Mike Masnick

San Francisco

Founder and Editor, Floor64 at Techdirt

CEO at Copia Institute

I write/edit @techdirt. Mostly gone from here. If you're looking for me I'm at the better place: @mmasnick.bsky.social

Articles

Trump Admits He Could Get Abrego Garcia Back, But Angrily Insists Non-Existent Tattoos Are The Reason He Won’t

1 week ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

Bizarrely buried near the bottom of NY Times article about the chaos behind the renditioning of people to a Salvadoran gulag is an important detail: the US and El Salvador have already brought back eight people who were “mistakenly” sent there: In Washington, the Trump administration was working to address Mr. Bukele’s confusion about whom the United States had sent him. Eight women who had been mistakenly sent were swiftly flown back.
Trump Appointed Judge: No You Can’t Use Alien Enemies Act To Rendition Venezuelans

1 week ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

Well look who else thinks Trump’s plan to use a centuries-old law to vanish people to El Salvador is batshit crazy: one of his own judges, Fernando Rodriguez Jr. I’m sure the admin will be out there calling him a far-left radical Marxist before long. Let’s be clear about how absolutely unhinged this whole thing is. Using the Alien Enemies Act to rendition people to a foreign concentration camp is shameful.
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Look What The Chat Dragged In

1 week ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:The group chats that changed America (Semafor)Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done.
DOGE Aide Involved In Dismantling Consumer Bureau Owns Stock In Companies That Could Benefit From the Cuts

1 week ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. A federal employee who is helping the Trump administration carry out the drastic downsizing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau owns stock in companies that could benefit from the agency’s dismantling, a ProPublica investigation has found.
Colorado’s Social Media Moral Panic Bill Dies After Governor’s Thoughtful Veto

1 week ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a state legislature, caught up in the moral panic about social media, passes yet another clearly unconstitutional bill that will waste taxpayer money on doomed legal battles. This time it’s Colorado, whose legislature passed a ridiculously bad social media regulation bill (SB25-086) that looks suspiciously similar to bills that have already failed in Utah, Arkansas, and other states. But this story has a slightly different ending.
Judge In Apple / Epic Case Is Spitting Mad At Apple’s Willful Contempt

1 week ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

Back in 2021, Apple mostly won the antitrust case that Epic brought against it, and the Ninth Circuit largely agreed. The court rejected most claims about Apple’s App Store being an illegal monopoly. The company just had to make one small change: let developers tell users they could make purchases elsewhere. Simple enough.
‘Free Speech’ GOP Threatened Billboard Company To Remove Democrats’ Ads About Medicaid Cuts

2 weeks ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

The “Party of Free Speech” is at it again. House Speaker Mike Johnson just bragged about using legal threats to remove his opponents’ political advertising — perhaps the most constitutionally protected form of speech that exists. And he did it while lying about them lying. As he says in that clip:Do not believe the hype. Do not believe the lies the Democrat Party has said. We had their ads taken down.
FTC’s ‘Tech Censorship’ Investigation Is Censoring Comments About ‘Censorship’

2 weeks ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

The FTC’s politically motivated inquiry into “tech censorship” has managed to prove exactly the opposite of what it intended: the government agency is now actively censoring public comments from people complaining about being censored by tech platforms. It’s almost too perfect. The FTC, under Chair Andrew Ferguson, launched what it called an investigation into “tech censorship” back in March.
The Hallucinating ChatGPT Presidency

2 weeks ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration. It does not involve facts. It does not involve thinking at all. It certainly doesn’t involve comprehension or nuance. It’s just about generating based on prompts and system setup.
Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act

2 weeks ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

Here’s a puzzle: How do you write a law that’s so badly designed that (1) the people it’s meant to help oppose it, (2) the people who hate regulation support it, and (3) everyone involved admits it will be abused? The answer, it turns out, is the Take It Down Act. The bill started with the entirely reasonable goal of addressing non-consensual intimate imagery online. But then something went wrong.