Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Toom1275 with a comment about Missouri’s new speech police:

Teaching kids the reality that trans people exist and are normal is no more grooming them than teaching kids that frogs exist is grooming them to become amphibians.

In second place, we’ve got a double-winning comment that also takes second place over on the funny side. It’s That One Guy responding to Meta ending its link tax deals in Australia:

Kinda giving the ‘It’s theft!’ argument lie away there…

Australian government: If you’re going to use that content then you have to pay for it otherwise that’s stealing!

Meta: Okay, we’ll stop using it then.

Australian government: Blackmail! Extortion! How dare you fiendishly try to get out of paying for content by no longer using it!?

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from T.L. about the anti-TikTok bill:

Besides the First Amendment nightmare this poses, the bill’s authors have no idea how TikTok would be able to comply with a divestiture. TikTok is too large to be bought by any single company, with a valuation of $80 billion, and the only ones based in the U.S. who could possibly afford it are Meta, Google and Musk, raising antitrust issues; it’s not clear whether a spinoff from ByteDance would suffice (they failed to realize the TikTok unit is incorporated in the U.S., Singapore and the Cayman Islands); and Chinese regulators would stymie any forced divestiture. It also raises competition concerns by eliminating a competitor to the three biggest social media companies, meaning lawmakers would have no right to complain about their market dominance because they enabled Meta, X/Twitter and YouTube/Google to hog market share.

Banning it opens the door to breaking the Internet, giving China and other autocratic countries justification to censor platforms, hurting the same U.S. companies that would benefit. China could also retaliate against our economy, pushing our companies (like Apple and GM) out. It would also risk America falls to fascism by angering young voters to not show up in November, handing the country to Trump and MAGA.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about Peoria police advertising to new recruits by asking them to “come play Call of Duty in real life”:

This seems like a good time for a reminder that much of what cops do to our own citizens would be classified as war crimes if our soldiers did it to civilians, or even enemy combatants in some cases.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Crafty Coyote with a comment about Eminem’s upcoming deposition in a trademark dispute:

When it comes to litigation, he’s going to lose himself in the motions, the moment, he wants it, he better never let it go. He only gets one shot, to not miss his chance to blow. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime.

We’ve already had our second place winner for funny above, so now on to editor’s choice, starting with Flakbait and another comment about the Peoria police recruitment ad:

Never satisfied

Some people are never satisfied. The cops finally start using truth in advertising and everyone loses their minds.

Finally, it’s an anonymous response to the phrase “typical anti-free speech conservative”:

You packed a lot of redundancy into 5 words.

That’s all for this week, folks!