The volume of stories about Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Oklahoma, seems to be increasing. Walters is a Christian Nationalist by name, though the first of those words goes against all of what I learned about Christianity as a Catholic minor and curious adult. While he certainly wants to inject bibles into public schools for reasons outside of actual teaching scenarios, a clear violation of the First Amendment, he’s also interested in injecting his own love of Donald Trump, election conspiracy fantasies, and allegedly a tad bit of pornography into the school system as well. He has also decided to give so-called “woke tests” developed by Prager U, a propaganda factory, to transplant teachers from California and New York seeking a teacher’s license, potentially violating the 14th Amendment as well.
We’ve become quite used to MAGA assbags operating free of consequence and getting away with their nonsense. But in Walters’ case, we’re starting to see some signs that consequences might actually be a thing. For starters, on the whole porn showing up on a screen during a board meeting thing, it appears that Walters recently behaved defiantly in an interview after accusing the board members of lying, while also having the state look into a criminal defense attorney for him.
The Oklahoma State Department of Education may be seeking an attorney to defend State Superintendent Ryan Walters related to further troubles stemming from allegations that a TV in his office depicted nudity during an executive session of the State Board of Education meeting on July 24.
83 pages of emails, provided by the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, reflect conversations between OSDE employees and the AG’s office as OSDE sought approval to hire private counsel.
Now, to be very clear, seeking counsel is not an admission of guilt. But it is an admission that defense is likely needed and that seems a far cry from a situation as simple as a couple of board members merely lying whole cloth about seeing porn on a TV screen at a board meeting. The request for a specific outside counsel was later dropped, but it’s unclear if another lawyer is being sought instead.
Walters had indicated that this is all some coordinated attack against him, because of how awesome he is, I suppose. I think I can guess who he sees himself as in that bible he claims to spend so much time reading. But I would challenge you to go back and read up on the details in the post I wrote on this incident and decide for yourself if the board members sound like they’re just making stuff up.
Besides, you know it’s getting a bit real when the federal MAGAs don’t want anything to do with a state MAGA like Walters. Sec. of Education Linda McMahon was in Oklahoma last week to promote charter schools. Plenty of other state government representatives were in attendance, but Walters was very much absent. And the reporting suggests that was at McMahon’s request.
Gorman, in an article published on August 21, explains, “Walters in particular has been a big advocate for school choice, specifically for giving families more access to religious and conservative schools. But he was nowhere to be found on Tuesday — and that was by design. According to three sources familiar with the matter, McMahon and her team specifically asked Oklahoma officials not to include Walters on the trip, fearing his presence would be a distraction.”
Two things on this. First, if your state’s superintendent of schools can’t attend a visit by the Sec. of Education at a charter school because he’d be a distraction, well, that’s at least an indication that we have a problem in Oklahoma.
Second, it appears this had less to do about distractions and more to do with Walters breaking the ninth commandment.
Gorman notes that Walters, in an August 8 statement, “claimed that the Department of Education had given the state the required waiver to eliminate end-of-year testing in public schools.” And Walters told the far-right outlet Real America’s Voice, “We went to the Trump administration, and they said they were all for it.”
“But the administration hadn’t approved it,” Gorman reports, “and one of the sources cited the incident as a reason McMahon’s team did not want Walters at the event. McMahon had to publicly dispute Walters’ comments at the Oklahoma event.”
Local reporters, on August 19, asked McMahon if she planned to meet with Walters while she was in Oklahoma — to which she responded, “I don’t believe that’s on my schedule today.”
That shoulder is so cold it’s causing frost to develop.
Look, Walters sucks. Sucks at his job, given how poorly his state is ranked in education. Sucks at being a human being, given how he’s handled this whole porn thing and how he’s treated his board members. Sucks at government, as he can’t be bothered with such silly things like the Constitution.
I doubt he’s going anywhere anytime soon. But if these stories keep racking up, it’ll certainly effect his reported gubernatorial bid, if nothing else.
Not content to rewrite American history to better serve white people, the Trump administration is now rewriting world history on the fly by recasting terminal human rights violators as “not all that bad, actually” and adding stuff to other human rights reports just because some MAGA people had some bad experiences in a few select foreign countries.
The State Department released its long-awaited reports on international human rights Tuesday, and they drastically reduce the types of government repression and abuse that the United States under President Trump deems worthy of criticism.
The agency said the “streamlined” human rights reports adhere more closely to what’s required to be in them by law. But critics say the reduced content lets authoritarians off the hook.
The critics are right. If you have any doubts about the criticism, go ahead and read a few of the reports generated by Marco Rubio/Donald Trump’s State Department and compare them to literally any of those published before Trump’s second term began.
Under the state of exception, reports of gang violence decreased significantly, allowing citizens to exercise their right to life, liberty, and security of person, and to engage in daily activities and commerce without the constant threat of violence and extortion. Arbitrary arrests and mass pretrial hearings, however, undermined due process and exacerbated historically difficult conditions in overcrowded prisons.
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic and sexual violence, and femicide; substantial barriers to sexual and reproductive health services access; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; and crimes involving violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.
The “state of exception” is President Bukele’s blend of martial law and police state that has supposedly resulted in a massive decrease in gang violence, but that’s only if you ignore credible reports about government officials giving gang members money in exchange for votes and Bukele directly negotiating with gangs to lower violence in exchange for better prison conditions. That last part is something the State Department itself accused Bukele of doing before it was undermined completely by this administration.
There were no significant changes in the human rights situation in El Salvador during the year. Reports of gang violence remained at a historic low under the state of exception as mass arrests suppressed gang activity.
There were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses.
While it’s possible to read the first sentence as being low-key acknowledgement that things remain as terrible as they’ve been for years in El Salvador, I doubt that’s what the person composing this actually meant. The last sentence is patently false.
If that’s not evidence of some bullshit, take a look at what’s been added to the State Department’s report on alleged human rights violations in (wait for it…) Canada:
Rather than participate in government-mandated bargaining, some American digital platforms announced that they would no longer make news content available to Canadian users, leading to substantial censorship of news content including local news content. The opposition party described the Online News Act as a government censorship law, because of its effects on the character and quality of the country’s news reporting.
A trial of two organizers of the 2022 “Freedom Convoy” concluded during the year. A verdict was still pending at year’s end. In response to the 2022 convoy (which protested draconian lockdown measures that substantially damaged the communities and economic livelihoods of many Canadians), the government took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act, leading to large-scale social media censorship and debanking. In January, the Federal Court ruled that the government’s imposition of the Emergencies Act was unreasonable and violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The federal government appealed the decision.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) continued its legal efforts to block an independent news outlet’s Access to Information request for CBC’s communications with American social media platform Twitter (now X) dating to 2018. The news outlet previously published investigative reporting alleging that the CBC exerted pressure on Twitter/X to censor it and other disfavored news outlets over political speech.
But if you really want to see how this administration is rewriting its world view to serve its own ends, you need to click through and see the depressingly long list of human rights violations and international crimes the Trump administration no longer desires to treat as violations or criminal acts.
Everything highlighted and struck-through is something the State Department will not be investigating or reporting on as long as the GOP is still in power.
Starting from the top, here’s only a partial list of what the Trump administration will be deliberately turning a blind eye to for at least the next three years:
Prison conditions
Due process rights
Property seizures and/or restitution
Libel and slander laws
“National security (used as a pretext for punishing critics)”
Freedom of peaceful assembly
Abuse of refugees and asylum seekers
Access to basic services for asylum seekers
Abuses or irregularities in recent elections
Participation of women or members of marginalized people in elections
“Section 4: Corruption in government”
Retribution against human rights defenders
Rape and domestic violence
Gender-based violence
Child abuse or neglect
Sexual exploitation of children
Institutionalization of people with disabilities
Everything under the heading: “Lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons”
That’s not even the entire list, but it’s indicative enough of what this administration thinks should be treated as acceptable behavior by the government, government officials, and anyone in the general population deserving enough of having their crimes against others (and humanity in general) ignored by the people in power.
This sort of thing would be considered breathtakingly horrendous anywhere in the world. That it’s happening in the nation that many considered to be the “Leader of the Free World” is absolutely sickening.
The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There’s been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess.
Earlier this month, we noted how Politico is among the major media companies rushing to embrace AI without really thinking things through or ensuring the technology actually works first. They’ve implemented “AI” systems –without transparently informing staff — that generate articles rife with all sorts of gibberish and falsehoods (this Brian Merchant post is a must read to understand the scope).
Politico management also recently introduced another AI “report builder” for premium Politico PRO subscribers that’s supposed to offer a breakdown of existing Politico reporter analysis of complicated topics. But here too the automation constantly screws up, conflating politicians and generating all sorts of errors that, for some incoherent reason, isn’t reviewed by Politico editors.
Actual human Politico journalists are understandably not pleased with any of this, especially because the nontransparent introduction of the new automation was in direct violation of the editorial union’s contract struck just last year. So unionized Politico employees have since been battling with Politico via arbitration.
On July 11, the PEN Guild (which has about 250 Politico union members) and Politico held an arbitration hearing to determine whether the publication had broken its collective bargaining agreement. Nieman Lab obtained access to the arbitration hearing transcript, at which Politico higher up editors tried to claim that automation shouldn’t be held to the same editorial standards as humans.
Specifically asked about the problems with Report Builder, deputy editor-in-chief Joe Schatz insisted that because Report Builder was technically built by coders, and its output isn’t reviewed by professional editors (which is insane) it shouldn’t have to adhere to the site’s broader editorial standards:
“He went on to argue that Report Builder sits “outside the newsroom,” since Politico’s product and engineering teams built the tool and editorial workers don’t review its outputs. As a result, he said, the AI-generated reports should not be held to the newsroom’s editorial standards.”
That’s… incoherent. LLMs are tools, they’re not inherently exempt from editorial standards and material reality just because management is bullish on AI. The CEO of Politico Owner Axel Springer, Mathias Döpfner, recently introduced a company wide mandate that every single employee in the organization has to not only use AI, but consistently file reports justifying why they don’t. It’s rather… cultish.
This tap dancing around what constitutes “newsgathering” is effectively a way for Politico management to try and tap dance around their contract with union employees, since said contract plainly states:
“If AI technology is used by Politico or its employees to supplement or assist in their newsgathering, such as the collection, organization, recording or maintenance of information, it must be done in compliance with Politico’s standards of journalistic ethics and involve human oversight.”
Again, most U.S. media is owned by affluent older, white, Conservative men who generally see AI not as a way to make their products or employees’ lives better or more efficient, but as a way to cut corners and undermine already underpaid labor. Men like Döpfner, who like our authoritarian President, and whose editorial standards and relationship with labor were pretty fucking shaky to begin with.
These men want to create a fully automated ad engagement ouroboros that effectively shits money without having to pay humans a living wage, and that goal is evident everywhere you look.
In an ideal world this would result in surging demand for intelligent, savvy journalism and analysis by competent, experienced people who actually have something to say. But this isn’t an ideal world, and increasingly the kind of folks dictating the trajectory of U.S. media (and automation) are routinely demonstrating they lack any sort of ethical competency for the honor.
Even though Trump says it’s about the crime rates, it’s not actually about the crime rates.
Just like he used the hallucination that the entirety of Los Angeles was under siege by “violent” protesters to justify sending in the troops, the reality was that any violence was contained to a few small blocks in the city. Furthermore, most of the violence was being committed by law enforcement officers. Finally, even local law enforcement officials saw no need to add National Guard troops and Marines to the mix because they already had everything under control.
The same game plan has gone into effect in Washington D.C. After some punk kid hired by Musk’s DOGE squad got rumbled by a couple of teens, Trump declared the city lawless and took direct control of policing the District of Columbia with a hodgepodge mix of whatever federal law enforcement officers hadn’t already been deputized by ICE to detain ice cream vendors, meatpackers, and day laborers. Added to that unheady brew of g-men? 800 National Guard troops.
Because the people who love Trump suck as much as Trump does, politicians are aiding and abetting martial law implementation simply because the Big Man asked.
Three Republican-led states, responding to a Trump administration request, said Saturday they will send up to 750 National Guard troops to join 800 already mobilized in D.C.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said he would deploy 200 troops “to stand with President Trump as he works to restore law and order to our nation’s capital.” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said he was sending 150 military police from the state’s National Guard. The Ohio Guard members are expected to arrive to D.C. in the coming days, DeWine said in a statement.
They followed West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, who said 300 to 400 National Guard troops would be called up.
Well, I guess do whatever you think might earn you Trump’s endorsement/derision over the remainder of your career. It’s not like Trump hasn’t turned on his most vehement supporters for the pettiest of reasons in the past. And, by all means, ignore the crime happening in your own jurisdiction.
This isn’t because there’s no crime in D.C. to combat (of course there is, as the right-wing media insists one acknowledge) but because the mission as established by President Trump isn’t really about that. Crime is simply the pretext Trump is using to put into effect his long-standing desire to deploy troops on the streets of D.C. Maybe it’s a lingering frustration from what happened in 2020; maybe it’s about pressing his thumb down on a city that voted heavily against him. Either way, it is not centrally about crime.
Because Trump is championing this deployment, his supporters are treating it as necessary and brilliant. And that, in turn, is triggering GOP politicians to start another scramble onto another bandwagon. Hence the deployments from Republican governors in Republican states: They get to say that they helped Trump do the thing that Trump told his base needed to be done. And here we are.
As the FBI’s own crime data points out, Washington D.C.’s crime rates have returned to historic lows, following an uptick in 2020 (when Trump was still president!) amid large-scale disruption created by a worldwide pandemic.
None of this matters to Trump. And none of this matters to the first Republican governors willing to send their own off to Washington D.C. to stand around looking useless while crime continues to remain at historic lows.
Meanwhile, on the home front, there’s plenty of actual crime that’s essentially being ignored by these performative losers. As Bump’s infographics — taken directly from FBI crime rate data — show, these governors might have been better off sending the National Guard into some of their own cities. More than a few have violent crime rates close to, or surpassing, the crime rate in D.C. that has Trump all hot and bothered.
Anything in pink is a city that has a higher violent crime rate per capita than Washington D.C. And the maps Bump has included in his post are interactive, so you can fact-check them yourself, should you feel compelled to do so. Certainly, no one in the White House is concerned with actual facts. This is all a performance.
And it’s a performance Trump wants to extend past Los Angeles and Washington D.C. He has made vague statements about sending the military into any city or state he doesn’t feel is run by loyalists. Of course, he claims it’s all about crime, but the facts aren’t going to simply vanish just because Trump (and his acolytes)[and his MAGA fans] refuses to acknowledge them.
Following his military incursion into the D.C. area, Trump threatened similar things may be happening soon in Los Angeles (where it already has happened), Baltimore, Oakland, New York, and Chicago. According to this oratorical genius, all of these cities are “bad, very bad.”
The facts say otherwise. (I mean… I guess? How do you directly contradict “bad, very bad?”)
In Oakland, all violent crime has dropped 19% since last year. Homicides are down 32% and robberies decreased 24%. In Chicago, crime rates have fallen 15% since 2023, with murder being down 37%.
Baltimore’s violent crime rate has decreased 17% since last year, and even more since 2020, despite the implementation of “liberal” policies the Trump administration continues to claim (without any facts in evidence) have turned Baltimore into an unlivable nightmare of constant criminal violence.
The same goes for New York City, which has seen a crime rate decrease as well, despite being hampered by a mayor who thinks it’s time to go back to “broken windows” policing, which will apparently be overseen by any number of city and law enforcement officials who were investigated for corruption. (And that includes the mayor.)
None of this is about crime. It’s just another show of force from a megalomaniac who loves cheap, meaningless “wins” and being catered to by an entire cadre of cabinet members and advisors who couldn’t find a spine if you trapped them in an ossuary. (Which is something we, the people, should definitely consider doing.)
It’s a stunt presidency that’s doing actual lasting damage to this nation, democracy, and everything a lot of people claimed they stood for before they started voting for Trump. There’s a nation to be had here, but we should be the ones taking it, rather than sitting by while it’s taken from us. Every fact matters, even if this administration refuses to engage with them. Journalists like Bump are doing what needs to be done. While everyone understands this “bad, very bad” shit is performative, it takes a concentrated effort to ensure it never becomes uncontested.
Bluesky made a major statement last week when it announced that it would be geoblocking Mississippi IP addresses from accessing its site—making it the first major social media platform to completely block access from a US state.
Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control. Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring — costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers. This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.
We believe effective child safety policies should be carefully tailored to address real harms, without creating huge obstacles for smaller providers and resulting in negative consequences for free expression. That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved,we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses. We know this is disappointing for our users in Mississippi, but we believe this is a necessary measure while the courts review the legal arguments.
Some companies have been blocked by foreign countries, or blocked access in other countries. But geoblocking specific states had generally been limited to adult content sites in the past. This unprecedented response highlights just how unworkable Mississippi’s law really is.
Here at Techdirt, we’ve been warning about the dangerous negative consequences of age verification mandates for years. But even then there are variations in the pure ridiculousness of some of these laws. Some can be dealt with. Some are effectively impossible. Enter Mississippi’s HB 1126.
The bill is ridiculous in many, many ways. It first requires “digital service providers” (defined fairly broadly) to engage in age verification of every new user (the bill is written so badly that it’s not clear if it applies to accounts from before the bill goes into effect). If the user is deemed to be under the age of 18, the site is required to get “parental consent” before making the service available.
The parental consent requirements alone show how divorced from reality this law is. Picture this: your 17-year-old wants to join a social media platform, so now you need to:
A digital service provider shall not permit an account holder who is a known minor to be an account holder unless the known minor has the express consent from a parent or guardian. Acceptable methods of obtaining express consent of a parent or guardian include any of the following:
(a) Providing a form for the minor’s parent or guardian to sign and return to the digital service provider by common carrier, facsimile, or electronic scan;
(b) Providing a toll-free telephone number for the known minor’s parent or guardian to call to consent;
(c) Coordinating a call with a known minor’s parent or guardian over video conferencing technology;
(d) Collecting information related to the government-issued identification of the known minor’s parent or guardian and deleting that information after confirming the identity of the known minor’s parent or guardian;
(e) Allowing the known minor’s parent or guardian to provide consent by responding to an email and taking additional steps to verify the identity of the known minor’s parent or guardian; or
(f) Any other commercially reasonable method of obtaining consent in light of available technology.
So if your teenager wants to use Bluesky (or any other digital service), you might need to mail in a signed form, hop on a video call with the company, or hand over your government ID to verify you’re really their parent—all so they can post about their favorite bands or follow local news. What if the kid is estranged from their parents? What if their parents disagree over whether or not their child can use the site? How do you verify that it’s actually a legal guardian? The law is effectively silent on all that.
There’s a lot more that’s problematic in the law as well. Even if the parent gives permission, a site is still required to block kids from accessing anything deemed harmful… but also shouldn’t stop the kid from searching for harmful information. It basically demands the impossible.
And if a kid does access ambiguously “harmful” information any parent can sue and sites can face penalties of up to $10k per violation and the potential of criminal penalties as well.
NetChoice, the trade group that has been kept busy the last few years suing (and mostly winning) to stop every unconstitutional internet law, sued over this law, and, after some procedural nonsense related to last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Moody, got a temporary restraining order blocking the law from going into effect (at least against NetChoice’s members). Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden recognized how obviously unconstitutional the law was, noting that the law was incredibly broad, was not even remotely narrowly tailored to the state’s compelling interest. Basically this law is a mess and the state has no reasonable defense:
In short, NetChoice has carried its burden of demonstrating that there are a number of supervisory technologies available for parents to monitor their children that the State could publicize… Yet, the Act requires all users (both adults and minors) to verify their ages before creating an account to access a broad range of protected speech on a broad range of covered websites. This burdens the First Amendment rights of adults using the websites of Netchoice’s covered members, which makes it seriously overinclusive. But NetChoice has also presented persuasive evidence that “[u]ncertainty about how broadly the Act extends—and how Defendant will interpret the Act—may spur members to engage in over-inclusive moderation that would block valuable content from all users,” and that not all covered websites have the ability to “age-gate,” meaning that “they are unable to separate the content available on adults’ accounts from content available on minors’ accounts.” …. This likewise renders H.B. 1126 overinclusive.
The Act also requires all minors under the age of eighteen, regardless of age and level of maturity, to secure parental consent to engage in protected speech activities on a broad range of covered websites, which represents a one-size-fits-all approach to all children from birth to age 17 years and 364-days old. H.B. 1126 is thus overinclusive as to Netchoice’s covered members to the extent it is intended as an aid to parental authority beyond the resources for monitoring children’s internet activity NetChoice has already identified, because not all children forbidden by the Act to create accounts on their own have parents who will care whether they create such accounts. See Brown, 564 U.S. at 789, 804 (holding the state act purporting to aid parental authority by prohibiting the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors “vastly overinclusive” because “[n]ot all of the children who are forbidden to purchase violent video games on their own have parents who care whether they purchase violent video games” (emphasis in original)).
This follows on what happens in basically every district court over laws like this. But, of course, Mississippi is in the Fifth Circuit, where good judicial systems go to die. What happened next perfectly encapsulates why the Fifth Circuit has become synonymous with lawless judicial activism. A month later the Fifth Circuit—with no explanation—said the law could go into effect, putting a “stay” on the TRO. No reasoning. No analysis. Just a naked power grab that ignores clear Supreme Court precedent.
NetChoice went to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, where the Supreme Court refused to vacate the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, even as Justice Kavanaugh explained that it was pretty obvious the law was unconstitutional: We had mentioned this very odd result when it happened. Here’s Kavanaugh:
To be clear, NetChoice has, in my view, demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on the merits—namely, that enforcement of the Mississippi law would likely violate its members’ First Amendment rights under this Court’s precedents. See Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U. S. 707 (2024); Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn., 564 U. S. 786 (2011); cf. Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, 606 U. S. ___ (2025). Given those precedents, it is no surprise that the District Court in this case enjoined enforcement of the Mississippi law and that seven other Federal District Courts have likewise enjoined enforcement of similar state laws.
Okay? So why are you letting the law go into effect?
… because NetChoice has not sufficiently demonstrated that the balance of harms and equities favors it at this time, I concur in the Court’s denial of the application for interim relief.
What?!? This is judicial gaslighting at its finest. The Supreme Court has said, repeatedly, that denial of your First Amendment rights is very much a harm. But apparently, they all forgot that.
And now social media users begin to suffer. Welcome to the two-tiered internet. As Bluesky explained, there’s basically no other reasonable way to comply with this law short of blocking all users from the state:
Mississippi’s approach would fundamentally change how users access Bluesky. The Supreme Court’s recentdecisionleaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurancelaw—and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines. The law would also require us to identify and track which users are children, unlike our approach in other regions. We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.
The harm is immediate and concrete. Mississippi now has a fundamentally different internet than the rest of the country—one where geography determines your access to information and communities. This is exactly the kind of balkanization that the internet was designed to prevent. The Mississippi Free Press, a fantastic independent journalism site covering news in Mississippi, has said that Bluesky has been a huge part of their distribution:
For those of us at the Mississippi Free Press, this is a significant blow. We left Twitter earlier this year for a lot of reasons, and have since made Bluesky our main social media platform (it’s also where we have the most followers).
[….]
We don’t know yet what this will mean for our ability to continue to post on Bluesky. Frankly, I’m more concerned about how this will prevent our readers who follow us on Bluesky from continuing to do so.
Think about what this means: A local news organization in Mississippi can no longer easily reach its readers through a major social media platform because of their state government’s actions. Independent journalism—already struggling—now faces additional barriers created by the very government it’s trying to hold accountable.
MFP’s news editor, Ashton Pittman has made it clear where the blame lies for this: with Mississippi’s legislators who (on a bipartisan basis) passed this terrible law:
To be clear, I'm not blaming BlueSky for this situation.I understand perfectly well WHY BlueSky is blocking access to Mississippi IPs; the state government gave them no other viable choice.We are looking into our options, of course (including VPNs).
And, yes, as with every other age-gating law that shows up anywhere in the world, all it’s really doing is promoting VPN subscriptions. The tech-savvy will route around the censorship. Everyone else—including the most vulnerable populations this law claims to protect—gets cut off.
Separately, I’ve seen some commentary regarding how this somehow goes against Bluesky’s decentralization promises, but nothing can be further from the truth. Understanding why requires grasping how the AT Protocol actually works. Bluesky is one provider on the wider Atmosphere (the rapidly growing set of services using the underlying ATprotocol). Each of those services can make their own decision of how to comply with the law here. Bluesky made this point in its explanation:
This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently. We believe this flexibility is one of the strengths of decentralized systems—different providers can make decisions that align with their values and capabilities, especially during periods of regulatory uncertainty. We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice.
This is actually decentralization working as intended. If this were Twitter or Facebook, users would have no alternatives when states make dangerous policy choices. With AT Protocol, other providers could theoretically serve Mississippi users differently (though they’d face the same impossible legal risks). More importantly, users retain their identity and social connections across different providers within the network.
The key thing to remember is that nothing in this law actually makes kids safer. Like all age verification laws, it just creates a ridiculous scenario that infringes on people’s rights, closes off portions of the open internet, and serves no purpose other than enabling legislators to pat themselves on the back and pretend they’ve done something useful.
One hopes that the legislators in Mississippi will reconsider this bad law. Or that the courts (which continue to review this law) issue a new injunction that the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court don’t reject.
Until then, it really sucks that the state of Mississippi has effectively decided that smaller, upstart social media sites have three awful choices: comply with the law and block all access, disobey the law and risk ruinous liability, or comply with the law by collecting a ton of extremely sensitive data and setting up an impossible and unworkable system of “parental consent” that will create a huge mess for both kids and parents. The option Bluesky took seems like the only sensible one in this scenario.
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The man who never expected to be the public face of the Trump administration’s shotgun approach to deportation is, yet again, being given a set of untenable options and expected to pick one of them. And when he refused to accept the bad choice they gave him, they arrested him this morning at his mandated ICE check-in and announced they’re just going to send him to Uganda.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was originally swept up by ICE and sent to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison, despite have a clear court order that he could not be deported to El Salvador.
Garcia is from El Salvador. Although he’d clearly like to remain in the States with his family, if he had to be removed from the US, he’d prefer to be sent to nearby Costa Rica, which has promised to grant him status, rather than left to rot in a prison overseen by the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” (or an American prison on totally trumped up charges that don’t pass the laugh test).
Garcia has been yanked around by the Trump administration, which has vehemently refused to take even the smallest loss in the War on asylum seekers, even if doing so might have resulted in larger wins later. This yanking around extended to a federal court, where DOJ prosecutors and DHS legal advisors repeatedly tested the patience of multiple presiding judges.
After weeks of claiming it was impossible to retrieve Garcia from the Salvadoran hellhole the administration had sent him to, Garcia was suddenly returned to the United States. While that may have been good news, the rest of it wasn’t. The government still wanted to make Garcia pay for refusing to accept his unlawful punishment silently. It threw the book at him upon his return, claiming Garcia was nothing more than a human trafficker — something it based solely on a 2022 traffic stop where Garcia wasn’t even cited, much less arrested for any criminal activity whatsoever. Two separate courts found the entire claim by the US government preposterous and ordered him released from jail.
The federal government is trying to force Kilmar Abrego Garcia to accept a guilty plea or face deportation to Uganda, his attorneys claimed in a filing on Saturday.
The Salvadoran man, who was wrongly deported in March before being brought back to the United States to face human smuggling charges, was released from criminal custody in Tennessee and sent back to Maryland on Friday.
After Abrego Garcia declined an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to the human smuggling charges, his attorneys say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed them that he could be deported to Uganda and ordered him to report to their office in Baltimore on Monday.
This is just more pure cruelty from a president who’s made that his presidential brand. Costa Rica would be the obvious choice when the only other option is Uganda, one of the poorest nations in the world. But Costa Rica is only an option if Garcia pleads guilty to fake charges and serves time in prison. If he wants to remain a “free” man, he must subject himself to being involuntarily displaced yet again, unceremoniously deposited in one of the worst places this cruel and unusual administration can think to send him.
The DOJ, of course, refuses to address the allegations made by Abrego Garcia’s lawyers. Instead, its statement says nothing about the pressure it’s applying. Nor does it explain why the government has decided on Uganda as the final destination for Garcia should he refuse to give it the guilty plea it sorely needs to justify its heinous actions after the fact. And rather than actually dealing with this appropriately, they just decided to arrest him and announce the plan to send him to Uganda. It’s pretty clear that the choice of Uganda is about further punishing Garcia for existing and trying to exercise his own rights.
This came a few hours after Abrego Garcia filed a lawsuit to try to block ICE from doing this.
All of this is so blatantly obvious retaliation for making the Trump administration look bad. They wanted quiet acquiescence as they illegally human trafficked hundreds of people to a foreign gulag, and now they’re taking it out on one guy for daring to ask to have his basic rights respected. It’s a sad show from a pathetic Trump administration that is simply unable to handle anyone pointing out their mistakes.
Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input. Of course it doesn’t really work that way: for years we’ve noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, and make shitty policy (giant mergers, mindless deregulation, the elimination of consumer protection) seem like it has broad public support.
And now the government is making it harder than ever for real Americans and activist groups to comment on regulatory proceedings. Matthew Gault at 404 Media notes that the General Services Administration (GSA), the government agency in charge of regulations.gov, notified API key holders in an email last week that they’d soon lose the ability to POST directly to the site’s API.
That makes it significantly harder for consumer groups and others to file collected public comments with regulatory agencies on issues of importance:
“POST is a common function that allows users to send data to an application. POST allowed third party organizations like Fight for the Future (FFTF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and Public Citizen gather comments from their supporters using their own forms and submit them to the government later.”
Consumer groups like Fight For The Future tell 404 Media that while they can still submit comments through the regulations.gov website, the interface is a nightmare to deal with, forcing organizations to jump through multiple hoops just to comment on proceedings:
“The experience on our campaign sites right now is like, we make our impassioned case for why you should care about this and then give you one box to type something and click a button. But the experience going forward is going to be like: ‘Alright now here’s a link and some instructions on how to fill out your taxes,’” Ken Mickles, FFTF’s chief technology officer said.”
Wealth and power needs the illusion that this is still a Democracy to mute dissent and maintain control. As the very real world (and likely extremely fatal) harms of napalming the regulatory state begin to manifest over the next few years, the public is going to have a lot to say about it. And it’s very clear this administration wants to pretend it can’t hear you.
