It says something about Trump’s all-out war on free speech that the New York Times couldn’t find a more credible person than “presidential historian” Craig Shirley to defend it. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/u...

Go Birds.

Our own study of multilingual AI finds that these systems are trained on mostly English-lang data, machine translated speech, or data scraped from the web which doesn't represent how people speak. Translation is an art form. AI is creating six-fingered mimicry of language: cdt.org/insights/los...

I have lost all patience with the apparently unshakeable conviction that striking a reasonable, moderate pose means assuming the sincerity of transparently pretextual horseshit. Donald Trump does not care about reducing crime in DC. He is testing and normalizing paramilitary deployments in cities.

This.

I was honored to join this conversation with @knightcolumbia.org about federal funding the the First Amendment and to write this piece, in which I ask, what if Congress decided to exercise its power in this moment to protect our First Amendment rights?

I want #40MoreYearsofEvanGreer giving us essential security lesson via pop song covers! We sing this one in my house constantly. @evangreer.bsky.social youtu.be/EJW7v_Emw8k?...

CDT’s @beccabranum.bsky.social in the @nytimes.com on the unconstitutionality of the TAKE IT DOWN Act that recently passed in the House this Monday. www.nytimes.com/2025...

Much more than six times

Imagine seeing the Venus de Milo for the first time and thinking “filth.” How broken and sad.

Wikipedia is the ground truth of the internet. It has over 260000 dedicated people engaged in radically transparent content moderation and that’s why it’s the last best thing on the Internet. Targeting it says more about the one doing the targeting. www.theverge.com/news/656720/...

Leading us off, CDT CEO @alexreevegivens.bsky.social: “We’re convening this event because the U.S. is facing a crisis moment for the future of free speech."

Join CDT for this important discussion tomorrow!

A bop.

I think Mel Brooks once said something like: Tragedy is when I stub my toe, comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die. By extension, "censorship" is when I can't use racial slurs on a private social media platform; "free speech" is when you get abducted off the street for political opinions.

From CDT’s @kateruane.bsky.social: “Automated tools are error-prone & guaranteed to improperly categorize an unknown number of applicants’ viewpoints as violent, terroristic, or antisemitic, even by the Administration’s broad definitions of those terms.” www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

From CDT’s @kateruane.bsky.social: “DHS is targeting people based on nothing more than their First Amendment-protected expression, which is wrong in the first place. To make matters worse, it will almost certainly use error-prone automated tools to detect disfavored speech.” bsky.app/profile/npr....

Just me banging on again that BROADWAY employs more people than coal.

It’s also lazy. It doesn’t actually take that long to understand how social media can benefit kids and everyone. Or how censorship is bad and anti-democratic!! ::Gestures wildly at everything::

I mean… who among us

Gutting Section 230 won't punish Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. It will just kill Bluesky and Wikipedia

Honest to god what is wrong with people

I hope people see how blatantly hypocritical it is for the U.S. to complain about EU "censorship" right now. I have plenty of quibbles with the DSA, and with EU platform regulation generally. If the U.S. currently had any leg to stand on at ALL in this area, I would be talking about those. 1/

Always a good day to listen to @evangreer.bsky.social but especially today: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2QK...

Indeed. Thank you, @wyden.senate.gov

Esha is absolutely right. It doesn't matter if you agree with Mr. Khalil, the constitution protects his advocacy from punishment by the state. We must protect his constitutional right to ensure that the constitution protects all of us.

Yesterday the 4th Circuit held that the fed gov can begin enforcing provisions in 2 anti-DEI exec orders that Trump signed on his 1st and 2d days in office that a district court had enjoined bc it thought the provisions didn’t actually *do* anything. 1/ storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

I will say this for them. They fully understand how important access to information is to freedom.

Arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world’s most repressive regimes. It’s genuinely shocking that this appears to be what’s going on right here. 1/

I wrote section 230 to protect the little guys and the upstarts like Bluesky. Repealing section 230 only helps Meta, Musk, and Donald Trump.

100% this (read the whole thread for a primer on the law). The direct and express purpose of many of the Executive Orders is to cower people into not exercising their 1st Amendment rights. These are not the subtle coercion cases courts struggle over. Vullo had tougher facts than these.

And another unconstitutional, speech-chilling, viewpoint based move from the "free speech" Administration. This time with AI! www.axios.com/2025/03/06/s...

"Do law, not vibes." is a quote applicable to so very much of our current situations.

👇

And another example: www.ap.org/the-definiti...

funniest highlights of the philly police scanner, a thread

Philly Philly

All that work to (correctly) kill the Fairness Doctrine and now this.

And the broader damage is already done. According to the Supreme Court this is a constitutional exercise of government power. What else is constitutional now? It's not just about TikTok anymore, if it ever was.

Our brief speaks to Jess's point here exactly. Children will be able to get around age verification and assurance systems too. One of these systems was fooled by holding a dachsund up to the camera (page 26): cdt.org/wp-content/u...

This is basically what I just said to my wife - verbatim.

Folks are mostly missing the forest for the trees re: the recent Meta announcement. Specifically, the focus on the move from fact checking to community notes. There two different changes that are a much bigger deal that have received less focus. 🧵 1/11

The research I did at @datasociety.bsky.social on online harassment absolutely supports her statements about the silencing of voices that happens in spaces with so-called unfettered online speech. datasociety.net/library/onli...

The changes to Meta’s Hateful Conduct Policy are disastrous for free expression. Meta cannot claim that it’s protecting free speech while making changes that will silence entire communities. Short 🧵 1/

Whose speech? Honest question.

Amid all the reporting about Trump's amicus brief, You can still do this!

Good. www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme...

Very nice piece on some of the problems with society going cashless, with focus on seniors. Not mentioned: cashless transactions can also be blocked by censorious middlemen.