From the massive handout to already-wealthy Americans to the likely fatal cuts to Medicaid, there’s plenty to be disgusted by in the GOP Budget bill approved by Congress today. But there’s also a lot of little gifts in there to corporations that will likely fly under the radar, including a massive new handout of valuable […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.
All hail Jason Fyk, one of the most aggrieved “failure to monetize piss videos” dudes ever. In fact, he might be the only person angered about his inability to turn pee into cash with third-party content featuring people urinating. Anything that gives me a chance to embed this video (which also served as the ultimate […]
Back in the summer of 2020, RFK Jr. was leading the Children’s Health Defense organization, built on an anti-vaccination platform. The organization sued Facebook/Meta that year, along with several fact-checking organizations, for limiting the reach of, and otherwise fact-checking, its posts due to their inclusion of medical and scientific misinformation. CHD argued, in an incredibly […]
Way back in the day of EARLIER THIS YEAR, people could expect to be subjected to warrantless, invasive device searches only at US borders and international airports. Visa applicants, however, just needed to fill out some paperwork and wait for permission to head abroad to find work and/or continue their education. Now, you don’t even […]
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People have referred to CECOT, the Salvadoran gulag, as “The Prison that Nobody Leaves.” That’s one reason (of many) that it was so concerning that the Trump regime was renditioning people there with no due process. Indeed, most had no criminal record at all. This is why there were concerns that it would, in fact, […]
As predicted, CBS execs have folded like damp cardboard and decided to pay Donald Trump $16 million in an incredible and historic act of cowardice. CBS, seeking FCC regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance, wanted to settle a completely baseless Trump lawsuit falsely alleging that 60 Minutes misleadingly edited an election season […]
Book bans are all the rage these days, as you likely well know. Far too many people, and folks in government more importantly, seem to have read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 not as a lesson in the dangers of new media, but as some sort of instruction manual for how to treat literature. But the […]
A bill purporting to target the issue of misinformation and defamation caused by generative AI has mutated into something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out. The Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act aims to address understandable concerns about generative AI-created “replicas” by […]
According to the latest data on robocalls from the YouMail Robocall Index, the scale of the U.S. robocall problem has grown by another eleven percent year over year. U.S. consumers received just over 4.8 billion robocalls in May. We’ve normalized ceding our primary voice communications platforms to corporations, debt collectors, and scammers, and there’s every […]
The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They’re literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And they’re doing it all to cover up their own massive legal fuckups. Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We covered this last week when Magistrate Judge […]
The DHS finally decided to provide the underlying stats for its exponentially increasing claims of sky-high numbers of assaults on ICE officers. Earlier this year, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted assaults were up 413%, which was parroted by acting ICE direction Todd Lyons in his whiny response to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump’s questioning of […]
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After Donald Trump won the election, he was still so full of hatred, bile, and spite, that he sued the pollster Ann Selzer as well as the Des Moines Register. Selzer, who has been one of the most trusted names in polling, released a poll slightly before the election that predicted a somewhat shocking victory […]
While the GOP budget bill continues to include no limit of corrupt garbage that will kill millions of Americans (the cuts to Medicaid and rural hospitals being particularly brutal), one key component of the GOP agenda didn’t quite make the cut. Ted Cruz had proposed withholding billions of dollars in federal broadband grants for states […]
When it comes to the anti-piracy efforts taken by some of the more aggressive companies out there, such as Nintendo, the most frustrating part of the whole thing for me is just how completely short-sighted those efforts tend to be. Take Nintendo’s updated EULA for its Switch consoles, for example. The updated agreement makes several […]
I need to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: your refusal to call fascism “fascism” is not sophistication—it’s complicity. When Donald Trump posts explicit orders for “REMIGRATION” and “Mass Deportation Operations” targeting American cities because they are “the core of the Democrat Power Center,” that’s not “controversial immigration policy.” That’s mass deportation directed against […]
Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous […]
Martial law? Police state? These are just things the alleged Leader of Free World wants, rather than things a nation founded on rejecting these options should be in the process of instituting. And yet, here we are, barely six months into Trump’s return to office, staring down the barrel of both of these related horrors. […]
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