I just had an idea: someone should do something like this, but based on block links instead of follow links 🫠

A common refrain I've heard from (often well-meaning) people is that they agree that Section 230 is important, but they'd like to reform it so it doesn't apply to algorithmically recommended content. I think that's a bad idea and finally wrote a long thing explaining why.

In search of fighty bastards (affectionate): do you live in SC, are you a user of DW (or any other social media), and would you be willing to tell the court how what sites like us would have to do to comply with SC's terrible law would restrict your speech and association with others?

The U.S. press is 100% going to help the Trump DOJ pretend its "antitrust inquiry" into Netflix is in good faith, in order to transfer ownership of Warner Brothers (and CNN, HBO, Discovery) to Trump's friend Larry Ellison

personally I believe that bsky/atproto has a much higher decentralization ceiling than Mastodon, even if the vast majority of accounts *currently* exist on bsky social tools like the Moover demonstrate how easy it is to migrate, and more PDSes are now being set up actively

The headline does not convey how completely batshit this story is. The Archive Today (archive.ph etc) admin weaponized the site's captcha to attack a blogger who wrote about them and *altered archived screenshots* as part of the attack. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Newsmax Didn’t Like Its NewsGuard Rating, So The FTC Attacked NewsGuard, And Now NewsGuard Is Suing We've written a few times now about how the GOP's "free speech warriors" have been waging an absolutely absurd campaign against NewsGuard, a company whose entire business model is… expressing…

The ‘Most Massive Attack On Free Speech’ Is Happening Right Now, And The Twitter Files Crew Is Mighty Quiet For the last five years, we had to endure an endless, breathless parade of hyperbole regarding the so-called "censorship industrial complex." We were told, repeatedly and at high volume,…

Breaking news: 50 million questionable content moderation decisions revised after 50 million questionable appeals processes. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/two-...

Techdirt Podcast Episode 444: Answering Your Questions Support us on Patreon » Two weeks ago, we ran a bit of an AMA experiment, with a call on Bluesky for fans of Techdirt to ask Mike any questions they might have. We got lots of great responses and now, as promised, Mike is delivering the…

"[the 4th Amendment] is dead on arrival," according to three sources close to the administration and a GOP strategist www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Complaining that following the Constitution will stop you from doing the thing you want to do is... an admission that what you want to do is unconstitutional. You swore an oath to defend the Constitution. You are violating that oath, Rep. Alford. Time to go home and let someone else do the job.

Kristi Noem: "When it gets to Election Day, we've been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country."

It seems pretty pretty bad that after all the times people have explained Section 230 to @amyklobuchar.com she still doesn't understand how it works, what it does, or what damage her "reforms" would do to speech online, especially speech from marginalized people.

Exclusive overnight, at Law Dork: www.lawdork.com/p/uscis-refu...

This is a vivid, horribly relevant read. “She does not sleep well. And as you lift up her pajama top to check her rash one morning, you see that her breathing is labored, shadows pooling between her ribs when she sucks in air. You suffer an icy moment of realization: This is a medical crisis.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Goes To Washington DC, Gets Section 230 Completely Backwards 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…

Bondi Spying On Congressional Epstein Searches Should Be A Major Scandal 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…

In case you were looking for nearly 4k words on why Joseph Gordon-Levitt got Section 230 exactly backwards, I got you covered. Also, if anyone knows him, please share. I hope we can get him on the right track with this stuff.

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.” 1/

Can a DC reporter ask Mike Johnson if he's ever seen anything ever? More to the point, why don't reporters come armed with phones ready to show Johnson all the things he claims to have not seen.

An 18-Million-Subscriber YouTuber Just Explained Section 230 Better Than Every Politician In Washington Over the years, we've written approximately one million words explaining why Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is essential to how the internet functions. We've corrected politicians…

its funny to me that the same folks who yell about how people in tech need to take classes in the humanities simultaneously get upset whenever the humanities start getting applied to tech

And that single slide, leaked out of context and framed in the most disingenuous way possible, has been shown in literally every single congressional hearing and lawsuit against Facebook since.

Before Section 230, websites faced a lose-lose choice: either ignore harmful content entirely or be held legally liable for everything users posted if they tried to moderate. Congress created #Section230, so websites could act against bad actors without fear of endless lawsuits. 1/2

Hours later and I still don’t understand how a magistrate judge signed off on this

HEY GUESS WHAT IT'S ANOTHER LAWSUIT. This one is so new it's not even on RECAP yet, but I present Netchoice v Wilson, Netchoice's as-filed copy: netchoice.org/wp-content/u...

*sigh* If elon is responsible for getting a bad 230 ruling by using it as a defense in a case like this, it's just going to be one more thing on the long list of good things he's ruined.

People like to paint the Big Sites as criminally indifferent to the harms they cause (or worse, deliberately engaging in them) when every bit of "proof" that's been produced was PART OF AN ATTEMPT AT HARM REDUCTION.

The "Facebook knew their product was causing body image issues in teen girls and did it deliberately" narrative is taking the ACTUAL RESEARCH Facebook did entirely out of context! They commissioned that internal research to SEE HOW THEY COULD STOP IT HAPPENING.

There's a subthread about the current trend towards derivative liability that's relevant here because that kind of statement is ABSOLUTELY used against companies in derivative liability cases bsky.app/profile/raha...

The Discord age verification discourse focuses on adults losing access to communities they have a right to access. That's important. I'm also worried, though, about the kids. They seem to be an afterthought in these conversations. They have much to lose too. 🧵 www.theverge.com/tech/875309/...

Not to mention, of course, what happens when these kids grow up and then join us all online having learned nothing about how to safely navigate our digital spaces? Though, that problem assumes we'll still have an online environment for them to navigate when that time comes.

While this absolutely sucks, we are going to see a lot more places implementing universal global age verification over this next year, because the number of states and countries legally requiring it has gotten to the point no one can keep up anymore.

Ten years ago today, #SCOTUS issued five unsigned and unexplained 5-4 rulings granting emergency applications to block President Obama’s Clean Power Plan—a completely unprecedented move that helped to usher in the Court’s modern … (mis)adventures … with its shadow docket. Me in today’s “One First”:

When I wrote Section 230 I did so knowing it would be critical for protecting free speech online. 30 years later and it’s one of the last things standing in the way of Republican censorship of the internet. Here’s to many more years of defending this vital safeguard of free speech.

/2 AIso it did not occur to me that a person could use his blog to publish all the letters to the editor that the papers would not publish I will be back in about six months

I remember Trump suing CBS and the BBC about "unfair" edits. MAGA insisted they had to do this because such edits are illegal (they're not). But of course they have nothing to say about @nbcnews.com editing out the boos of JD Vance

This is a perfect example of "I saw a thing that I could do and I started doing it"

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

"Oh dear" indeed

Federal judge: "The presumption of regularity that has previously extended to [the United States Government] that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds." This is in a case where the Trump admin sued Oregon.

DOJ’s Frivolous Boasberg Complaint Dismissed—While Nobody Can Explain How DOJ Got The ‘Evidence’ It Never Provided Back in August, we wrote about the Department of Justice's unprecedented decision to file a judicial misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg. The complaint, which…

I'm going to introduce legislation blocking Trump from stealing taxpayer dollars with this absurd lawsuit. Stay tuned.

Gephardt is fabricating a story about the motivation for #section230. The point was *never* that Internet platforms should be "just a dumb pipe". That's the exact *opposite* of why the law was written. The point is to give platforms a free hand to be something *other than* a "dumb pipe". JFC.

"What [Section 230] does is create breathing room for platforms to moderate content without facing endless litigation over every removal decision, while simultaneously protecting their ability to leave up controversial-but-legal speech without being treated as the publisher of that content."

In her latest blog post, Policy Analyst @mwils.bsky.social breaks down various Section 230 reform and repeal proposals — and why these ideas won't work as intended.

Put a gun to most Senators heads and they could not tell you what cookies are. Wyden can explain age verification tech, Section 230, and how to interrupt online crime circles without trampling privacy laws.

These are the people that would write the speech rules for the entire internet if Section 230 is gutted

Posting misinformation about Section 230 on a platform that wouldn’t exist without Section 230 is a choice but it’s not one that I would make