Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

 

at 10/11/26 1:00pm

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad replying to a comment about Mark Zuckerbergs past projects: I’d say the first thing he did was bring back the AOL silo paradigm. In second place, its MrWilson with a comment about the fifth measles-related death in Pennsylvania: My bingo card has the next uninked square of “Measles doesn’t kill as many people as the flu!” This is a great reason to do nothing about the issue, or even make it worse, so that measles has an opportunity to close the gap by even the slightest amount. Big Vaccine wants your children to live so they can grow up and purchase vaccines for their children! For editors choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Cathay about Trump keeping RFK Jr. around: RFK Jr has valuable qualities as far as Trump is concerned. He’s a genuine member of the Kennedy dynasty, a political outsider like Trump, and even less competent than Trump. That provides valuable support for Trump’s delusional belief that he’s he’s a great politician. See, he’s smarter than the Kennedys! The idea of doing the job of government is utterly irrelevant. Trump’s idea of “public service” is that the public exists to service him. Next, its an anonymous comment about Alabamas TikTok settlement: Feels like they found a way the make a “contract” that can’t be legally made with the state, laundering it in via a “settlement” Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous commenter making a good ol misplaced-modifier joke in response to New Yorks state of emergency around measles, and a sentence noting that pharmacists can inoculate the public, so long as they are at least 2 years old: One year old pharmacists still can’t, though. In second place, its TheResidentSkeptic with a comment about public submissions on the rules around midterm AI robocalls from Republican campaigns: Filed With this comment: I have no problem with these calls. They give me the names of the candidates to vote AGAINST. For editors choice on the funny side, things are pretty slow this week so well keep it to just one. Its another anonymous comment, this time about the White Houses midterm agitprop commercials: On TV commercials, when something’s shot in black in white, it’s either the bad, “before” scene, or a cologne ad. Thats all for this week, folks!

— This Week In Techdirt History: October 4th – 10th

 

at 10/10/26 1:00pm

This Week in 2016 Trump Campaign Threatens To Sue NY Times For Sharing His 1995 Tax Returns Yahoo Secretly Built Software To Scan All Emails Under Pressure From NSA Or FBI Yahoo Issues Tone Deaf Non-Denial Denial Of Email Scanning Report Trump Joins Clinton In Pushing For Cyberwar Trump Adds To His Anti-First Amendment Legacy In Threatening To Sue Clinton For Campaign Ads Details Of Charges Against Backpage Execs For Pimping Look Totally Bogus This Week in 2011 Merger Of The Also Rans: Rhapsody Buys Napster Copyright Trolls Invading Australia Amanda Knox Is Guilty… Of Making Newspapers Jump The Gun On Guilty Headlines Former Anti-Piracy Investigator Explains How He Fed Police Cases, Inflated Piracy Stats RIAA Law Lets Law Enforcement Ignore 4th Amendment, Search Private Property With No Warrants No, The Supreme Court Did Not Legalize Downloading This Week in 2006 Facebook Says Leave The Innovation To Us, Please, And Quit Using The Word Face While Youre At It Wal-Marts MySpace Clone Gone, Missed By Nobody The Problem (Insert Ad Here) With Advertising (Insert Ad Here) On YouTube If Terrorists Could Please Tag Their Blog Posts Death To America, The US Government Would Appreciate It Falsely Accusing Your Customers Of Software Piracy Is Not A Victimless Crime George Lucas Announces The Death Of The $200 Million Feature Film

[Category: 1, history, look back]

— Polling: Americans Uncertain On RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Stance, Very Certain That They Hate Him

 

at 10/9/26 8:39pm

In my many, many posts about RFK Jr. and his disastrous tenure as Secretary of HHS, there are two themes that have hopefully broken through all the noise. The first is that Kennedy is a miserable communicator, in a way that is totally purposeful. He talks out of both sides of his mouth all the time, such that hes able to claim to both sides of the vaccine debate that hes said what they want him to say. Go get the MMR vaccine hell say when confronted by a measles crisis that is spinning out of control. Then hell get in front of anti-vaxxer groups and brag about how he is changing the childhood MMR vaccine schedule, while claiming it is untested and dangerous. This leaves the public confused. Its how you get outbreaks of once-defeated diseases. The second is that the public generally understands that Kennedy is a problem and doesnt like what hes doing. We saw that trend begin in polling going back to the middle of 2025, as well as when the White House briefly flirted with understanding that Kennedys bullshit was becoming a massive liability for the now-approaching midterms. Well, more recent polling demonstrates both of these things together in one poll. The public is generally confused about what Kennedys stance on the MMR vaccine is, but they are not at all confused about the fact that they hate him. Lets start with the MMR vaccine. Americans’ uncertainty of where Kennedy stands on the MMR vaccine might in large part be traced back to Kennedy himself. He has rarely provided unflinching support for the highly effective vaccine. More than 1,900 adults responded to the poll, conducted from August 4 to 17. Of all participants, 31% correctly stated that Kennedy recommends the MMR vaccine, up from 23% in August 2025. But most indicated that Kennedy either doesn’t recommend the vaccine (29%) or are unclear about his position (40%). I will quibble slightly with the wording in the post, specifically the word correctly. This is putting way, way too much weight on Kennedys statements that people should in fact get the vaccine. While hes done that, Ive already described how Kennedy talks out of both sides of his mouth on the subject. Kennedy has spent his entire career claiming that vaccines are dangerous in part because they arent tested. Hes made other claims about the ingredients in the MMR vaccine being deadly or causing other afflictions like autism, even long after those ingredients were removed. To view his statement that he wants people to get a vaccine that he claims is dangerous and untested as though it came with a wink and a pair of crossed-fingers isnt in any way unreasonable. To claim the only correct answer to the polling question is that Kennedy recommends the MMR vaccine is simplifying things in the extreme. Later in the post, CIDRAP even acknowledges much of this when talking about the current measles outbreak. On August 2, after years of unproven claims about the MMR vaccine and an assertion that childhood vaccines cause autism, Kennedy denied responsibility for the measles outbreaks. “I’ve never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine,” he said on CNN. “A measles vaccine is effective. It stops measles in about 97% of the cases.” But the overall point here is that Kennedys purposeful waffling is the direct cause of a public that is confused on what Kennedy actually wants them to do to combat the measles outbreak and plays a huge part in the outbreak existing to begin with. This resurgence absolutely is his fault. Its his lifes work, in fact. And the public appears to be very aware of that in his favorability polling and the negative side of the respondents is getting more extreme. A total of 23% of respondents said that their opinion of Kennedy is favorable, unchanged from August 2025. Half report an unfavorable view of him, with 42% saying they see him very unfavorably and 8% somewhat unfavorably. While the public’s overall unfavorable rating of Kennedy has not changed since August 2025, significantly more participants said their opinion is very unfavorable in 2026 than in 2025 (42% vs 37%). That the White House hitched its wagon to this absolute turd of a cabinet secretary is strategic political suicide. It makes no sense. Trump could raise his favorability ratings full points almost immediately by firing this clown and committing to actually sound healthcare policy. That may sound like a small thing overall, but in the current climate of political inertia, it really isnt. I cant explain why Kennedy has such as grip on Trump. I dont know why it is that the White House is so enamored with this kind of political weight as it swims towards a midterm election that sure looks like its going to be a GOP ass-kicking. But I do know were all worse off for it.

[Category: 1, anti-vaxxers, hhs, measles, mmr vaccine, rfk jr., vaccines]

— US Postal Service To Start Exploring Its Always-On Surveillance Options

 

at 10/9/26 4:18pm

Here comes the latest in ho-hum dystopia. And by that, I mean surveillance creep has become such a regular occurrence that it takes something truly Overton Window-breaking to gain traction with the general public. But thats no reason to let this slide by without pointing it out. The government (at all levels) has a lot of vehicles. People in the government (at all levels) are now asking with increasing frequency, why not put a camera on it? Thats why weve got city sanitation vehicles wielding cameras for the purpose of generating blight citations. And thats why we now have the Postal Service do a trial run with always-on cameras attached to delivery vehicles. Joseph Cox has the details at 404 Media: The United States Postal Service is running a pilot program to put cameras in its mail carrier trucks that continuously scan roads and signs, map roadways and sidewalks, and improve “community safety,” according to a letter posted by a labor union and a statement from the agency to 404 Media. The idea is that, since the trucks are constantly traveling anyway, they can be used as a way to collect data, eventually potentially across the nation. “The purpose of this pilot is to leverage the Postal Service’s unique ability to collect this valuable data due to the scale and frequency with which our fleet of postal vehicles travel the streets of every community across the country,” the letter, posted by NALC Branch 238 to Facebook, reads. I always love it when the people laying the groundwork for a persistent, abusable surveillance network say things like leveraging unique [collection] abilities. For the most part, I think we were all fine with the USPS mainly being in the delivery business, with collection limited to getting the stuff that needs to go to somewhere else. It all seems pretty innocuous, at least at first. And, to be sure, theres a use case for what the USPS says it intends to do with the cameras: A spokesperson for the USPS told 404 Media in an email “The Postal Service is conducting a limited pilot to assess whether vehicle-mounted cameras can help identify roadway conditions and support community safety. The pilot includes privacy safeguards and requires no additional action from employees. Findings will inform any future decisions.” But thats what everyone says when they want to add cameras to places and things that didnt have them before: mumble mumble community safety and maybe something vague about privacy. Pervasive surveillance rarely rolls out fully developed. It develops incrementally. But the most important thing is to get the ball rolling and wait for mission creep to set in. If this hangs around long enough, it just becomes another set of cameras and recordings other agencies with less respect for privacy safeguards and even less interest in supporting community safety can access and, eventually, abuse.

[Category: next base, alpr, nalc, persistent surveillance, usps]

— Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Like Herding Chats

 

at 10/9/26 2:15pm

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations 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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon. In this weeks episode, Mike and Ben cover: The Official Sonic Discord Server’s Launch Went About As Poorly As You’d Expect (Kotaku) Vladimir Putins Forkiverse (Search Engine) They trade child sex abuse material. They find each other on TikTok (Prospect) Meta rolls out new AI tools to detect ads that secretly lead to child sexual abuse material (TechCrunch) TikTok gave teens, children placebo safety feature in experiment, New York alleges (Reuters) DNS Resolver Quad9 Rejects French Piracy Blocks, Weighs Exit as beIN Seeks Up to €580K a Day (TorrentFreak) And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover: EU drops sponsorship of disinformation conference at Trump officials’ request (The Guardian) EEAS runs scared of US disinformation debate (Rapporteur) Canada drops sponsorship of conference that cites U.S. as foreign-interference actor (The Globe and Mail) Our fun links this week include the Job Trail game and Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft City. Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and Bluesky for video clips from this weeks episode! If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

[Category: 1, discord, meta, quad9, tiktok, content moderation, csam, disinformation, free speech, trust and safety]

— Alabama’s TikTok Settlement Comes With An Affiliate Program For Getting Other AGs To Go After TikTok

 

at 10/9/26 12:10pm

The big Meta multi-state settlement got most of the headlines, and theres been plenty of discussion about how its a bad deal for kids and pretty clearly anti-competitive. Thats thanks to a very strange clause that encourages Meta to make its own required feature changes the industry standard by convincing other platforms to cut similar deals with state AGs. So far, YouTube has said it wont accept Metas terms, because they dont make sense for its very different platform. TikTok hasnt publicly commented on the Meta deal, though it did reject Metas attempt to run ads on TikTok itself urging TikTok to join the settlement. It didnt get nearly as much attention, but TikTok did somewhat quietly settle with one state: Alabama. They came to a $100 million settlement in a case that Alabama brought last year, claiming that the features of TikTok were addictive. The settlement came out on a Friday, just before the first such trial was set to begin against TikTok the following Monday. Given how weve seen juries more than willing to blame social media platforms for anything bad that happens to kids using the platform, its clear that TikTok was under the gun to work out a settlement that avoided an expensive trial and possibly more expensive verdict. On Friday, Alabama announced that TikTok had agreed to safety measures including a two-hour daily limit for underage users and additional parental controls to further limit time on the site. The settlement also restricts unlimited scrolling and overnight access, as well as the use of beauty filters and other features that social media experts have said are harmful to teenagers’ mental health. Most of those sound pretty similar to Metas settlement. But there are some key differences in the full settlement agreement. And the biggest, as first pointed out by Stanfords Daphne Keller, is that whereas the Meta settlement encouraged Meta to convince TikTok and YouTube (and possibly Snap) to sign similar deals and to pay similar amounts, the TikTok settlement appears to encourage Alabama to convince other Attorneys General to go after TikTok. Its weird. The agreement sets up multiple funds that are wholly dependent on other state AGs coming to similar settlements. The headline $100 million number is fund 1. The $100 million is supposed to go towards compensating people harmed by TikTok, but it appears that the Alabama Attorney General gets to decide how that works, and based on past settlements in other cases, Im going to assume there wont be much transparency there. Then theres another $16.2 million going to outside lawyers and litigation costs: Fund 1 is paid to resolve the States claims under the Alabama Deceptive Trade Practices Act (Ala. Code § 8-19-1 et seq.). $14,200,000.00 is allocated to attorneys fees and $2,000,000.00 is allocated to litigation expenses associated with this action (to be paid to outside counsel directly). The remaining $100,000,000.00 of Fund 1 is designated as compensatory restitution and remediation for the benefit of Alabama consumers within the meaning of Section 162(f)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code and shall be paid to the Office of the Alabama Attorney General to be used in the Attorney Generals sole discretion for any lawful purpose, including compensatory restitution and remediation for the benefit of Alabama consumers. Sole discretion for any lawful purpose. In other words, the AGs office can spend it however it wants, and theres no requirement that a dime reach anyone harmed by TikTok. Indeed, the chief counsel in the case has more or less admitted that the Alabama has no intention of actually using the money to help kids at all: Chief Counsel Katherine Robertson, who oversees the case for the Attorney General’s Office, said the money will likely land in the state’s general fund, though her office wants lawmakers to steer it toward Alabama youth. “It will probably go to the general fund, but we hope to have discussions with our legislative leadership about using this to really remediate the harm that’s been done to our youth here in Alabama,” Robertson said. But then it gets really bizarre. Theres a second fund, Fund 2, that TikTok agrees to pay, up to an additional $183.8 million, depending on if and when certain tiers of other AGs convince TikTok to settle: Fund 2 Contingent Payment Pool & Sequential Tiered Vesting (a) Total Contingent Amount: In addition to Fund 1, Defendants shall establish a contingent payment allocation pool of $183,800,000.00 (Fund 2 or Contingent Amount). (b) Vesting Tiers and Sequential Timeframes: Fund 2 shall vest incrementally across four (4) distinct tiers based upon state participation in qualifying agreements (including any consent judgment and settlement agreements) or Assurances of Voluntary Compliance (AVCs) (i) Tier 1 (30% / $55,140,000.00): Vests when ten (10) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the tenth (10th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Effective Date (Tier 1 Window). (ii) Tier 2 (30%/$55,140,000.00): Vests when twenty (20) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the twentieth (20th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Tier 1 Vesting Date (Tier 2 Window). (iii) Tier 3 (20%/$36,760,000.00): Vests when thirty (30) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the thirtieth (30th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Tier 2 Vesting Date (Tier 3 Window). (iv) Tier 4 (20%/$36,760,000.00): Vests when forty (40) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the fortieth (40th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Tier 3 Vesting Date (Tier 4 Window). I cant recall ever seeing anything even remotely like this. As regular Techdirt commenter John Roddy noted, TikTok and the Alabama AG here basically created an affiliate program for settlement enforcement. I honestly cant even wrap my head around the logic here. Here, weve agreed to pay you a ton of money to settle this case and if we agree to pay more money to other states, you also get a cut for being first in line. Think about the incentive structure here: Alabamas AG now has a direct financial stake in recruiting 39 other states to pressure TikTok into the same deal, on a deadline. I cant see how anything good comes of that. And, just as with the Meta settlement, this appears to be painfully unconstitutional. The settlement requires the suppression of clearly constitutionally protected speech at gunpoint. Agree to suppress this content we dont like or we will make you suffer through a painful trial, and possibly an even more painful verdict. The Meta settlement was concerning enough on its own, but now this model of AGs extracting speech restrictions through settlements is becoming a template, and its picking up weird gamified bounty structures along the way. The state AGs may get their headlines and their billions, but the real losers are everyone who uses social media and the First Amendment.

[Category: tiktok, 1st amendment, alabama, free speech, settlements, social media, social media addiction, state ags, steve marshall]

— Daily Deal: The Essential MATLAB & LabVIEW Mega Bundle

 

at 10/9/26 12:05pm

The Essential MATLAB and LabVIEW Mega Bundle has 9 courses to help you improve your skills in programming and visualization. Youll learn the basics of each and then go through hands-on courses building apps, learning about data analysis and visualization, and more. Its on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

[Category: 1, daily deal]

— Hey Platforms: Your Violent Content Policies Are About To Meet The Pentagon’s Firing Squad

 

at 10/9/26 10:23am

There is plenty of coverage everywhere you look about how Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon have announced plans to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer who shot up Fort Hood, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. There is plenty of debate about the moral atrocity that is a firing squad execution and plenty of comparison to the botched lethal injection execution in Tennessee last week. This is not the place for such discussions, other than to make it clear that the entire concept here — no matter how terrible Hasan is or no matter how terrible his crime — of the state putting people to death is a barbaric practice that should be ended. But there is one angle here that we can talk about that most other places wont: whether hosting the livestream would violate the platforms own rules — and whether theyll simply ignore (or rewrite) those rules to do it anyway. While its probably perfectly legal in the US to stream the execution, it still might violate the various platform rules that most sites have set up for themselves. (Hosting it globally may also create legal headaches in countries with stricter rules on violent, extremist, and terrorist content, but thats a separate question.) But lets look more closely at the possible platforms Hegseth might use, since the Pentagon hasnt yet said where this livestream is supposed to occur. X Elon Musks X is (duh) a likely choice. In theory, X has a violent content policy, but it leaves a lot of wiggle room for Elon to claim the barbarous execution doesnt violate its policies: You may share graphic media if it is properly labeled, not prominently displayed and is not excessively gory or depicting sexual violence, but explicitly threatening, inciting, glorifying, or expressing desire for violence is not allowed. X is a place where people can express themselves, show and learn about what’s happening, and debate global issues, often sharing images and videos as part of the conversation. However, healthy conversations can’t thrive when Violent Speech is used to deliver a message, and not every participant wishes to be exposed to Violent Media. As a result, we may remove or reduce the visibility of Violent Content to ensure the safety of our users and prevent the normalization or glorification of violent actions. We also do not allow sharing Violent Content in highly visible places such as profile photos, banners or bio. I would argue that livestreaming a government firing squad is excessively gory and, depending on how its packaged, glorifying violence, though theres clearly room to argue otherwise. And Im sure Elon will claim its not. The policy does do a little more of an explanation of what it considers glorification as well: Glorification of Violence: Glorifying, praising, or celebrating acts of violence where harm occurred, including expressing gratitude or praising that someone experienced physical harm by Violent Entities. This also includes glorifying animal abuse or cruelty. Again, I would argue the execution counts, because it is clearly celebrating an act of violence. The policy also says that it prohibits violent content in live video but again, I expect that to be ignored by Elons team. There is one concrete area of Xs policy that is interesting: Moment of Death: We may request the removal of images or videos that were taken at the point of, immediately before, or after an identifiable individuals death, if we receive a request from their family or an authorized representative. In theory, Hasans family could ask X to remove the video, and then the question is whether Elon would honor that request. And since the policy only says X may remove such content, it leaves plenty of wiggle room to say no. In short, the video will likely be shared on X, and whether or not it violates the companys policies really depends on a very subjective set of decisions. YouTube YouTube is the other most likely choice for streaming the execution. Here, it seems pretty clear that the execution video, on its own, would violate YouTubes stated policy. Violent or gory content intended to shock or disgust viewers, or content encouraging others to commit violent acts, are not allowed on YouTube. That said, YouTube leaves itself an out in saying theres an exception for content that is in the public interest. In some cases, we may make exceptions for content with educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context, including content that is in the public’s interest. Looking through that linked exceptions page, the obvious hook is that YouTube lists government proceedings as public-interest material that may get an exception, and you can bet thats what it would point to. But the same page lists content thats barred from exceptions no matter the context, including the act of decapitation. While this isnt quite decapitation, its still a pretty gruesome public execution. Meta (Instagram / Facebook) Zuck has spent the past couple years sucking up to Donald Trump after Trump threatened to put Zuck in jail for life. But Metas Violent and Graphic Content policy is the clearest of the bunch in ruling out hosting a livestream of the execution. In the list of things that it says Do not post is literally: Live-streams of capital punishments. The policy does allow still imagery of such content behind a warning screen and limited to adults, but livestreams of capital punishment are banned outright. I dont see any exceptions or language that Meta can wiggle out of for this, meaning that if it does allow such a livestream, it would only be either by ignoring its current policies or changing them. TikTok TikTok has less detail than the others in its policy, but does say they dont allow glorification of violence among other things. Violent and Criminal Behavior: We don’t allow threats, encouragement or glorification of violence, promotion of crime, or instructions on how to commit harmful acts. Again, the company (now backed by Trumps investor friends) can probably wriggle around that language and try to claim that the execution isnt a glorification of violence, though it would be wrong. Truth Social I guess we need to consider that the Pentagon might try to post it on the presidents personal social media and propaganda site, Truth Social. Truth Social has very unhelpful terms of service and community guidelines, that do say that when you upload content you represent and warrant that your content isnt violent: your Contributions are not obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable. your Contributions do not depict violence, threats of violence or criminal activity. But that is only the agreement with the user. It says nothing about whether or not the site will take such content down. In the community guidelines, it only notes that you can report content that depicts violence or threat of violence, but says nothing about whether or not thats actually allowed. In short, depending on how much these services want to bend over backwards (or should I say, bow down?) to appease Donald Trump and the bloodthirsty Pete Hegseth, all of them except Meta can make unfortunately credible claims that livestreaming an execution by firing squad doesnt technically violate their policies. Meta cannot say that. Id argue that the videos likely do violate YouTube, X, and TikToks policies as well, but it very much depends on subjective calls for all three. Again, as a reminder, in the US, all of these platforms are free to set their own editorial policies, including both what to allow and what not to allow. Remember, some of the earliest moral panic over how bad social media is came from US elected officials losing their minds about terrorist execution videos on YouTube. Its kind of incredible how far weve come: Now the US government itself is planning to stream a gruesome execution of its own, and any platform that pushes back will likely be attacked by the president and his supporters for not being patriotic enough.

[Category: facebook, instagram, meta, tiktok, truth social, twitter, x, youtube, capital punishment, content moderation, death penalty, donald trump, execution, firing squad, nidal hasan, pete hegseth]

— Cable Giants Ironically Plan To Sue FCC For Illegally Killing Media Ownership Limits

 

at 10/9/26 6:27am

Ive explored how Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr has been working tirelessly to illegally destroy whats left of already shaky U.S. media consolidation limits. Hes particularly interested in helping Trump-friendly local broadcasters like Sinclair, Tegna, and Nexstar merge and dominate whats left of broadcast TV news, as a very obvious reward for their loyalty to the president. Consumer groups, media reformers, and activists have obviously been disgusted by the efforts. But the efforts have also repeatedly pissed off other Trump-friendly companies. Right wing propaganda news outlet Newsmax, for example, recently complained to Carr because they feel the elimination of media consolidation rules will make their local broadcast competitors in the right wing propaganda space too powerful. Carrs moves have also ironically pissed of bigger cable companies, which are now saying Carrs attempt to greenlight a monopoly over local TV broadcast news will result in the bigger, combined broadcasters extracting significantly more money from them. As such, a lobbying org representing cable giants like Comcast and Charter say theyll soon be filing suit against the agency over the changes: The TV ownership rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Congress directed the FCC to set the cap at 39 percent in 2004. On Friday, cable lobby groups submitted a petition asking the FCC to keep the TV ownership cap in place until litigation over the FCC’s authority to repeal the rule is over. Theres no shortage of irony that this is what passes as media policy in the U.S. Cable giants like Comcast and Charter, which have actively (and successfully) lobbied for reduced scrutiny of their own monopolization and consolidation across broadband and TV, are now complaining that other illegal efforts at consolidation will be bad for them personally. They like it when Carr obliterates oversight of their own monopolization, but dont much like it when the shoe is on the other foot. This is all the embarrassing gesticulations of obvious regulatory capture and corruption. Trumps first FCC boss, Ajit Pai, was basically just a revolving door regulator whose interests fully lined up with industry. Brendan Carr is most certainly that but hes also a radical authoritarian zealot keen on censoring voices critical of his autocratic boss, and helping right wing propagandists dominate U.S. media much to the chagrin of some other, equally terrible companies. The cable lobby wont be alone in suing Carr and the FCC over its attack on media consolidation limits. Media reform group Free Press is also planning to sue the agency over its effort: Changing this limit requires congressional action, but Carr doesn’t care,” Free Press General Counsel Matt Wood said at the time. “He’ll do whatever it takes to clear the way for Trump-aligned billionaires to swallow up stations wherever and whenever they please. The result would be just one or two dominant broadcasters in every market, deep job cuts for journalists, and an influx of bargain-basement content disguised as local news.” Several of these bigger cable giants (like Comcast NBC Universal) have been lobbying the FCC to also eliminate rules preventing the big four major networks from merging as well. The plus side is that Comcast and Charter taking a stand against Carr policies is another indicator that big companies are starting to gain in confidence as Trumps health and political power wanes. In no time at all well be back to ordinary corruption and regulatory capture, slightly less tainted by the unpleasant, lingering odor of autocratic extremism.

[Category: 1, charter, comcast, newsmax, nexstar, sinclair, tegna, agitprop, brendan carr, cable industry, extremism, fcc, lawsuit, media consolidation, ownership rule, tv]

— Pete Hegseth Pretends Pentagon’s New ‘Religious Affairs’ Office Isn’t Christian Nationalism

 

at 10/8/26 9:11pm

Theres a certain segment of the American population that likes to really bang on about the importance of the First Amendment to our rights to free speech and the freedom of religion right up until that includes speech and religion they dont like. This same segment also tends to make a lot of noise about how America is the freest and bestest country in the world, full of liberty and apple pie and Ford F150s, or whatever the hell else gives them a jingoistic flutter. The reality is different, of course. Human rights in America in the modern era were never blazing any new trails, and religious liberty specifically has been on the decline for decades, particularly since the 9/11 attacks. Certain populations and sects of Christianity have enjoyed general freedom, no matter the gnashing of teeth you might hear over a fucking wedding cake or website on occasion, while many other faiths have faced all kinds of headwinds. Including, I might add, those with no faith whatsoever, who find their contributions to federal coffers routinely misused for religious purposes of which they want no part. Such as the faith-based offices that have sprung up within federal government departments ever since George W. Bush decided that faith had a place in the American government after all. It was inevitable that charlatans like Donald Trump would use that sort of thing to his advantage, of course, but the practice was also continued under Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And now we have Pete Hegseth injecting a religious office directly into the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is launching an office of religious affairs, the latest of his faith-related reforms at the Pentagon. He announced in a speech Wednesday that the office will help offer “first-class religious support” and will report directly to him. “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God, because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual,” he said. If a chill didnt just run down your spine, youre not paying attention to history. There is nothing more dangerous, as Christopher Hitchens used to say, than a man with a powerful army who believes he has god on his side. To cloak the Pentagon in religiosity is a dangerous mistake so obvious that it barely needs arguing. So much so, in fact, that the Pentagons PR department attempted to clean this up and make it all sound more benign. The Office of Religious Affairs, or ORA, will advocate for military chaplains and religious support “at the highest level of the Department,” according to a Pentagon statement. It will not “compel religious participation, favor one faith, or diminish the rights of personnel of any faith or lack thereof.” Yeah, Im going to go ahead and call bullshit on that one. Go read Hegseths remarks again and tell me if that doesnt sound like someone who is going to compel participation. As for the favoring of one religion over another, or of the faithless, thats already happened. And this office, bound by the arbitrary determinations made under Hegseths DoD, will be compelled to follow suit. The Defense Department also slashed the number of religious affiliations it officially recognizes, down to 31 from more than 200 previously recognized traditions. The list no longer includes atheists, Unitarian Universalists, pagans and Wiccans. And then add to it all that the military is currently in a bit of a crisis over mental health and suicides. Chaplains have been tasked in recent years to help guide soldiers in a therapeutic way for those suffering, but Hegseth is tired of that namby-pamby bullshit. The memo mentions “faith-based initiatives supporting Department-wide suicide reduction.” In recent years, the military has become increasingly dependent on chaplains to help address the growing numbers of troops in mental health distress. Hegseth has said he wants chaplains to focus more on God and less on therapeutic “self-help and self-care.” This is what happens when you let religion creep its way into secular organizations. Religion is evangelical and expansionist by its very nature. That isnt meant to be a criticism; it just is, definitionally. The original sin, as it were, was allowing Bush to open the door just enough to get a more benign version of this established. Perhaps it was even earlier, when the Continental Congress approved the very first military chaplains, even as they fought the Revolutionary War. The fascistic takeover of that religious infrastructure is, and always was, inevitable.

[Category: 1, christian nationalism, dod, office of religious affairs, pete hegseth, religion]

— The Metric Is Not The Mission: The Illusion Of Knowing Us

 

at 10/8/26 4:31pm

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life. The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place. Part VI: The Illusion of Knowing UsPart V explored what is lost when an open system becomes a finished one. Part VI returns to the question at the heart of the series: what happens when the ability to measure human behavior creates the illusion that human beings themselves have become fully understood? There is an old temptation that accompanies every period of technological progress: the belief that a sufficiently complete collection of facts will eventually become indistinguishable from understanding. It is an idea that predates computers by centuries. Enlightenment thinkers imagined that careful observation might reveal the laws governing society just as Newton had revealed the laws governing motion. Nineteenth-century bureaucracies believed that censuses, maps and statistics would render increasingly complex populations legible to governments. Twentieth-century corporations discovered that markets could be segmented, modelled and predicted through ever more sophisticated forms of consumer research. Every era has entertained, in one form or another, the hope that enough information might finally dissolve uncertainty. The digital age inherited that ambition and expanded it beyond anything previous generations could have imagined. Never before have private organizations possessed such detailed knowledge of everyday human behavior. The major technology platforms know what captures our attention, how long we hesitate before making a decision, which conversations draw us back repeatedly, what time we wake, when we travel, where we shop, what we read, which videos we abandon after twenty seconds and which ones persuade us to remain for twenty minutes. Individually, these fragments appear almost trivial. Collectively, they amount to one of the most ambitious efforts in history to observe human behavior at planetary scale. The achievement is extraordinary. It is also deeply misleading. Observation and understanding are not the same thing. The distinction is easy to overlook because the predictive power of these systems has become genuinely remarkable. Recommendation algorithms often anticipate our preferences before we consciously recognize them ourselves. Navigation applications predict our journeys with astonishing accuracy. Streaming platforms learn our habits so quickly that their suggestions can feel almost uncanny. The practical success of these systems encourages a subtle but important assumption: if behavior can be predicted with sufficient precision, perhaps behavior itself has been understood. And this may be the most consequential consequence of the platform age. The more of human behavior platforms learned to measure, the easier it became to believe that human beings themselves had become legible. Clicks became preferences. Networks became communities. Attention became interest. Prediction became understanding. Metrics became meaning. The platforms could see more of us than any institution in history and gradually became less capable of seeing what their measurements left out. Yet this conclusion rests upon a philosophical confusion that extends far beyond technology. More than half a century ago, the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek argued that modern societies possess a form of knowledge that can never be fully centralized. Much of what people know is contextual, local and often impossible to articulate explicitly. A shopkeeper understands the rhythms of a neighborhood without reducing them to data points. A teacher recognizes the confidence of a struggling student before it becomes measurable through examination results. A parent notices subtle changes in a childs mood that no questionnaire could adequately capture. This knowledge is not irrational. It is simply embedded within lived experience rather than abstract information. Around the same time, the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi expressed the idea even more succinctly. We know more than we can tell, he wrote. Human understanding depends not only upon explicit facts but upon intuition, memory, culture, relationships and forms of judgement that resist codification. Much of what makes societies function exists precisely because it cannot be reduced to a formal rule. Technology has always struggled with this distinction because computation requires representation. Before an algorithm can optimize anything, the world must first be translated into variables that can be measured. Human beings become profiles. Relationships become networks. Interests become categories. Attention becomes duration. Influence becomes engagement. These abstractions are indispensable because without them computation would be impossible. Yet every abstraction also excludes dimensions of reality that prove difficult to quantify. The political scientist James C. Scott devoted an entire book to this problem. Modern states, he argued, simplify the societies they govern in order to make them administratively manageable. Forests become inventories of timber rather than ecosystems. Cities become grids. Citizens become statistics. These simplifications are not inherently malicious; they are necessary for governing large populations. Problems arise when institutions begin mistaking their simplified representations for reality itself. The map becomes more authoritative than the territory it was intended to describe. Digital platforms confront a remarkably similar dilemma. Their models of human behavior are necessarily simplified because every computational system requires simplification. The question is not whether these models are imperfect; they are. The more consequential question is what happens when organizations become so successful within their own representations of the world that they gradually lose contact with the world those representations were created to explain. One sees hints of this throughout the contemporary digital landscape. Platforms confidently predict what will retain our attention while appearing increasingly uncertain about what earns our trust. They identify emerging trends with astonishing speed while repeatedly struggling to distinguish civic participation from performative outrage. They optimize conversations according to measurable interactions while overlooking qualities such as reflection, empathy, restraint or wisdom because none of these can easily be incorporated into engagement metrics. This should not surprise given that trust is not merely repeated interaction. Community is not simply network density and friendship is not the frequency of communication. Curiosity is not equivalent to clicking. These distinctions may sound obvious when expressed in ordinary language. They become far less obvious once organizations begin making billions of decisions each day through computational systems that necessarily privilege what can be counted over what can only be experienced. There is another irony here that deserves attention. For decades, Silicon Valley celebrated itself as uniquely capable of understanding people because it possessed unprecedented quantities of behavioral data. Traditional institutions, like governments, universities or newspapers, were often portrayed as slow, hierarchical and detached from ordinary life. Technology companies, by contrast, claimed to learn directly from users. Every click became feedback, every interaction generated insight and every product update reflected continuous adaptation to human behavior. For many years, this confidence appeared justified. Today, however, one encounters an increasingly curious paradox. Never have companies measured human behavior so exhaustively, and never have so many users felt so profoundly misunderstood by the systems surrounding them. Social media platforms seem endlessly surprised by phenomena that emerge beyond the boundaries of their models: declining public trust, digital fatigue, growing skepticism toward artificial intelligence, the desire for smaller communities, renewed interest in newsletters, blogs, private messaging groups and slower forms of communication that escape the logic of algorithmic optimization. These developments often appear puzzling only because they are interpreted through behavioral models that assume more engagement necessarily reflects greater satisfaction. Yet anyone familiar with modern cities knows that constant traffic does not indicate affection for the road network. Congestion may simply reveal that people have few practical alternatives. Likewise, continued use of social media reveals remarkably little about whether users believe these platforms enrich their lives. Behavior alone cannot answer that question because behavior is shaped not only by preference but also by dependency, habit, professional necessity and the absence of viable substitutes. This may be the deepest misunderstanding at the heart of Big Techs current predicament. The companies continue to believe that they understand society because they observe so much of its behavior. Increasingly, society appears unconvinced. People do not feel recognized merely because they have been accurately profiled. They do not experience prediction as understanding. If anything, the extraordinary precision with which platforms anticipate our habits has heightened our awareness of everything they fail to perceive: our uncertainty, our changing aspirations, our moral dilemmas, our search for meaning, and our persistent desire to belong to communities that are valued for something more enduring than their ability to generate engagement. History suggests that this moment arrives sooner or later for every dominant institution. Power often produces the illusion of comprehension. Success encourages organizations to believe that because they have mastered the mechanics of a system, they have also grasped its purpose. Yet societies are not machines, and human beings have an inconvenient habit of changing the questions they ask long before institutions notice that the answers they continue providing have ceased to satisfy. Perhaps that is the quiet reckoning confronting Big Tech today. Not that it has forgotten how to build extraordinary technology. Rather, it has become so accomplished at modelling human behavior that it has begun to overlook the one thing behavior can never fully reveal: what it actually means to be human. Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

[Category: 1, behavior, big tech, metric not mission, open internet, optimization, platforms]

— DNC Sues Trump For Wasting $20 Million In Taxpayer Dollars On Ineffective Midterm Propaganda

 

at 10/8/26 2:18pm

The Democratic party has announced theyre suing Donald Trump for his recent attempt to flood the midterm airwaves with propaganda hes falsely claiming are public service announcements. The DNC complaint was filed in federal court in Washington, and names the White House, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as defendants in what the party calls “a blatant violation of the statutory ban on the use of appropriations for ‘publicity or propaganda purposes. As we recently noted, Donald Trump decided to flood the midterm airwaves with agitprop, including a recycled black and white advertisement from the 2024 election cycle featuring the president walking down a hallway promising to smite his perceived enemies. Given Trumps abysmal polling its more likely to hurt than help midterm Republicans, but Trumps gargantuan ego couldnt help itself. There are a few different ads in the campaign. The catch: the $20 million advertisement campaign was funded by taxpayers. That violated not only Federal Appropriations Laws restricting taxpayer-funded propaganda, but also other potential laws like the Hatch Act and the The Anti-Deficiency Act. From the Democrats lawsuit: The use of public funds also places the DNC and Democratic candidates at an electoral disadvantage, even though the publicly funded propaganda advertisements are deeply unpopular with American voters, by preserving funds held by campaign committees and PACs—including MAGA Inc.—for other political expenditures. To try and pretend they werent violating multiple laws, dutiful Trumplings like FCC boss Brendan Carr repeatedly lied and claimed these were just public-service announcements despite the fact that PSA legal exemptions require some actual government service or program to be advertised. Vice President JD Vance also lied about this when interviewed by the press this week, going so far as to falsely claim the Trump propaganda spots were not partisan: Trump subsequently made a post to his personal propaganda website, Truth Social, claiming (for whatever thats worth) that hell stop using taxpayer dollars and instead fund the ads himself (leverage his existing SuperPAC cash trove): Granted this being Trump, theres been no indication anything changed about the ads or how they are being funded, and Trump cant legally direct his SuperPAC how to spend its money anyway. Early indications are that even if he does follow through on the promise to stop using taxpayer dollars for propaganda, the Trump administration wont be reimbursing taxpayers for the cost of the ads that have already aired. Republicans enjoy a massive financial advantage over Democrats, and are throwing half-a-billion dollars at midterm ad spending with the help of top donor and white supremacist Elon Musk. Theyre also doing everything possible to ignore or eliminate traditional restrictions on how that money is spent, whether were talking about the Supreme Court and FCC working in concert to give dark money groups the ability to spend unlimited cash on steeply discounted broadcast TV ads, or Brendan Carr weakening robocall rules so they can bombard voters with AI-generated robocalls. The great irony remains that Trump is increasingly so unpopular due to his empty promises, pointless wars, blatant corruption, and constant bumbling, that all the money in the world doesnt seem to be providing any real tactical advantage. If anything, slathering the airwaves with Trumps face seems more inclined to undermine Republicans in key House and Senate midterm races.

[Category: 1, advertising, agitprop, dnc, donald trump, illegal, polling, propaganda]

— FBI Whistleblower Says Emil Bove Directed Agents To Investigate Anti-ICE Protesters

 

at 10/8/26 12:13pm

Hey, this guy is a judge now! Let that seep in for a bit. Emil Bove used to work for the DOJ. Then he went to work for Trump, acting as his personal lawyer starting in 2023. Upon Trumps return to office, he was brought back to the DOJ to serve as an associate deputy attorney general a position that didnt actually require Bove to be subjected to the Senate confirmation process. Bove was fine with this. And being one of Trumps guys, he decided to use this new position to aid and abet illegal activities engaged in by ICE and the DHS. It was Bove who first instructed DOJ lawyers to tell courts to fuck themselves when faced with rulings that demanded the administration respect the law. It was also Emil Bove who pushed hard for the murder people in boats program the Trump administration has been engaged in ever since it first decided people from Central and South America needed to be killed to prevent them from eventually reaching the US border. This show of absolute loyalty was rewarded. Emil Bove is no longer just a guy who thinks ignoring court orders and murdering people in international waters is a fine way to run a government. Hes now capable of turning an entire circuit against Americans and their rights, thanks to his installation as a Third Circuit Appeals Court judge. Theres no reason he should be given this position. Hes entirely untrustworthy and has, at best, only a cursory relationship to the rule of law so often claimed as the high ground by Trump and his bootlickers. There was plenty of evidence already on the record that should have blocked this nomination, but all it took to install him in a position to do serious damage to an entire nation was a unified MAGA front that could override any opposition from the Democratic Party minority in the Senate. It doesnt take much to get a judge installed, as Trump has repeatedly proven. It takes far, far more to remove one who is so compromised they cant possibly be trusted. The wheels are greased and the trolley car has been directed to engage in maximum cruelty. And thats not going to change even if more dirt on Bove emerges. Nevertheless, we will engage with this dirt, which comes to us via a whistleblower complaint about Boves activities during his relatively brief tenure as a top DOJ prosecutor. Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, made a formal whistleblower complaint to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders over the federal response to anti-ICE protest activity around federal buildings, as well as in a residential area, early last year. [] Fields says Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, told the head of the field office to open an investigation into activities outside the federal building even though, she says, the activities were protected free speech. Separately, she says the White House gave a directive to FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate a group of protesters using megaphones during immigration enforcement operations after FBI agents had conducted a check into the conduct and declined to open an investigation. Theres no pretending this doesnt sound exactly like something Bove would have directed and approved. After all, he was already giving his blessing to boat strikes and courtroom fuck yous at this point. The whistleblower report [PDF] goes into more detail about Boves actions, demands, and general disregard for constitutional rights. First, it details how FBI agents and officers were taken off task to help Trump fight his War on Los Angeles that was a vindictive offshoot of his general War on Migrants. It also details the administrations desire to do these things while adding as little as possible to the public record. From the very start of the second Trump administration, Ms. Fields and her colleagues at the Los Angeles Field Office were instructed by Field Office leadership, including the Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC), the Special Agents in Charge (SACs), the Assistant Special Agents in Charge (ASACs), and the Senior Supervisory Intelligence Analysts (SSIAs), through emails and directives in meetings, to support what they called a nationwide “big immigration push” to takeplace across multiple “weeks of action” that would begin in February and continue throughout the year. The initiative included assigning agents Title 8 authorities, directing intelligence analysts to conduct checks on lists of immigrants, and supporting immigration-related arrests across FBI Field Offices nationwide. During meetings on this initiative, Ms. Fields experienced supervisors encouraging her and others to not put things in writing and noticed many directives and subsequent discussions were conducted in face-to-face meetings rather than over email. Not only were agents redirected to support the big immigration push, they were told not to create any written documentation of their actions in support of Trumps bigotry. The FBI no longer served the public or the ideal of public safety. What FBI agents in the Los Angeles area were instructed to do was make their superiors look good in front of the boss. [A]gents were pulled off active cartel cases to satisfy what her supervisor, , described as “optics” designed to “make a show for the president.” Meanwhile, ICE and DHS were busy making themselves look worse. Whatever wasnt an obvious lie about the situation in Los Angeles was a series of boots on the ground debacles that failed to produces the thousands of migrant arrests the administration had already told its voting base were all but inevitable. Either Bove sensed some impending displeasure or was just a hideous human being who should never have been allowed to become a judge. Whatever the case, Bove while still holding a position as a top DOJ prosecutor directed the FBI to start investigating peaceful protesters simply because they were protesting the government that now employed him. In late January or early February 2025, shortly before a standing 4:00 pm Pacific Timemeeting including SACs, ASACs, SSIAs, and the Los Angeles Criminal Program’s Mission Support Analyst regarding the immigration push, [redacted] came to Ms. Fields’s office, shut the door, and informed her that Department of Justice (DOJ) former Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove had instructed Akil Davis, the ADIC of the Los Angeles FBI Field Office, to open an investigation into any anti-ICE and CBP protesters demonstrating at federal buildings in Los Angeles. The FBI knows constitutionally protected activity can never form the basis for an investigation. And it ignores this knowledge with alarming regularity. But this is Trumps DOJ, which not only spends most of its time satisfying his bigotry and revenge fantasies, but also hasnt met a right it doesnt feel comfortable violating (Second Amendment excluded). That Bove would be the lapdog Trump wants to see in the world is unsurprising. What is surprising is that an agent would actually file a whistleblower report while overseen by an administration that has been rooting out dissent since day one, and would gladly hang any dissenter if it didnt have to hammer out a contract with Dana White first. Anyone who isnt a loyalist will soon be unemployed. And those who dare to peep above the parapet will be the first against the wall. This report is essential. But its being handed to people who cant do anything about it and raises issues the current administration views as features, rather than bugs. And it certainly wont get Bove booted back to where he should be: just another Trump lawyer wondering when hes going to get paid for protecting Mr. MAGA from the consequences of his own actions.

[Category: 1, 1st amendment, emil bove, fbi, ice, jill fields, mass deportation, rights violations, trump administration, whistleblower]

— Daily Deal: The iPhotography Training Course

 

at 10/8/26 12:08pm

From exposure to shutter speed and everything in between, this award-winning training walks you through the nuts and bolts behind capturing truly stunning photos. iPhotography is the leading online photography choice of aspiring photographers worldwide, and its easy to see why. Each of this courses 18 modules has been carefully constructed and feature personal mentorship from award-winning photographers along the way, taking you from zero to hero with your camera in no time. Its on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

[Category: 1, daily deal]

— US Gov’t Interferes To Get Foreign Sponsors To Drop Conference Because A Panel Asks If The US Engages In Foreign Information Interference

 

at 10/8/26 10:35am

One of the most bizarre things over the last few years is how two guys, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, bumbling around cosplaying as free speech experts, have done tremendous damage to free speech. After Elon Musk brought them in to report on the so-called Twitter Files, the two of them spun up nonsense tales of conspiracy theories that didnt exist, either because they were too clueless to understand what they were looking at, or because they knew there was a grift in screaming censorship where it didnt actually exist. The whole premise of this made up theory of a censorship industrial complex is the idea that anyone who does any kind of research on disinformation is secretly a government censor. These two bumbling doofuses cant comprehend that there could possibly be any reason ever to study disinformation and propaganda, except to censor. And, because of them running around screaming censorship at thoughtful research on how propaganda spreads, theyve been able to lean on their government connections to create actual censorship, silencing researchers across the globe. Shellenberger was at it again this week. Theres a conference happening right now in Vilnius, Lithuania, called #Disinfo2026, hosted by the EU Disinfo Lab, which (as the name implies) does a ton of work studying disinformation, including how its created, how to respond to it, how it spreads, and its potential impact on democracy. Unlike Shellenberger, Ive spent plenty of time with actual disinformation researchers and recognize that there is a wide variety of (often conflicting) beliefs about how to deal with disinformation, the most common of which is figuring out how to use counter speech to respond to disinformation campaigns. While there absolutely are exceptions — people who believe that suppression is the right approach — it is far from the most common view within the disinformation ecosystem. If anything, a lot of disinformation research is explicitly about finding alternatives to censorship, because most disinfo experts know that actual censorship tends to backfire (hold that thought). But, because Shellenberger — who has a job at Bari Weisss flailing fake university as the Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech — thinks that the only purpose of disinformation research is censorship, he spent the last few days on a campaign to demonize the entire conference as yet another gathering in the Censorship Industrial Complex focused on how to censor speech. That, of course, is not what the conference is about at all. But Shellenberger, posing as a journalist, sent a bunch of participants emails in the last few days asking fairly silly questions about the conference. For example, he sent an email with a bunch of questions to someone who runs an independent spam labeling service on Bluesky (because, you know, on Bluesky anyone can build their own moderation tools). A bunch of other researchers reported receiving similar emails. Indeed, in every email Shellenberger seemed especially focused on one particular issue: how the attendees of the conference felt about whether or not the US government is a source of foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) in Europe. Then, the day of the conference, attendees noticed that signs at the conference appeared to have had the logos of sponsoring countries and orgs — namely Canada, Lithuania (where the event was being held!), and the European External Action Service, the EUs diplomatic arm — hastily covered up as they apparently pulled out of having their sponsorship listed either the day before or the morning of the conference. A running theme of #Disinfo2026h this year is about the US as FIMI actor.In a completely unrelated turn of events, a few sponsors pulled out at the last moment, including the @eudiplomacy.bsky.social (yet another case of our institutions making me ashamed to be European). — Robin Berjon (@robin.berjon.com) 2026-10-07T08:26:25.459Z A few hours later, The Guardian found out that the US State Department was actually responsible, leaning on the governments sponsoring the conference until they pulled their support — and then thanking them for it. Three persons familiar with the matter, including European officials, confirmed that the US state department had been in touch with multiple governments over their support for the conference. Internal state department documents seen by the Guardian also show US officials thanking Lithuania for “taking US concerns seriously”. The main issue? One panel, out of many at the conference, asked whether the United States itself should be viewed as a foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) threat the very same issue that Shellenberger seemed so focused on. The document says Washington was “grateful” Lithuania supposedly found a panel framing the US as a foreign information threat “reprehensible and surprising” and welcomed its decision to limit involvement in the conference. That panel – called “USA as a FIMI threat: adapt, acknowledge, push back”, with the acronym FIMI referring to “foreign information manipulation and interference” – took place Wednesday. It explored how Europe’s disinformation community could rebuild resilience without Washington, and is the first time the conference appears to have entertained the idea that the US could be a disinformation actor in Europe. Sources and the internal document indicate the state department was explicitly focused on this panel Indeed, soon after the sponsorships were pulled and before anyone had publicly reported it, Shellenberger emailed at least some attendees yet again, pointing out that the sponsorships had been pulled, and asking them more questions about their participation in light of the dropped sponsors. Yeah, let me repeat that so were abundantly clear: we had a guy who cosplays as a free speech supporter trying to drum up propaganda attacking a disinformation conference because one panel of many asks the question of whether or not the US engages in foreign information manipulation. Around the same time, the State Department reaches out to sponsors of the event to literally engage in foreign information manipulation and interference because the US government is upset that anyone wants to discuss how the United States might engage in foreign information manipulation and interference. Its a hypocrite turducken. After this started getting some attention, the State Department tried to defend its censorial lobbying efforts: The U.S. State Department criticized the conference for proposing that the United States is a source of foreign interference and manipulated information. “The organizers appear to put the United States in the same bucket as foreign adversaries,” the department said in an e-mailed statement. “This false equivalence is antithetical to the goals these individuals claim to promote and obscures the scale and nature of adversarial interference.” Knowing how these conferences work, its not the organizers who did this, but whoever proposed this panel. And, more to the point, by threatening sponsors of this event for their participation in a foreign conference about speech, the US is kind of confirming that it absolutely is a foreign adversary when it comes to interference and manipulating information. Not surprisingly, at least some of the communications appear to have come from the office of the State Departments top censor, Sarah Rogers, who literally a few days ago (I was there) spoke at the Future of Free Speech Summit about how important free speech was to her, as an American. Apparently, that support for free speech does not extend to anyone talking about the USs propaganda efforts. According to one person familiar with the deliberations, other communications appeared to originate from the office of Sarah B Rogers, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Also, this is absolute bullshit: In statements, Lithuania, Canada and the EU said the program of the conference did not align with their official views on the US role in disinformation – although that program had been in place for months before they withdrew their support, since June. “Lithuania has cancelled its participation in ‘Disinfo 2026’ as several parts of the conference programme differ from the official position of the Government,” Lithuania’s foreign ministry wrote in a statement. Global Affairs Canada “carefully assesses participation in, and sponsorship of, external events on a case-by-case basis,” GAC spokesperson Samantha Lafleur said. “Following changes to the framing of several panel discussions, GAC decided to revise its participation in those sessions at the EU DisinfoLab 2026 conference.” . An EU spokesperson confirmed that the European External Action Service had decided to withdraw its support from the conference because “the organisers chose to frame some of the discussions in a way which does not align with the official positions held by the EU.” Canada, at least, tries to defend its position by saying the framing changed, but the Guardian points out that the program has been public since June. The other statements are just weird. Do they mean that other conferences sponsored by Canada, the EU, or Lithuania only take place after those three have carefully vetted and approved all speakers and topics? Because that would seem like more of a free speech problem than having a single panel discussing how the US engages in foreign propaganda campaigns. The only supporter of this conference who comes out of this with any principles is, surprisingly, France: A diplomatic source at France’s foreign ministry said “there’s absolutely no reason for us to change our commitments” when it came to supporting the conference. “We stick to supporting civil society. It’s not just principled, it’s operational,” she said, adding that the conference was a “laboratory” that helped Europe develop key policy around disinformation. Theres no way to get around this: this is the same US State Department that has exiled critics in the name of free speech, with a censorial guy who pretends to be a supporter of free speech as their warm-up act, making sure that there can be no discussion about how the US itself engages in foreign propaganda campaigns. Except, of course, as both Rogers and Shellenberger should know by now, the Streisand Effect remains undefeated. And now tons of people who had never heard of a conference panel on America as a foreign propaganda threat know all about it. The main takeaway from this year’s #Disinfo2026 conference will be about Streisand effect. — Nicolas Hénin (@nicolashenin.net) 2026-10-07T08:46:45.464Z Hopefully, next years disinfo conference includes a panel on The Streisand Effect.

[Category: eu disinfo lab, canada, disinfo 2026, eu, fimi, foreign interference, france, lithuania, michael shellenberger, sarah rogers, state department, streisand effect]

— Right On Cue: Here Comes The Skydance/Paramount Layoffs

 

at 10/8/26 6:29am

You can set your watch to it. Major media companies insist they simply have to merge to create all manner of amazing new consolidative synergies. The debt from the acquisitions then result in brand and company cannibalization as labor and consumers are forced to carry the load. The net result is mass layoffs, higher prices, and shittier products from corner cutting. Typical enshittification. It used to be that after a major acquisition, executives would spend six months to a year at least pretending there were no labor downsides to consolidation. Now they dont even bother. The Ellison family and Paramount/Skydance/Warner Bros executives are already warning staff of major impending layoffs as redundancies are eliminated and workers are forced to pay off $82 billion in debt. But worry not, in a memo to staff by Skydance CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, the duo states that coming mass terminations will be conducted thoughtfully and respectfully: “Integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce,” the execs wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Variety. “We are committed to handling this process thoughtfully and respectfully.” The mass firings are, employees are told, part of building a culture where people feel supported and empowered: We must never lose sight of what matters most: our people. We will build a culture where people feel respected, empowered, supported and proud of the work they do.” Its important to recall that Skydance was first created years ago by Larry Ellison as an avenue that would allow his son David to pretend he was an actor. Like most extraction-class brunchlords, David has just failed upward ever since, to the point where hes now in charge of most of Hollywoods biggest studios. Paramount execs say theyre aiming to create more than $6 billion in annualized cost savings over three years, most of which will come from layoffs (despite claims to the contrary by deal architect and RedBird Capital Partners boss Gerry Cardinale). Recall that when AT&T bungled its dual, doomed acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, more than 50,000 employees ultimately lost their jobs. This comes after numerous rounds of layoffs caused by the previous merger between Paramount and Skydance. Further layoffs will come next year as bumbling Paramount execs struggle to adapt to shifting demand across traditional film and television. We know this because this is literally what happens every single time major media companies (especially Warner Brothers) pursue growth for growths sake consolidation. The risks here are so bad, even normally pro-consolidation and pseudo-growth obsessed Wall Street is getting cold feet about how this all ends: TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a note Wednesday that investors should hold their shares of Skydance as the firm remained “quite cautious on the ability of the company and its management to avoid integration and execution problems that have bedeviled other major media mergers.” “The risks (leverage, integration) of the combination with WBD are high; we remain skeptical that SKYD management will be able to create value from this deal when so many other major media deals have failed,” the note read. And again, this could have been potentially prevented if California Democrats like Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra hadnt pressured state AGs to settle their antitrust lawsuit against the company. Whats worse is they couldnt even be bothered to affix meaningful conditions to the deal; most were simply empty gestures Paramount suggested itself.

[Category: 1, paramount, skydance, warner bros., consolidation, david ellison, hollywood, larry ellison, layoffs, media, redundancies, synergies]

— New York Declares State Of Emergency As Measles Cases Spread Fast

 

at 10/7/26 9:07pm

Its becoming very apparent that we failed to learn a key lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic: infectious diseases arent partisan; they will come for us all. While Donald Trump and RFK Jr. play their little partisan games over the measles outbreak, the disease is spreading. Spinning conspiracy theories, falsely claiming that the government has it all under control, or trying to hide the data that says otherwise doesnt stop measles. Vaccinations stop the measles. Thats why, while the focus recently has been on the outbreak in Pennsylvania that has resulted in 5 deaths, a disease like measles was never going to be bound by state borders. Its disappointing, but unsurprising, to see that New York has declared a statewide emergency due to measles infections as a result. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a statewide emergency on Monday over a measles outbreak spreading from Pennsylvania. It is the first time an emergency declaration has been issued since measles began surging in the U.S. in 2025. No one should get seriously ill or die from a vaccine-preventable disease, Hochul said in a statement. Indeed, but this is what Kennedy and the Trump administration hath wrought. Hochul paired the declaration with an executive order that expands what types of medical professionals can administer the MMR vaccine, and to whom. Now, pharmacists can inoculate the public, so long as they are at least 2 years old. The EO also requires that any administration of the vaccine must be reported to the state within three days, regardless of whether patients opt into that reporting or not. I fully expect the MAHA goons to go kazoo over that last bit, but its important for the state to have this data when theyre trying to combat a disease as infectious and problematic as measles. Its unlikely that New York will be the last state to have to do this sort of thing. For now, I guess we hold our breath until November to see if the government is reconfigured in a way that can finally put an end to Kennedys profane reign at HHS.

[Category: 1, anti-vaxxers, cdc, hhs, kathy hochul, measles, new york, rfk jr.]

— PD’s New Policy For Flock Cameras Just Shows How Little It Was Doing Before The Blowback Hit

 

at 10/7/26 4:26pm

Flock is being tossed aside by tons of cities and the trend doesnt seem to be slowing down. Sure, these cities may ultimately decide to go with another ALPR provider, but hopefully it will be one thats a bit more serious about preventing abuse. Recent changes by Flock, in response to months of sustained negative reporting, have the potential to limit abuse by officers, but they dont really have the power to make it happen. You can add flags and guidelines by default, but if the defaults can be switched off and current users arent forced to comply with new demands, it really doesnt do a damn thing. While Flock and Flocks supporters in law enforcement claim its essential to the business of fighting crime, the results speak for themselves. A national network that generates billions of plate/location images every month coupled with plain text, AI-utilizing searches that allow officers to search for more than just plate images lends itself to abuse. And how. Stories are surfacing daily about how officers have used Flocks tech to stalk ex-spouses, ex-paramours, and anyone else they want to keep an (unofficial) eye on. Whats semi-comforting is that even some law enforcement agencies are recognizing the techs potential for abuse and responding positively to public criticism. But before we start handing out gold stars to every cop shop that decides to rein things in because it cant simply continue to ignore the people theyre supposed to be serving, lets take a closer look at one attempted response that says far more than the police department probably thought it did. Louisville Metro Police is limiting which officers are able to search the departments controversial Flock automated license plate reader camera system, officials announced during a Sept. 16 news conference. Independent search capability will be generally limited to personnel who are assigned to investigative and analytical roles, said Deputy Chief Emily McKinley. These are detectives and analysts who are responsible for investigating crimes. They will be the ones who will have the search capability within the system. This seems like good news. And, to be fair, it is. At least up to a certain point. And that certain point has already been reached in the opening statement by the deputy chief. If youre serious about limiting access to only people who should have access, you shouldnt need to start hedging almost immediately. Generally limited is at least from the outside indistinguishable from a free-for-all. The PD gets to decide who should have access. But then it immediately says access wont generally be limited to just those people. The LMPDs equivocation gets worse as the announcement continues. Worse, it makes it clear the LMPD was doing almost nothing to prevent abuse of Flock camera access prior to this point. In addition to limiting who has access to Flock, LMPD officials said the department would add new training on Flock and tighten required documentation for searches. Outside agencies will also be restricted from accessing LMPD’s system without making a formal request. Searches will need to include an identifying factor tying it to a case, such as a report or warrant number, and officers will be required to explain why a Flock search would be needed for the investigation. The new policy also outlines prohibited uses, including “curiosity searches” as well as harassment and intimidation, McKinley said. Officers will not be allowed to share their credentials or conduct searches for unauthorized individuals. This statement tells everyone everything the PD hasnt done prior to this point. And limiting access doesnt mean as much as it should when the deputy chief qualifies it with generally and later in the police chief Paul Humphreys statement, he says officers without access will still receive appropriate information in a timely fashion, which strongly suggests those without access will just ask others to perform searches on their behalf. That undercuts the assertion that unauthorized individuals will not be allowed to ask others to do what they cant do themselves. But the truly damning stuff is in the middle. These are policies going forward. And that means that up until now, the LMPD never required officers to tie searches to cases or to explain why theyre accessing the system. It also means the PD never considered taking a hardline stance on questionable searches before now. This next part of the chiefs statement perhaps explains why this has never been the case prior to this: As part of the new policy, auditing will become routine and mandatory, McKinley said. LMPD will audit searches at least every 90 days using Flock’s audit assistance tool, which runs continuously to flag suspicious searches. How in the fuck was none of this routine and mandatory before this? I mean, I know the answer. The less the police police themselves, the less often they have to fire, punish, or criminally charge one of their own. See no evil is SOP. Agencies willingly blind themselves to prevent having to engage in any form of accountability. The LMPD can no longer pretend its okay to simply pretend abuse isnt happening because it deliberately hasnt gone looking for it. Sure, things will be better going forward, but that doesnt excuse this agency for refusing to engage in any minimal form of Flock accountability up to this point, even though Flock has given it access to audit tools pretty much since day one. This is on the LMPD, not Flock. To its credit, auditing features have been provided by Flock for months, if not years. Its the existence of these auditing tools (and the logs they generate) that have allowed activists, journalists, and even law enforcement agencies themselves to sniff out abusive searches. The LMPD could have been on top of this for months, but has only decided to start using these features because the public has forced it to. While I do appreciate law enforcement doing the right thing, no matter how belatedly, I cannot praise them for deciding to do things they could have been doing for months, if not years. Its this sort of thing that makes cops indistinguishable from criminals: its apparently not a crime unless you get caught.

[Category: flock, flock safety, alpr, location tracking, louisville metro pd, police abuse, privacy, surveillance]

— How Copyright Is Being Abused To Censor Albania’s Flamingo Revolution

 

at 10/7/26 2:13pm

For the last couple of years, the copyright world has been grappling with the latest generation of AI, as numerous posts on Walled Culture attest. That’s hardly surprising, since AI is currently delivering the greatest challenge to the foundations of copyright since the arrival of the computer, which was discussed at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). Although this is the main focus, the copyright industry continues to pursue some of its other traditional obsessions. For example, calls for ever-more stringent Net blocks are still being made. France is leading the way once again, reported here by TorrentFreak: French lawmakers have officially adopted a new sports law that replaces manual domain checks with support for automated, real-time piracy blocking. The system allows for instant blockades during live sports broadcasts, with oversight checks from regulator ARCOM being applied afterward rather than before. A new study commissioned by the European Parliament calls for something similar: The study recommends a swift takedown obligation for streaming intermediaries, requiring these to take action within a certain time limit. As an example, it mentions 30 minutes, following the example of Italy’s Piracy Shield. This takedown requirement should not only apply to Internet providers. Other intermediaries including third-party DNS resolvers such as Google and OpenDNS, VPN providers, and CDNs such as Cloudflare, should also take action. The suggestion therefore is to adopt all the bad ideas that EU countries such as Italy, France and Spain have been trying out recently, with no sign that any of them actually help. The copyright companies also continue to chip away at the surprisingly resilient Anna’s Archive. In January, the site lost its main .org domain; in April, Spotify secured secured a $322 million default judgment against the still unknown operators of Anna’s Archive. More recently, the site was hit with what it calls a “coordinated attack” that took it offline for a while, although it is not clear whether anyone in the copyright world was involved. Against the background of those recurrent copyright topics, it is interesting to see a less familiar issue crop up recently. It concerns large-scale protests taking place in Albania. They were triggered by revelations that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, planned luxury tourism developments in two important Albanian natural habitats. One of them, the Vjosa–Narta wetland ecosystem, is the home of flamingos. This has led to the mass protests being given the name the Flamingo Revolution. The protests against the proposed developments have been on a very large scale – some estimate 250,000 participants at times – and have rocked the Albanian government, which was caught completely off-guard by the widespread objections to the plans, and which has struggled to counter them and the widespread support they have received online. That makes the sudden mass suspension of Instagram accounts posting about anti-government protests in Albania because of alleged copyright infringement suspicious, to say the least. Martha Dimitratou, founder of Repro Uncensored, a nonprofit organization that tracks digital censorship, spoke to Wired about what has been happening in Albania: Dimitratou told WIRED they had verified around 100 cases of account restrictions connected to protests. “We continue to receive additional reports and, based on the volume and patterns we are seeing, estimate that the true number could be several hundred,” she says. “We also identified that multiple posts on an account would receive copyright complaints, often five to 10 in a relatively short period, followed by escalating enforcement and, in some cases, the disabling of the entire account,” Dimitratou says. “Taken together, the alleged paid reporting, the repeated sequence of copyright complaints followed by account enforcement, the concentration of targets around the same movement, and the repeated targeting of replacement accounts strongly indicate coordinated activity,” Dimitratou added. Arjan Koçi, who had multiple posts taken down, managed to contact the person behind those copyright complaints. Koçi asked why he was making these false claims against him: To his surprise, Koçi received a response. “He asked for my contact and then texted me.” The person told Koçi that he had been paid $1,800 to report these accounts and would withdraw his complaints if Koçi paid him. “He said he would accept crypto as payment.” This kind of coordinated copyright abuse is a well-known phenomenon: “This tactic of mass copyright reporting, commonly called brigading, is an abuse of the systems that Meta has in place for people to report genuinely problematic, abusive, dangerous, or illegal content on their platforms,” said Kian Vesteinsson, deputy director for tech policy and digital rights research at Freedom House. “We’ve even seen this sort of brigading happen at scale in the context of a war or a conflict. Certainly, it’s a tactic that we saw carried out by the Myanmar military, for example, to go after people criticizing the government’s conduct,” he told WIRED. As that indicates, this is not a new problem. Walled Culture the book discusses similar cases of copyright being abused for the purposes of censorship, notably as part of online “reputation management” services. These often use false claims of copyright infringement to remove material that is damaging or embarrassing to their clients. The application of similar censorship techniques on a large scale against politically inconvenient material in Albania shows how copyright continues to be perverted for purposes far from the purported ones of encouraging and rewarding creativity. Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.

[Category: 1, albania, censorship, copyfraud, copyright, flamingo revolution, free speech, jared kushner, protests]

— Judge Blocks Utah’s Demand That Websites See Through VPNs

 

at 10/7/26 12:09pm

Over the last few years, with Congress completely incompetent and a massive moral panic about tech raging, states have stepped up to try to regulate the internet any way they can. Even after the Supreme Court reminded states that the First Amendment still exists online and their varied attempts to regulate speech faced serious constitutional hurdles, it hasnt cooled state legislators and governors enthusiasm for pushing through a patchwork of confusing (and sometimes conflicting) laws. And of course, with the Supreme Courts prudish ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Court seemed to say states could ignore the First Amendment so long as they shouted porn! and children! in proximity to each other. One estimate says that over 300 state bills to regulate social media and kid safety on the internet were introduced in 2025 alone. And, from the beginning, some of us have wondered how states could even try to regulate the internet at all, given that the dormant Commerce Clause (DCC) is (in theory) supposed to limit the states ability to regulate commerce that runs across state lines, as the internet obviously does. While the DCC has come up in a few cases, its mostly been as an extra throw-in and given significantly less attention than other arguments. So, its good, if somewhat surprising, to see that a federal judge in Utah has blocked a key piece of that states latest (in a long line) attempt to age verify parts of the internet. Utah already required adult content sites to age verify Utah users back in 2023. This years amendment added a provision saying that anyone actually located in Utah counts, VPN or no VPN. Aylo, the internets largest adult content company, sued to block that new provision. And, so far it has worked, with the court granting a preliminary injunction against that provision. But whats most interesting is that the ruling relies on the dormant Commerce Clause, though in a very narrow way. The new law was crazy in all sorts of ways, effectively demanding that websites see through VPN usage to figure out where a person really is, even if they appear to be somewhere else. Even Utah agreed that this isnt something anyone can actually do with certainty: However, all the parties agree that IP-based geolocation is underinclusive because it fails to account for technologies that obscure a user’s location. These technologies, including virtual private networks (“VPNs”) and proxy servers, mask a user’s true location by routing traffic through IP addresses corresponding to different geographic locations. VPNs and location-obfuscation technologies have entirely legitimate purposes—such as securing communications on public networks, preventing websites from harvesting personal data, and circumventing censorship by oppressive governments. But these technologies can also be used to circumvent IP-based geolocation restrictions, such as the one used by Aylo for its free sites. Utah presumably passed the actual-location provision to address this issue. But both parties also agree that there is no way for a website operator to determine a user’s physical location with perfect certainty. Aylo argues that Utah’s actual location requirement means that Aylo must “impose age verification on every user of their platforms, everywhere in the world” because it is impossible to know for sure whether any given user actually is in Utah. The court then rejects a bunch of Aylos other arguments before zeroing in on the one that lands: because Utahs law demands perfect geolocation — an impossibility — the only way to comply is to age verify absolutely everyone, everywhere. That clearly impacts commerce far beyond Utahs borders and thus triggers the dormant Commerce Clause: The law requires geolocation perfection, but the parties agree that current technological advancements do not allow an entity to perfectly (1) detect VPN/proxy users, or (2) geolocate where all of those VPN/proxy users are accessing the site from. Aylo could not ensure compliance with the law without age-verifying all users. Unlike a law that merely increases a company’s cost of running its business, the actual-location provision in practice requires an entity to perform age verification services for every user visiting its site from any location because the entity would violate the law if even one of those users happened to be obfuscating their location from Utah. As a result, the law “cannot effectively be limited” to primarily regulating those in Utah obfuscating their location “over the Internet because no such [technology to detect those users in every instance] exist[s].” Because the actual-location provision, in most cases, directly regulates an entity’s interactions with those who have no connection to Utah, it likely creates too much direct regulation of wholly out-of-state conduct to be lawful under the dormant Commerce Clause. The court also finds that the law fails the (recently weakened) Pike balancing test, burdening interstate commerce far out of proportion to its local benefits: As an example, Aylo has approximately 28 million active visitors to its sites each month from the United States. Because the law requires perfection in the absence of perfect geolocation tools, Aylo would need to verify those 28 million users—whether located in Salt Lake City, Boston, New Orleans, Anchorage, or Honolulu—to ensure compliance and avoid liability. Indeed, every entity that hosts material applicable under the actual-location provision would need to age verify all of the entity’s users nationwide or inevitably violate the law. This reach is expansive and would involve massive numbers of wholly out-of-state interactions. The ruling is fairly narrow, though, and the court more or less tells Utah how to fix it: by adding a reasonableness clause that gives Aylo (and any others under the law) some leeway in how they determine the location of visitors: Utah argues that the actual-location provision is indirect because technology “allow[s] Aylo to reasonably and feasibly attempt to age assure VPN-using Utahns, [so] any decision by Aylo to instead age-verify all users would be a voluntary business choice, not an effect forced by Utah law.” The court does not doubt that this is the Attorney General’s good faith intention. But, as discussed above, the actual-location provision does not contain a reasonableness or feasibility standard and would therefore impose liability every time an entity did not perform age verification on a user located in Utah. Unlike Online Merchants Guild, the nationwide reach of the actual-location provision would not be due to an entity’s choice on how to structure its business. Rather, it would be “inevitable” that the entity would need to comply by age verifying every outside-of-Utah user on its site to avoid liability. The court makes the same point again when it notes that there are less burdensome means to get what Utah says it wants: Second, the significant local interests served by the actual-location provision can be achieved through less burdensome means. To be sure, the law involves a substantial safety interest in preventing minors from accessing harmful sexual material, which falls squarely within Utah’s traditional regulatory power. But Utah has represented that a law requiring “feasible and reasonable [geolocation] methods,” instead of perfection, would promote the same interests served by the actual-location provision. Because of this unique posture, Utah’s weighty interests could clearly be “promoted with . . . a lesser impact on interstate activities.” Thus, Aylo has shown that the actual-location provision likely imposes an excessive burden on interstate commerce in relation to its local benefits. So, while its nice to see one of the many state internet regulations blocked on DCC grounds, it seems incredibly likely that Utah will just have its legislature rewrite the law (again), add a reasonable or feasible standard, and take another crack at it. While that would have the benefit of not requiring companies to do the literal impossible thing of seeing through VPNs to figure out where people really are, it wont do much to stop yet another silly age verification law from existing.

[Category: aylo, adult content, age verification, dormant commerce clause, state regulations, utah, vpns]

— Daily Deal: flowkey Piano Learning App

 

at 10/7/26 12:04pm

flowkey is a fun, interactive piano learning platform that helps anyone go from absolute beginner to confident player — at their own pace. It combines step-by-step courses with thousands of songs you know and love, tailored for every skill level, from first-time learners to advanced pianists. The app listens as you play and gives instant feedback so you can improve faster, practice technique, and master sheet music with confidence. Whether youre learning scales or your first full song, flowkey makes piano practice easy, fun, and rewarding. A one year subscription is on sale for $40, two years for $60, or five years for $80 for a limited time. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

[Category: 1, daily deal]

As of 10/12/26 10:56pm. Last new 10/11/26 6:49pm.