For years, the idea of expanding the Supreme Court has been dismissed as a fantasy among "serious" thinkers. However, with it becoming ever more clear that the Supreme Court has gone completely off the rails and is now a purely partisan entity, rather than one doing neutral adjudications, more people are open to the idea of "fixing" or "reforming" the court in some form or another. Plenty of reforms are regularly suggested, from term limits to strict ethics and abstention rules. But one that gets the most attention is expanding the court.

This one is also the most controversial. A new Marquette poll found the public evenly split, 50-50, on expanding the court. That's way behind the 79% who support term limits, but it's hardly a fringe position.

Law professor Steve Vladeck, whose work we regularly discuss and cite, recently posted what he called "hard questions about court expansion," which I think cover the key criticisms most people make about expanding the court. As regular Techdirt readers know, I advocate for expanding the Court to 100 Justices, with cases being heard by random panels of nine, with the possibility for some sort of larger "en banc" review as well.

Part of this also has to involve a more balanced system for bringing the number of Justices up to 100 without it being initially overweighted with ideologically biased Justices to one side. The most obvious initial system is to elevate a bunch of existing appeals court judges (currently there are 179 such seats), but doing so in a manner that requires some form of bipartisan consensus (at least one Senator from each party?) to agree to the elevation. Yes, such a system risks deadlock, but if there's broad agreement that the process won't tilt the Court toward either side, there's at least a path to making it work. We have seen something kind of like this work with the FTC and the FCC and their bipartisan commissioners — at least until Donald Trump blew that up and basically fired all Democratic Commissioners (minus the one still hanging on at the FCC, because she's needed under the law to allow the FCC to operate). And, yes, this ideologically captured Supreme Court blessed Trump doing so, but that's all the more reason to set up a stronger system to ensure a Supreme Court that can't become ideologically captured.

This can easily be combined with a term limit structure, but I'm not convinced term limits make that big a difference under my plan, other than changing the political calculus of when to retire. And with 100 Justices, that calculus matters a lot less, because no single retirement can swing the Court.

I think this type of expansion deals with nearly all of the "negatives" people warn about when it comes to expanding the Supreme Court. Let me explain why, and then see how it holds up against Vladeck's "hard questions."

1. By expanding to 100 Justices you massively dilute the power and importance of any single Justice. So much of the issue now is that each Justice has so much influence and power that every single one of them matters a massive amount. Each Justice individually has a strong likelihood of changing the way fundamental parts of America work, with effectively no true recourse. Expanding the pool to 100 Justices means that none are nearly as important.
2. Expanding to 100 Justices, rather than the much more conservative suggestions of 11, 13, or even 21, likely defuses one of the first concerns people raise: that each party, whenever it takes control of Congress, will simply expand the Court again in its favor. I agree that that is a very real risk if the expansion is just a few Justices. Then "packing" the Court becomes practical in some form. Leaping from nine to 100, with randomized nine-judge panels makes future packing much more difficult. It's not impossible, but the much larger pool with the panel selection process makes it way more difficult to consistently bias decisions to the extreme level we see today. A smaller number makes it easier.
3. Adding an en banc review process creates an additional check on consistent biases. En banc already exists in the appeals courts, and this could follow the Ninth Circuit's model, where review goes not to the "full" court but to a larger, more randomized panel (the Ninth Circuit isn't fully randomized, but the Supreme Court could be). Law professor Paul Collins has discussed the potential benefits of having cases handled by three-Justice panels at the Supreme Court with the possibility of alternative panel reversal, and many of his arguments for why that could limit extreme ideological capture would apply to my scenario as well.
4. If this system were combined with term limits, and a better way to select the Justices that diminishes partisan bias, then it would limit a setup where one party could overwhelm the Court with too many Justices with a strong ideological bent, but rather would push for more Justices who can get support from both parties. I may have my own ideological biases, but any system designed to stock the Court with only Justices who believe in specific ideological beliefs will be seen as illegitimate. But a 100-Justice Supreme Court with an actual mix of Justices and beliefs is much harder to insist is ideologically biased towards either side, making it less a target of ideological capture.
5. Side benefit: having way more Justices means they can handle way more cases more fairly, increasing access to justice for many parties who are effectively squeezed out of the Supreme Court by the heavy focus on so-called impact litigation, brought by parties seeking to use the Supreme Court as a tool to route around Congress. It might also help deal with Vladeck's other big issue: the weird recent infatuation of the Court to make consequential decisions on the shadow docket with no reasoning.

I'm sure there are risks. But a massive shift in how the Court itself functions, rather than a small increase designed to swing the ideological balance, has a much better chance of surviving long-term without triggering partisan swings every few years. The goal of the 100-Justice system isn't to swing the ideological balance. It's to rethink how the Supreme Court functions to make it way more difficult for it to become ideologically captured in any way. And with such a big change, it also acts as a bit of a shock to the system, getting people to rethink the function of the court, to bring it back to being a true judicial body, rather than a political body.

Now, on to Vladeck's "hard questions":

• How do we avoid touching off a race to the bottom, where each time one party controls the House, Senate, and presidency, it expands the Court to ensure an ideologically and politically sympathetic majority?

I think my explanation above gets at this point directly. Merely expanding the Court by two or four Justices likely does set off just such a "race to the bottom" for each time Congress switches hands. But by massively shifting the setup of the Court, greatly diminishing the importance of any single Justice, we can avoid the value of constant one-upping the previous party in control, and reset the judicial balance.

• If a race to the bottom is unavoidable, how do we avoid further (and potentially fatal) erosion of public confidence in the Court—which will quite transparently be little more than a lever of power for whichever party last had such a trifecta?

First off, I think with my system, a race to the bottom is absolutely avoidable! And, again, there are other elements in my system that I think should increase public confidence in the Court. It diminishes the risk of ideological capture of the Court, it enables greater effectiveness and throughput of the Court, and includes a safety valve in the en banc system as well.

• If eroding public confidence in the Court is a feature, and not a bug, how do we insulate against the same erosion of public confidence in lower federal courts?

Again, I think my plan doesn't erode public confidence at all. If anything, it should rebuild it, by making the institution more resistant to ideological capture. It could also help restore trust in the lower federal courts because the Supreme Court itself should be more effective and able to take on more issues, which gives the lower courts more clarity, as opposed to the vague hand-waving we've gotten used to under Chief Justice Roberts.

• What is the case for why expansion is a better way to achieve the desired reforms than alternatives that would (or, at least, should) avoid many of these forward-looking concerns?

Vladeck has outlined a number of alternative proposals for Supreme Court reform in his own work, and we can address those and some of the other most popular suggestions.

Term limits by themselves seem to do very little to increase public confidence in the Courts. It still allows for ideological capture based on the party in power. Yes, it gets rid of a few very old cranks, but that's a short term fix if they are just replaced by the next MAGA crank in line. A massive expansion with a push for some level of bipartisan consensus again seems like a much bigger lever towards resetting the Court.

The ethics enforcement system seems like it barely helps at the margins of the most corrupt scenarios, but does little more to help in other ways.

"Jurisdiction-stripping" would block the Court from hearing certain kinds of cases, but I'm not sure how that helps, other than potentially increasing the power of Congress in a way that could further unbalance our three branch system of government.

Vladeck also has suggested systems of increased accountability:

There are many examples, but these would include: (1) expanding the Court's mandatory docket; (2) establishing an Article III Inspector General; (3) codifying existing standards (as opposed to raising the standards) for emergency relief; (4) increasing public congressional oversight of the Court (including of its budget); and (5) on a more basic level, heightening congressional engagement in the Court's day-to-day work.

The paper linked above also includes specific docket reform proposals that… are… fine? But I'm not sure any really move the needle on institutional trust.

Finally, to Vladeck's long-term focus on the shadow docket, I'd be open to a specific reform on that as well, requiring that the shadow docket be explicitly tied to actual emergency situations, designed to focus on keeping the status quo in such an emergency, and only up to the point when a full briefing/hearing process can lead to a full decision on the merits. That alone wouldn't fix the Court's reputation problem, but it would be a useful addition.

But, on the whole, part of the argument for switching to the 100-Justice system is the very fact that it's not an incremental reform, but a rethinking of how the Supreme Court itself works in a way that shocks the system out of the mess it has currently become.

Just like no voting system is perfect, no system for selecting a Supreme Court will be perfect either. But I remain fairly convinced that a 100 Justice Supreme Court would be a big improvement over what we have today, and clearly better than almost all other suggested reforms, including (importantly) the much more narrow plans to increase the number of Justices by two or four, which would set off the very concerns Vladeck outlines in his questions.

The Ultimate Web Coding for Everyone Bundle has 8 introductory courses covering core programming languages and web development frameworks. You'll learn about Python, Ruby, JavaScript, MySQL, and more. It's 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.

There's been plenty of talk by judges about imposing sanctions on ICE and DOJ lawyers who have routinely violated court orders and constitutional rights, and straight up lied in court (or allowed agents and officers to lie in court). But not much has actually been done about this. So far, it's mostly been threats of future punishment. But if there's a sign of hope for the future, it's this, even if "this" is a bit underwhelming. (h/t Kyle Cheney)

Sanctions are coming. Slowly. And almost comically. But it's better than nothing, if only barely. A federal court in Arizona is finally going to "punish" an ICE lawyer for misconduct. The targeted wrist may barely feel the slap, but here it is, as delivered by federal judge Diane Humetewa in this recent court order [PDF].

The DOJ lawyer being hit with sanctions is Brooks Chupp, the Assistant US Attorney for the District of Arizona. Chupp is a Notre Dame graduate whose LinkedIn profile seems to have suddenly gone missing now that he's been sanctioned by a federal court. According to his Notre Dame bio, Chupp served as a "research assistant" to Professor David Waddilove. It will surprise no one to know that Prof. Waddilove is a current contributor to The Federalist Society. (It will surprise everyone even less to learn that Waddilove claims to be a "legal historian," despite apparently being far more focused on securing multiple degrees in "Theology.")

That's the background. This is how Chupp fucked up, leading to his being sanctioned by a federal court.

From the record here,the Court has little difficulty concluding that AUSA Chupp's accusation against Petitioner's counsel was factually baseless from an objective perspective. No evidence has been provided to support that Petitioner's counsel "represented to ICE that Petitioner was not presently removable due to his pending motion before the Board of Immigration Appeals." What evidence has been provided supports, at most, that Petitioner's counsel informed the "El Paso field office" that Petitioner had an appeal pending with the BIA, but made no representation as to Petitioner's removability. (Doc. 14-1 at 8). Objectively, there was no factual basis to assert that Petitioner's counsel had "represented to ICE that Petitioner was not presently removable."

[…]

This is not, as AUSA Chupp argues, an instance of "weak" evidence; it is an instance of no evidence. (Doc. 26 at 6). While AUSA Chupp may have desired to "preserve an argument based on an inference," that inference was wholly unreasonable, unsupported by the evidence, and antithetical to the ethical rules that guide attorney conduct.

More simply put, AUSA Chupp lied to the court. Then he attempted to cover up his lies with factually unsupportable statements and inferences — things that are, of course, just more legally acceptable lies.

The court's not going to put up with this, at least not from Brooks Chupp.

The Court has no difficulty concluding that AUSA Chupp's accusation was, at the very least, negligent and possibly reckless. On its own this would be insufficient to justify finding a violation of Rule 11 here. Id. However, the Court further finds that the accusation was also frivolous.

[…]

Nor was the accusation here some minor or tangential fact, but was instead presented as a dispositive fact justifying Respondents' continued detention of Petitioner and carrying with it the implication that Petitioner's counsel had engaged in potentially criminal behavior. See 18 U.S.C. § 1001. As such, it required Petitioner to expend the effort and resources—in less than 24 hours—to secure a signed Declaration from his former counsel, complete with evidentiary support, and briefing in response. Only then, after that effort had been made, did AUSA Chupp "withdraw" the argument, and even then, only because he "d[id] not have specific records of what Petitioner's attorney did or did not state." Given these stakes and, as he himself recognizes, the "special role of AUSAs" (Doc. 26 at 2), the Court concludes—especially in light of how the accusation hardened from "unclear" on March 24 to "likely" on April 1 without any supportive evidence or reasonable investigation in the interim—that the accusation was both negligent and frivolous, and thus "tantamount to bad faith," and, as such, in violation of Rule 11(b)(3).

So, what does this mean for this DOJ lawyer? Not a lot, unfortunately. I mean, he'll be viewed as untrustworthy from now on (so expect a resignation or firing in the near future), but Chupp is only being ordered to spend a few hours being told things he already knows, but chose to ignore in hopes of pleasing the bloodthirsty bigots running/ruining the country at the moment.

The Court will therefore order that AUSA Chupp participate in at least one (1) hour each of continuing legal education on a) the special role of United States Attorneys and b) the need for evidentiary support for all factual contentions.

That's it: two hours of CLE (Continuing Legal Education) that Chupp can likely apply to any outstanding CLE balance he might have racked up as a practicing attorney. As I said earlier, it is better than nothing. But not because it's something other than nothing. On its own, it's no deterrent at all. It practically suggests DOJ lawyers engage in lying and cheating because they'll still have their jobs, their incomes, and their freedom, no matter how much they fuck with the legal system and fuck over people who just want their rights to be respected.

But it does do something, although it will be some time before we see whether or not it will have any effect. It breaks the seal, so to speak. It signals to other judges dealing with similarly slimy DOJ lawyers that sanctions can be brought and enforced. Any judge hesitating to be the first to do these things in their own jurisdictions should draw some courage from this turn of events, especially if the Trump administration decides it's not worth its time to step in every time one of its lawyers is caught fucking up. Hopefully, there will be more of this in the near future, but only better, faster, and harder.

Our consolidated corporate press doesn't really make this clear, surprisingly, but the United States is too corrupt to function. There's simply no shortage of evidence across every arena that matters. Trump's corruption is utterly historic, yet it's just endlessly normalized. To the point where most press outlets don't really even mention Trump's corruption clearly when discussing policy moves.

But it exists all the same.

Recently, the administration issued yet another executive order; this one purportedly aimed at "expanding U.S. commercial space transportation." How? Mostly by urging the U.S. government agencies to market U.S. commercial space options. There are also some vague calls for new export controls; as well as a push to make it easier for SpaceX to obtain land.

The goal purports to be to orient the U.S. to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries annually by 2030. But a lot of the order, as is typical for Trump EO's, just a bunch of words jumbled together to make it sound useful and official:

"The Memorandum directs the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Commerce to ensure U.S. space transportation market access to promote and enable U.S. space transportation capabilities and standards."

Primarily the order is about easing regulatory oversight and putting the government at the direct beck and call of top donors like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

The fun part: financial disclosure statements indicate that the president purchased $5 million in SpaceX debt two days before he signed his policy attempting to expand U.S. commercial space transportation (that same day, Trump acquired $25 million in Meta shares).

But worry not! White House spokesperson Davis Ingle insisted to the press that everything was completely on the up and up, and the president has no insight into or control over the financial decisions of "independent managers":

"Neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested or when investments are bought or sold," Ingle continued. "All investment decisions are made entirely by independent managers. There are no conflicts of interest."

In a functional country, the president divests individual stocks or relies on blind trusts or diversified funds to avoid potential conflicts of interests. The Trump administration, by contrast, is just one largely-unchecked financial conflict of interest.

Last week Trump awarded Musk — who has spent $366 million to try and ensure Republicans maintain control during the midterms — the National Medal of Science at the White House's "Science: A New Golden Age" summit.

The corruption is unsubtle, but the vast majority of U.S. corporate "tech and business journalism" fails to clearly mention that Musk effectively purchased an authoritarian government, had that government butcher all meaningful regulatory inquiries into his multiple legal, environmental, and labor violations, and generally made billions off of regulatory capture under the cover of space innovation.

It's just somehow not really deemed useful context for the reader.

We just talked about how the majority of the American public either believes that RFK Jr. recommends they not get the MMR vaccine that protects people from measles, or are otherwise unsure of what his stance even is on the topic. When Kennedy sycophants (sickophants?) attempt to point at all the times Kennedy has said he recommends people get vaccinated for measles, that polling is the only retort needed. Because Kennedy routinely talks out of both sides of his mouth on the topic, both stating that people should be vaccinated while also claiming that the vaccines cause all kinds of harms and deaths, he's created a confusing and confused message that allows him to say he's not an anti-vaxxer. It's bullshit, most of us know it's bullshit, and Kennedy definitely knows it's bullshit. When Kennedy headlines an anti-vaxxer group conference, however, what he actually believes is laid bare.

Actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes. So, as the country continues to suffer through the worst measles outbreak in decades, one which has now killed its 6th victim in Pennsylvania, what is Kennedy doing about it? The answer appears to be trying to bribe doctors to report more vaccine injuries as he sets up an NIH clinic designed to "study" vaccine injuries.

In a press announcement Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) laid out four aspects of the large-scale initiative. The first is a new clinic at the National Institutes of Health that is "dedicated to studying and caring for patients experiencing health problems following vaccination." Despite only being announced today, the clinic actually opened October 5, and Kennedy secretly attended its ribbon-cutting ceremony alongside other high-level Trump administration officials. It's unclear why his visit and the clinic's opening were not disclosed by the Trump administration, but they were reported by Bloomberg Law at the time.

Another aspect of the initiative is a proposal to reimburse doctors for reporting possible injuries from vaccines to a federal system called VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System). VAERS, which is run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a common focus of anti-vaccine advocates, who incessantly misuse it. The system is meant to be an indiscriminate dragnet of any potential safety concerns linked to vaccines, providing a sensitive early warning monitoring system. Anyone, including members of the public, can submit an unvetted report.

VAERS has always been used by the anti-vaxxer crowd to try to legitimize their bullshit claims. Because that platform is open to anyone who wants to make a vaccine injury claim, it is overflowing with claims of injury that end up having nothing to do with vaccinations. I can go in there right now and claim that the MMR vaccine I got as a child made my left ear fall off. Reviewers of the platform will find that to be a false claim, but it's in the system nonetheless. Or, if you want a more horrifying example, a woman could allegedly suffocate her twin 1 year old children, but then report the deaths as vaccine injuries before she gets charged with murder. That's how wide open this platform is to reporting errors and fraud.

And now, Kennedy is going to spend your money to solicit more of these claims from doctors.

In addition to providing a financial incentive for doctors to submit reports, the HHS is also working to overhaul VAERS to make it "simpler, more accessible, and easier to use." That includes making the reporting system available on mobile devices—so doctors can report vaccine injuries on the go—and adding more tools for researchers studying vaccine injuries. The CDC has already awarded a nearly $1 million contract to a Virginia-based Christian tech company called SPN Solutions Inc.

Lastly, Kennedy's initiative will also require electronic health records to include information about vaccine injuries. This requirement will be carried out through the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which oversees federal health information technology standards. HHS said that by adding vaccine injuries to electronic medical records, healthcare providers will have a "more complete picture of a patient's medical history."

It's hard to overstate just how insidious this is. Kennedy is going to financially incentivize doctors who are willing to claim vaccine injuries to do more of that, then append those claims of injury to patient medical records. The fraud that is going to occur here is multiplicative. First taxpayer money will be used to generate more claims of vaccine injury, then those patients' future medical care will be altered by those same fraudulent claims.

"Somehow the Trump-RFK Jr. anti-vax agenda keeps getting more corrupt and dangerous," Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, said in a statement Thursday. "Now Secretary Kennedy wants to bribe doctors to claim they see vaccine harm without proof, which is just asking for higher insurance costs and a rash of waste, fraud and abuse."

This is going to result in poorer health outcomes for many, many people. Kennedy doesn't care about that. Sociopaths never concern themselves with the outcomes for others when their own interests are at stake.

No, Kennedy will use this plan to generate more "evidence" of his preconceived claims. It's false-proof manufactured on the public's dime, which will only lead to worse health outcomes for all involved and the further eroding of vaccination numbers. All as we're dealing with an outbreak of a disease we were supposed to have effectively eliminated more than two decades ago.

Get this ass out of government the moment the November elections are over, if at all possible.

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 VIII — The Long Decline of Certainty
In Part VII, the universal ambitions of the internet met the realities of geopolitics. Part VIII turns to another form of reckoning: the growing gap between Big Tech's extraordinary technological capability and the declining certainty that capability alone is enough.

The history of technology is often written as a succession of inventions. We remember the steam engine, the telegraph, electricity, the automobile, the personal computer and the internet as though each represented a discrete breakthrough that propelled humanity from one age into another. Yet technologies rarely transform societies on their own. What changes history are the systems of belief that emerge around them.

The railway altered far more than transportation; it changed how people understood time itself. Electricity did not simply illuminate cities; it transformed architecture, labor, domestic life and the rhythms of human activity. The internet was never merely a communications network; it also carried with it an entire philosophy about openness, participation, decentralization and the distribution of knowledge.

The platform era represented a further evolution of that philosophy. It proposed that complexity itself could be managed through increasingly intelligent systems. Human relationships could be organized more efficiently. Information could be filtered more effectively. Communities could be cultivated at planetary scale. Public conversation could be optimized through algorithms that learned continuously from billions of interactions.

For a time, the proposition seemed not only plausible but self-evidently true. Then something curious happened. The technology continued improving while confidence in the underlying philosophy began to erode. This is a pattern that historians encounter with surprising regularity. Empires often reach the height of their administrative sophistication shortly before their political legitimacy begins to weaken. Financial systems become increasingly efficient in the years preceding systemic crises. Institutions acquire extraordinary technical competence while gradually losing public confidence. Institutional decline rarely begins with the collapse of capability. More often, it begins with the discovery that capability is not the same thing as legitimacy.

By almost every measurable indicator, today's largest technology companies remain astonishingly capable. Their engineering talent is unrivaled; their computational infrastructure stretches across continents; and, their investments in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology are redefining the frontier of scientific research. Their products continue to mediate the daily lives of billions of people. Judged solely by conventional measures of corporate performance, they have never appeared stronger. And yet something important has changed.

For much of the platform era, the central political question was whether governments would regulate Big Tech. That question produced years of commissions, hearings, white papers, consultations, investigations, and legislative proposals. Some of these produced important rules. The GDPR changed how personal data is treated. Competition authorities have imposed significant constraints. The Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act and other legislation have begun altering the legal environment in which the largest platforms operate.

But legislation has its limits. Big Tech has spent decades learning how to operate inside political systems. It has the resources to lobby governments, influence legislative drafting, challenge rules in court, negotiate implementation, and shape the technical details that determine whether an ambitious principle has a meaningful effect in practice. Even the strictest legislation can be weakened by exemptions, delayed through litigation, narrowed during implementation, or transformed into a compliance exercise that leaves the underlying structure of power largely intact. This does not mean regulation is futile. It means that regulation is not self-executing.

A law can establish a boundary. It cannot, by itself, guarantee that the institutions subject to that boundary will surrender power willingly. Large corporations do not usually change because they have experienced a moral awakening. They change when the cost of maintaining existing behavior becomes greater than the cost of changing it.

The question is therefore no longer simply whether legislators can produce sufficiently ambitious rules. The more consequential question may be who has the power to enforce a different understanding of corporate responsibility when governments are slow, politically divided, or vulnerable to corporate influence. Increasingly, the answer may lie elsewhere: it may lie with users and it may lie with courts.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

This is not a unique or new observation, but so many MAGA attacks on others are projection, claiming that Democrats were doing the very things that MAGA always knew they would do if they were in charge. We've certainly spent plenty of time talking about Donald Trump's myriad and non-stop attacks on free speech, and just recently I wrote about how Trump has turned his FCC into the very "ministry of truth" that Fox News falsely claimed Biden had created. But two recent articles show how MAGA has gone all in on doing the two things it most loudly (and falsely) accused the other side of: suppressing free speech on campus, and running a "censorship industrial complex" to coerce private companies into silencing speech it doesn't like.

On the "free speech on campus" thing, we already know that the Trump admin has disappeared students for their speech. But Adam Serwer, over at The Atlantic, has an incredible story on how MAGA officials in Texas have effectively silenced all kinds of speech across universities in Texas.

At Texas Tech, medical students no longer learn about racial disparities in medical care. Faculty at the university's medical center in Lubbock were advised to "refrain from treating transgender patients, for any medical condition, if a medical student was present," according to a lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors. (When asked for comment, a spokesperson said that the university's "written guidance is publicly available and expressly protects instruction necessary for licensure and patient care.") According to the same lawsuit, the censorship bot—officially known as the Course Content Review Process—ordered a Tech philosophy professor to remove Plato's Republic from a syllabus because "it references Plato's beliefs concerning gender roles and homosexuality."

Professors in the Texas A&M system have had to strip their syllabi too. According to an ACLU lawsuit, last January, Aaron George, a professor at Tarleton State University, was told by administrators to remove A Gay Manifesto, a Stonewall-era LGBTQ-rights pamphlet, and White Flight, a history of urban segregation, from his American-political-history course. After a student complained that a different class the professor taught violated university policy, George was informed by administrators that it would be canceled if he did not make "necessary" (but unspecified) changes. He cut a reference in the course description to the significance of the Fourteenth Amendment for LGBTQ rights, and the class was allowed to proceed.

The University of Texas at Austin, the flagship school of the UT system, announced last month that it was eliminating majors in Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women's and gender studies, and race and migration studies. More than 100 courses have been flagged for removal from the core curriculum, primarily ones relating to slavery, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. Consolidating majors isn't necessarily nefarious, nor is rethinking a core curriculum (a central group of courses from which students must take a certain number to graduate). But these changes are happening, Lauren Gutterman, an American studies professor at UT, told me, "entirely because of the political context."

Where are all the folks who spent years screaming about "academic freedom" and insisting that colleges were censoring conservative speech? Remember how Bari Weiss and Joe Lonsdale created their "University of Austin" because (they falsely claimed) there were no universities where people could speak freely — and then they fired someone for suggesting that there might be some value in thinking about the importance of diversity.

Hilariously, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had signed a bill back in 2019 guaranteeing "free speech on campus." But as Serwer's piece details, these days there are all sorts of banned topics on Texas college campuses, and basically none of free speech grifters who spent years crying crocodile tears over supposed attacks on "campus speech" seem to have anything to say about it.

Even more ridiculous, Serwer details how Texas Tech is using AI to scan syllabi for wrongthink, with predictably stupid results:

Alan Barenberg, a history professor who specializes in the Soviet Union, was told to remove readings by the Princeton historian Joan Scott and the French philosopher Michel Foucault from his Ph.D.-level historiography class, after they were flagged by the AI—whose assessments he described to me as "completely inaccurate." It also seemed to have mixed his course up with a different one. The texts were part of a unit of the class related to how treatment of gender in historical research has changed over time. "These things have been taught in classes for a long time," Barenberg told me. The material is controversial, he said, only "in the eyes of a few people who aren't even actually on campus."

"The fact that the system AI doesn't work, that it makes inaccurate pronouncements—that's a feature, not a bug. They don't care if it's accurate or not. They just want to be able to say, Look, we're making sure that your children are not being exposed to these horrible ideas from these radical professors," Barenberg said. "A key part of how authoritarian systems often work is that, through the vagueness and sending up signals and vibes, they're essentially saying, You know what not to do, but being deliberately vague about it."

Although the AI is now reviewing only some courses, the university could extend the process to more.  For now, professors are the ones responsible for volunteering whether their own materials may be considered controversial. Many, unsure of what might trigger the bot, told me that they had private conversations with administrators who told them to simply self-censor and remove materials from their courses in advance, so as not to draw the wrath of leadership or lawmakers.

So the "free speech on campus" crowd is now actively censoring speech on campus because a computer program told them it was woke. What could go wrong?

Now, the other story: Anthony Fisher, at MS Now, is pointing out how Donald Trump has absolutely created the "censorship industrial complex" that a bunch of factually challenged "free speech" grifters insisted the Biden admin had built.

MAGA-adjacent journalists, one of whom now runs CBS News, have claimed there was a vast "censorship industrial complex" — run exclusively by Democrats, of course. In 2022, they peddled Elon Musk's nothingburger "Twitter Files" as the free speech scandal of the century. It was, in fact, a fake controversy driven by politically motivated reasoning and faux-journalistic laziness, and none of them ever had the integrity to admit they were led by the nose by the world's richest man or that they got the story completely wrong.

But the Trump Censorship Industrial Complex is very real. It is chilling speech in the media, academia and everyday life.

"Over the last two years, there's been escalating threats against ABC," Wilkinson said in court Tuesday. She added that the president "has control over vast regulatory powers that he's willing to use against those he does not like" and "has put in place a chairman at the FCC who understands his marching orders and is not shy about saying so. These are blatant violations of the U.S. Constitution."

You can follow the links there to get more details, but the most important detail is that when some individuals and two MAGA-run states sued the Biden admin over the supposed "censorship industrial complex," it was two Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justices — Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who pointed out how wrong they were.

During oral arguments Kavanaugh practically laughed at the lawyer making these claims, pointing out that government officials merely pressing their side of the story with no associated threats or coercion happens every damn day in the government, and is not even remotely close to censorship. Then Coney Barrett wrote the decision of the court, noting the complete lack of evidence tying any government outreach to actual moderation decisions, and called the lower court judge's factual findings "clearly erroneous." That resulted in the case being sent back for lack of standing due to the fact that there was zero evidence presented of any coercive behavior.

So there was no Biden "censorship industrial complex," but there absolutely is a Trump one. As Fisher notes:

The Trump administration's juvenile bullying has already restricted The Associated Press' White House access for more than a year over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And those efforts have now bled over into MAGA Republican-dominated states, like Alabama, where a new law requires "all state and local entities and their employees" to refer to the body of water as the Gulf of America. That means public schools, colleges and even the state's NPR affiliate have to abide by Trump's embarrassing attempt at patriotic virtue signaling.

Carr has threatened broadcasters' licenses for reporting accurately on Trump's asinine and failing war on Iran. The administration is still in a legal battle with MS NOW, CNN and Politico, as it preposterously claims its ban on the three news organizations is a national security issue. And the administration has been siccing its secret police force on private citizens who've written social media posts criticizing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement's brutal crackdown on immigrants — and U.S. citizens caught in their lawless dragnets.

And not a peep from those who falsely argued that it existed under Biden. How strange.

Once again, those complaints were all lies and projection. Richard Hanania, the far right commentator who spent years spreading hate and white supremacy online and now pretends to have turned against the very MAGA Trumpism he long supported, at least admitted clearly, back before Elon Musk took over Twitter, that right wingers like himself only scream about "censorship" because they want to do it themselves. This was in response to him getting banned from (again, pre-Elon) Twitter for violating its rules against hateful conduct. At the time, he said:

I don't feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn't let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They're wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I'm actually impressed they let me get away with the things I've been saying for this long.

But that kind of honesty about how much MAGA authoritarians want to censor people while screaming about non-existent "censorship" from the other side is rare.

Still, it would be nice if everyone stopped pretending that Greg Abbott, Donald Trump, or Elon Musk ever stood for free speech at all. They all whined about free speech solely as a means to make sure that they were in charge of censoring those they disliked.

The Academy of Game Art Bundle teaches you the basics of how to create video game art. You'll learn how to use Inkscape to create logos, 2D backgrounds, pre-defined modules, UI designs, and characters. A course on using DragonBones will teach you how to animate your characters as well. The bundle is on sale for $25.

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.

More evidence is piling up that contradicts the almost-but-not-quite denials given by administration officials in response to allegations about the DHS compiling a database to keep tabs on protesters.

Just a few months ago, "Immigration Czar" Todd Lyons was trying to turn credible accusations into a nothingburger by deploying a few vague and trite statements that didn't actually add up to real denial. Protesters were reporting that immigration officers were taking photos of protesters, trying to gather other identifying info from them when accosting them, and then doing truly nasty stuff plainly meant to deter them from engaging in further protests or simply trying to document what ICE officers were doing out in the field.

Protesters and observers who have encountered ICE officers have reported multiple drive-bys by ICE officers at their personal homes, calls from unidentified officers containing veiled threats of punishment, and other forms of intimidation that are reliant on having enough collected data to locate people's homes, phone numbers, places of business, etc.

If this database of protesters and other ICE opponents doesn't actually exist, it would seem unlikely that any immigration officer would refer to it. But that has happened and that's what drew the questions from congressional reps that Lyons then attempted to dance around.

Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., cited a well-circulated clip of an ICE agent in Portland, Maine, telling a person videotaping that she would be added to a "nice little database." 

"I can't speak for that individual," said Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE. "But I can assure you that there is no database that's tracking United States citizens."

Lyons doubled down on his denials about the database's existence during a Senate hearing Thursday. When asked if ICE is giving protester information to any other agency, Lyons said: "We do not." 

In his official response to congressional oversight, Lyons went a bit further… which only made things worse.

If individuals who interact with ICE officers are not arrested or detained, any information collected during those encounters is maintained consistent with applicable law and DHS and ICE policies and is treated as an official government record.

That's the information-gathering side of things, which clearly states that ICE is collecting information on more than just the people it arrests. And since it's collecting this information on non-arrestees in the normal course of business, the compilation is undeniably happening. Whether or not this information is segregated from the rest of the stuff ICE gathers is hardly consequential, which makes this statement from Lyons especially meaningless.

DHS is not creating or maintaining a separate, standalone database for individuals encountered that haven't been arrested or detained.

You don't have to create a new database. You don't even have to silo it off. You can just dump this info in with the rest of the stuff and let those with access use this info to track down protesters in order to intimidate them.

A recent court filing in a lawsuit against the DHS brought by anti-ICE protesters in Maine (one that alleges a lot of truly troubling behavior by ICE officers) says ICE is shoving this info into Palantir's gaping data maw, presumably to expedite future threats, intimidation, and retaliation against First Amendment-protected activity.

An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers—including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information—and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir.

[…]

Plaintiffs allege in the filing, which is heavily based on documents produced by the government and depositions of DHS agents, that agents had a practice of intimidating protesters and observers. They did this, the filing says, by doing drive-bys of the observers' homes and, in the case of at least one observer, requiring that she be referred to secondary inspection any time she tries to cross the border until at least January 2027.

The allegations are only going to get more serious the further this case proceeds. The plaintiffs are still operating with limited information, but what little they have already suggests ICE officers routinely engage in retaliatory acts against protesters and observers. From the filing [PDF]:

While the case is still in its preliminary stage, with only limited discovery, the record demonstrates that agents routinely collect images of observers' faces and license plates, and have created retaliatory investigative records about their protected activity. Agents also threatened multiple observers with being placed on watchlists, and have continued their practice of intimidating drive-bys: in June of this year, an agent led Plaintiff Hilton to the address on her driver's license and conspicuously stopped in front of the house. Other Mainers have experienced the same. All Plaintiffs have experienced concrete harm and have been chilled in the exercise of their First Amendment rights: Williams and Pantos have stopped all observation activity entirely, and Hilton and Fagan have reduced their protected activity or taken other precautions while doing so.

Whatever guidelines ICE may have in place (if any) to prevent ICE officers from gathering info on protesters and observers clearly isn't working. The filing mentions multiple times where ICE officers have directly told the people they're accosting that they would be adding them to the ICM (ICE's case management system) or, worse, a "domestic terrorism watchlist."

These are credible allegations, especially since some of these threats from officers have been recorded. The plaintiff who's allegedly now facing mandatory secondary inspection at all border crossings for the next six months lends a lot of credence to claims about being added to terrorism watchlists.

DHS's denial is hardly worth noting.

A spokesperson for DHS calls the case "meritless" and says that "the underlying lawsuit is based on the lie that there is a database of 'domestic terrorists' run by DHS."

All this says is that the DHS doesn't "run" the "domestic terrorists" database. While that is true (the Terrorist Screening Dataset is overseen by the DOJ and "run" by the FBI), the Terrorist Screening Center is a multi-agency operation (including the DHS and its components) that "manages" (direct quote here) its operations. Furthermore, the DHS and its components are designated "nominators," which means exactly what's being denied by DHS spokespeople: officers do have the power to put people on "terrorist watchlists."

Whether or not this lawsuit leads to more discovery, there's no reason to give the DHS the benefit of a doubt while waiting for more information to roll in. It has already shown it's willing to violate rights, ignore court orders, and pretend existing immigration laws don't actually say what they say. The mass deportation machinery deployed by the Trump administration is in a state of constant acceleration. Anything that might reduce a bit of the friction — even if it's clearly unconstitutional acts of intimidation — will be deployed until a court tells it to stop… and then for awhile after that, if recent history is any indication. And it's all being aided by a company that's collecting tens of millions of dollars to, basically, help ICE agents connect these dots faster.

Remember how the Trump administration — and folks like Brendan Carr — spent four straight years fear-mongering about China's purported control over TikTok and its owner, ByteDance? And remember how the Trump administration (with incompetent Democratic lawmaker help) "fixed" the problem by offloading Tiktok to Trump's billionaire buddies while still maintaining co-ownership with the Chinese?

It was basically a five-year xenophobic fear campaign designed to steal the revenues of a top short-form video company that U.S. giants like Meta were struggling to compete with. And it was propped up by endless empty lip service to propaganda, consumer privacy, and national security; in turn propped up by a tech press that struggled to explain how silly and corruption-fueled it all was.

After the Trump deal, U.S. operations of TikTok now had three "managing investors" that collectively owned 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation (Larry Ellison), Silver Lake, and MGX. Another 5 percent is owned by other new investors, 30.1 percent is "held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 20 percent was retained by ByteDance.

The Trump administration offloaded most of TikTok's infrastructure to Oracle — a company with a long list of privacy violations — so they could pretend they "fixed privacy issues" with the app. They also set up a bunch of "safeguards" designed to pretend they'd cut off Chinese influence, without actually doing so.

Unsurprisingly, a deep dive by Politico found that little has actually changed in terms of Chinese access to some of the core components of the app and user data. And there's little to no indication the Trump administration is doing anything to ensure adherence to the deal. Employees are still using AI and internal chat systems built by ByteDance, which would likely make Chinese data collection trivial:

"Employees at the new company, officially named TikTok USDS Joint Venture, still work regularly with the global TikTok organization, according to current and former employees, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, and internal communications reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. That includes coordinating over new features, sharing information about dangerous trends on the app and collaborating over policies. U.S. employees also still use an internal chat system called Lark, which was built by TikTok's former Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to communicate and share information with both their U.S. and global counterparts."

Great stuff. There are other instances of largely performative attempts to keep Chinese and U.S. TikTok employees separated, but there's no real indication this is working or being overseen by anybody competent in the U.S. government:

"At TikTok office buildings, U.S. employees can go to TikTok global offices on different floors but are required to get a chaperone, an employee said, and are prohibited from bringing laptops. Prior to the deal, U.S. employees could mostly move freely between the U.S. and global offices."

It's equally murky as to whether "the algorithm" (a subject of endless debate during the fearmongering campaign) is still maintained and updated by ByteDance engineers.

Again, there's no real indication that this was ever about anything but Trump and his allies hijacking the revenues of a profitable short-form video company under the pretense of national security. You could also easily argue that under Byetance ownership the company was at least incentivized to behave to remain in the U.S.; guys like Larry Ellison — with a long history of ethical and privacy "lapses" — really has no worries that the government will ever hold him accountable for much of anything.

As we noted early on, the Chinese really don't need TikTok to spy on Americans or funnel propaganda to the electorate. Because we're too corrupt to regulate data brokers or pass a privacy law, most U.S. consumer data is openly accessible via the public market to anybody — including Chinese intelligence.

The Trump administration is still facing a lawsuit alleging the deal is illegal. And Democrats continue to look positively feckless and ignorant for helping the Trump administration hijack an app (popular with young voters) during a presidential election season where the youth vote mattered more than ever.

The apocryphal quote supposedly from Mark Twain is one of my favorites: "History does not repeat, but it does often rhyme." Now, there is no evidence that Twain ever actually authored these words, but it's incredible how true they tend to be regardless. And when it comes to the current measles outbreak that is ravaging the country, and the Northeast in particular, they seem incredibly apropos.

We're suffering this outbreak for many reasons: the anti-vaxxer agenda being rendered directly into the federal government, the distrust in medical professionals and science that has been purposefully fostered by bad actors, and a general apathy for vaccinations. But if you want to know why it's gotten worse and not better, the answer to that is singular: inaction by the federal government.

And if you go back to 1991, the last time the country suffered a measles epidemic this significant, you can read news stories that don't exactly mirror our current situation, but they do rhyme.

A breakdown in the vaccination system caused the nation's worst measles epidemic in decades, and more epidemics may occur unless the system is changed, a Federal advisory panel said today.

The panel, the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, said in a report, "The principal cause for the epidemic is failure to deliver vaccine to vulnerable preschool children on schedule." It said the health care system created "barriers to obtaining immunization and fails to take advantage of many opportunities to provide vaccines to children."

It's a similar story today, of course. Though, unlike today, I don't have any reason to believe that governmental failures in 1991 that led to the measles epidemic at the time were purposeful. In fact, federal officials at the time responded to this report not by lambasting state officials with conspiracy theories and political attacks, but by acknowledging the report's accuracy and promising to do better. There's no indication that the federal government at the time attempted to hide cases and deaths from measles, unlike the current administration under RFK Jr.

No, this was federal advisors and federal officials working off the same set of facts and combining their efforts to make things better. And better things actually got. This was, by the way, a time when the Executive Branch was also Republican.

Dr. Bart, director of the National Vaccine Program Office of the Department of Health and Human Services, said the Bush Administration had been waiting for the report and would quickly plan to follow as many of the panel's recommendations as possible.

"We have a huge increases and deaths due to measles for the first time in two decades," he said. "We also think there is some acute deterioration of the health care system, and we fear that this may be a warning flag for other problems to come."

Dr. Henderson said that immunization "is the simplest procedure in the entire medical armamentarium, and is by far the most cost effective of all the medical interventions we have." If we cannot provide the simplest and most cost effective thing we have, he said, "what does that say about our health system? It is clear that we have a problem."

Well, then at present we have a problem. A bigger one, actually. The story at present isn't one of government bureaucracy failing simply because big governmental systems are slow and lethargic generally. In this case, the causes of vaccine hesitancy and under-vaccination is the plan. It's what the leadership of our health agencies are striving for.

There is no argument otherwise. Kennedy has said the government is doing a great job on the measles question, even as thousands are infected and people are dying. We'll get into this more separately, but Kennedy also has, in the middle of this outbreak, created a federal program to financially incentivize the reporting of vaccine injuries.

If disease is the enemy of Americans, then Kennedy is a traitor. He's giving aid and comfort to that enemy, plain and simple. It's why the measles outbreak is getting worse, not better. It's why other health conditions are on the rise, such as pertussis and mumps.

What is happening right now is insane. What makes it more insane is that the lessons we learned from the last time we engaged with this enemy are barely 35 years old. Universe willing, November will pave the way for Congress to actually do something about it all.

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 VII: The End of the Universal Internet
Part VI examined the limits of what platforms can know about us. This part widens the lens again, looking at what happens when the supposedly universal internet collides with geopolitics, national interests and the return of sovereignty.

Every age constructs its own myths. The Industrial Revolution gave us the myth of endless progress: the conviction that scientific discovery and economic growth would move steadily, almost mechanically, towards a more prosperous future. The twentieth century inherited the myth of globalization, imagining that the increasing movement of goods, capital, and people would gradually soften political boundaries and render old rivalries economically irrational. The internet age produced its own variation on the same theme. Technology, we were told, would become the first truly global language. Networks would succeed where diplomacy often failed. Code would travel more easily than ideology. Connectivity would create constituencies for cooperation that governments could neither manufacture nor easily disrupt.

Silicon Valley became the principal narrator of that story. Its ambitions were never presented as merely commercial. They were civilizational. Google did not simply index websites; it sought to organize the world's information. Facebook did not describe itself as a social network so much as an instrument for making the world "more open and connected." The rhetoric mattered because it invited users to think of these companies not as corporations competing for market share but as custodians of a new global infrastructure. They increasingly resembled institutions whose legitimacy derived from serving humanity rather than shareholders alone. And, for a remarkably long time, much of the world accepted that proposition.

The claim was not entirely unreasonable. The internet had always been unusual in the way it blurred geography. An email ignored borders. A website became available almost everywhere simultaneously. Engineers from countries with profoundly different political systems collaborated through common technical standards. Open-source software demonstrated that voluntary cooperation across cultures could produce systems of astonishing sophistication. The internet did not abolish the nation-state, but it often operated according to a logic that transcended it.

Many of the major technology companies genuinely believed they were extending that tradition. Their work forces became international and they acquired global user communities. Product launches were increasingly discussed as worldwide events rather than national ones. Executives frequently spoke in the language of humanity rather than citizenship, presenting their platforms as shared spaces that belonged, in some broader cultural sense, to everyone who used them. The distinction between an American company and a global institution became deliberately blurred. History, however, has a way of reintroducing distinctions that periods of optimism encourage us to overlook.

The return of geopolitics over the past decade has been one of the defining developments of the twenty-first century. Strategic competition between major powers has expanded far beyond military capability to encompass semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, undersea cables, quantum research and digital infrastructure. Technologies that were once understood primarily as commercial products have become matters of national security. Supply chains are scrutinized through strategic rather than economic lenses. Investment decisions increasingly reflect geopolitical calculations. Even the language has changed. Governments now speak of technological sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and digital resilience with a confidence that would have seemed unusual only a decade ago.

The internet did not escape this transformation. For the technology companies themselves, this represented an unusually difficult moment. They had spent decades cultivating identities that rested upon universality. Their products connected families, businesses, and communities across political boundaries. Their legitimacy depended, at least in part, upon the perception that they served users rather than governments. Yet the world around them increasingly demanded choices that universal institutions rarely have the luxury of making.

Those choices did not always arrive dramatically. Sometimes they appeared in export controls on advanced semiconductors. Sometimes in legal obligations to remove applications from national app stores. Sometimes in debates over encryption, data localization, or cloud infrastructure. Sometimes in public appearances alongside political leaders announcing industrial strategies designed explicitly to strengthen national technological advantage. Each individual decision could be justified on pragmatic grounds. Taken together, however, they revealed that the age of the post-national technology company had come to an end.

This is not a moral criticism. No corporation exists outside the legal and political framework of the state in which it is incorporated. Governments possess legitimate security interests. Companies have legal obligations. In periods of geopolitical stability, these realities often remain comfortably in the background; during periods of strategic competition though, they become impossible to ignore. What changed was not simply the relationship between governments and technology companies. It was the relationship between technology companies and the stories they had long told about themselves.

The promise of universality became increasingly difficult to sustain once digital infrastructure itself became a strategic asset. A platform cannot simultaneously present itself as belonging equally to everyone while operating within a world that increasingly expects technological capability to serve national interests. The contradiction is not necessarily the fault of the companies involved; it is a consequence of history changing around them.

There is a revealing parallel with another great infrastructure of modernity. For much of the twentieth century, commercial aviation cultivated an image of cosmopolitanism. Air travel compressed distance, encouraged cultural exchange, and embodied the optimism of an increasingly interconnected world. Yet no one seriously imagined that airlines existed independently of states. Routes reflected diplomacy. Airspace reflected sovereignty. Aircraft manufacturing reflected industrial strategy. The industry remained deeply international while never ceasing to be profoundly geopolitical.

Digital platforms are discovering a similar reality. The internet encouraged us to believe that information could flow independently of power. For a time, perhaps it did. Today, information infrastructure has become power. Artificial intelligence depends upon computational capacity. Computational capacity depends upon semiconductor supply chains. Cloud services depend upon data centers, energy grids and legal jurisdictions. Networks remain global, but they are no longer politically weightless.

This shift has consequences that extend well beyond geopolitics. For users around the world, one of the most striking aspects of the early internet was the feeling that participation itself conferred a kind of equality. A student in Addis Ababa, an entrepreneur in Mexico City, and a researcher in Helsinki entered the same digital spaces and, at least in principle, encountered the same opportunities to create, publish, and collaborate. The internet's openness did not eliminate global inequalities, but it fostered the belief that the network itself belonged to no single political center.

That belief has become harder to sustain. Increasingly, the largest digital platforms appear not simply as global companies headquartered in the United States, but as organizations whose strategic interests inevitably intersect with those of their home state. Again, this is not unusual in historical terms. It is precisely how most industries have always functioned. The novelty lies elsewhere. For perhaps the first time since the commercial internet emerged, the mythology of technological universalism has given way to the more familiar realities of geography, sovereignty, and power.

The consequences are likely to endure long after today's geopolitical tensions have evolved into new forms. Once users begin to see platforms not as neutral environments but as actors embedded within particular political and economic systems, trust acquires a different character. Questions that once appeared purely technical become constitutional. Who governs digital space? Whose values shape its rules? Whose interests ultimately prevail when cooperation gives way to strategic competition?

These are not questions that engineers alone can answer. Nor, for that matter, are they questions that any platform can resolve through better product design. They belong to a different historical moment altogether.

The great irony is that the internet has arrived at precisely the moment when the world is rediscovering the enduring importance of political boundaries. The dream that networks might quietly dissolve geopolitics has not survived contact with the twenty-first century. It is not the internet that failed but the assumption that technology could ever remain separate from history.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

In 2023, Mozilla released a report noting that modern U.S. cars had the worst security and privacy standards of any major technology industry the organization tracks. That was followed by a major NYT report in 2024 showing how automakers routinely hoover up oodles of consumer driving and phone info, then sell access to that data to auto insurance companies looking to justify rate hikes.

Despite a lot of noise and fury, the U.S. doesn't do anything about this for the same reason we refuse to pass a modern privacy law or regulate data brokers: "we" (more accurately the people who purportedly democratically represent us) have repeatedly decided that making gobs of money is significantly more important that human lives, public safety, consumer privacy, or even national security.

Consumer Reports is conducting a more recent follow up study in collaboration with Northeastern University. The full study will arrive next week, but their breakdown of what they've found indicates the problem hasn't gotten better — and in some cases may have gotten worse.

The researchers tested 21 vehicles and their companion mobile apps at CR's Connecticut auto testing facility using a faraday cage to isolate and analyze vehicle communications. They found they all funneled oceans of behavioral, driving, browsing, location, and other data to a long list of industries and companies. Often without fully informing consumers:

"…almost a quarter of the vehicle apps were found to be sending out personally identifiable information, including vehicle owners' names, vehicle identification numbers (VINs), and precise geographic locations. That information can make it easy for companies to link driving behavior to personal data profiles created by data brokers and marketers. Such profiles are routinely sold to banks, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, lenders, and retailers, who can use it for personalized loan terms and filtered bank and insurance offers, a CR and CalMatters investigation found."

Car makers, as they've always done, often blame third parties for any "data leakage" and act surprised when provided details on the width and depth of the data transfer. One company, Honda, claims it put an end to the problem immediately (which in a working country, regulators would independently confirm):

"General Motors, Honda, Nissan, and Stellantis (which owns 14 auto brands, including Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, and Jeep), said some recipients of driver data were prohibited from independently using or selling any data they are provided. But the Northeastern researchers found those restrictions aren't necessarily effective: After they showed their findings to Honda, the company instructed one of its vendors, Amplitude, to delete all of the location data it had received and stopped sending it going forward."

In a lot of instances (much like the "smart TV" and other markets), if consumers try to take informed action to opt out of collection and protect themselves, they lose vehicle functionality.

Again, carmakers do this because they know the federal U.S. government won't meaningfully hold them accountable. And the government won't hold them accountable because the current U.S. government is too corrupt to function in the public interest — and incentivized toward apathy because it unconstitutionally exploits this dysfunction to buy data and avoid warrants.

Despite their own products lacking privacy and security standards, these same automakers are intensely lobbying the government to ban Chinese vehicles from the U.S. market, usually under the pretense that they're just really worried about U.S. privacy and security (Dem lawmakers in Michigan want to ban Chinese EVs from even visiting the state).

But as we saw with the "TikTok ban," this is all annoyingly performative. China doesn't need TikTok, EVs, or Chinese-made drones to collect sensitive U.S. consumer data because they can already buy most of it on the open and largely unregulated market. And they can buy most of it on the open market because the U.S. Congress is too corrupt to function in the public interest, despite ample pretense to the contrary.

Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck themselves… and then sued them (unsuccessfully) for not advertising on his personal propaganda and manipulation site? Well, it appears that Donald Trump is trying a government-backed variation on that abusive power play: claiming that news networks choosing not to cover him after he announced he was initiating a "free press ban" in the White House… is somehow an antitrust violation.

The Justice Department is investigating whether the major television networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News — violated federal antitrust laws when the group briefly suspended their pooled coverage of President Trump, according to six people with knowledge of the department's action.

Officials from the Justice Department contacted networks on Friday and demanded communications and materials related to the White House TV pool, the people said. The pool is a longstanding system where the networks share the responsibility of providing footage of the president and distributing it to other news outlets.

So, before we get into the details here, let's just do a quick refresher of the same "antitrust 101" lesson I suggested for Elon Musk two years ago during his lawsuit. While there can be antitrust concerns when a group of businesses get together to engage in a boycott, that only applies to situations where that boycott is focused on actual harms to consumers or competition. A boycott with political and expressive aims is protected under the First Amendment, and publicity campaigns aimed at influencing government are not an antitrust violation. This has been established over and over again at the Supreme Court and beyond.

Indeed, as former FTC chair William Kovacic tells the NY Times, the biggest missing factor here is that for there to be antitrust, there needs to be a commercial motive:

"The critical ingredient in successful antitrust cases is to demonstrate that there is unmistakably a commercial motive and that the commercial motive predominates," Mr. Kovacic said. "And I don't think they would ever be able to do that here."

So this "investigation" is little more than fan service for the MAGA faithful in an attempt to create chilling effects on the media after Trump threw a hissy fit that the media wasn't covering his every damn word as closely as before. The White House TV "pool" reporting involves a rotating group of media entities which share their work with others so that not every journalism org has to have their own camera crew (there are separate pools for radio and print, again to avoid overlap and crowding).

As a reminder, on Friday, September 18th, Donald Trump announced that he was "banning the free press" from the White House, specifically in the form of pulling the press passes from CNN, Politico, and MSNow reporters. On Monday the 21st of September, CNN had been scheduled to handle the TV pool that day, but since it was barred, it didn't do so. And the other members of the TV pool — ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News — all agreed they would not step in to cover for the White House's clearly unconstitutional attack on CNN and the other media entities barred from the White House.

Thus, for a few days there wasn't TV pool coverage, which seemed to piss off Trump, even though it was all in response to his own First Amendment-violating censorial actions. He took to his own personal pinboard, Truth Social, to whine about the lack of coverage of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's state visit:

CNN and MSDNC, to show you how fake they are, today refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years, the arrival at the White House of the Highly Respected President of China, Xi Jinping, and his beautiful wife, Madam Peng. The event was magnificent—Actually made for Television but, because they're Fake News, and because they knew how good it would be, they didn't want credit to be given to 'TRUMP,' they refused to be there. That's why they have such poor Ratings.

Yes, that's Donald Trump literally complaining that CNN and MSNow "refused to cover" an event days after he had personally banned them from the White House where the event was happening.

The MAGA base, of course, quickly spun up nonsense claims about how not covering the president was clearly an antitrust violation (it's not) with Laura Loomer attacking the current boss of the DOJ's antitrust division, Stanley Woodward, as secretly a "Democrat."

This is all kinds of stupid, given that Woodward has been a MAGA faithful Trump supporter for years. He represented January 6th rioters, and a whole bunch of people in and around Donald Trump, including Peter Navarro, Dan Scavino, and Kash Patel, among others. Politico even dubbed him "the legal nerd who MAGA bigwigs" turn to when they need help. Woodward was also involved in the ridiculous, illegal $1.776 billion slush fund Trump tried to create as part of a "settlement" with himself over his fight with the IRS.

Meanwhile, back in the actual story, by Thursday of that week a judge had granted a temporary restraining order against the White House, telling the White House to let the reporters back in. It took some time to do so, but eventually CNN, MS Now, and Politico reporters were given their WH press passes back, at least while the TRO remains in effect. And by Friday morning, September 25th, after just four days of no TV pool coverage, the networks restarted the press pool.

The White House almost immediately tested the boundaries of the TRO by blocking CNN from Air Force One (claiming the TRO only applied to the White House itself) the very next day. CNN was scheduled to handle the TV pool for that Trump trip to Tennessee, so the pool went dark again directly because the White House barred CNN from the flight. That same day, however, the networks announced they would restart the TV pool coverage, just without CNN, effectively caving to the Trump White House.

So, to sum up, the non-banned networks stood firm to boycott Trump's TV pool for… five whole days (Monday through Thursday, and then Saturday) before totally caving and continuing to provide Trump pool coverage.

But Laura Loomer called Stanley Woodward the worst insult you can imagine for a MAGA cultist: "a Democrat." And thus there must be action to feed the culture war beasts. Hence… an investigation into the networks for refusing to run the TV pool for less than a week in response to Trump illegally banning one member of the pool, that, Trump complained, wasn't covering him even after he had banned them.

In a statement on Saturday, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, described the five networks as having "proudly boycotted covering White House events."

"Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act," a core antitrust law, Ms. Covington wrote. "The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws."

Again, as discussed above, that's not at all how the Sherman Act works. And everyone involved knows that full well. The only purpose of this is to (once again) punish the press for its editorial choices — and possibly to get private insight into the networks' editorial decision-making process as part of the investigation.

I mean, it really needs to be emphasized here that the DOJ is investigating CNN for "boycotting" pool coverage it was literally banned from providing. In the MAGA cultist worldview, Donald Trump can ban whoever he wants from the "free press" but those he does not ban are absolutely required to cover him and spread his conspiracy theories and bullshit to the world.

It's just a continuation of FCC chair Brendan Carr's threatened investigation into networks that didn't broadcast Trump's conspiracy theory-laden speech about China's supposed interference in the 2020 election (where the documents he declassified actually showed Russia interfered, not China).

But these stories are all the same basic story: Trump has such a fragile but inflated ego that he believes news networks are required to cover him positively, and that he can punish news orgs that (1) don't cover him positively or (2) don't cover him at all.

That's not how the First Amendment works, but it is how the MAGA Trump world punishes news organizations for their editorial choices. But, of course, all the people who spent years screaming about "Biden admin censorship" are suddenly very, very quiet.

The Complete CompTIA and IT Exam Training Bundle offers access to multi-platform IT training courses, practice exam simulators, and hands-on labs such as CramWise, LinuxPath, DojoLab, CodeDirect, and ExamsDigest. These help prepare you for exams like CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, Cloud+, Server+, and PenTest+, alongside cloud and networking credentials. It's 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.

In today's episode of "wtf," we have a jury deciding a local blogger is a criminal because a local politician didn't appreciate being sent a Shrek bereft of clothes to his cell phone. Morgan Trau of the Ohio Capital Journal has the (pathetic) details on this particular miscarriage of justice.

An Ohio political blogger let out a surprised laugh as he was found guilty of harassment after he sent an explicit digitally altered image of the cartoon character Shrek to a powerful lawmaker.

After just thirty minutes, eight Lake County jurors decided D.J. Byrnes was guilty of telecommunications harassment against state Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), after he sent him two taunting messages and a meme of Shrek holding his genitals.

Laugh he should, although we both certainly wish the laugh had been provoked by the judicial dismissal of plainly vindictive prosecution. The alleged crime has real consequences: up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Fortunately (I guess) for Byrnes (who runs a popular local-focused blog that routinely criticizes local MAGA-leaning officials), the judge only ordered him to pay court costs and a $200 fine.

But that shouldn't let State Senator Jerry Cirino off the hook. After all, he conjured all of this into existence by using his power and political connections to turn a naked Shrek jpeg into a criminal conviction.

The lawmaker testified he directly called the local police chief, saying he wanted charges to be filed. Public records show Cirino called the judge who signed Byrnes' arrest warrant a "good friend" in late April and donated at least $2,500 to her political campaign in 2016. 

It's impossible to say whether a different judge would have handled this arrest warrant differently, but it's certainly easy to assume there was some grease on the wheels when this judge was given the chance to review the affidavit.

Cirino is not to be trusted. Not only did he use his connections to turn an unwanted text message into a criminal act, but he pretended (in court!) that this was harassment because Byrnes sent the naked Shrek to his personal cell phone.

Just because he is a politician doesn't mean he deserves that on his private cell phone, Cirino added.

Whether or not Cirino "deserves" to receive taunting messages and dick-stroking Shrek pics is a question that isn't really answered by this verdict. But what's no longer open for debate is whether or not Cirino has a "private" phone that's more deserving of protections not normally afforded to public figures, like local politicians. He doesn't. The state may not be paying for his cell service contract, but the number is anything but "private."

One of the main arguments the defense brought up was that this was official political business and free speech, citing examples of Cirino using his cell phone for public business, even allowing local newspapers to publish his number for constituents to reach him.

It seems Cirino only likes to receive supportive messages from right-wing locals. What he doesn't care for is criticism, taunts, and naked Shreks sent to him by people who don't agree with his political actions or views. Since he's already handed it out to the locals, I'm sure any enterprising search engine user should be able to find this supposedly "private" number.

But I'm sure people aligned with Cirino's right-wing views will find Byrne first, and engage in similar harassment in response to previous "crimes" that embarrassed GOP figures and the people they love. Here's a choice bit from Byrne/The Rooster's CV:

He helped unearth a scandalous cell phone video that brought down former Ohio State and NFL football coach Urban Meyer. He catfished Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, posing as an Ohio State football coach. And he was present when an Ohio State professor tackled a cameraman who was trying to cajole former OSU President Gordon Gee into an interview. 

And that's really why Cirino went after Byrne. He could have done nothing more than block Byrne's number to end the alleged "harassment." But he didn't. He made a personal call to the police chief and somehow managed to get his criminal accusations presented to a "good friend" who also happened to be a local judge.

Politicians like Cirino consider corruption to be a feature of government, rather than a bug directly related to citizens trusting their fellow Americans to serve their interests, rather than their own. Hopefully, the end result of this will be Cirino being voted out of office and those who aided and abetted his petty quest for revenge coughing up a settlement to Byrne for violating his rights.

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 You're At It
• Wal-Mart's 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

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 he's able to claim to both sides of the vaccine "debate" that he's said what they want him to say. "Go get the MMR vaccine" he'll say when confronted by a measles crisis that is spinning out of control. Then he'll 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. It's how you get outbreaks of once-defeated diseases.

The second is that the public generally understands that Kennedy is a problem and doesn't like what he's 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 Kennedy's 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 Kennedy's stance on the MMR vaccine is, but they are not at all confused about the fact that they hate him. Let's 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 Kennedy's statements that people should in fact get the vaccine. While he's done that, I've 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 aren't tested. He's 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 isn't 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 Kennedy's 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. It's his life's 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 isn't.

I can't explain why Kennedy has such as grip on Trump. I don't 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 it's going to be a GOP ass-kicking.

But I do know we're all worse off for it.

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 that's 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?"

That's why we've got city sanitation vehicles wielding cameras for the purpose of generating "blight" citations. And that's 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 we're 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, there's 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 that's what everyone says when they want to add cameras to places and things that didn't 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.

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week's episode, Mike and Ben cover:

• The Official Sonic Discord Server's Launch Went About As Poorly As You'd Expect (Kotaku)
• Vladimir Putin's 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 week's episode!

If you're already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

The big Meta multi-state settlement got most of the headlines, and there's been plenty of discussion about how it's a bad deal for kids and pretty clearly anti-competitive. That's 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 won't accept Meta's terms, because they don't make sense for its very different platform. TikTok hasn't publicly commented on the Meta deal, though it did reject Meta's attempt to run ads on TikTok itself urging TikTok to join the settlement.

It didn't 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 we've seen juries more than willing to blame social media platforms for anything bad that happens to kids using the platform, it's 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 Meta's settlement. But there are some key differences in the full settlement agreement. And the biggest, as first pointed out by Stanford's 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.

It's… 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, I'm going to assume there won't be much transparency there. Then there's another $16.2 million going to outside lawyers and litigation costs:

Fund 1 is paid to resolve the State's 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 General's 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 AG's office can spend it however it wants, and there's 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. There's 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 can't 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 can't even wrap my head around the logic here. "Here, we've 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: Alabama's AG now has a direct financial stake in recruiting 39 other states to pressure TikTok into the same deal, on a deadline. I can't 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 don't 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 it's 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.

The Essential MATLAB and LabVIEW Mega Bundle has 9 courses to help you improve your skills in programming and visualization. You'll learn the basics of each and then go through hands-on courses building apps, learning about data analysis and visualization, and more. It's 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.

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 won't: whether hosting the livestream would violate the platforms' own rules — and whether they'll simply ignore (or rewrite) those rules to do it anyway. While it's 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 that's a separate question.)

But let's look more closely at the possible platforms Hegseth might use, since the Pentagon hasn't yet said where this "livestream" is supposed to occur.

Elon Musk's 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 doesn't 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 it's packaged, "glorifying" violence, though there's clearly room to argue otherwise. And I'm sure Elon will claim it's 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 Elon's team.

There is one concrete area of X's 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 individual's death, if we receive a request from their family or an authorized representative.

In theory, Hasan's 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 company's policies really depends on a very subjective set of decisions.

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 YouTube's 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 there's 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 that's what it would point to. But the same page lists content that's barred from exceptions no matter the context, including "the act of decapitation." While this isn't quite decapitation, it's still a pretty gruesome public execution.

Zuck has spent the past couple years sucking up to Donald Trump after Trump threatened to put Zuck in jail for life. But Meta's "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 don't 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 has less detail than the others in its policy, but does say they don't 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 Trump's investor friends) can probably wriggle around that language and try to claim that the execution isn't a "glorification" of violence, though it would be wrong.

I guess we need to consider that the Pentagon might try to post it on the president's 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 isn't 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 that's 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 doesn't technically violate their policies. Meta cannot say that. I'd argue that the videos likely do violate YouTube, X, and TikTok's 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. It's kind of incredible how far we've 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.

I've explored how Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr has been working tirelessly to illegally destroy what's left of already shaky U.S. media consolidation limits. He's particularly interested in helping Trump-friendly local broadcasters like Sinclair, Tegna, and Nexstar merge and dominate what's 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.

Carr's moves have also ironically pissed of bigger cable companies, which are now saying Carr's 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 they'll 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."

There's 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 don't much like it when the shoe is on the other foot.

This is all the embarrassing gesticulations of obvious regulatory capture and corruption.

Trump's 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 he's 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 won't 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 Trump's health and political power wanes.

In no time at all we'll be back to ordinary corruption and regulatory capture, slightly less tainted by the unpleasant, lingering odor of autocratic extremism.

There's 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 don't 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 didn't just run down your spine, you're 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 Pentagon's 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, I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on that one. Go read Hegseth's remarks again and tell me if that doesn't sound like someone who is going to compel participation. As for the favoring of one religion over another, or of the faithless, that's already happened. And this office, bound by the arbitrary determinations made under Hegseth's 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 isn't 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.

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 Us
Part 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 child's 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 Tech's 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.

The Democratic party has announced they're suing Donald Trump for his recent attempt to flood the midterm airwaves with propaganda he's 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 Trump's abysmal polling it's more likely to hurt than help midterm Republicans, but Trump's gargantuan ego couldn't 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 weren't 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 that's worth) that he'll stop using taxpayer dollars and instead fund the ads "himself" (leverage his existing SuperPAC cash trove):

Granted this being Trump, there's been no indication anything changed about the ads or how they are being funded, and Trump can't 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 won't 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.

They're also doing everything possible to ignore or eliminate traditional restrictions on how that money is spent, whether we're 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 doesn't seem to be providing any real tactical advantage. If anything, slathering the airwaves with Trump's face seems more inclined to undermine Republicans in key House and Senate midterm races.