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It has been frustrating, to say the least, to watch many of the big Silicon Valley tech firms bow down to Trump and do his bidding, especially when it directly contradicts things they’ve said and done in the past. I’ve tried to explain to tech company execs why this doesn’t end well for them, but it seems it’s a lesson they’re going to have to learn from… what’s that they say…? Oh right, from “...
A coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for the elimination of a longstanding FCC rule the Trump administration abused to “bully” ABC and CBS into kissing the president’s ass (I’ll use the term bully loosely since both companies seemed very eager to roll over for the far right wing).
Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “...
This week, all our winning comments came in response to our post about Donald Trump falling for satire from a website called The Dunning-Kruger Times. In first place on the insightful side, it’s That One Guy with a comment about how this is hardly surprising:
He fell for it because he WANTS to believe it(and he’s incredibly stupid)
Of course he fell for it, and I’ve no doubt that a massive...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, we looked at election polls as an example of the challenges involved in defining and handling misinformation. We noted how Trumpland seemed to have entirely forgotten about its own manufactured TikTok hysteria, at which point the Commerce Department suddenly remembered it was supposed to ban the app. Following Trump’s election loss, there was pressure on Ajit Pai...
We’ve written about Buc-ee’s a couple of times recently, given the famed convenience store chain of the south’s aspirations to become the Monster Energy of convenience stores when it comes to nonsense trademark bullying. Buc-ee’s has gone after all kinds of other companies, almost always for the crime of having a cartoon animal in their logos. The company appears to think that it somehow has the...
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was supposed to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness data from across federal agencies to expose illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement.
DHS...
A couple months ago we offered up the few remaining copies of our social media card game, One Billion Users, after fulfilling orders from our Kickstarter backers. Quite a few of you took the chance to snag one, and now we’re down to an extremely small number remaining: at time of writing, we only have ten undamaged copies of the game, and a few dozen of the damaged copies that we are offering at...
The Trump administration has been ramping up its rhetoric against Venezuela since Day 1. Efforts to arrest up to 3,000 migrants a day focused on Venezuelans, many of whom had fled to the United States seeking a land with actual freedom.
Those who weren’t simply locked up in ICE’s many forever prisons were sent to places even worse than the autocratic government they had fled. Many Venezuelans...
A key theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is that copyright, born in an analogue age of scarcity, works poorly in today’s digital world of abundance. One manifestation of that is how lawmakers struggle to adapt the existing copyright rules to deal with novel technological developments, like the new generation of AI technologies. The EU’s AI Act marks a major step in...
Last year, we wrote about Donald Trump’s bullshit lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for releasing surprising polls right before the 2024 election suggesting that Kamala Harris might actually beat Donald Trump in Iowa. The polls turned out to be wrong—as polls sometimes are—and Trump decided this was grounds for a lawsuit. That case continues with a bunch of nonsense legal gamesmanship.
But...