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 — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this sponsored Spotlight episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, host Ben Whitelaw speaks with George Vlasto, head of the Trust & Safety division at…

Yes, as I already wrote about, the indictment against James Comey was already thrown out due to Halligan's improper appointment, but it's also worth covering how badly she fucked up even if she had been appointed legally. These cases were destined for the dustbin no matter what, because Halligan had no idea what she was doing. Late last week just one example of that insanity came out in court.

Mark Kelly—former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator—stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when “I was following orders” was rejected as defense for war crimes. The Trump Administration opened a federal investigation into him for saying this.

The US Patent Office is about to gut the only effective tool we have for killing bad patents—and they're doing it by administrative fiat, without Congress, in a way that would make patent trolling easier than it's been in over a decade. They need to hear from you by Tuesday, December 2nd, or this may become reality. Patent trolling was really holding back all sorts of innovation in the 2000s.

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The DOJ continues to shed talent as those who actually care about doing the job right are either quitting or being fired for refusing to be Trump's vindictive blunt force objects. The problem with shedding this much talent is that you need to replace it with someone capable of fogging a mirror while also being a MAGA loyalist. When attrition outpaces the appointment process, things get sloppy.

Trump’s right wing billionaire friend Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son, David) recently acquired CBS and likely co-ownership of TikTok. Like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the goal isn’t really subtle: rich, thin-skinned right wingers want to own the entirety of U.S. new and old media, then convert it into a giant propaganda and lazy infotainment bullhorn that blows smoke up their asses…

We've talked a lot about measles throughout this year, which is particularly frustrating given that America officially eliminated this disease from its endemic state back in 2000. How we got here is a very simple story: too many people refused to vaccinate themselves and/or their children, giving the virus a foothold which it had been deprived for nearly a quarter of a century.

If you've been following the wave of age-gating laws sweeping across the country and the globe, you've probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing. Age verification, age assurance, age estimation, age gating—they get thrown around interchangeably, but they technically mean different things. And those differences matter a lot when we're talking about your rights, your privacy, your data, and who gets to access information online.

CNN, like most U.S. cable news networks, professes to provide users access to journalism. Instead, what you’ll most consistently find is a sort of generic, ad-slathered, center-right, corporatist drivel with the rough edges (read: truth) sanded off like a Ken doll's genitals to avoid offense. “View from nowhere” journalism that doesn’t inform so much as it tries to present a sanitized, corporate-friendly, apolitical platter of feckless infotainment mush.

Last week's dismissal of the FTC's antitrust case against Meta—combined with the earlier limited remedies in the Google search case—demonstrates something that should be obvious by now: antitrust is a pathetically weak tool for increasing competition in digital markets. This isn't an argument against competition. Competition in digital markets matters, desperately. But antitrust enforcement is slow, cumbersome, and nearly blind to how fast these markets actually move.

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has already made a name for himself during Trump's second administration. He began making this name by engaging in an unapproved sweep of the area he controlled in California as Trump was still waiting to be sworn in. Then he was sent to Chicago by a vengeful Trump who wanted to see as many people in the state harmed for no other reason than he didn't like the politicians running the state and the city.

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For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior—particularly foreign influence operations. They've insisted that any attempt to study and limit such operations is actually just "censorship" with various forms of cover, whether academic or operational.

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a comment about Trump's freakout after Democrats told soldiers not to follow illegal orders: What everyone appears to overlook Trump’s tantrum here clearly shows that he is perfectly aware that orders he puts out and plans to put out in future are illegal. Otherwise why would he bother?

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we featured a guest post about the many problems with the idea of upload filters, while Poland was trying to get them excluded from the EU Copyright Directive. Twitch was continuing to trip over itself in response to its DMCA apocalypse, and we dug into just how bad things were going for it…

I knew this was coming but this still is absolutely maddening. In all of our coverage of RFK Jr., particularly since his vile appointment and confirmation as head of Health and Human Services, it's been abundantly clear that he's an anti-vaxxer. While that may seem obvious to most of our readers, it's important to note that there are a great many Kennedy fans out there who will tell you he's…

When the Trump administration gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a massive database of information about Medicaid recipients in June 2025, privacy and medical justice advocates sounded the alarm. They warned that the move could trigger all kinds of public health and human rights harms. But most people likely shrugged and moved on with their day. Why is that? It’s not that people don’t care.

So we've noted repeatedly how there's a real push afoot to implement statewide "right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

The President of the United States is calling for the execution of six Democratic lawmakers—all military veterans or former intelligence officers—because they reminded US service members of their oath to the Constitution. That's not hyperbole or exaggeration. That's an actual thing that happened yesterday. Donald Trump spent hours on social media demanding that Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, along with Representatives Chris DeLuzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, and Jason Crow be arrested, tried, and put to death for "seditious behavior" and "treason."

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I've expended far too many words stating the obvious: the Trump administration's deportation program isn't interested in removing criminals. It's only interested in removing people who aren't white. That's why it vets visa applicants for "anti-American" social media posts while throwing the immigration door wide open for any white people seeking to escape the "persecution" they face in post-apartheid South Africa.

We've noted time and time again that Trump's attack on U.S. cybersecurity defenses and oversight are utterly indistinguishable from a foreign attack. Perhaps with the exception of more lip filler, spray tans, diabetes, bogus efficiency, and fake piety. That's been particularly true for Trump's attack on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has done a lot of heavy lifting in recent years when it comes to thwarting security threats, maintaining election cybersecurity, providing useful threat assessments for orgs that can't afford to do their own, and even deterring the spread of misinformation about government security.

Ken Paxton's bullshit lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol, built on Trump and RFK Jr.'s bullshit press conference in which they pretended that science says acetaminophen causes autism, is off to a predictably bad start. I had a bit of a laugh shortly after this turd was filed, mainly because Kennedy himself came out after the lawsuit was filed to walk back the claims made in the press conference and acknowledged that all that science he and Trump cited "is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism." And, while Trump repeatedly instructed women to not take Tylenol while pregnant, a stance medical professionals overwhelmingly disagree with, Kennedy instead said women should consult with their doctors on its use.