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The Trump administration keeps demonstrating that it really hates affordable broadband. It particularly hates it when the government tries to make broadband affordable to poor people or rural school kids.
In just the last year the Trump administration has:
Rewritten the infrastructure Act at the behest of telecom giants, ensuring that they can take $42.5 billion in taxpayer money without...
Echo chambers are generally bad. Any group making important decisions should have a certain level of diversity of thought to avoid groupthink. But I would argue that there are some stances that are so fundamental that it’s good when everyone is on the same page about them. Vaccines, for instance. It would be just the best if everyone in the agencies that manage American health, all the way up to...
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...
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
Days into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “Please Donald Trump, I need your help,” he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. “I am an American. … Help me...
For years, we’ve been subjected to an endless parade of hyperventilating claims about the Biden administration’s supposed “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, over and over again, that the government was weaponizing its power to silence conservative speech. The evidence for this? Some angry emails from White House staffers that Facebook ignored. That was basically it. The Supreme Court...
I have to admit: the first one-and-a-half paragraphs of this CNN report had me thinking the Trump administration was shedding another pretense and just embracing its inherent shittiness.
Justice Department officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss how to reenergize probes that are considered a top priority for President Donald Trump — reviewing the actions of officials who investigated...
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If you’ve been paying attention to surveillance and civil liberties issues over the past fifteen years, you’ve likely learned to recognize a particular pattern. Senator Ron Wyden will occasionally send a public letter that essentially says “hey, I can’t tell you what’s happening because it’s classified, but something really bad is going on and you should all be paying attention.”
A decade ago...
We’ve been talking about how the Trump GOP is launching an all out attack on Netflix’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust or corporate power, but because they really want Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison to buy Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. It’s part of their unsubtle plan to acquire what’s left of U.S. media and turn it it to MAGA state television...
It’s darkly funny, in a way, to recall a racist trope that gets trotted out about immigration all the time: immigrants bring disease into the country. That in itself isn’t funny, obviously. The funny part is that it seems like we’re proving the opposite to be true under the Trump administration. As the measles outbreak in America continues to rage, immigration detention camps are starting to feel...