AI Slop Startup To Flood The Internet With Thousands Of AI Slop Podcasts, Calls Critics Of AI Slop ‘Luddites’ So look, I'm not one of these people who thinks "AI" has no useful applications. Just this week I had an efficient conversation with a Gemini chatbot when trying to cancel a Google…

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Heart of Dawn with a comment about Disney pulling Jimmy Kimmel's show: Conservatives absolutely hate “cancel culture” right up to the point they are the ones doing it. Hypocrisy is…

This Week In Techdirt History: September 14th – 20th Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the first phase of the TikTok fight resolved with Oracle getting a lucrative hosting deal instead of buying the company in a deal driven by Trump-world insiders, while a court refused to block Trump's executive…

Ryan Walters’ Plan To Teach OK Students Election And COVID Conspiracies Put On Hold By State Supreme Court We've talked a lot about Ryan Walters recently, mostly because he keeps forgetting that the United States Constitution applies to him and his state. Between his attempt to inject Christian…

Copyright Troll Backfires: Has To Pay Up To Get Out Of Its Lawsuit Of Lies It's been a good while since we've had an old-fashioned copyright troll nonsense story around here, and boy do we have a doozy for you today. Regular Techdirt readers know that we've covered Paul Levy's work for years—the…

You Don’t Own What You Buy: New Lawsuit Dings Amazon For Misleading Video ‘Purchases’ Techdirt has long lamented how in the modern era, you don't really "own" what you buy. That game console, smart lock, or smart refrigerator can quickly become less useful (or completely useless) with a firmware…

How MAGA Killed Foreign Influence Research, But Now Demands Social Media Stop Foreign Influence Campaigns It's fascinating how quickly the tune changes when the shoe's on the other foot. For years, we've been treated to endless screaming about how any effort to identify and counter foreign…

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Bill Would Give The State Dept. The Ability To Deny Passports To Citizens Who Criticize Israel This isn't anything that actually needed to be done. The federal government has plenty of options at its disposal if it thinks someone is providing material support for terrorism. It's one of things that…

Warner Bros CEO Laments ‘Terrible’ Streaming TV Experience’ He Created, Proposes More Shitty Mergers And Price Hikes As The Fix We've mentioned repeatedly how the AT&T-->Time Warner-->Discovery series of media mergers were some of the most destructive and pointless business efforts ever, resulting…

Somebody’s Lying: Susan Monarez’s Congressional Testimony Is 180 Degrees From RFK Jr.’s When you're brought before Congress to testify, you're not supposed to lie. I realize that sounds rather obvious to many of you, but I'll remind you that this is the year of our lord, 2025, and such common…

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: From ‘Free Speech’ To ‘Flag This’ 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 —…

X And Canada Fight Over Takedowns And They’re Both Wrong A Canadian tribunal's $72,000 fine against X for refusing to globally remove non-consensual intimate images (NCII) exposes a fundamental tension that courts have been dodging for years: When can one country order worldwide content takedowns,…

The World’s Most Popular Porn Site Is a Government Agent Now. Does It Matter? On Monday, I published a two-part blog post about the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement with Aylo, parent company of Pornhub. The FTC’s complaint alleged that Aylo violated federal consumer protection law by…

Jimmy Kimmel’s Firing Comes As Feckless TV Networks Lobby Trump To Destroy Remaining Media Consolidation Limits As Mike just got done noting, our major media companies continue to respond to authoritarianism by being pathetic and feckless little shitweasels. First with the ABC and CBS bribery…

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Facebook Flooded With Agitslop Of AI Grief Farming About Charlie Kirk Last year, there was some talk about how AI-generated wacky images—summed up generally as “shrimp Jesus” as an example of one of the most bizarre—were taking over Facebook. It was only a matter of time until this sort of AI slop…

The Trump FCC’s CBS ‘Truth Nanny’ Is Unsurprisingly A Trump Lackey Who Has No Idea How Journalism Works You might recall that one of the conditions of the FCC's approval of The Ellison family's $8 billion acquisition of CBS was that the agency would install a "ombudsman" at the network to ensure…

Cowardly Disney Caves To Brendan Carr’s Bogus Censorial Threats, Pulling Jimmy Kimmel There are multiple ways into this story, but almost all of the reporting on what’s happened claims that Disney pulled talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” over comments that Kimmel made about Charlie…

The Illiberal, Transphobic Pipe Dream Of Banning Porn Reaches Michigan Republicans It appears that the illiberal, transphobic pipe dream of banning all pornography has reached an enterprising group of far-right Christian nationalist Republicans in Michigan who want to impose the moralistic agendas…

California Lawmakers Pass A Bill That Would Ban Use of Face Masks By Law Enforcement It's probably too much to ask, but I hope California law enforcement agencies will remember who to direct their hate at if this bill becomes law. It's not the "liberals" running the state. It's the Trump…

World’s Sorest Winner: Trump Demands $15 Billion From NY Times For Not Fluffing His Ego Enough Even by Donald Trump's standards for frivolous defamation lawsuits, this one is impressively stupid. On Monday, the president filed yet another lawsuit against the NY Times—this time seeking $15 billion…

TikTok To Be Sold To Trump’s Right Wing Billionaire Buddies And Converted Into A Propaganda Mill Donald Trump has successfully used xenophobia and fake concerns about propaganda and national security to get what he's long wanted: TikTok (and its fat ad revenues) are poised to be sold off to his…

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The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I’ve seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to “those who disagree with him” as a sign that he was…

The Washington Post Fires Its Last Black Opinion Columnist For Directly Quoting A Bigot The Washington Post isn't what it used to be. While the paper is still peppered with a few decent journalists trying to do good work, the outlet is being slowly strangled to death by billionaire owner Jeff…

RFK Jr. Adds Five More Unqualified, Anti-Vaxx Members To ACIP We've all become entirely too familiar with ACIP, the CDC panel that discusses and recommends vaccination schedules across a wide swath of vaccines. The method by which ACIP became part of the general American lexicon traces all the way…

She Pushed To Overturn Trump’s Loss In The 2020 Election. Now She’ll Help Oversee U.S. Election Security. This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, has been…

Missed The Kickstarter? You’ve Got One Last Chance! Limited Copies Of Our Social Media Card Game Are Now Available Over the past few months, we've been fulfilling the orders for all the backers who helped us launch One Billion Users, the social media card game, on Kickstarter. Now that process is…

Trump’s Selective Memory: “Not Familiar” With Assassinated Democratic Lawmaker While Raging About “Left-wing Violence” Donald Trump's response to political violence this week reveals something more sinister than mere hypocrisy—it's the deliberate construction of a false reality where only certain…

DOJ Is Now Investigating University Professors For Wrongthink There's no slippery slope here. The bigoted fiends have already claimed the bottom of the hill for themselves and now they're bringing in the earth-moving equipment in hopes of creating an ideological Mariana's Trench. Thanks to Trump's…

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Pam Bondi Threatens To Prosecute Hate Speech, Which Charlie Kirk Himself (Rightly) Said Was Protected Speech Attorney General Pam Bondi just provided a masterclass in how to completely misunderstand the First Amendment while threatening to abuse government power to silence critics. In response to…

CBS/Paramount And The Ellisons Look To Buy Time Warner In Latest Destructive Major Media Megadeal Fresh off of kissing Trump's ass to gain regulatory approval for Skydance's merger with CBS and Paramount, the billionaire Ellison family is cooking up another terrible idea: quickly merging with…

Flock Safety Claims It Can Rid The US Of Crime, Even As Cities Rid Themselves Of Flock Even if you truly believe the company you work for is capable of doing this, perhaps read the room a bit before offering up this sort of insane assertion to a journalist: Langley offers a prediction: In less…

Trump Says He’s Sending The National Guard To Another City Run By A Democratic Party Member What began in Los Angeles and Washington DC is being expanded to any other place the president thinks is being run by people who just aren't subservient enough to the GOP. The next city in line for the…

The FTC’s Settlement With Aylo: This Isn’t Really About Fighting CSAM And Revenge Porn This is part two of a two-part series about the recent settlement between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Utah Consumer Protection Division (CPD), and Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub. The order…

The Trump FTC’s War On Porn Just Ensured That Accused CSAM Offenders Will Walk Free Well, they finally did it. A federal agency finally shattered the precarious base that upholds the edifice of prosecutions for child sex abuse material (CSAM) in America. That agency is the Federal Trade Commission…

Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Deserve What’s Happening To Him I am not here to celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. I will not, however, engage in the completely unearned celebration of his life that is happening pretty much everywhere in the wake of his murder. What's happening now would normally be…

Daily Deal: The Ultimate Software Testing Bundle Get the skills you need to become a software tester with the Ultimate Software Testing Bundle. Software testing is performed to identify differences between given input and expected output and to verify that software products function according to…

Stop Begging. Start Building As a reminder, I’m on the board at Bluesky, which means you should consider me extremely biased, even as this article isn’t really about Bluesky. The writer Jerusalem Demsas wants you to stay on Twitter. In "The case for staying on Twitter," she admits the site is…

Trump GOP Redirected Essential Cybersecurity Funding To Give Rich Assholes More Tax Cuts Long before the great TikTok moral panic of 2021 to 2024, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent a solid decade freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei.…

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt This week, we've got a double-win on the insightful side for MrWilson. In first place, it's a comment about walling off the open internet to stop AI: The thing is, everyone is a victim, not just the sites getting hammered. The value of the…

This Week In Techdirt History: September 7th – 13th Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we learned about how the White House supposedly blocked Walmart from buying TikTok, and we asked why amidst all the fear around the site, nobody was equally worried about advertising tech and location data sales.…

Newly Granted Nintendo Patents An ‘Embarrassing Failure’ By The USPTO, Says Patent Attorney As you will hopefully recall, that very strange patent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair over the latter's hit game, Palworld, is ongoing. At the heart of that case is a series of overly broad patents…

Trump Is Accusing Foes With Multiple Mortgages Of Fraud. Records Show Three Of His Cabinet Members Have Them. This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by…

The Judiciary Is Breaking Down: Federal Judges Now Openly Revolt Against SCOTUS Shadow Docket During Live Court Hearing We've been tracking the growing judicial revolt against the Supreme Court's shadow docket nonsense, from individual district judges getting snarky in footnotes to anonymous…

After 30+ Deaths In Protests Triggered by Nepal’s Social Media Ban, 145,000 People Debate The Country’s Future In Discord Chatroom The Himalayan nation of Nepal has featured only rarely on Techdirt. The first time was back in 2003, with a story about an early Internet user there. According to the…

Fake “Free Speech” Champion Clay Higgins Now Wants To Use Gov’t Power To Silence Anyone Who “Belittles” Kirk’s Death Rep. Clay Higgins wants to use his government power to ban Americans from the internet for life if they say unkind things about Charlie Kirk's death. Yes, the same Clay Higgins who…

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