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At some point, we, as a society, are going to realize that farming copyright enforcement out to bots and AI-driven robocops is not the way to go, but today is not that day. Long before AI became the buzzword it is today, large companies have employed their own copyright crawler bots, or employed those of a third party, to police their copyrights on these here internets. And for just as long,...
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
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In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined...
For thirty years, internet users have benefited from a key federal law that allows everyone to express themselves, find community, organize politically, and participate in society. Section 230, which protects internet users’ speech by protecting the online intermediaries we rely on, is the legal support that sustains the internet as we know it.
Yet as Section 230 turns 30 this week, there are...
Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. Among the more notable exchanges was when Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked some of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims who were in the audience to stand up and indicate whether Bondi’s DOJ had ever contacted them about their experiences. None of them had heard from the Justice Department. Bondi wouldn’t even look at the victims...
The DHS and its components want to find non-white people to deport by any means necessary. Of course, “necessary” is something that’s on a continually sliding scale with Trump back in office, which means everything (legal or not) is “necessary” if it can help White House advisor Stephen Miller hit his self-imposed 3,000 arrests per day goal.
As was reported last week, DHS components (ICE, CBP)...
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You may have heard last week that actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt went to Washington DC and gave a short speech at an event put on by Senator Dick Durbin calling for the sunsetting of Section 230. It’s a short speech, and it gets almost everything wrong about Section 230. Watch it here:
Let me first say that, while I’m sure some will rush to jump in and say “oh, it’s just some Hollywood actor guy,...
Trump 1.0 took a hatchet to media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely-owned) competitors underfoot. The result of their destruction has been a rise in local news deserts, a surge in right wing propaganda outlets pretending to be “local news,” ...
I want to say a little something upfront in this post, so that there is no misunderstanding. While I’ve spent a great deal of time outlining why I think RFK Jr. and his cadre of buffoons at HHS and its child agencies are horrible for America and her people’s health, I do understand some of the perspective from people who pushback on vaccinations some of the time. One of those areas are vaccine...
Artificial intelligence promises to change not just how Americans work, but how societies decide which kinds of work are worthwhile in the first place. When technological change outpaces social judgment, a major capacity of a sophisticated society comes under pressure: the ability to sustain forms of work whose value is not obvious in advance and cannot be justified by necessity alone.
As AI...