thank goodness!

The ability to gather and report information without authorization from the government is pretty much the definition of a free press

This claim would have greater than zero legal merit if the Fairness Doctrine hadn’t been repealed in 1987

I won’t pretend to know who can win let alone who should win, but I do wonder sometimes if the actual lesson from Hillary and Kamala is not so much that voters don’t want a woman but that voters don’t want someone who sometimes comes across as a phony careerist

🎵 It’s like a sooooooooooong / about irony That misconstruuuuuues / the meaning of irony

If Americans wanted First Amendment rights they shouldn’t have shot Charlie Kirk

OpenAI won't say whose content its video tool was trained on. So @nitasha.bsky.social & @kevinschaul.bsky.social did a deep dive and turned up some telling clues... www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

TikTok has gotten the green light to spin off a US version of its app under different ownership, after Trump and Xi blessed the outlines of a deal today to avert a ban signed by President Biden, @drewharwell.com reports: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

New: Meme culture is youth culture now. Why we see it everywhere - including in acts of shocking violence. "Everyone wanted to read some form of ideology into those shells. The only thing those references told me is he spent a lot of time on the computer, being terminally online" wapo.st/41Y0rkq

Interesting historical article but it’s important not to draw comparisons between Nazis and the current US administration, which is the kind of insensitive and hyperbolic remark that could get you fired from your job

folks surfaced a lot of past brendan carr tweets that seem to contradict his current agenda but i feel like this one got unfairly slept on a bit

People voted Trump for many reasons, but I think for some blue-collar folks it was an anti-establishment vote & for others it was a reaction to perceived liberal overreach in policing language/speech. If that's true, I could see a lot of those votes flipping in 2028 based on what Trump is doing now.

When he named Brendan Carr as his FCC chair, Trump called him a "warrior for free speech." We wrote about how he has become a warrior against it. Gift link: wapo.st/4pxe2t0

Brendan Carr, Donald Trump's media enforcer at the FCC, is relishing his Jimmy Kimmel moment. In the @washingtonpost.com today with @willoremus.com and Jeremy Barr: www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Is it important that the media can report the news without government censorship? In the United States, 92% say it is important. www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/...

I don't know why I got this in my inbox today but I'd just like to take this opportunity to clarify for the record that I also did not f*** a single person on Riverdale

Top story on @washingtonpost.com this morning: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Re Kimmel, it's important that Disney has left itself an out--it is a "suspension," not a cancellation or firing. What happens in the next two days--reaction within the company but also in the press, in the industry, in Washington, among consumers, and on social media--may affect how this plays out.

Then they came for Jimmy Kimmel And I did not speak out Because I was like, “Seriously, Jimmy Kimmel?”

Sinclair, the largest network of ABC affiliate stations, says suspending Jimmy Kimmel is “not enough,” calls for FCC action and demands that Kimmel personally donate to both Kirk’s family and his conservative advocacy group, Turning Point USA.

The United States is a country where comedians must take care not to offend the ruling party if they want to keep their jobs.

“Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized Kimmel earlier Wednesday, suggesting the federal agency could pull broadcast licenses owned by parent company Disney.” ABC takes comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air over Charlie Kirk remarks: www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Hard to think of a more on-the-nose encapsulation of how far the online speech wars have swung in the year of our lord 2025 than major U.S. corporations racing to fire people whose tweets offended Milo Yiannopoulos

Kash Patel would like to phone a friend

true stancilism has never been tried

It says here that seafood products are Venezuela’s largest agricultural export www.fas.usda.gov/data/venezue...

Not that Silicon Valley was ever pure of heart, but drawing the occasional ethical line used to be a point of pride for a lot of tech companies. It's now such a rarity that it feels almost quaint

Kirkland Signature All-In-One Molotovs

the political valence of the first amendment tends to flip depending on which party controls the government. when one party controls all three branches and feels unconstrained is when the other side needs it most

help, i think i'm losing the ability to discern factual news reporting from madlibs

The Washington Post Guild today condemned the firing of op-ed columnist @karenattiah.bsky.social

"Healthy debate" = when I criticize you "Cancel culture" = when you criticize me

Me: So you were racing against time? 10yo: [scoffs] Nah. We easily beat time. Time is slow.

Techmeme turns 20 today. This is a @techmeme.com appreciation post. In a time of personalized feeds, fragmented audiences and endless noise, an old-school, hand-curated (with input from algorithms) landing page that collates the day's most noteworthy tech news is a godsend. www.techmeme.com

Yesterday we heard from dozens of parents and other people upset by the prevalence of the Charlie Kirk clip on social media. We found that social media apps amplified the video broadly -- often an autoplay to unsuspecting viewers. From me and @willoremus.com. Here's a gift link: wapo.st/4n6oBSi

When the narrative that's dominating partisan discourse runs up against facts too glaring to deny, there ensues an awkward interstitial in which the discourse quiets as partisans grasp for a new narrative around which to coalesce. I suspect we'll soon be hearing a lot about how video games are bad.

tfw you’re living in a very normal timeline

Remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter to get rid of the bots?

X is wild because you can post a link to a NYT feature story on this and no one will see it, but cuntycakes123 can make a post summarizing the main bullet points with no attribution and it will go viral and everyone will be like "OMG why isn't the media covering this?!?"

live shot of Helldivers PR team

And in a way he engraved that stuff so it would be solemnly read at a presser like that. Maybe there’s something to the argument going back to Columbine days to try to largely ignore self mythology from violent killers and mass shooters etc

Watching the cable news commentary on the bullet engravings is wild because none of these people seem to realize that the content of the engravings are indicative of extremely online meme brain rot

Visceral closeup videos of Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck were everywhere on social media. A lot of parents were not pleased that mainstream social apps’ algorithms showed it to their kids. Story today by @tatumhunter.bsky.social & me (gift link): wapo.st/4n6oBSi

California's state Senate just passed legislation regulating AI companion chatbots (SB 243), a source there tells me. The bill now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk. calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202... (Photo credit: State Sen. Steve Padilla's office)

Do you have a kid or teen who either saw or had to actively avoid seeing the Charlie Kirk shooting video on social media? Please DM me if you're willing to discuss it for a Washington Post story I'm working on. Thanks.

No shade to anyone because I've done it too, but just as a general observation: Having lived in SF and NYC for 15 years, and now living in Delaware for 8 years, I think it's very easy for people in coastal superstar cities to overestimate how representative their experiences and social circles are.

Kirk was not a "national hero" but this idea you can dismiss his importance based on interactions with a few folks you know is misguided. If you live near a non-elite college and ask the male students I bet most have not only heard of him but some will tell you they voted Trump because of him.

Comparing people to Nazis may be unkind and unhelpful but worth noting it is also protected speech under the First Amendment

The tech industry says social media doesn’t polarize us but sure feels like you could watch it happen in real time today