Techdirt

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, another attempt to hold Twitter responsible for terrorist attacks was tossed out of court (but it didn’t stop the trend of rushing to blame social media for every tragedy) while we got a look behind the scenes of how Facebook dealt with the Christchurch shooting. Another Hollywood company […]

For several years now, we’ve had a running series of posts discussing how, when it comes to digital goods, you often don’t own what you’ve bought. This ugliness shows up with all kinds of content, including purchased movies, books, and shows on digital platforms. But it has reared its head acutely as of late in […]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online […]

Well, this ought to prompt another round of police-protecting legislation in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed two bills into law — one that creates a 25-foot “no go” zone around police officers and one that strips police oversight boards of their independence. And that’s on top of the immediate effort made by the legislature […]

Over the last few years, there have been a ton of lawsuits, pretty much all of them dubious, arguing that social media is inherently harmful to children (something the research does not show) and that therefore there is some sort of magic product liability claim that will hold social media companies responsible. A bunch of […]

The FCC on Thursday once again voted along party lines to restore popular net neutrality rules stripped away during the Trump administration in a flurry of protest and sleazy industry behavior. You might recall the 2017 repeal was so unpopular that telecom giants were caught using fake and dead people to create the illusion of […]

Envy those picture-perfect vlogs and YouTube channels? You can easily re-create them Aduro’s U-STREAM Home Streaming Studio. The 10″ ring light offers 3 distinct lighting options — white, warm yellow, and warm white. The brightness feature on the remote offers 10 different levels of brightness so you can choose what’s best for you. Not only […]

Apparently TikTok is so evil and pernicious that it must be banned from the United States… and so useful that the man who signed the ban, President Joe Biden, made sure to post a few new videos to the platform. It feels like maybe his concerns are a bit overblown? It seems that TikTok users […]

Last month the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill published a major story on how GM collects driver behavior data then sells access (through LexisNexis) to insurance companies, which will then jack up your rates. The absolute bare minimum you could could expect from the auto industry here is that they’re doing this in a way that’s clear to car […]

MAGA SLAPP suits apparently aren’t going out of style, but yet another one has been tossed out of court. Remember lawyer Steven Biss? He was the grand filer of tons of SLAPP suits for the MAGA crowd against media outlets. He had quite a losing streak, with nearly all of those cases failing. Last fall, […]