to check the Overton window. It’s quite another thing to shatter it because you’re too impulsive or stupid to see if it can be nudged open a bit before exploring your options further.

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