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Back in early 2024 Amazon announced that Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) would be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. It was just the latest example of “enshittification” in a streaming sector all out of original ideas, desperate to provide Wall Street with impossible skyward quarterly growth — regardless of consumer annoyance or brand harm.

When originally announced, Amazon promised it would try to keep the ad load to  three-and-a-half minutes per hour to try and be less annoying than its competitors. But the march toward enshittification yields to no one; 18 months later and Amazon has already doubled that volume of advertisements per hour:

“According to six ad buyers and documents reviewed by ADWEEK, the current ad load on Prime Video now ranges from four to six minutes per hour. And while that could bring down CPMs, buyers will be watching whether this impacts user experience.”

In the modern era it’s simply not allowed for a public company to offer people an affordable product everyone really likes. The unyielding pressures for quarterly growth at any cost inevitably result in the cannibalization and enshittification of most of your favorite products. It’s obvious everywhere; but particularly in newer industries (like say, video streaming) that were disruptive just a few years earlier.

Amazon has told eager investors but hasn’t bothered to communicate the latest enshittifcation to consumers yet. When asked for comment by Adweek, Amazon offered a redundant lie about how total ad load isn’t increasing (it is) and if it was it would be okay because Amazon is focused on “improving ad experiences”:

“Our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown,” said an Amazon Ads spokesperson. “While demand continues to grow, our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown.”

As new growth in streaming customers has slowed down, giant media companies have relegated to seeking old ways to give Wall Street their sweet, sweet, improved quarterly returns. That means not just price hikes, but layoffs, pointless mergers, less money spent on content and residuals (meaning they’re too cheap to keep popular programs online), and crackdowns on things that used to be consumer benefits, like the lax treatment of things like password sharing.

The short term stock boosts and tax gains from this kind of gamesmanship and consolidation disincentivizes execs from learning anything useful from the experience. By the time consumers begin a backlash and the brand begins to tank, the executives who led the charge are already off working at a different company on the basis of their “savvy deal-making prowess.”

It’s purely extractive and utterly pathological. Consumer interest, employee welfare, and the long term integrity or quality of the brand or product simply have nothing to do with it.

In this case, streaming companies are going to keep pushing their luck until piracy sees a massive resurgence (which is already starting to happen), at which point the executives will blame everyone and everything but themselves. Instead of any sort of self-awareness of the doom cycle they participate in, they’ll do something even more harmful: like lobbying Congress to make VPNs illegal.


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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about ICE arresting Brad Lander:

Republicans keep saying no one is above the law, but they keep referring only to other people and not themselves. They don’t need warrants. They don’t need to provide due process. They get to assault whomever they like. They don’t even have to identify themselves.

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with another thought on the arrest and the idea that Lander was pulling a “stunt”:

If more Democrats pulled “stunts” like this one, maybe they wouldn’t be seen as a bunch of nutless, gutless, “we must appease the GOP at all costs” cowards⁠—even (and especially) by the people who ostensibly make up the Democrat voting base.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with BernardoVerda and a comment about RFK Jr. predictably spreading even more disinformation:

This is why experts stopped having “debates” with RFK Jr.

RFK Jr repeatedly lies and misinforms:

*He consistently cites bad data and bad studies, and while misrepresenting good data and good studies.**He gets corrected with detailed explanations on why the data is bad, and/or how it doesn’t mean what he claims it means.*At the next opportunity, he repeats the very same misinformation as before, that he wasn’t able support the last time he argued against informed expert opinion, as if the previous “debate” never happened.

It’s RFK Jr’s basic modus operandi .

Next, it’s one more comment from MrWilson, this time about ICE complaining about assault on officers:

Assault to these Meal Team Six cosplayers means they brutalized a bunch of human beings and that some victims pushed back, didn’t collapse immediately, or some even did, but they want to claim something happened to make themselves out to be the victims.

They’re pretending that they are the only ones who can be subject to unjust violence. They’re also admitting, despite their toxically masculine culture, that they’re a bunch of wimps.

Over on the funny side… well, this is something I’ve never quite seen before. Perhaps due to the incredibly dire state of the world right now, we had virtually no funny votes on comments this week. No comment got more than a handful of votes, with only 7 barely scraping past the threshold to receive a badge — and several of those are not “real” funny comments but just dumb comments that people seem to have idly clicked funny on for the sake of mockery. So, for once, we’re just going to forego the full Funny side of this post, and I’ll highlight one comment from Thad that performed better on the insightful side but might as well go here, in response to Trump and ICE waffling on the mass arrests of employed migrants:

The racists who want cheap labor and the racists who want a white ethnostate are fighting again.

That’s all for this week, folks!


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Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests were having an impact, with one court citing the incident in denying immunity to officers in another case, more schools moving to end contracts with cops, and Minneapolis city council voting unanimously to disband its police department. Meanwhile, Devin Nunes’s lawyer was telling a judge to ignore Section 230, Josh Hawley was pushing yet another dumb anti-230 plan that was even worse than it appeared at first, and the DOJ released its own preposterous recommendations on 230. Also, the Internet Archive closed its National Emergency Library program early due to the lawsuit from publishers.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, News Corp. was trying to use the DMCA to defend a ridiculous Sunday Times story about Edward Snowden from criticism, even as the reporter behind it admitted he just wrote what the UK government told him. Congress was realizing it didn’t really have the votes to move fast track trade authority forward, much to the chagrin of TPP supporters, while the legislative fight got more confusing and went back to the Senate. We also wrote about how the CIA was still acting like a domestic surveillance agency despite instructions otherwise.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, as the release of the iPhone 4 approached, it was still far from clear whether video calling would ever truly catch on. The iPad was already making a big splash, but attempts to adapt all kinds of media to focus on them were not so promising, and we weren’t sure why iPad digital comics were being priced higher than paper copies. It was earlier in the history of Section 230, but there was still discussion about whether it needed to be “fixed”, and it was late in the history of LimeWire but apparently not too late for the recording industry to sue it yet again.


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A couple of weeks back, we discussed famed southern convenience store chain Buc-ee’s and its penchant for initiating all kinds of trademark related threats and lawsuits. While we talk about this sort of thing a lot around here, the company’s actions have been particularly silly. When taken in sum total, you’re left with the idea that Buc-ee’s seems to think that it is the only company involved in the food and/or drinks business that is allowed to have a cartoon animal as its logo. Think I’m exaggerating? The company argued that its beaver logo looked too similar to that of an alligator. And a chicken. And a guy eating a hotdog.

Well, the company is still at it, but at least it’s a tad bit closer to trademark reality in this instance. That said, its latest lawsuit is still likely to run into a significant challenge, after it went after an apparel store that specifically sells clothes that parody brands.

The Texas-based Buc-ee’s filed the suit against Born United.

Buc-ee’s operates a chain of travel centers and convenience stores across nine states, including South Carolina. A “significant and growing portion” of the company’s business involves making, distributing and selling clothing prominently featuring the Buc-ee’s trademarks, the lawsuit, filed last Tuesday, states.

Born United sells clothing and other merchandise bearing patriotic themes and slogans and operates under the slogan, “Bringing brands together that stand for freedom,” the suit alleges. Court documents state it offers its own private label products as well as merchandise from third-party brands like Grunt Style, Palmetto State Armory, Nine Line Apparel, and others.

And here is an example of one of the parody images in question.

In the MSN post, the owner of Born United is quoted saying that they love Buc-ee’s and would be willing to discuss their concerns. That flies in the face of the store’s failing to respond to a C&D Buc-ee’s sent, as well as comments from a minority owner named Tom Fernandez, who also happens to be a state senator in South Carolina.

Now, nobody is attempting to claim that Born United didn’t use a large portion of the Buc-ee’s logo and branding in its shirts, of course. Instead, the store used a portion of that branding, added to it to make a parody that aligned with the store’s values, and then sold them in its own storefront. That reads like fairly clear parody to this writer, but it is also undeniably the case that this sort of use is unlikely to confuse anyone into thinking that Buc-ee’s has somehow gotten into the business of creating a gun-toting version of its beaver in military garb. Combine that with the Born United name being prominently displayed and any such concern gets even more silly.

It sounds like Born United is prepared to fight this out. Having a sitting state senator on your side probably doesn’t hurt either. Perhaps the beaver finally bit off more than it can chew.


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This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological evolution while safeguarding the rights of creators and ensuring AI’s development serves the broader interests of society.

Let’s start with the original metaphor of the six blind men and the elephant. In this classic Indian tale, each man feels a different part of the elephant—one touches the tusk and declares it’s a spear, another grabs the tail and swears it’s a rope, and so on. Each is convinced they’ve got the whole picture, but in reality, they’re missing the full scope of the elephant because they refuse to share their perspectives.

Now, let’s apply this to AI regulation. Imagine six policymakers, each with a firm grip on their own slice of the AI puzzle. One is fixated on privacy, another sees only risks, while yet another is laser-focused on copyright. But as a result, their narrow focus is leaving the broader picture woefully incomplete. And that, my friends, is where the trouble begins.

Accepting the Challenge of Innovation

AI is so much more than just a collection of legal headaches. It’s a powerful, transformative force. It’s revolutionizing industries, supercharging creativity, driving research, and solving problems we couldn’t have even dreamed of a few years ago. It’s not just a new avenue for academics to write articles—it’s a tool that could unlock incredible potential, pushing the boundaries of human creativity and innovation.

But what happens when we regulate it with tunnel vision? When we obsess over the tail and ignore the rest of the elephant? We end up stifling the very innovation we should be encouraging. The piecemeal approach doesn’t just miss the bigger picture—it risks handcuffing the future of AI, limiting its capacity to fuel new discoveries and reshape industries for the better.

By focusing solely on risks and potential copyright or privacy violations, we’re leaving research, creativity, and innovation stranded. Think of the breakthroughs AI could help us achieve: revolutionary advances in healthcare, educational tools that adapt to individual learners, creative platforms that democratize access to artistic expression. AI isn’t just a regulatory problem to be tackled—it’s a massive opportunity. And unless policymakers start seeing the whole elephant, we’re going to end up trampling the very future we’re trying to protect.

So, What’s the Way Forward?

We need to rethink our approach. AI, especially generative AI, can offer immense societal benefits—but only if we create policies that reflect its potential. Over-focusing on copyright claims or letting certain stakeholders dominate the conversation means we end up putting brakes on the very technology that could drive our next era of progress.

Imagine if, in the age of the Gutenberg Press, we had decided to regulate printing so heavily to protect manuscript copyists that books remained rare and knowledge exclusive. We wouldn’t be where we are today. The same logic applies to AI. If we make it impossible for AI to learn, to explore vast amounts of data, to create based on the expressions of humanity, we will end up in a data winter—a future where AI, stifled and starved of quality input, fails to reach its true potential.

AI chatbots, creative tools, and generative models have shown that they can be both collaborators and catalysts for human creativity. They help artists brainstorm, assist writers in overcoming creative blocks, and enable non-designers to visualize their ideas. By empowering people to create in new ways, AI is democratizing creativity. But if we let fears over copyright overshadow everything else, we risk shutting down this vibrant new avenue of cultural expression before it even gets started.

Seeing the Whole Elephant

The task of policymaking is challenging, especially with emerging technologies that shift as rapidly as AI. But the answer isn’t to clamp down with outdated regulations to preserve the status quo for a few stakeholders. Instead, it’s to foster an environment where innovation, creativity, and research can flourish alongside reasonable protections. We must encourage fair compensation for creators (and let’s not forget they should not be equated to the creative industry) while ensuring that AI can access the data it needs to evolve, innovate, and inspire.

The metaphor of the blind men and the elephant serves as a clear warning: if we only see a part of the elephant, we can only come up with partial solutions. It’s time to step back and view AI for what it truly is—a powerful, transformative force that, if used wisely, can uplift our societies, enhance our creativity, and tackle challenges that once seemed impossible.

The alternative is to regulate AI into irrelevance by focusing only on a single aspect. We need to see the whole elephant—understand AI in its entirety—and allow it to shape a future where human creativity, innovation, and progress thrive together.

Caroline De Cock is a communications and policy expert, author, and entrepreneur. She serves as Managing Director of N-square Consulting and Square-up Agency, and Head of Research at Information Labs. Caroline specializes in digital rights, policy advocacy, and strategic innovation, driven by her commitment to fostering global connectivity and positive change.


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I need to say something that will be deeply uncomfortable for many of you: if you have friends, family, or colleagues defending what’s happening right now, their old sane selves may not be coming back.

Let me be specific about what I mean. This week, Donald Trump posted explicit orders on Truth Social directing federal law enforcement to conduct “Mass Deportation Operations” targeting “America’s largest Cities” because they are “the core of the Democrat Power Center.” He used the term “REMIGRATION”—language borrowed directly from European fascist movements. He accused Democratic officials of treason for opposing him. He framed resistance to his orders as hatred of America itself.

This isn’t hyperbole. This isn’t political theater. This is a written directive for ethnic cleansing and political warfare, posted publicly by the President of the United States.

But here’s what’s going to happen next—what’s already happening: his supporters will tell you that you’re overreacting. That Trump is “just being hyperbolic.” That you suffer from some cognitive pathology if you take him seriously. They’ll perform concern for your mental health while his ICE agents conduct raids in the exact cities he named, using the exact dehumanizing language he provided.

This is the shell game of fascist gaslighting, and you need to understand how it works.

The game has three moves, executed simultaneously:

First, speak directly to your base using unmistakable authoritarian language. “REMIGRATION.” “Mass Deportation Operation.” “Radical Left Democrats who hate our Country.” The signal is clear: we are at war with internal enemies who must be eliminated. The base hears this loud and clear.

Second, implement the policy exactly as described. Deploy federal troops. Conduct mass raids. Target political opponents. Separate families. Use the state apparatus to terrorize designated enemies. The action matches the rhetoric precisely.

Third, gaslight everyone else into thinking the language doesn’t mean what it obviously means. “He’s just being tough on immigration.” “It’s political rhetoric.” “You’re reading too much into it.” The goal isn’t to convince—it’s to create enough confusion that resistance seems like overreaction.

This allows the regime to operate in plain sight while maintaining plausible deniability. Supporters get to cheer ethnic cleansing while pretending they’re just supporting “law and order.” Enablers get to collaborate with fascism while telling themselves they’re being reasonable about complex issues.

And critics get painted as hysterical for accurately describing what’s happening in front of everyone’s eyes.

The people in your life defending this aren’t confused. They’re not struggling with cognitive dissonance. They’re not victims of misinformation who just need better facts. They’ve made a choice—to align with authoritarianism while maintaining the comfortable fiction that they’re still reasonable people making reasonable assessments.

When your colleague tells you that mass deportation raids are just “enforcing immigration law,” they know those raids are targeting cities because they vote Democratic. When your family member says Trump is “just being tough,” they know he’s using the language of ethnic cleansing. When your friend claims you’re overreacting to “political rhetoric,” they know that rhetoric is being translated into operational reality by federal agents.

They understand exactly what’s happening. They just want you to pretend you don’t.

This is the most insidious part of the shell game—it recruits you into your own gaslighting. It makes you question whether you’re seeing clearly, whether your moral responses are proportionate, whether your alarm is justified. It transforms your accurate perception of fascist tactics into evidence of your own psychological instability.

Stop playing along.

When someone tells you that explicit orders for ethnic cleansing don’t mean what they obviously mean, that person has chosen to enable fascism. When someone suggests you’re mentally unwell for taking authoritarian threats seriously, that person has chosen to weaponize psychology against moral clarity. When someone demands you remain calm while democracy is dismantled in real time, that person has chosen compliance over resistance.

These aren’t good people trapped in bad information ecosystems. These aren’t confused souls who need patient explanation. These are people who’ve decided that maintaining their social comfort matters more than opposing ethnic cleansing.

The version of them that you could reason with—the one that shared basic democratic values, that would be horrified by mass deportations, that understood the difference between immigration enforcement and political warfare—that person is gone. What remains is someone who’s chosen tribal loyalty over moral truth.

This doesn’t mean they’ve become cartoonish villains. They still laugh at the same jokes, care about their families, perform kindness in their daily interactions. But on the question that defines our moment—whether to resist or enable fascism—they’ve made their choice.

And their choice is enabling.

Stop waiting for them to snap out of it. Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt they wouldn’t extend to you. Stop pretending their “concerns” about immigration justify support for ethnic cleansing. Stop treating their gaslighting as good-faith disagreement about complex policy questions.

They know what they’re supporting. The language is explicit. The implementation is visible. The historical parallels are unmistakable. Their choice to defend it isn’t based on ignorance—it’s based on preference.

Some people, when forced to choose between democracy and authoritarianism, choose authoritarianism. Some people, when forced to choose between human dignity and tribal dominance, choose dominance. Some people, when forced to choose between moral clarity and social comfort, choose comfort.

That’s what you’re learning about the people around you. Not that they’re confused, but that they’re complicit. Not that they don’t understand, but that they don’t care. Not that they need better information, but that they’ve chosen to prioritize their own position over other people’s humanity.

This is who they are now. This is who they’ve chosen to be.

The shell game depends on your willingness to pretend otherwise. It requires you to treat their gaslighting as sincere confusion, their enabling as innocent misunderstanding, their collaboration as reasonable disagreement about policy details.

Stop participating in the performance. Stop pretending their positions are intellectually respectable. Stop treating fascist sympathizers as if they’re just confused about immigration policy.

Call it what it is: they’ve chosen to enable ethnic cleansing because it targets people they consider enemies. They’ve chosen to support authoritarianism because it promises to hurt the right people. They’ve chosen fascism because it offers them power over those they despise.

The most dangerous lie you can tell yourself is that they don’t really mean it. They mean every word. They just want you to pretend they don’t so you won’t resist effectively.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And when someone shows you who they are—when they defend ethnic cleansing, enable authoritarianism, and gaslight you for noticing—believe them.

The revolution is seeing clearly. The rebellion is refusing to play the shell game. The resistance is calling fascism by its name, regardless of how much that upsets the people who’ve chosen to enable it.

Stop waiting for their permission to defend democracy. Stop seeking their approval to oppose ethnic cleansing. Stop playing their game of pretending this is all normal political disagreement.

This is fascism. They support it. Act accordingly.

Remember what’s real.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.


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It has never been about removing dangerous criminals — the “worst of the worst” — from the United States. Under Donald Trump, immigration enforcement has been about removing immigrants from the country. Period. That’s the whole thing. (And, apparently the only immigrants welcome to seek shelter in the US are those of the whiter variety who are “suffering” the effects of a fake crisis manufactured by racist conspiracy theories.)

Not only does ICE believe it doesn’t need real warrants to enter homes, it believes it doesn’t even need self-issued “administrative” warrants to perform arrests. We’re seeing this all over the nation as ICE raids are now as common a feature in the daily news as sports scores and weather forecasts.

But in certain parts of the nation, ICE needs to show more than the usual nothing to support warrantless arrests. A settlement in a lawsuit filed during Trump’s first term — one that covers six states — said ICE agents must thoroughly document warrantless arrests. Despite the fact that this is still be litigated, ICE has told agents they no longer need to abide by this agreement, as Marisa Kabas reports for The Handbasket:

The terms of the settlement were given a three year duration, meaning it —by ICE’s definition, at least—expired last month. The email on Wednesday—a copy of which was shared with The Handbasket—was sent by ICE’s Principal Legal Advisor Charles Wall, and it made one thing clear: Agents are no longer constrained by the need to justify their warrantless arrests.

[…]

In Wall’s email he wrote: “Despite a pending motion to enforce the settlement agreement and a motion to extend the settlement agreement, it remains terminated. Accordingly, I hereby rescind the May 27, 2022, Castañon-Nava Settlement Obligation statement of policy.”

Here’s what ICE is wiping off the books, despite pending motions to keep the settlement agreement in place. These stipulations applied to the six states (Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, and Kansas) overseen by the ICE Chicago field office, as listed on the National Immigrant Justice Center website (NIJC represented the plaintiffs):

Under the policy, ICE must document the facts and circumstances surrounding a warrantless arrest or vehicle stop in the individual’s arresting documentation, called an I-213, including:

*The fact the noncitizen was arrested without an administrative warrant;**The location of the arrest (e.g., place of business, residence, vehicle, or a public area);**If arrested at a business, whether the individual is an employee of the business; if arrested at a residence, whether the person resides at that place of residence;*Ties to the community, if known at the time of arrest, including family, home, or employment;The specific, particularized facts supporting the conclusion that the individual was likely to escape before a warrant could be obtained; andA statement of how the ICE officers identified themselves as ICE and “state[d] that the person is under arrest and the reason for the arrest.”

With respect to vehicle stops, ICE must also document specific facts that formed the basis for its reasonable suspicion that a person in the vehicle did not have legal status.

ICE’s lead law-talking guy thinks this should no longer apply because it expired on May 27, 2025. And he says so despite knowing (and admitting!) NIJC has been seeking to have this agreement extended since March 13.

Obviously, ICE never had any intention of following the agreement and would prefer to do its dirty business the way it’s doing it now: with masked agents, unmarked vehicles, and as little of a paper trail as possible. NIJC Associate Director Mark Fleming points out that being overseen by Joe Biden, rather than Donald Trump, didn’t have much of an effect on compliance.

[Fleming] made it clear that ICE has not been diligently observing this policy since Trump resumed office this year. As referenced in Wall’s email, NIJC has filed a motion to extend the terms because, “ICE has not been in substantial compliance with the settlement and consent decree over the last number of months.”

Fleming pointed to a recent case in Liberty, Missouri in which ICE raided a local restaurant to arrest one individual and ended up making 12 warrantless arrests—a clear violation of the policy that was created in response to the settlement.

All this email does is create a quasi-legal cover for ICE’s continuous refusal to respect the rights of the people it arrests or detains. This puts the Chicago office — and the six states it covers — on equal footing with the rest of the nation where stipulations like these were never in place. ICE will continue to operate as though it’s a secret police agency, legally capable of disappearing literally anyone without so much as a self-issued warrant.


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Disclosure*: I am* on the board of Bluesky and am inherently biased. Adjust your skepticism of what I write on this topic accordingly.

It seems a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can’t stop writing about it. Consider the curious case of Bluesky, which, according to various pundits, is a failed “liberal echo chamber” that nobody uses anymore. And yet the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle argues that “The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes,” Josh Barro insists “Bluesky Isn’t a Bubble. It’s a Containment Dome,” and multiple outlets have breathlessly reported on Mark Cuban’s complaints about his personal Bluesky experience as if they were definitive proof of platform failure. Not to be left out, Slate published not one, but two separate articles complaining about Bluesky.

For a supposedly dying bubble that no one wants to use, Bluesky sure generates a lot of traffic-driving hot takes. Which suggests that maybe—just maybe—the entire premise is wrong.

The real story isn’t about Bluesky’s supposed failures—it’s about how these critiques fundamentally misunderstand what people want from social media and who gets to decide what constitutes healthy discourse.

The “echo chamber” myth

Now, you might think that if everyone is complaining about “echo chambers” and “bubbles,” that there must be solid research showing that social media creates them. You would be wrong. The “echo chamber” critique of social media has been thoroughly debunked by researchers, who have consistently found the opposite to be true: people not on social media live in more sheltered information environments than those who are. Professor Michael Bang Petersen gave an interview about his research on the topic where he noted the following:

One way to think about social media in this particular regard is to turn all of our notions about social media upside down. And here I’m thinking about the notion of ‘echo chambers.’ So we’ve been talking a lot about echo chambers and how social media creates echo chambers. But, in reality, the biggest echo chamber that we all live in is the one that we live in in our everyday lives.

I’m a university professor. I’m not really exposed to any person who has a radically different world view or radically different life from me in my everyday life. But when I’m online, I can see all sorts of opinions that I may disagree with. And that might trigger me if I’m a hostile person and encourage me to reach out to tell these people that I think they are wrong.

But that’s because social media essentially breaks down the echo chambers. I can see the views of other people — what they are saying behind my back. That’s where a lot of the felt hostility of social media comes from. Not because they make us behave differently, but because they are exposing us to a lot of things that we’re not exposed in our everyday lives.

Power, not purity

So the “bubble” critique is empirically wrong. But even if it were right, it misses the more important point: this isn’t really about ideological diversity. It’s about who controls the microphone. When critics argue that people should have stayed on ExTwitter to “engage across difference,” they’re ignoring a fundamental reality: Elon Musk controls the algorithm and actively throttles content he dislikes. The NY Times documented how Musk minimizes the reach of those expressing views he disagrees with.

So when McArdle suggests that “liberals” made some mistake by leaving ExTwitter, she’s essentially arguing that people should willingly subject themselves to algorithmic suppression by someone who has explicitly welcomed extremist content back onto the platform. This isn’t about “engaging across difference”—it’s about accepting a rigged game where one side controls the megaphone.

Community, not performance

The “bubble” framing also fundamentally misunderstands what most people want from social media. When you go to a knitting circle, are you disappointed that most people there want to talk about knitting? When you join a book club, do you complain that everyone seems interested in books? Pundits and politicians may want to broadcast to the largest possible audience, but most people are looking for community, not maximum reach.

Most people aren’t looking for a debating arena. They want to talk with people they like about topics they care about—whether that’s knitting, local politics, or professional interests.

This becomes impossible when the platform owner has hung out a shingle for Nazis, and your attempts to discuss your hobbies get drowned out by fascist propaganda algorithmically pushed into your timeline. That’s not “diverse discourse”—it’s just a bad user experience.

Communities have social norms, which can evolve over time

Any community—online or off—develops social norms. These cultural expectations show up as “we don’t do that here” or “we encourage this behavior” signals. Critics complaining about Bluesky’s norms are often just upset that those norms don’t align with their preferences. It’s a bit like complaining that different neighborhoods have different vibes.

Yes, some users can be overly aggressive in enforcing norms, and some reactions can be trigger-happy (I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of some angry responses). But this is true of every community, online and off. If you’ve ever accidentally worn the wrong team’s jersey to a sports bar, you understand how community norms work. The difference is that Bluesky users have actual tools to address these issues themselves, rather than begging platform owners to fix things for them.

Many of the tensions critics point to aren’t unique to Bluesky—they reflect how people are processing a world where fascism is rising in America and democratic institutions are under attack. When people are dealing with existential threats, online interactions can get heated. That’s not a platform problem; it’s a human problem.

But, also, part of the benefit of a system like Bluesky is that it puts users in much greater control over their own experience, meaning they can actually take charge themselves and craft better communities around them, rather than demanding that “the company” fix things. I’m thinking of things like Blacksky, that Rudy Fraser is building. He took the initiative to build community features (custom feeds, custom labelers, etc.) catered to an audience of Black users who want tools for greater self-governance within the ATprotocol ecosystem.

User agency changes everything

This is the fundamental point that critics miss: Bluesky isn’t just another Twitter clone. It’s a demonstration of what happens when you give users actual control over their social media experience instead of forcing them to rely on the whims of billionaires.

For the past decade, social media users have been like restaurant diners who can only eat at one restaurant, where they can’t see the menu in advance, the chef changes the recipes based on his mood, and the only thing diners can do if they don’t like the menu is yell loudly and hope the chef makes something different. Bluesky is more like a food court where you can choose from multiple vendors, see what each one offers, and even set up your own stand if you want. Some people still yell loudly, but out of the learned habit that that’s the only thing you can do.

Most users don’t actually need to know about this, and they don’t need to buy into the ideology of decentralization and user empowerment, but it’s really all about giving the users more control over their social media experience whether directly on a single platform like Bluesky (with things like custom feeds, custom labelers, self-hosted data servers) or through the rapidly growing set of third-party services and apps, some of which have nothing to do with Bluesky.

This represents a fundamental shift from the past decade of social media, where users had to conform to whatever made billionaires happy (posting to the algorithm, accepting whatever content moderation decisions were made) to a system where users can customize their experience to work for them.

The “Twitter competitor” framing is the Trojan Horse. Bluesky demonstrates just one type of service that can be built on an open social protocol—but the real revolution is in returning agency to users.

That kind of user agency and control is part of what also makes some of the other complaints silly. There are better and better tools for taking control over your own experience on Bluesky, and focusing on finding your community. For example, I recently saw that there are labelers that people use to block out talk of US politics (often used by people not in the US and who don’t want to see it).

We need to unlearn the lessons many people have internalized over the past decade and a half. You shouldn’t be at the whims of any billionaire. You should chart your own course, having it set up to work for you, not the billionaire’s best interests. Critics demanding that people return to X are essentially arguing that users should give up this agency and go back to being at the mercy of Elon Musk’s mood swings and algorithmic manipulation.

That kind of user agency and control makes Elon Musk’s version of “free speech” look like what it really is: a billionaire’s right to control the conversation.

The premise is wrong

Finally, the entire premise is wrong. Anyone who actually spends time using Bluesky knows that it’s vibrant and active with a wide variety of discussion topics (and plenty of disagreements and debates, contrary to the whole “bubble” concept). It’s also well aware of what’s happening elsewhere, as there are plenty of discussions about what viewpoints are happening on the wider internet.

The idea that cultural discussions are somehow missing is ridiculous.

The data totally undermines the “dying platform no one uses” narrative: multiple media properties have noted that they get way more traffic from Bluesky than sites like Threads and ExTwitter (both of which throttle posts that include links). And a recent Pew study found that so-called “news influencers” are increasingly on Bluesky.

So we have a platform that publishers say drives more engaged traffic than the “mainstream” alternatives, where news influencers are increasingly active, and which generates enough interest that major media outlets regularly write trend pieces about it. This is not what “failure” looks like.

So basically none of the premises behind those “woe is Bluesky” articles make any sense at all.

About the only context they make sense in is as arguments from people who know they should give up on the sewage drain that ExTwitter has become, but refuse to do so. Rather than deal with their own failings, they are blaming those who have made the leap to a better place and a better system.

So, sure, some people have complaints about Bluesky. But people have complaints about any community they’re in. And Bluesky lets people have way more control over those norms and experiences than any other platform and doesn’t support fascist billionaires at the same time. And, as multiple people have already realized, embracing the Bluesky community already works much better than the billionaire-owned platforms do.


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As Mike Masnick noted late last week while covering yet another extremely disturbing development in the ongoing horror show that is our current government, the Trump Administration isn’t fucking around. It wants to destroy America so it can have the only kind of America it’s willing to put up with: one it can rule, rather than lead.

When a federal official can announce that military forces will remain in American cities until democratically elected leaders are removed, then violently detain a Senator for asking questions about it, constitutional government has effectively ended. This isn’t creeping authoritarianism—it’s the active dismantling of democratic institutions in real time.

That federal official was DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. The democratically elected person who was violently detained for daring to interrupt Noem’s self-glorifying press conference was Senator Alex Padilla from California, who is the ranking member of a Senate subcommittee that directly oversees the DHS.

The authoritarianism isn’t creeping. It’s everywhere. But its primary focus right now is California.

First, Trump violated the law by commandeering National Guard forces that are supposed to be left to the discretion of the state they serve. In this case, 2,000 California National Guard members were sent to Los Angeles for extremely vague reasons. Unlike the massive rioting that occurred in 1992, the anti-mass deportation protests in California have been mostly peaceful with anything resembling a riot contained to a very small part of downtown Los Angeles.

Despite the lack of widespread violence and destruction, the Defense Department added 700 Marines to the mix, escalating this past the illegal hijacking of California’s National Guard (without the permission or request of the state of California) to the direct deployment of the US soldiers to help police protests that local law enforcement appeared to have pretty much fully contained without outside intervention.

That extra step is hugely problematic, especially if Marines start pitching in with law enforcement work — something they’re explicitly forbidden from doing. And yet, here they are, doing cop work for cops, something captured on video and (unbelievably) confirmed by the Defense Department:

BREAKING: US Marines deployed to Los Angeles have carried out the first known detention of a civilian, the US military confirms.It was confirmed to Reuters after they shared this image with the US military.

News Eye (@newseye.bsky.social) 2025-06-13T22:01:17.462Z

The official confirmation that US Marines are detaining people in Los Angeles was obtained by Reuters.

Asked about the incident, the U.S. military’s Northern Command spokesperson said active duty forces “may temporarily detain an individual in specific circumstances.”

“Any temporary detention ends immediately when the individual(s) can be safely transferred to the custody of appropriate civilian law enforcement personnel,” a spokesperson said.

Another photo posted at Reuters shows the man’s hands are zip-tied behind him while a Marine restrains him by holding his shoulder. The ugly irony is that the man detained by Trump’s martial law trial run is an Army veteran who obtained his US citizenship via military service and was only trying to access services at the local Department of Veterans Affairs office.

Sure, this may seem like a small thing. But only if this is the only thing you see. Trump and DoD head Pete Hegseth have sent military members to the streets of Los Angeles. Administration officials have affirmatively stated there’s no end date for this mini-occupation and have actually said OUT LOUD that the ultimate goal is to remove elected leaders that disagree with them and their efforts.

This is a direct quote of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, taken from the press conference where she stood idly by as a US senator was grabbed by armed officers and thrown to the ground:

We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.

Sure, there may be a bit of performative hyperbole thrown in there. And, given that this is coming from a person who doesn’t know the definition of habeas corpus, there’s also the possibility Noem doesn’t understand some of the larger words she used during this press conference.

But make no mistake about it: if the Trump Administration thinks it can get away with a full military occupation of Los Angeles, it definitely will attempt to do it. What’s happening now is the administration testing the waters while manufacturing the provocations it needs to move forward with the next step. Shrug this isolated instance off if you dare. It’s not going to remain an anomaly for long, not when most of the Republican party is actively cheering on the use of military force against their fellow citizens.


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Late last year, eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim of a massive intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent a year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers this happened.

Like most hacks, the scale of the intrusion was significantly worse than originally stated. Last week, insiders told NextGov that Comcast and data center giant Digital Realty were also caught up in the hack and had their systems compromised. The same insiders stated that government officials still aren’t really sure that they have a full grasp on the attack’s impact:

“Various agencies across the U.S. government are in possession of lists of confirmed or potential victims, but it’s not clear if the tallies are consistent with each other, adding to confusion about who may have been accessed, targeted or marked for investigation, one of the people said.”

But it’s this little bit in the report that I thought was of particular note:

“Inside two major U.S. telecom operators, incident response staff have been instructed by outside counsel not to look for signs of Salt Typhoon, said one of the people, declining to name the firms because the matter is sensitive.”

So big telecoms are so afraid of liability and government oversight they’ve just stopped looking for evidence of intrusion in one of the worst hacks the U.S. has ever seen. That’s sure to fix the problem.

The U.S. business press covering the hack refuse to talk about it, but a major catalyst for the hack was the steady and mindless deregulation of the U.S. telecom sector. Libertarians and right wingers, “free market” think tanks in tow, spent the better part of the last thirty years insisting that gutting all meaningful state and federal oversight would result in vast, near-Utopian outcomes.

Instead, freed of both pesky competition and competent oversight, major U.S. telecoms saw zero incentive to compete on price, shore up spotty access, improve quality, or even consistently, adequately invest in privacy and security standards. The results are everywhere you look, from sloppy handling of consumer location data, to companies like T-Mobile being hacked eight times in five years.

And this was all before the Trump 2.0 authoritarians came to town. Now, we’re disemboweling our telecom and cybersecurity regulators at a much faster rate, stocking our regulators with weird, incompetent, and unqualified zealots, and building a court system in which it’s genuinely impossible for telecom giants to see any sort of real-world accountability for fraud or incompetence.

Again, the second Trump administration is utterly indistinguishable from a foreign attack. Because it’s dressed up in so much domestic religious and pseudo-populist propaganda and bullshit, it’s in many ways worse.


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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 week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by guest host Mercy Mutemi, lawyer and managing partner of Nzili & Sumbi Advocates. Together, they cover:

Meta can be sued in Kenya for human trafficking and for algorithmic amplification of harm (Open Democracy)Billy Perrigo on investigating Facebook’s ‘ethical’ outsourced content moderation in Kenya (Everything in Moderation)A first look at Meta’s Community Notes (Indicator Media)Get Noted (Columbia Journalism Review)The Meaning of Being an African YouTuber: Big Audiences, No Big Money + Is TikTok Excluding Africans From its Creator Economy? (Fast Company)Is TikTok Excluding Africans From its Creator Economy? (OkayAfrica)I was tricked, tortured, finally freed: inside a Burmese scam farm (The Times)Tanzania announces shutdown of X because of pornography (BBC)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.


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Back in May, we talked about a change that Nintendo made to its EULA that essentially amounted to “We’ll brick your console if we don’t like how you use it.” Now, Nintendo will tell you that the changes were done to protect the company from the threat of piracy. The problem is that’s not what the EULA actually says. Instead, it lists out a series of actions it is prohibiting, despite most of those actions having perfectly legal and legitimate use-cases that have nothing to do with piracy. Here’s what PC Gamer had to say about it at the time:

The sections I most take issue with are the prohibitions on copying, modifying, or decompiling software—particularly as it no longer accounts for it being “expressly permitted by applicable law”—as well as hardware/software modifications “that would cause the Nintendo Account Services to operate other than in accordance with its documentation and intended use.”

No game or hardware modding, no extracting ROMs⁠—something Nintendo continuously asserts we cannot do, even though it is a legally protected consumer right⁠—and no dual booting to another OS.

When it comes to extracting ROMs, that is perfectly legal in America. Threats to render a $500 console functionally destroyed because someone engaged in legal activity isn’t just absurd, it should itself be illegal. As is often the case, Nintendo is asserting rights it simply doesn’t have here, with overly broad restrictions on a console that the buyer, in theory at least, owns.

Well, we have yet to see Nintendo go that nuclear route of bricking devices, but it is already exacting punishments on owners of the Switch 2 for the use of a MIG Switch.

The device in question is called the MIG Switch and it’s a cartridge that users can load up with games—either ones backed up from legally purchased copies or files pirated online. Nintendo started suing people who sell the MIG Switch last year and designed the Switch 2 so the carts wouldn’t work with it. The makers of MIG Switch, however, recently released a firmware update that made it possible to use the devices to load Switch 1 games on the Switch 2.

Nintendo has responded by banning any Switch 2 that it’s seemingly found to have run one of the illicit flash cartridges at some point. “My NS2 has been console banned and I have absolutely no idea why!” wrote SquareSphere on the Switch 2 subreddit earlier today. “The only thing I can think what has happened is that I tried my Mig switch in my NS2 once.”

There are a lot more of these reports out in the wild, but essentially Nintendo is cutting these consoles off from all online services. And, again, the offense leading to this punishment is the use of a device that can be, but is not strictly, used for piracy. Other uses include backing up your game library, loading your ROMs from games you absolutely purchased so they can be ported over to your new Switch 2 on one cartridge. In fact, for their piracy concerns, Nintendo has a bunch of other methods for policing that sort of thing.

That being said, it isn’t as simple as dumping pirated copies on a MIG-Switch and calling it a day since Nintendo has robust anti-piracy measures in place, often through unique cartridge identifiers. If two users attempt to play the same game online simultaneously using a single copy, Nintendo can flag this as piracy. As you can expect, this likely has led to many false positives, especially in the case of used cartridges.

It appears the Switch 2 is even stricter on this front, as there are now widespread reports of users being banned even when using what they purport as their own legitimately dumped game ROMs on the MIG-Switch. While users’ Nintendo accounts reportedly remain unaffected, their consoles are now blocked from accessing Nintendo’s online services. That means saying goodbye to Mario Kart World, the eShop, YouTube, cloud saves, and the list goes on.

Now, why it’s allowed to do all of this without any confrontation from any sort of consumer rights organization or, hell, civil litigation lawyers is possibly just a matter of time. The console is new and perhaps we’ll see some of that activity in the near future. We certainly should, after all, given how wildly anti-consumer this all is.


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What may be one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most important and far-reaching rulings in decades dropped in late May 2025 in an order that probably didn’t get a second – or even first – glance from most Americans.

But this not-quite-two-page ruling, as technical and procedural as they come, potentially rewrites a major principle of constitutional law and may restructure the operation of the federal government.

The case is dry in a way only lawyers could love, but its implications are enormous.

Public mission, not presidential whims

The dispute began when President Donald Trump fired two Biden-era officials: Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board, and Cathy Harris, a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, like the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Reserve, are among more than 50 independent agencies established by Congress to help the president carry out the law. Though technically located within the executive branch, independent agencies are designed to serve the public at large rather than the president.

To ensure these agencies are devoted to their public mission, not the will or whims of a president, congressional statutes generally permit the president to remove leaders of these agencies only for “good cause.” Malfeasance in office, neglect of duty, or inefficiency generally constitute “good cause.”

Other executive branch agencies, such as the FBI, Food and Drug Administration and Department of Homeland Security are entirely under presidential command – if he wants their leaders out, out they go. But independent agencies, in existence since the late 19th century, are to carry out congressional policy free from the president’s purview and his political pressure.

Because independent agencies are creatures of Congress housed within the executive branch, there is long-standing disagreement among scholars about just how much power the president should have over them.

Limiting Congress, empowering the president

In the two firings, there was agreement that Trump had violated the relevant statute by firing Wilcox and Harris without “good cause.”

He justified Wilcox’s removal, in part, because she did not share his policy preferences. For Harris, he gave no reason at all.

But the bigger issue was whether the law itself was constitutional: Could Congress limit why or how a president can remove employees of the executive branch?

The root of the problem lies within the Constitution. Although Article 2 specifically gives the president the power to “appoint” certain federal officials, it says nothing about the power to fire -– or “remove” – them.

Conservative legal scholars propose, under what’s called the “unitary executive theory,” that because the president “is” the executive branch, he has complete authority, including removal, over all who serve within it. Only with the unfettered ability to fire anyone who serves under him can the president fulfill his constitutionally mandated duty to ensure that “the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Opponents have countered that this ignores fundamental aspects of our constitutional framework: the framers’ devotion to checks and balances, their aversion toward monarchical, kinglike rule, and their determination to put policymaking in the hands of Congress.

These questions are not new.

The Supreme Court first took up the issue in 1926 in Myers v. United States, when Chief Justice – and former president – William Howard Taft held that Congress could not limit the president’s ability to fire an Oregon postmaster, writing that “the power to remove inferior executive officers … is an incident of the power to appoint them.”

Less than a decade later, however, the court ruled in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that the Constitution did not grant the president an “illimitable power of removal,” at least over certain types of officials. This included the head of the Federal Trade Commission, whose firing by President Franklin Roosevelt had sparked the case.

Humphrey’s Executor stood basically untouched for decades, until Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito – both of whom had previously served in the executive branch – were appointed.

With a now-solid conservative majority, the Supreme Court invalidated restrictions on the president’s ability to remove members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in 2009.

Two years after the arrival of fellow executive branch alumnus Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, the court struck down the “good cause” removal restriction for the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Rather than explicitly overrule Humphrey’s Executor, however, the justices declared that these agencies were factually distinct from the Federal Trade Commission – leaders of one were protected by a “two-layer” removal system and the other because it was run by a single individual, not a multimember board.

‘Massive change in the law’

Because Humphrey’s Executor was still good law, and the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board were structured like the Federal Trade Commission, district courts in 2025 initially held that the firings of Wilcox and Harris were unlawful.

On April 9, 2025, Trump filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, asking it to put the district court decisions on hold. On May 22, the Supreme Court granted that request, at least while the cases proceed through the lower courts.

The court did not decide on the constitutionality of the removal statute, but the ruling is nonetheless a major victory for Trump. He can now fire not only Wilcox and Harris but also potentially the heads of any independent agency. Low-level civil servants may also be at risk.

In the unsigned order, the high court echoed unitary executive theory, stating, “Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the Presidents … he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions.” It simply ignored Humphrey’s Executor altogether, leaving its value as precedent unclear.

The Supreme Court also said that the holding did not apply to the Federal Reserve Board. That “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity” would remain free from executive control via removal.

Such an explicit carve-out in legal doctrine is striking but responds directly to claims made by litigants and political commentators of the dire economic consequences that could result were the president to have free rein over the Federal Reserve’s chairman.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan blasted the majority for allowing the president to overrule Humphrey’s Executor “by fiat,” a result made even worse because the court had done so via the so-called shadow docket, in the absence of full briefing or oral argument. Such “short-circuiting” of the “usual deliberative process” is, she wrote, a wholly inappropriate way to make a “massive change in the law.”

The shadow of Humphrey’s Executor

What happens now?

The National Labor Relations Board is paralyzed, and the Merit Systems Protection Board is somewhat hamstrung, with both lacking the quorum necessary to act. Cases about the firing of Harris, Wilcox and multiple other officials will bedevil lower courts as they try to figure out whether Humphrey’s Executor still stands, even as a shadow of its former self.

Trump aims to continue axing federal employees, even as the administration struggles to rehire others.

And, already asked again to make major legal change on its emergency docket, the Supreme Court will need to determine whether such change warrants more than the few paragraphs of explanation it gave in the ruling on the Wilcox and Harris firings.

If, as seems likely, the court ultimately overturns Humphrey’s Executor, Kagan’s dissent serves as a warning voiced by others as well: A decision that allows the president to have total control over the heads of more than 50 independent agencies – agencies that pursue the public interest in areas from financial regulation to the environment, to nuclear safety – could shift their focus from serving the public to pleasing the president, profoundly affecting the lives of many Americans.

Claire B. Wofford is Associate Professor of Political Science, College of Charleston. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.


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One recurring theme of our head-first rushed adoption of “AI” is that half-cooked automation routinely reflects the often shitty natures of the companies or individuals installing it.

Health insurance companies with a history of being crooks implement Medicare rejection AI with a 90% error rate. Incompetent media company executives implement half-cooked “AI” that plagiarizes, undercuts labor, and makes constant mistakes. Weird anti-science zealots who are routinely full of shit wind up issuing government reports full of absolute anti-science bullshit. Curious!

Over in telecom, Verizon has implemented automation in its customer support systems, and, once again, it directly reflects Verizon’s long history of terrible customer service, weird upcharges, and just generally being curiously terrible at math. The company’s new “Personal Shopper” AI assistant is ruffling customer feathers because it routinely adds unwanted features and constantly tries to rip customers off.

Reddit is full of posts like this one where users trying to make basic changes to their account using the tool routinely find themselves suddenly paying an arm and a leg for all sorts of services they neither wanted nor asked for:

“I went to the Verizon store to add a line and get a watch. I’m looking at my Verizon account and just noticed that the person assisting me added the 100GB of hot spot add on, Netflix & IMAX and insurance which I never asked for. All I wanted was the watch. I expected my bill to be $170-$180 but it’s $261 with all these add ons that I never asked for.”

Introduced last holiday season, Verizon insisted the new AI assistant would bring more joy and less stress to the experience with the telecom. But it’s clear that, in traditional Verizon fashion, the AI is being shaped to reflect Verizon’s endless efforts to upsell customers to more expensive plans, add-ons, and services. Even Verizon reps say they’re annoyed with the system, which makes their jobs harder:

“Anyone else who works for Verizon having issues with “Personal Shopper”?

I’m indirect and tried to place an order for an iPad yesterday, something that normally would take me like 5 minutes ended up being like 30 because I’m constantly fighting personal shopper wanting to add perks. Makes omni absolutely dog shit to use now.”

So automation that’s supposed to make customers’ and reps’ lives easier is actually making both experiences worse, and driving annoyed customers over to other wireless providers. Ironic that technology that’s supposed to revolutionize things seems to be simply supercharging many companies’ worst habits, adding new layers of annoyance and complexity.

Maybe Verizon should have spent less time kissing Trump’s ass to gain merger approval and more time fine tuning their AI assistants.


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Brazil’s Supreme Court appears close to ruling that social media companies should be liable for content hosted on their platforms—a move that appears to represent a significant departure from the country’s pioneering Marco Civil internet law. While this approach has obvious appeal to people frustrated with platform failures, it’s likely to backfire in ways that make the underlying problems worse, not better.

The core issue is that most people fundamentally misunderstand both how content moderation works and what drives platform incentives. There’s a persistent myth that companies could achieve near-perfect moderation if they just “tried harder” or faced sufficient legal consequences. This ignores the mathematical reality of what happens when you attempt to moderate billions of pieces of content daily, and it misunderstands how liability actually changes corporate behavior.

Part of the confusion, I think, stems from people’s failure to understand the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale. There is a very wrong assumption that social media platforms could do perfect (or very good) content moderation if they just tried harder or had more incentive to do better. Without denying that some entities (*cough* ExTwitter *cough*) have made it clear they don’t care at all, most others do try to get this right, and discover over and over again how impossible that is.

Yes, we can all point to examples of platform failures that are depressing and seem obvious that things should have been done differently, but the failures are not there because “the laws don’t require it.” The failures are because it’s impossible to do this well at scale. Some people will always disagree with how a decision comes out, and other times there are no “right” answers. Also, sometimes, there’s just too much going on at once, and no legal regime in the world can possibly fix that.

Given all of that, what we really want are better overall incentives for the companies to do better. Some people (again, falsely) seem to think the only incentives are regulatory. But that’s not true. Incentives come in all sorts of shapes and sizes—and much more powerful than regulations are things like the users themselves, along with advertisers and other business partners.

Importantly, content moderation is also a constantly moving and evolving issue. People who are trying to game the system are constantly adjusting. New kinds of problems arise out of nowhere. If you’ve never done content moderation, you have no idea how many “edge cases” there are. Most people—incorrectly—assume that most decisions are easy calls and you may occasionally come across a tougher one.

But there are constant edge cases, unique scenarios, and unclear situations. Because of this, every service provider will make many, many mistakes every day. There’s no way around this. It’s partly the law of large numbers. It’s partly the fact that humans are fallible. It’s partly the fact that decisions need to be made quickly without full information. And a lot of it is that those making the decisions just don’t know what the “right” approach is.

The way to get better is constant adjusting and experimenting. Moderation teams need to be adaptable. They need to be able to respond quickly. And they need the freedom to experiment with new approaches to deal with bad actors trying to abuse the system.

Putting legal liability on the platform makes all of that more difficult

Now, here’s where my concerns about the potential ruling in Brazil get to: if there is legal liability, it creates a scenario that is actually less likely to lead to good outcomes. First, it effectively requires companies to replace moderators with lawyers. If your company is now making decisions that come with significant legal liability, that likely requires a much higher type of expertise. Even worse, it’s creating a job that most people with law degrees are unlikely to want.

Every social media company has at least some lawyers who work with their trust & safety teams to review the really challenging cases, but when legal liability could accrue for every decision, it becomes much, much worse.

More importantly, though, it makes it way more difficult for trust & safety teams to experiment and adapt. Once things include the potential of legal liability, then it becomes much more important for the companies to have some sort of plausible deniability—some way to express to a judge “look, we’re doing the same thing we always have, the same thing every company has always done” to cover themselves in court.

But that means that these trust & safety efforts get hardened into place, and teams are less able to adapt or to experiment with better ways to fight evolving threats. It’s a disaster for companies that want to do the right thing.

The next problem with such a regime is that it creates a real heckler’s veto-type regime. If anyone complains about anything, companies are quick to take it down, because the risk of ruinous liability just isn’t worth it. And we now have decades of evidence showing that increasing liability on platforms leads to massive overblocking of information. I recognize that some people feel this is acceptable collateral damage… right up until it impacts them.

This dynamic should sound familiar to anyone who’s studied internet censorship. It’s exactly how China’s Great Firewall originally operated—not through explicit rules about what was forbidden, but by telling service providers that the punishment would be severe if anything “bad” got through. The government created deliberate uncertainty about where the line was, knowing that companies would respond with massive overblocking to avoid potentially ruinous consequences. The result was far more comprehensive censorship than direct government mandates could have achieved.

Brazil’s proposed approach follows this same playbook, just with a different enforcement mechanism. Rather than government officials making vague threats, it would be civil liability creating the same incentive structure: when in doubt, take it down, because the cost of being wrong is too high.

People may be okay with that, but I would think that in a country with a history of dictatorships and censorship, they would like to be a bit more cautious before handing the government a similarly powerful tool of suppression.

It’s especially disappointing in Brazil, which a decade ago put together the Marco Civil, an internet civil rights law that was designed to protect user rights and civil liberties—including around intermediary liability. The Marco Civil remains an example of more thoughtful internet lawmaking (way better than we’ve seen almost anywhere else, including the US). So this latest move feels like backsliding.

Either way, the longer-term fear is that this would actually limit the ability of smaller, more competitive social media players to operate in Brazil, as it will be way too risky. The biggest players (Meta) aren’t likely to leave, but they have buildings full of lawyers who can fight these lawsuits (and often, likely, win). A study we conducted a few years back detailed how as countries ratcheted up their intermediary liability, the end result was, repeatedly, fewer online places to speak.

That doesn’t actually improve the social media experience at all. It just gives more of it to the biggest players with the worst track records. Sure, a few lawsuits may extract some cash from these companies for failing to be perfect, but it’s not like they can wave a magic wand and not let any “criminal” content exist. That’s not how any of this works.

Some responses to issues raised by critics

When I wrote about this on a brief Bluesky thread, I received hundreds of responses—many quite angry—that revealed some common misunderstandings about my position. I’ll take the blame for not expressing myself as clearly as I should have and I’m hoping the points above lay out the argument more clearly regarding how this could backfire in dangerous ways. But, since some of the points were repeated at me over and over again (sometimes with clever insults), I thought it would be good to address some of the arguments directly:

But social media is bad, so if this gets rid of all of it, that’s good. I get that many people hate social media (though, there was some irony in people sending those messages to me on social media). But, really what most people hate is what they see on social media. And as I keep explaining, the way we fix that is with more experimentation and more user agency—not handing everything over to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk or the government.

Brazil doesn’t have a First Amendment, so shut up and stop with your colonialist attitude. I got this one repeatedly and it’s… weird? I never suggested Brazil had a First Amendment, nor that it should implement the equivalent. I simply pointed out the inevitable impact of increasing intermediary liability on speech. You can decide (as per the comment above) that you’re fine with this, but it has nothing to do with my feelings about the First Amendment. I wasn’t suggesting Brazil import American free speech laws either. I was simply pointing out what the consequences of this one change to the law might create.

Existing social media is REALLY BAD, so we need to do this. This is the classic “something must be done, this is something, we will do this” response. I’m not saying nothing must be done. I’m just saying this particular approach will have significant consequences that it would help people to think through.

It only applies to content after it’s been adjudicated as criminal. I got that one a few times from people. But, from my reading, that’s not true at all. That’s what the existing law was. These rulings would expand it greatly from what I can tell. Indeed, the article notes how this would change things from existing law:

The current legislation states social media companies can only be held responsible if they do not remove hazardous content after a court order.

[….]

Platforms need to be pro-active in regulating content, said Alvaro Palma de Jorge, a law professor at the Rio-based Getulio Vargas Foundation, a think tank and university.

“They need to adopt certain precautions that are not compatible with simply waiting for a judge to eventually issue a decision ordering the removal of that content,” Palma de Jorge said.

You’re an anarchocapitalist who believes that there should be no laws at all, so fuck off. This one actually got sent to me a bunch of times in various forms. I even got added to a block list of anarchocapitalists. Really not sure how to respond to that one other than saying “um, no, just look at anything I’ve written for the past two and a half decades.”

America is a fucking mess right now, so clearly what you are pushing for doesn’t work. This one was the weirdest of all. Some people sending variations on this pointed to multiple horrific examples of US officials trampling on Americans’ free speech, saying “see? this is what you support!” as if I support those things, rather than consistently fighting back against them. Part of the reason I’m suggesting this kind of liability can be problematic is because I want to stop other countries from heading down a path that gives governments the power to stifle speech like the US is doing now.

I get that many people are—reasonably!—frustrated about the terrible state of the world right now. And many people are equally frustrated by the state of internet discourse. I am too. But that doesn’t mean any solution will help. Many will make things much worse. And the solution Brazil is moving towards seems quite likely to make the situation worse there.


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At some point, there’s supposed to 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines added to a volatile mix that already includes peaceful protesters, some not-so-peaceful protesters, definitely-not-peaceful peace officers, and a large migrant community already on edge.

Piled on top of this is mindless, harmful rhetoric steadily flowing from the mouths of Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, DHS head Kristi Noem, and pretty much every elected Republican in DC.

None of this mixes well. The GOP seems to desire martial law. Los Angeles residents just want ICE to leave. The LAPD and LASD seemed to have a handle on this before the interlopers arrived, even if they — like seemingly every police force in the nation — are better at picking fights than de-escalating conflict.

The current LAPD chief has already issued a statement that said the deployment of military units was unnecessary at best, and possibly dangerous at worst, given the lack of communication from the federal government. Meanwhile, the Guardsmen who have already been sent to LA are sleeping on floors and going without pay because, with this administration, it’s action first and logistics last.

A former LAPD chief, Michael Moore, says the current situation is a powder keg in search of a lit fuse. Moore would know. He was an officer during the riots that followed the Rodney King beating verdict. What he saw then doesn’t exactly paint a promising picture of the near future:

I was an officer during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when federal troops were last deployed to our streets. I witnessed the confusion and the risks created by sending soldiers trained for combat into a civilian environment. Even basic commands like “cover me” were misunderstood — interpreted by troops as calls for gunfire rather than tactical positioning. Whereas police officers are taught to use time, distance and de-escalation, soldiers are trained to apply overwhelming force.

We can argue about what officers are actually being taught, as well as what teachings they choose to deploy, but we can’t argue the fact that military mindsets are different than law enforcement mindsets, even though those lines have become increasingly blurred over the past couple of decades.

What’s impossible to ignore are the facts on the ground: Los Angeles is not overwhelmed by violent protests. What there is of that is relegated to an extremely small subsection of the city. Given that fact, it’s completely possible for local law enforcement to manage protests on their own.

There is no question that serious unrest and violence have occurred in parts of downtown Los Angeles. Attacks on buildings and threats to public safety must be taken seriously. But this is not an insurrection. These incidents are localized, and local law enforcement agencies are fully capable of addressing them.

The optics of sending in troops is already bad enough. And the Trump Administration has already had its commandeering of local National Guard troops blocked by a federal court. What’s happening here appears to be illegal, and the Trump Administration is openly daring courts to stop its steady march towards a fascism and martial law.

The outcome of this envelope-pushing will have a very human cost. The administration is playing with people’s lives literally as it tests the boundaries of its power. What happened years ago should be a cautionary tale, but it seems like Trump and his GOP enablers would be more than thrilled with this sort of death toll:

History reminds us of the dangers of blurring these lines. The tragedy at Kent State, where unarmed student protesters were gunned down by National Guard troops, offers a stark warning. The federal government’s deployment of military personnel now risks causing the same escalation, tragic error and lasting damage to public confidence.

Kent State appears to be the blueprint, rather than the barricade. If Californians need to be killed by members of the military so ICE can pack another bus with meaningfully employed migrants, so be it. You’d hope that someone in the administration with the power to push it back from this precipice would speak up. But it’s been five months and it appears every single batshit urge of Trump’s has been waved through like a cargo van full of Afrikaners at the Mexican border.

And despite protests to the contrary by California lawmakers and actual law enforcement officials in the state, this is what we’re seeing happen now: a scene that looks like it’s taking place in a foreign country but is actually nothing more than an untargeted ICE raid of a Los Angeles swap meet:

When I tell you Los Angeles is an occupied city/county, this is what I mean…Yesterday, ICE agents showed up to a regular Saturday swap meet with armed Marines and a military helicopter overhead, like it’s a fucking war zone.

Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) 2025-06-15T16:49:50.028Z

Absolutely chilling. People selling stuff to other people, rudely interrupted by ICE agents and US military members, performing stall-to-stall searches like they’re strolling through an open-air market in Iraq. This is fucked up. And it’s only just beginning.


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I’m old enough to remember Republicans claiming that any lawsuit against a Republican was “lawfare” and political persecution. But, as with so many things in the modern MAGA GOP, the reason they said such things was because, given the chance, they would totally seek to engage in actual political persecution and lawfare against anyone who stood in their way.

In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen multiple examples of Democrats (and only Democrats) arrested for trying to get a better understanding of what actions ICE was taking with immigrants or making sure that immigrants understood their civil rights under the law (something ICE has made clear it doesn’t want them to know).

The latest target comes during yet another disturbing escalation by ICE: the DHS has begun targeting refugees and asylum seekers who are fully playing by the rules. These people are voluntarily going to court to advance their case, legally, seeking to gain official permission to stay in the US.

What’s happening, according to multiple reports, is that the Kristi Noem’s DHS is literally secretly dropping their cases, then having ICE agents grab the people as soon as they exit the court room in order to deport them. Contrary to what Trump and the MAGA crowd will tell you, these are not hardened criminals or lawbreakers. They were literally following the law in seeking permanent residence papers. And, in the middle of it, DHS secretly drops their cases, while lining up ICE agents to grab them as they leave the courtroom, to then seeks to deport them (not necessarily back to their own country) without any due process.

If they wanted due process, they could let the court cases continue. But they don’t want due process.

That brings us to NYC Comptroller (and mayoral candidate) Brad Lander, who was arrested by ICE agents while visiting an immigration court. Lander has recently taken to going to immigration court hearings and trying to help those at risk from this new tactic. He’s done it twice before with no incidents, but on Tuesday, ICE agents arrested him, claiming he was interfering.

Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller who is running for mayor, was arrested on Tuesday by federal agents at an immigration courthouse in Lower Manhattan as he tried to escort a migrant whom agents were seeking to arrest.

Mr. Lander, a Democrat, was observing proceedings at the city’s main immigration courthouse, at 26 Federal Plaza, where an increasing number of migrants who appear for court have been arrested in recent weeks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security later said that Mr. Lander had assaulted and impeded a law enforcement officer, though as of Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Lander had not been formally charged.

Videos taken by reporters at the courthouse show Mr. Lander standing by a migrant man in a hallway on the 12th floor when several men in plainclothes who appear to be law enforcement officers, some wearing masks, push past a crowd in the hallway to arrest the migrant.

For all the fake talk you’ll hear from the MAGA faithful about how they support “lawful immigration” and they just don’t like “illegal” immigration, they can’t explain how this is fair. These cases often involve people who were migrants and asylum-seekers seeking permanent residence in the US. They’re following the lawful process to do so, including by showing up in court at the right time, even as the government has now made that dangerous.

It’s beyond sickening and simply pretty far along the “evil” spectrum to deliberately target the people who are actually following the law and are actually seeking to engage with the legal process for obtaining documentation and permission to permanently reside in the US.

Lander was out there trying to help people do that and have their civil rights protected. Instead, both he and the guy he was seeking to protect were arrested and held. As Lander noted upon his release two hours later , at least he’s still able to go home to his own bed, while the guy he was walking with has been detained and is likely to be deported with no real due process.

This story has a bit of everything regarding our fucked up immigration and enforcement systems.

ICE targeting people who are going through the proper legal process.Secretly dismissing lawsuits since it’s faster and easier (and involves significantly less due process) to just ship them out of the country (to their home? who knows? who cares?).Positioning ICE agents outside the courtrooms where these hearings are being held, just waiting to snatch the people who were following the rules.Culminating in the arrest of NYC’s comptroller and mayoral candidate for trying to help a confused immigrant through this attack on his due process.

And, once again, the Trump administration lies with impunity about what happened:

In a statement, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, the parent agency of ICE, said that Mr. Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.”

“Our heroic ICE law enforcement officers face a 413 percent increase in assaults against them,” she added. “It is wrong that politicians seeking higher office undermine law enforcement safety to get a viral moment. No one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences.”

There was zero evidence shown of him assaulting law enforcement or impeding them. But that’s just how this goes now. ICE does something horrific, and Tricia McLaughlin pops up on cue like Baghdad Bob, to insist that it’s really everyone else at fault, while DHS is faultless. McLaughlin’s routine is predictable: whatever ICE does wrong, she’ll manufacture a justification for it while attacking anyone who questions their tactics.

And while some people (including McLaughlin) have accused this of being a “stunt,” it really doesn’t seem like it was (again, Lander has been doing this multiple times without incident, suggesting he might actually just want to help). But more to the point: if it was done as a stunt, well… good! We should want politicians using every bit of whatever privilege they have to help highlight the sheer ridiculousness and vindictiveness of Trump and Noem’s immigration policies.

Having DHS drop cases involving immigrants following the legal process then grab them immediately outside the courtroom is absolute bullshit, deserving of widespread condemnation and news coverage. If it takes Lander showing up and trying to help people to turn that into news, so be it.

So here we are. The same people who spent years screaming “lawfare!” every time a Republican faced legal consequences for actual crimes are now using federal law enforcement to target people who are literally following the legal immigration process—and arresting the officials who try to help them navigate that process.

This is what actual weaponization of law enforcement looks like: not investigating crimes, but punishing people for complying with the law. Not going after lawbreakers, but going after those who dare to help others exercise their legal rights.

We need more politicians willing to engage in these kinds of “stunts” in standing up for civil liberties and against this administration’s authoritarian overreach. It’s important that more people know what’s happening and just how authoritarian and ridiculous our government is becoming. If what it requires is “stunts,” then that’s what needs to be done. If that means a politician gets more attention in the process, is that really a bad thing? Shouldn’t we want politicians willing to fight for civil rights and civil liberties of all constituents?


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For years we’ve noted how this country’s corrupt inability to protect consumer security, regulate data brokers, or pass even a baseline privacy law was going to have increasingly deadly consequences. Endless signs have been there; from stalkers abusing app and cell phone data to pursue their victims, to right wing extremists using data broker data to target vulnerable women seeking reproductive care.

Fast forward to this week, when court documents revealed that the killer of Minnesota representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, used data broker information to obtain their home addresses:

“The accused Minneapolis assassin allegedly used data brokers as a key part of his plot to track down and murder Democratic lawmakers,” Ron Wyden, the US senator from Oregon, tells WIRED. “Congress doesn’t need any more proof that people are being killed based on data for sale to anyone with a credit card. Every single American’s safety is at risk until Congress cracks down on this sleazy industry.”

To be very clear, both of the lawmakers’ addresses were available via their websites, and this information was already widely available online. Home addresses, even of prominent lawmakers, are generally widely available through public records.

That said, in this case, the court docs indicate the killer obtained the information through a dozen of different name and address websites that collect their data from a massive international web of barely-regulated data brokers.

This isn’t even the worst case scenario for the U.S. and its pathetic privacy standards. This was only name and addresses; most data brokers collect detailed minutiae about your every daily habit, including your movement patterns down to the meter, your online browsing behaviors down to the second, your sexual preferences, your bad driving habits, your home electricity usage, and so much more.

There’s zero meaningful oversight of the sector. Generally, data brokers and companies try to hide behind claims that they “anonymize” this data. A meaningless term given study after study has shown that users in such datasets can be easily identified with just a little extra information and a few seconds of work.

There’s bottomless potential for far worse scandals and potential deaths. All because the United States has, time and time and time again, put making money over public safety and even national security. It’s a hard lesson we’re going to learn again and again and again until Congressional lawmakers shake off the corruption and figure out how to craft competent legislation. Or we replace them.

In other words, prepare to be waiting a while.


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Here we go again. We have talked for years now about famed burger chain In-N-Out and its strategic, and very bullshit, practice of opening up pop-up locations in countries where it does not, and does not appear to plan to, have any real brick and mortar presence. This sort of trademark tourism is not unheard of, of course, but In-N-Out tends to take things to absurd levels. It’s gotten stupid enough that local press outlets in some countries have stopped gleefully writing posts about how In-N-Out is temporarily available and how awesome that is to pointing out exactly what the company is doing to retain trademarks it barely uses to wield against those same countries.

It appears that Australia, one of the original countries in which In-N-Out began pulling this crap, is joining the list of countries that are starting to understand why this is a problem and are wondering aloud what to do about it. It’s been about three years since the company’s last pop-up routine in Australia and they’re back at it again.

It’s not often you’ll see people queue up to enter a pub before 9am on a weekday, but on Wednesday, Sydney’s Coogee Bay Hotel was no ordinary pub. It was, for those who had at least $8 and time to spare, perhaps their only chance to taste American chain In-N-Out Burger for themselves.

So, are the pop-ups, which have, in the past, had as little as 250 burgers available for purchase, merely an exercise in ensuring market research decks are up to date with primary data? Or is the brand sending out smoke signals to the masses that one day it will expand in Australia in earnest? Both options are possible, but neither is likely.

The post goes on to posit instead what we already know: In-N-Out is conducting its hours-long pop-up store operations purely to retain ownership and control of trademarks that it is otherwise not using. Most of these temporary storefronts operate for less than a full business day, so limited are they in operating stock. Let’s be generous and call it a full day, however. And then let’s ask this question: is Australian trademark law really designed such that a foreign company can conduct operations 1 day out of over 1,000 calendar days to retain trademark ownership and that’s all valid?

The post over at the Sydney Morning Herald then asks an intellectual property professor what recourse there is for any of this. Turns out, there absolutely is one!

As Stoianoff notes, Section 92(4)(a) allows the possibility of a trademark to be stripped from its owner even if it’s used within three years (with the period ending one month before the date of filing) prior to an application for its removal.

“They need to be actually able to show that, whatever use has been made … the registered owner has not used their trademark in good faith,” Stoianoff says of those who wish to file an application for trademark removal.

“So I suppose the question becomes one of, well, is this constant popping up every so often a legitimate use or a good faith use, or is it simply a mechanism to try and make sure that Section 92(4)(b) doesn’t operate?”

Given the details around how In-N-Out specifically conducts these popup stores, it’s a question that answers itself. Of course none of this is a legitimate use of a trademark in the country. The percentage of time the company is using it in commerce is so small that it’s measured in fractions of a percent. What are we even talking about here?

So it seems that what is really needed here, at least in Australia, is for someone to challenge In-N-Out’s trademarks on Section92(4)(b) grounds. Given the shift in tone I’m starting to sense from the press, at least, I tend to think that move is coming sooner rather than later.


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This is a combo piece with the first half written by law student Elizabeth Grossman about her take on the recent FTC moral panic about the internet, and the second part being some additional commentary and notes from her professor, Jess Miers.

The FTC is fanning the flames of a moral panic. On June 4, 2025, the Commission held a workshop called The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families. I attended virtually from the second panel until the end of the day. Panelists discussed how the FTC could “help” parents, age verification as the “future,” and “what can be done outside of Washington DC.”  But the workshop’s true goal was to reduce the Internet to only content approved by the  Christian Right, regardless of the Constitution—or the citizens of the United States.

Claim #1: The FTC Should Prevent Minors From Using App Stores and Support Age Verification Laws

FTC panelists argued that because minors lack the legal capacity to contract, app stores must obtain parental consent before allowing them to create accounts or access services. That, in turn, requires age verification to determine who is eligible. This contractual framing isn’t new—but it attempts to sidestep a well-established constitutional concern: that mandatory age verification can burden access to lawful speech. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Supreme Court reaffirmed minors’ rights to access protected content, while Reno v. ACLU struck down ID requirements that chilled adult access to speech. Today, state-level attempts to mandate age verification across the Internet have repeatedly failed on First Amendment grounds.

But by recasting the issue as a matter of contract formation rather than speech, proponents seek to sidestep those constitutional questions. This is the same argument at the heart of Paxton v. Free Speech Coalition, a case the FTC appears to be watching closely. FTC staff repeatedly described a ruling in favor of Texas as a “good ruling,” while suggesting a decision siding with the Free Speech Coalition would run “against” the agency’s interests. The case challenges Texas’ H.B. 1181, which mandates age verification for adult content sites.

The FTC now insists that age verification isn’t about restricting access to content, but about ensuring platforms only contract with legal adults. But this rationale collapses under scrutiny. Minors can enter into contracts—the legal question is whether and when they can disaffirm them. The broader fallacy about minors’ contractual incapacity aside, courts have repeatedly rejected similar logic. Most recently, NetChoice v. Yost reaffirmed that age verification mandates can still violate the First Amendment, no matter how creatively they’re framed. In other words, there is no contract law exception to the First Amendment.

Claim #2: Chatbots Are Dangerous To Minors

The panel’s concerns over minors using chatbots to access adult content felt like a reboot of the violent video game panic. Jake Denton, Chief Technology Officer of the FTC,  delivered an unsubstantiated tirade about an Elsa-themed chatbot allegedly engaging in sexual conversations with children, but offered no evidence to support the claim. In practice, inappropriate outputs from chatbots like those on Character.AI generally occur only when users—minors or adults—intentionally steer the conversation in that direction. Even then, the platform enforces clear usage policies and deploys guardrails to keep bots within fictional contexts and prevent unintended interactions.

Yes, teens will test boundaries, as they always have, but that doesn’t eliminate their constitutional rights. As the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, minors have a protected right to access legal expressive content. Then, it was video games. Today, it’s chatbots.

FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak adopted a more cautious tone, suggesting further study before regulation. But even then, the agency failed to offer meaningful evidence that chatbots pose widespread or novel harm to justify sweeping intervention.

Claim #3: Pornography is Not Protected Speech

Several panelists called for pornography to be stripped of First Amendment protection and for online pornography providers to be denied Section 230 immunity. Joseph Kohm, of Family Policy Alliance,  in particular, delivered a barrage of inflammatory claims, including: “No one can tell me with any seriousness that the Founders had pornography in mind […] those cases were wrongly decided. We can chip away […] it is harmful.” He added that “right-minded people have been looking for pushback against the influence of technology and pornography,” and went so far as to accuse unnamed “elites” of wanting children to access pornography, without offering a shred of evidence.

Of course, pornography predates the Constitution, and the Founders drafted the First Amendment to forbid the government from regulating speech, not just the speech it finds moral or comfortable. Courts have consistently held that pornography, including online adult content, is protected expression under the First Amendment. Whether panelists find that inconvenient or not, it is not the FTC’s role to re-litigate settled constitutional precedent, much less redraw the boundaries of our most fundamental rights.

During the final panel, Dr. Mehan said that pornography  “is nothing to do with the glorious right of speech and we have to get the slowest of us, i.e. judges to see it as well.” He succeeds in disrespecting a profession he is not a part of and misunderstanding the law in one foul swoop. He also said “boys are lustful” because of pornography and “girls are vain” because of social media. Blatant misogyny aside, it’s absurd to blame social media for “lust” and “vanity”–after all, Shakespeare was writing about them long before XXX videos and Instagram—and even if it weren’t, teenage lust is not a problem for the government to solve.

Panelist Terry Schilling from the American Principles Project—known for his vehemently anti-LGBT positions—called for stripping Section 230 protections from pornography sites that fail to implement age verification. As discussed, the proposal not only contradicts longstanding First Amendment precedent but also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what Section 230 does and whom it protects.

Claim #4: The Internet Is Bad For Minors

FTC Commissioner Mark Meador compared Big Tech to Big Tobacco and said that letting children on the Internet is like dropping children off in the red light district. “This is not what congress envisioned,” he said, “when enacting Section 230.” Commissioner Melissa Holyoak similarly blamed social media for the rise in depression and anxiety diagnoses in minors. Yet, as numerous studies on social media and mental health have consistently demonstrated, this rise stems from a complex mix of factors—not social media.

Bizarrely, Dr. Mehan noted “Powerpoints,” he said, “are ruining the humanities.” And he compared online or text communication to home invasion: if his daughter was talking on the phone to a boy at 11 o’clock at night, he said, that boy would be invading his home.

This alarmist narrative ignores both the many benefits of Internet access for minors and the real harms of cutting them off. For young people, especially LGBTQ youth in unsupportive environments or those with niche interests, online spaces can be essential sources of community, affirmation, and safety. Just as importantly, not all parents share the same values or concerns as the government (or Dr. Mehan). It is the role of parents, not the government, to decide when and how their children engage with the Internet.

In the same vein, the Court in NetChoice v. Uthmeyer rejected the idea that minors are just “mere people-in-waiting,” affirming their full participation in democracy as “citizens-in-training.” The ruling makes clear that social media access is a constitutional right, and attempts to strip minors of First Amendment protections are nothing more than censorship disguised as “safety.”

Conclusion

The rhetoric at this event mirrored the early pages of Project 2025, pushing for the outright criminalization of pornography and a fundamental rewrite of Section 230. Speakers wrapped their agenda in the familiar slogan of “protecting the kids,” bringing up big right-wing talking points like transgender youth in sports and harping on good old family values—all while advocating for sweeping government control over the Internet.

This movement is not about safety. It is about power. It seeks to dictate who can speak, what information is accessible, and whose identities are deemed acceptable online. The push for broad government oversight and censorship undercuts constitutional protections not just for adults, but for minors seeking autonomy in digital spaces. These policies could strip LGBTQ youth in restrictive households of the only communities where they feel safe, understood, and free to exist as themselves.

This campaign is insidious. If successful, it won’t just reshape the Internet. It will undermine free speech, strip digital anonymity and force every American to comply with a singular, state-approved version of “family values.”

The First Amendment  exists to prevent exactly this kind of authoritarian overreach. The FTC should remember that.

Elizabeth Grossman is a first-year law student at the University of Akron School of Law in the Intellectual Property program and with a goal of working in tech policy.

Prof. Jess Miers’ Comments

Elizabeth’s summary makes it painfully clear: this wasn’t a serious workshop run by credible experts in technology law or policy. The title alone, “How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families,” telegraphed the FTC’s predetermined stance and signaled a disinterest in genuine academic inquiry. More tellingly, the invocation of “families” serves as a dog whistle, gesturing toward the narrow, heteronormative ideals typically championed by the religious Right: white, patriarchal, Christian, and straight. The FTC may not say the quiet part out loud, but it doesn’t have to.

Worse still, most of the invited speakers weren’t experts in the topics they were pontificating on. At best, they’re activists. At worst, they’re ideologues—people with deeply partisan agendas who have no business advising a federal agency, let alone shaping national tech policy.

Just a few additional observations from me.

Chair Ferguson opened by claiming the Internet was a “fundamentally different place” 25 years ago, reminiscing about AOL Instant Messenger, Myspace Tom, and using a family computer his parents could monitor. The implication: the Internet was safer back then, and parents had more control. As someone who also grew up in that era, I can’t relate.

I, too, had a family computer in the living room and tech-savvy parents. It didn’t stop me from stumbling into adult AOL chatrooms, graphic porn, or violent videos, often unintentionally. I remember the pings of AIM just as vividly as the cyberbullying on Myspace and anonymous cruelty on Formspring. Parental controls were flimsy, easy to bypass, and rarely effective. My parents tried, but the tools of the time simply weren’t up to the task. The battle over my Internet use was constant, and my experience was hardly unique.

Still, even then, the Internet offered real value, especially for a queer kid who moved often and struggled to make “IRL” friends. But it also forced me to grow up fast in ways today’s youth are better shielded from. Parents now have far more effective tools to manage what their kids see and who they interact with. And online services have a robust toolbox for handling harmful content, not just because advertisers demand it, but thanks to Section 230, a uniquely forward-thinking law that encourages cleanup efforts. It built safety into the system before “trust and safety” became a buzzword. Contrary to Mark Meador’s baseless claims, that result was precisely its authors’ intent.

A more serious conversation would focus on what we’ve learned and how the FTC can build on that progress to support a safer Internet for everyone, rather than undermining it.

That aside, what baffles me most about these “protect the kids” conversations, which almost always turn out to be about restricting adults’ access to disfavored content, is how the supposed solution is more surveillance of children. The very services the FTC loves to criticize are being told to collect more sensitive information about minors—biometrics, ID verification, detailed behavioral tracking—to keep them “safe.” But as Eric Goldman and many other scholars who were notably absent from the workshop have extensively documented, there is no current method of age verification that doesn’t come at the expense of privacy, security, and anonymity for both youth and adults.

A discussion that ignores these documented harms, that fails to engage with the actual expert consensus around digital safety and privacy, is not a serious discussion about protecting kids.

Which is why I find it especially troubling that groups positioning themselves as privacy champions are treating this workshop as credible. In particular, IAPP’s suggestion that the FTC laid the groundwork for “improving” youth safety online is deeply disappointing. Even setting aside the numerous privacy issues associated with age verification, does the IAPP really believe that a digital ecosystem shaped by the ideological goals of these panelists will be an improvement for kids, especially those most in need of support? For queer youth, for kids in intolerant households, for those seeking information about reproductive health or gender-affirming care?

This workshop made the FTC’s agenda unmistakable. They’re not pursuing a safer Internet for kids. As Elizabeth said, the FTC is pushing a Christian nationalist vision of the web, built on censorship and surveillance, with children as the excuse and the collateral.

Just as the playbook commands.

Jess Miers is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Akron School of Law


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In a world awash with misinformation and disinformation, those who spread and benefit from the chaos have worked hard to brand fact-checking and counterspeech as a form of censorship — and it’s a worryingly effective tactic. But there’s one type of counterspeech that is very hard to evade: mockery and satire. One person who knows that very well is Ben Collins, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, which purchased The Onion last year. This week, Ben joins us on the podcast to talk about the incredible power of mockery in the social and political landscape.

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Let’s talk about constitutional hypocrisy so brazen, so comprehensive, so morally bankrupt that it would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous to the republic.

I’ve learned something about modern Republicans that crystallizes everything wrong with our current political moment: they care more about the constitutionality of Biden’s student debt forgiveness than they do about the 4th and 5th Amendments being universally applied. Let that sink in for a moment.

They’ll spend months screaming about executive overreach when it comes to loan forgiveness—a legitimate constitutional concern, to be fair. But when it comes to the systematic violation of due process rights, when it comes to warrantless searches and seizures, when it comes to the weaponization of law enforcement against political opponents—suddenly, constitutional principles become negotiable.

This isn’t principled constitutional interpretation. This is weaponized constitutionalism—using the Constitution as a cudgel against political enemies while ignoring it entirely when it constrains their own power.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the Republican Party has become a fascist organization that simply doesn’t think the Constitution applies to them.

We’ve never seen anything like this in either party in our history until now. Not during the Civil War, when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus but acknowledged he was acting in constitutional gray areas. Not during World War II, when FDR interned Japanese Americans but at least maintained the pretense that all citizens deserved constitutional protection. Not during Watergate, when even Nixon’s defenders argued he was acting within presidential prerogatives rather than claiming he was above the law entirely.

What we’re witnessing now is different. It’s a party that wants power, and it wants that power to be unchallenged by legal or democratic constraints. It’s pushing in every direction it can to solidify its grip on power—from trying to steal elections (like they attempted in North Carolina recently) to illegally shutting down entire government departments mandated by Congress because they perceive them to be filled with ideological enemies.

This is a coup. And the entire party is participating in it.

It wasn’t always this way. The Republican Party once had genuine constitutional conservatives—people like Barry Goldwater, who famously said “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, but moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” yet still believed in constitutional constraints on power. People like John McCain, who defended the independence of democratic institutions even when it hurt him politically. People like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who put constitutional duty above party loyalty.

But here’s what happened: the Republicans who were actually committed to constitutional government were systematically purged from the party. They were branded “RINOs”—Republicans In Name Only—for the sin of believing that constitutional principles should apply even when inconvenient. They were primaried out by candidates who promised more aggressive partisan warfare. They found the door themselves when they could no longer stomach what their party was becoming.

The result is a party that has been hollowed out of anyone who might provide internal resistance to authoritarian drift. The constitutional conservatives didn’t change their principles—they were driven out for having principles at all.

What remains is a party captured by people who view constitutional constraints as obstacles to be overcome rather than principles to be upheld. They kept the constitutional rhetoric—it polls well and provides useful cover—but abandoned the constitutional substance entirely.

The constitutional charade works like this: When Democrats exercise executive power, Republicans discover a sudden, passionate commitment to constitutional limits, separation of powers, and congressional prerogatives. But when Republicans exercise power, these same principles become obstacles to effective governance that must be swept aside in the name of efficiency, national security, or fighting the “deep state.”

Student loan forgiveness? Constitutional crisis! The president can’t possibly have that authority! Where’s Congress? What about the separation of powers?

Defying Supreme Court orders? Well, the Court overstepped its bounds. The executive has inherent authority. Sometimes you have to break a few constitutional eggs to make an authoritarian omelet.

Weaponizing the Justice Department against political opponents? That’s just effective law enforcement. Besides, those people are criminals anyway—due process is a technicality that gets in the way of justice.

Shutting down congressionally mandated agencies? Congress doesn’t understand the complexities of modern governance. The executive knows best. Constitutional requirements are suggestions.

This selective constitutionalism reveals what the modern Republican Party has become: an organization that uses constitutional language tactically while abandoning constitutional principles strategically. The Constitution is useful when it can be weaponized against opponents and inconvenient when it constrains their own authority.

And anybody who claims to oppose this but strategically votes Republican over some issue like trans rights or “woke” culture or taxes is a fool. And a moral traitor to the country.

I don’t care how much you hate progressive social policies. I don’t care how frustrated you are with Democratic economic proposals. I don’t care how offended you are by campus speech codes or diversity training or whatever cultural issue keeps you up at night.

None of that—none of it—justifies voting for a party that has abandoned constitutional government entirely. When you vote for Republicans because you’re angry about trans athletes or critical race theory, you’re not making a strategic choice about policy priorities. You’re voting to end constitutional democracy in America.

You’re saying that your cultural grievances matter more than the rule of law. That your policy preferences matter more than the Constitution itself. That your ideological comfort matters more than preserving the system that makes democratic debate possible in the first place.

This isn’t hyperbole. This isn’t partisan exaggeration. This is the documented reality of what the Republican Party has become: an organization dedicated to establishing one-party rule through the systematic dismantling of constitutional constraints on power.

The tragedy is that the party once had voices who might have prevented this transformation. But they were systematically silenced, marginalized, and expelled for the sin of taking constitutional principles seriously. What remains is a hollowed-out shell using constitutional rhetoric to justify unconstitutional behavior.

And to argue that the GOP is the better party for judicial matters while that very party is actively trying to turn public opinion against the judiciary? That’s very special indeed.

They spent decades building the conservative legal movement, appointing originalist judges, claiming they were restoring respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. And now, when those same courts occasionally issue rulings they don’t like, suddenly the judiciary is illegitimate, biased, part of the “deep state” conspiracy against real Americans.

The Supreme Court isn’t conservative enough when it occasionally rules against Republican interests. Lower courts are activist when they enforce constitutional rights. The entire federal judiciary becomes suspect when it tries to maintain some independence from partisan political pressure.

This is how authoritarianism works: first you capture institutions, then you delegitimize any institution you can’t fully control. First you pack the courts with ideological allies, then you attack the courts when even your allies occasionally follow the law instead of your preferences.

We are watching the live-action implementation of fascism in America, carried out by people who wrap themselves in the flag while systematically destroying what that flag represents. They invoke the Constitution while violating its most basic principles. They claim to defend democracy while working to dismantle democratic institutions.

And the most morally disgusting part? They expect us to treat this as normal political competition. They expect us to pretend that this is just another partisan disagreement, just another election cycle, just another policy debate between competing visions of American governance.

It’s not. This is a party that has purged its constitutional conservatives and embraced authoritarianism. This is a party that believes the Constitution applies to its enemies but not to itself. This is a party that will use any means necessary to gain and maintain power, including the systematic destruction of the legal and institutional frameworks that make democratic self-governance possible.

If you vote for this party for any reason—if you prioritize any policy preference over the preservation of constitutional democracy—you are complicit in the destruction of the American republic. You are helping to dismantle the system that makes political disagreement possible in the first place.

The constitutional conservatives didn’t abandon the Republican Party. The Republican Party abandoned them. What remains is the advancing edge of American fascism dressed up in constitutional rhetoric.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And anyone who can’t see that the modern Republican Party represents an existential threat to constitutional democracy is either willfully blind or actively complicit in its destruction.

The center must be held. And holding it requires recognizing that there is no center left in the Republican Party—only the hollowed-out shell of what was once a constitutional conservative movement, now captured entirely by forces that view the Constitution as an obstacle rather than a foundation.

Choose accordingly.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.


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When a federal judge ruled last week that Marco Rubio can’t just declare that the US can detain green card holder Mahmoud Khalil based on the Secretary of State’s “vibes check” assessment of his political beliefs, you might think Khalil would finally be free to return to his family.

You’d be wrong. The DOJ has decided to play the classic bureaucratic shell game: “Oh, that reason for detaining him was unconstitutional? No problem—we’ve got another one.”

On Friday, his lawyers asked the judge to order Khalil’s release.

Mr. Khalil submits this letter to respectfully request this Court order Mr. Khalil’s release pursuant to this Court’s June 11, 2025 order and opinion enjoining Mr. Khalil’s removal and detention based on the Secretary of State’s determination. ECF 299. In accordance with the Court’s Order, Mr. Khalil has satisfied the requirements for this preliminary injunction and has posted his Bond. ECF 300. The Government has not filed a notice of appeal of this Court’s Order by the Court-ordered deadline for the preliminary injunction to be in effect. Nor has the Government represented that Mr. Khalil is being detained based on any ground other than the one the Court enjoined. See Exhibit A (email exchange between Respondents and Mr. Khalil’s immigration Counsel). The Government has declined to provide information about plans for Mr. Khalil’s release today. See id. Consistent with the Court’s factual finding that “it is overwhelmingly likely that the Petitioner would not be detained based solely on the lawful-permanent-resident application charge,” and that “detention almost surely flows from the Secretary of State’s determination,” this Court should order his release forthwith.

The DOJ responded by saying that the court ruling makes no difference regarding Khalil’s detainment, because they have other reasons to keep him locked up.

The Court expressly noted that its holdings “have no impact on efforts to remove the Petitioner for reasons other than the Secretary of State’s determination.” ECF No. 299 at 13 n.14. And, while the Court made a factual finding that it was unlikely that Khalil would be detained on another basis, id. at 10, the Court never held that it would be unlawful for Respondents to detain Khalil based on another charge of removability. Khalil is charged as removable on a ground other than the Secretary of State’s determination. See ECF No. 90-1 at 5. Khalil is now detained based on that other charge of removability. Detaining Khalil based on that other ground of removal is lawful. 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a). An alien like Khalil may be detained during the pendency of removal proceedings regardless of the charge of removability.

This is prosecutorial gamesmanship at its most cynical. The DOJ is essentially admitting that their primary justification for detention was so weak that a federal judge had to step in and stop it. But rather than acknowledge they got it wrong and release Khalil, they’re doubling down by dusting off what appears to be a backup charge.

It’s the legal equivalent of a cop who pulls you over for “speeding” but then, when that doesn’t stick, decides you were actually violating some obscure taillight regulation. Except in this case, a man has been separated from his wife and newborn for months based on what we now know was an unconstitutional determination.

Procedurally, they may be correct, and the judge acknowledges as much in his order, basically saying that Khalil did not challenge other reasons he may be detained, and he should probably challenge those before an immigration judge:

It would plainly be unlawful to detain the Petitioner on a charge the Court preliminarily enjoined.

But by their letter of this afternoon, at ECF 304, the Respondents have now represented that the Petitioner is being detained on another, second charge.

That second charge has not been preliminary enjoined by the Court.

As the Court noted at some length on May 28, (1) the Petitioner did not put forward factual evidence as to why it might be unlawful to detain him on the second charge, and (2) the Petitioner failed to make meaningful legal arguments as to that second charge….

The Petitioner has not sought appellate review as to the Court’s May 28 holdings.

As the Respondents note in their letter today, a number of avenues are now available to the Petitioner, including a bail application to the immigration judge presiding over the immigration case.

That’s basically saying “hey, the rest of this is in the immigration judge’s hands.” While frustrating, that may be legally accurate.

But it also goes to show just how unnecessarily aggressive the Trump regime and Rubio are being here. There are no good reasons to keep Khalil locked up. Hell, there were no good reasons to detain him in the first place. Even if the government believed that he should be deported (and they’ve yet to show any good evidence to support that), most people in such situations get a notice of when and where to appear before an immigration judge — not grabbed from their home in front of their pregnant wife and whisked off to an unknown lockup for months.

And now we know that the main stated reason for his detention was bogus. It just seems like the Trump regime is doing this out of spite and general assholishness, rather than for any good reason. Hopefully the immigration judge recognizes that.


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For a brief moment, it looked like real life was finally having an effect on Trump’s “immigrants are inherently evil” fantasies. There was a brief window, last week, where Trump indicated he’d roll back some of his deportation goons because it was going too far. The fact that this moment of realization has arrived at all is somewhat of a miracle… though it only lasted all of two or three days, before the racist impulses shot back to the forefront and the Trump regime again ramped up its efforts

Even during Trump’s first term, ICE was having so much trouble finding enough migrants with criminal records to arrest it was resorting to (basically) falsifying records. Trump’s second term, however, amplified this already-impossible ask, with advisers and cabinet members continually demanding ICE arrest more and more people with each passing week.

The unavoidable problem is that there simply aren’t enough dangerous criminals in the country, regardless of their immigration status. Migrants commit fewer crimes than natural-born citizens. In addition, those seeking to obtain permanent residence are also better at paying taxes and, you know, showing up for work than those lucky enough to be born here.

The thing that has led to nationwide protests against ICE isn’t the alleged removal of gang members, drug traffickers, and other criminals from the US population. It’s the other thing — the necessity created by constantly escalating arrest quotas. ICE agents may be targeting a few known criminals but they’re going to sweep up everyone looking vaguely Latino when performing these arrests.

That’s what people are angry about. But only now are the right people angry about these sweeps and raids. It’s the anger of certain constituents that is now forcing Donald Trump to have second thoughts about his mass deportation program. (Well, it’s probably more accurate to say these are first thoughts. Everything prior to this mostly resembled involuntary responses to bigoted stimuli.)

While this comment is about as articulate as you’d expect from this particular orator, it’s one of the few that actually seems to contain some understanding of issues lying just below the immediate surface:

[A]t a news conference, [Trump] took an uncharacteristically sympathetic tone toward immigrants who work on farms and in the hospitality industry.

“Our farmers are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers, they have worked for them for 20 years,” he said. “They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be, you know, great. And we’re going to have to do something about that. We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have maybe what they’re supposed to have, maybe not.”

He later said that there would be an “order” soon on the matter.

“We can’t do that to our farmers and leisure, too, hotels,” he said. “We’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”

Exactly. It’s the thing everyone’s been saying! That’s why there are mass protests against ICE and that’s why some supporters of Trump are beginning to question their loyalty.

Now, it’s one thing for Trump to let something fall out of his mouth during an unscripted press conference. It’s quite another for this to result in some sort of administrative action. Implausibly, this realization — likely combined with weeks of anti-ICE sentiment around the nation — has resulted in a pull-back by ICE that roughly reflects the president’s meandering comment on hard-working migrants.

The guidance was sent on Thursday in an email by a senior ICE official, Tatum King, to regional leaders of the ICE department that generally carries out criminal investigations, including work site operations, known as Homeland Security Investigations.

“Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels,” he wrote in the message.

The email explained that investigations involving “human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling into these industries are OK.” But it said — crucially — that agents were not to make arrests of “noncriminal collaterals,” a reference to people who are undocumented but who are not known to have committed any crime.

While this sounded promising, everyone pretty much expected that Trump and ICE would reverse course once his inner circle of extremely racist advisors heard about it. And, indeed, that’s exactly what happened:

The Department of Homeland Security on Monday told staff that it was reversing guidance issued last week that agents were not to conduct immigration raids at farms, hotels and restaurants — a decision that stood at odds with President Donald Trump’s calls for mass deportations of anyone without legal status.

Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including its Homeland Security Investigations division, told agency leaders in a call Monday that agents must continue conducting immigration raids at agricultural businesses, hotels and restaurants, according to two people familiar with the call. The new instructions were shared in an 11 a.m. call to representatives from 30 field offices across the country.

So much for that brief moment of only slightly saner policy. In originally writing this up (before the about face), I tried to avoid cynicism and support ICE and Trump for coming slightly closer to their senses, if ridiculously late. But all that’s out the window now. The regime is back to destroying more and more of the backbone of the American economy… because racism.


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Never one to miss an opportunity to exploit the presidency for a quick and tacky buck, the Trump administration is getting into the cell phone business.

Well, sort of: the Trump administration is launching a lazy new MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that piggybacks on existing wireless networks with an added perk: a fake-gold $500 “T1” phone celebrating everyone’s favorite reality TV star turned incoherent authoritarian zealot.

The phone image appears to be a lazy Photoshop of a phone without a flash, suggesting this device is probably nowhere close to actually existing yet:

The new Trump Mobile service launches in September, and will offer a $47.45-per-month plan that includes unlimited talk, text and data, as well as roadside assistance and a “Telehealth and Pharmacy Benefit.” The Trump org claims the phone was “made in the USA,” which pretty much guarantees stories around six to eight months from now revealing the phones were all made in China (from [Trump family press appearances](http://eric/ Trump: "Eventually all the phones can be built in the USA." (so Trump phones are not actually being built in the USA lol ... )) there are already indications this is probably a lie).

The Verge notices that the press release for the gambit has a bunch of lazy errors, including RAM that’s described as storage, and the promise of a “5000mAh long life camera”; terminology that actually refers to battery capacity. The Trump Mobile terms of use say the network is really just a rebranding of another MAGA-friendly MVNO, Liberty Mobile, which runs on the (also Trump friendly) T-Mobile network.

These MVNOs have become a dime a dozen. Such networks (increasingly owned by celebrities), usually spend a few years pretending to be a serious pro-consumer venture, offering lower-cost cell phone plans with limited device options and a bunch of weird network restrictions and caveats buried in the fine print.

Once (if) the brand becomes valuable, it’s usually sold off to one of the major three carriers, who then steadily make the service shittier and shittier before sunsetting the brand. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There have been a lot of these half-assed MAGA MVNOs. Like Patriot Mobile, which you might recall was supposed to be a MAGA-friendly wireless phone service that claimed to be sticking it to AT&T — because AT&T briefly refused to carry right wing propaganda channel OAN (despite AT&T coming up with the idea for OAN and funding its creation!). Which network did the service run on? AT&T.

There’s occasionally an exception, but generally these kinds of MVNOs are a silly pump-and-dump gambit that helps prop up the idea that U.S. telecom is more competitive than it is, which of course makes it perfect for the Trump administration.

This one seems particularly lazy. Scratch at the surface, and Trump Mobile winds up being little more than a brand and a license agreement, according to the Trump Mobile website fine print:

“Trump Mobile, its products and services are not designed, developed, manufactured, distributed or sold by The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals.”

From Trump high tops to Trump bibles, there’s no shortage of low-quality Trump cack attempting to exploit the presidency for a quick and lazy buck (the admin made $8 million in such agreements in 2024). But in between destroying the rule of law and teeing up race riots, Trump’s underlings have been busy significantly ramping up such deals in 2025, including a looming new line of Trump home goods.

In many ways Trump continues to be the perfect reflection of this country’s obsession with artifice. We built a giant golem out of trash, garbage and the shallowest, tackiest bullshit imaginable, and it’s now eating us alive. With any luck the entire violent experiment will be available for pennies on the shelves of your local Good Will before too long.


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