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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about how “neutrality” and “free speech” become excuses for bigotry:
You can’t be neutral about bigotry
“Neutrality” is for elements of policy, like “What should be the top tax rate” or “should we build a new interstate highway” or “Which candidate should be Mayor.”
You can’t be “neutral” about someone’s...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, the RIAA tossed out a bogus DMCA claim to get a YouTube downloading tool pulled from Github, and was still flooding Twitch with takedowns that the company was responding to by freaking out and courting a lot of outrage from the users it failed to defend. Meanwhile, YouTuber Lindsay Ellis released an in-depth video about the most entertaining DMCA dust-up of the...
Both Google and Apple are cramming new AI features into their phones and other devices, and neither company has offered clear ways to control which apps those AI systems can access. Recent issues around WhatsApp on both Android and iPhone demonstrate how these interactions can go sideways, risking revealing chat conversations beyond what you intend. Users deserve better controls and clearer...
ICE can generate multiple horrible stories a day but it still can’t seem to find enough brown people to deport daily to satisfy White House advisor Stephen Miller’s demands for 3,000 arrests per day.
Trump and the GOP threw a lot of money at this problem with the Big Beautiful Bill. A lot of money: $75 billion over the next four years. Part of that goes to another metric ICE will apparently never...
When it comes to RFK Jr., I tend not to find much humor in the chaos he creates. The man’s work involves American health and illness, life and death, so it’s just generally not funny. And that holds true to Kennedy’s wielding of incomplete, inaccurate, and unsettled science to go before all of America and declare definitively that acetaminophen, of which Tylenol is the most famous brand, was at...
As anyone who has read Techdirt for any length of time knows full well, there’s been a years-long campaign to demonize kids and social media. Never mind that actual experts have said the data doesn’t support the claims of inherent harm, politicians around the globe are rushing to ban kids from social media as fast as they can.
But banning kids from social media has a fundamental problem: kids...
The Ultimate Unity Game Development Bundle has 4 courses are designed to designed to teach about game dev and how to create your own games using the Unity engine. You’ll learn about the fundamentals of C# programming, 2D and 3D game development, mobile game development, how to build amazing cutscenes, and more. It’s on sale for $25.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by...
It surprises absolutely no one that the Trump administration lies. Trump himself has been lying constantly ever since his first spin in the resolute desk chair. His new administration is right there with him this time around, ensuring we see nothing but a flood of falsehoods all the time.
The administration knows it’s lying. We know it’s lying. It knows that we know it’s lying. And it doesn’t...
While “AI” certainly has some useful applications, a lot of the folks in charge of the trajectory of LLMs clearly want to use it to build a giant, badly automated ouroboros of lazy internet slop that shits out ad money without the need for pesky labor. You see this most profoundly in media, where a bunch of far-too-clever lads rushed to integrate under-cooked, broadly misunderstood LLMs with...
As of this moment, the National Guard is indefinitely prevented from deploying within the Chicagoland area. The court order was issued pending the Supreme Court’s decision to rule on the matter. And because this administration is a walking, talking clown show, the information that SCOTUS is getting on the matter is hilariously stratified depending on who they’re talking to.
President Donald...