Several weeks back, we wrote about a very silly trademark opposition filed by Ohio State University against a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called The Brown Jug. At issue was the restaurants offering of an alcoholic drink called “Buckeye Tears.” See, the University of Michigan and OSU are big time rivals in the realm of college athletics and Ohioans in general, and OSU in particular, are referred to as the Buckeyes.
Well, OSU claimed that allowing this trademark to exist would both cause the public to associate the college with alcohol (can you even imagine the horror?), as well as confuse the public into thinking that OSU somehow was involved in or endorsed the drink. Both claims are absurd, of course. The only association that the public at The Brown Jug would make with Buckeye Tears is the rivalry between the colleges and the reputation for OSU and its fans to be a bunch of whiny crybabies when things don’t go their way.
OSU’s overreaction to a bit of good-natured ribbing just adds more Buckeye tears to the keg, they claim in papers filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Oct. 6. It’s their lawyer’s response to Ohio State’s opposition of a trademark application by the Brown Jug, a bar and restaurant near the University of Michigan’s campus in Ann Arbor.
“The Buckeye Tears mark … plays into a perception shared by Michigan fans — particularly in the wake of their football team’s four consecutive victories over Ohio State — that Ohio State and its supporters may on occasion act like sore losers,” attorneys from the law firm Fenwick & West wrote on the Brown Jug’s behalf.
“Ohio State’s very filing of the opposition validates that perception,” they wrote.
I mean…yeah? Combined with the facts that the term “Buckeye” is not solely associated with OSU and that there are several other uses of the term in trademarked products and services throughout Ohio, the response is a fairly thorough dunking on OSU’s whiny opposition. Which, of course, plays right into the hands of how this drink’s name came to be in the first place.
The Brown Jug’s lawyers, however, said the word Buckeye is already used for more than 5,700 licensed businesses in Ohio and is a brand name on beer, wine and liquor that OSU has “apparently not seen fit to police.”
“Ohio State called its team of lawyers only when a Michigan small business sought to make a good-natured joke,” he said.
As all things old are new again, a bill that would make obtaining bad patents easier and harder to challenge is being considered in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) would reverse over a decade of progress in fighting patent trolls and making the patent system more balanced.
PERA would overturn long-standing court decisions that have helped keep some of the most problematic patents in check. This includes the Supreme Court’sAlice v. CLS Bank decision, which bars patents on abstract ideas. While Alice has not completely solved the problems of the patent system or patent trolling, it has led to the rejection of hundreds of low-quality software patents and, as a result, has allowed innovation and small businesses to grow.
Thanks to the Alice decision, courts have invalidated a rogue’s gallery of terrible software patents—such as patents on online photo contests, online bingo, upselling, matchmaking, and scavenger hunts. These patents didn’t describe real inventions—they merely applied old ideas to general-purpose computers. But PERA would wipe out the Alice framework and replace it with vague, hollow exceptions, taking us back to an era where patent trolls and large corporate patent-holders aggressively harassed software developers and small companies.
This bill, combined with recent changes that have restricted access to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), would create a perfect storm—giving patent trolls and major corporations with large patent portfolios free rein to squeeze out independent inventors and small businesses.
EFF is proud to join a letter, along with Engine, the Public Interest Patent Law Institute, Public Knowledge, and R Street, to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing this poorly-timed and concerning bill. We urge the committee to instead focus on restoring the PTAB as the accessible, efficient check on patent quality that Congress intended.
Control of NSO Group is set to leave Israeli hands. A group of American investors led by Hollywood producer Robert Simonds has agreed to acquire the controversial spyware developer in a deal valued at several tens of millions of dollars. The transaction is expected to be signed in the coming days, though its completion will require approval from Israel’s Defense Export Control Agency (DECA) at the Ministry of Defense.
One of the last things this country needs is domestic ownership of a spyware firm best known for its cozy relationship with human rights violators and a 36-month run of negative press following the discovery that its flagship product (Pegasus) had been used to target dissidents, political opponents, ex-wives of Saudi princes, lawyers, religious leaders, journalists, and human rights activists.
Robert Simonds’ name first popped up in “what will become of the world’s most reviled tech firm” discussions in 2023, where he was warned away from this potential investment by none other than the presidential administration at that time. NSO Group had been blacklisted only months earlier and its attempt to get the FBI to buy its products had collapsed when it was made clear there was no way the FBI could use it against Americans and still expect to be on the right side of the US Constitution.
No one will be warning Simonds away from this purchase now. This entire administration has no desire to be on the right side of the Constitution and seems extremely willing to get it hands on anything that might allow it to keep tabs on its critics and opponents, not to mention millions of non-white people it thinks should be immediately ejected from this country.
Simonds is riding to the rescue of an administration that definitely can’t be trusted with this sort of malware. It’s one thing to point out that selling to human rights violators will inevitably result in abusive deployments that violate more rights. It’s quite another to be on the inside of impending doom, realizing that this administration is no better than those that NSO was correctly criticized for selling its products to. With this acquisition, NSO becomes a domestic firm (more or less… see below) and far more likely to be taken off the State Department’s blacklist.
That doesn’t just mean US citizens are now ripe for the malware-driven picking if the Trump administration clears NSO’s offerings for domestic surveillance. It also means the human rights violators of the world will again be given access to this tech, after being (temporarily) added to the “DO NOT SELL TO THESE COUNTRIES” list by the Israeli government. The world will become a worse place to live, thanks to the supposed “leader of the free world,” which is now led by people who don’t actually believe in freedom.
It’s safe to assume that anything NSO did to retain market viability in a world that was mostly unified in its hatred against it will get rolled back now that it belongs to a Hollywood mogul and safely resides in a country run by aspiring autocrats. During Trump’s first administration, we often felt assured cooler heads would prevail. But during this second term, the “cooler” heads are returning to room temperature after having been hoisted on pikes by an administration that has made a concerted, often-illegal effort to rid itself of anyone or anything that might slow its roll towards fully consummating its relationship with white Christian nationalism.
“This investment does not mean that the company is moving out of Israeli regulatory or operational control,” said [NSO spokesperson Oded] Hershowitz. “The company’s headquarters and core operations remain in Israel. It continues to be fully supervised and regulated by the relevant Israeli authorities, including the Ministry of Defense and the Israeli regulatory framework.”
Yeah, that means some operational control will be nominally overseen by a government engaged in genocide whose leader is one of Trump’s BFFs. Both figures who could plausibly restrain abuses by NSO of its customers are in agreement: Palestinians are all terrorists and anyone opposing either government involved here is also a terrorist. Can’t wait to see how that works out on a phone-to-phone level.
Brian Reed’s “Question Everything” podcast built its reputation on careful journalism that explores moral complexity within the journalism field. It’s one of my favorite podcasts. Which makes his latest pivot so infuriating: Reed has announced he’s now advocating to repeal Section 230—while demonstrating he fundamentally misunderstands what the law does, how it works, and what repealing it would accomplish.
If you’ve read Techdirt for basically any length of time, you’ll know that I feel the exact opposite on this topic. Repealing, or really almost all proposals to reform Section 230, would be a complete disaster for free speech on the internet, including for journalists.
The problem isn’t advocacy journalism—I’ve been doing that myself for years. The problem is Reed’s approach: decide on a solution, then cherry-pick emotional anecdotes and misleading sources to support it, while ignoring the legal experts who could explain why he’s wrong. It’s the exact opposite of how to do good journalism, which is unfortunate for someone who holds out his (otherwise excellent!) podcast as a place to explore how to do journalism well.
Last week, he published the first episode of his “get rid of 230” series, and it has so many problems, mistakes, and nonsense, that I feel like I had to write about it now, in the hopes that Brian might be more careful in future pieces. (Reed has said he plans to interview critics of his position, including me, but only after the series gets going—which seems backwards for someone advocating major legal changes.)
The framing of this piece is around the conspiracy theory regarding the Sandy Hook school shootings, and someone who used to believe them. First off, this feels like a cheap journalistic hook, basing a larger argument on an emotional hook that clouds the issues and the trade-offs. The Sandy Hook shooting was horrible! The fact that some jackasses pushed conspiracy theories about it is also horrific! That primes you in the form of “something must be done, this is something, we must do this” to accept Reed’s preferred solution: repeal 230.
But he doesn’t talk to any actual experts on 230, misrepresents Section 230, misleads people into understanding how repealing 230 would impact that specific (highly emotional) story, and then closes on an emotionally manipulative hook (convincing the person he spoke to who used to believe in Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, that getting rid of 230 would work, despite her lack of understanding or knowledge of what would actually happen).
In listening to the piece, it struck me that Reed here is doing part of what he (somewhat misleadingly) claims social media companies are doing: hooking you with manipulative lies and misrepresentations to keep you hooked and to convince you something false is true by lying to his listeners. It’s a shame, but it’s certainly not journalism.
Let’s dig into some of the many problems with the piece.
The Framing is Manipulative
I already mentioned that the decision to frame the entire piece around one extraordinary, but horrific story is manipulative, but it goes beyond that. Reed compares the fact that some of the victims from Sandy Hook successfully sued Alex Jones for defamation over the lies and conspiracy theories he spread regarding that event, to the fact that they can’t sue YouTube.
But in 2022, family members of 10 of the Sandy Hook victims did win a defamation case against Alex Jones’s company, and the verdict was huge. Jones was ordered to pay the family members over a billion dollars in damages.
Just this week, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Jones over it. A semblance of justice for the victims, though infuriatingly, Alex Jones filed for bankruptcy and has avoided paying them so far. But also, and this is what I want to focus on, the lawsuits are a real deterrent to Alex Jones and others who will likely think twice before lying like this again.
So now I want you to think about this. Alex Jones did not spread this lie on his own. He relied on social media companies, especially YouTube, which hosts his show, to send his conspiracy theory, out to the masses. One YouTube video spouting this lie shortly after the shooting got nearly 11 million views in less than 2 weeks. And by 2018 when the family sued him. Alex Jones had 1.6 billion views on his YouTube channel. The Sandy Hook lie was laced throughout that content, burrowing its way into the psyche of millions of people, including Kate and her dad.
Alex Jones made money off of each of those views. But so did YouTube. Yet, the Sandy Hook families, they cannot sue YouTube for defaming them because of section 230.
There are a ton of important details left out of this, that, if actually presented, might change the understanding here. First, while the families did win that huge verdict, much of that was because Jones defaulted. He didn’t really fight the defamation case, basically ignoring court orders to turn over discovery. It was only after the default that he really tried to fight things at the remedy stage. Indeed, part of the Supreme Court cert petition that was just rejected was because he claimed he didn’t get a fair trial due to the default.
You simply can’t assume that because the families won that very bizarre case in which Jones treated the entire affair with contempt, that means that the families would have a case against YouTube as well. That’s not how this works.
This is Not How Defamation Law Works
Reed correctly notes that the bar for defamation is high, including that there has to be knowledge to qualify, but then immediately seems to forget that. Without a prior judicial determination that specific content is defamatory, no platform—with or without Section 230—is likely to meet the knowledge standard required for liability. That’s kind of important!
Now this is really important to keep in mind. Freedom of speech means we have the freedom to lie. We have the freedom to spew absolute utter bullshit. We have the freedom to concoct conspiracy theories and even use them to make money by selling ads or subscriptions or what have you.
Most lies are protected by the First Amendment and they should be.
But there’s a small subset of lies that are not protected speech even under the First Amendment. The old shouting fire in a crowded theater, not necessarily protected. And similarly, lies that are defamatory aren’t protected.
In order for a statement to be defamatory, okay, for the most part,whoever’s publishing it has to know it’s untrueand it has to cause damage to the person or the institution the statement’s about. Reputational damage, emotional damage, or a lie could hurt someone’s business. The bar for proving defamation is high in the US. It can be hard to win those cases.
I bolded the key part here: while there’s some nuance here, mostly, the publisher has to know the statement is untrue. And the bar here is very high. To survive under the First Amendment, the knowledge standard is important.
It’s why booksellers can’t be held liable for “obscene” books on their shelves. It’s why publishers aren’t held liable for books they publish, even if those books lead people to eat poisonous mushrooms. The knowledge standard matters.
And even though Reed mentions the knowledge point, he seems to immediately forget it. Nor does he even attempt to deal with the question of how an algorithm can have the requisite knowledge (hint: it can’t). He just brushes past that kind of important part.
But it’s the key to why his entire argument premise is flawed: just making it so anyone can sue web platforms doesn’t mean anyone will win. Indeed, they’ll lose in most cases. Because if you get rid of 230, the First Amendment still exists. But, because of a bunch of structural reasons explained below, it will make the world of internet speech much worse for you and I (and the journalists Reed wants to help), while actually clearing the market of competitors to the Googles and Metas of the world Reed is hoping to punish.
That’s Not How Section 230 Works
Reed’s summary is simply inaccurate. And not in the “well, we can differ on how we describe it.” He makes blatant factual errors. First, he claims that “only internet companies” get 230 protections:
These companies have a special protection that only internet companies get. We need to strip that protection away.
But that’s wrong. Section 230 applies to any provider of an interactive computer service (which is more than just “internet companies”) and their users. It’s right there in the law. Because of that latter part, it has protected people forwarding emails and retweeting content. It has been used repeatedly to protect journalists on that basis. It protects you and me. It is not exclusive to “internet companies.” That’s just factually wrong.
The law is not, and has never been, some sort of special privilege for certain kinds of companies, but a framework for protecting speech online, by making it possible for speech distributing intermediaries to exist in the first place. Which helps journalists. And helps you and me. Without it, there would be fewer ways in which we could speak.
Reed also appears to misrepresent or conflate a bunch of things here:
Section 230, which Congress passed in 1996, it makes it so that internet companies can’t be sued for what happened happens on their sites. Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, they bear essentially no responsibility for the content they amplify and recommend to millions, even billions of people. No matter how much it harms people, no matter how much it warps our democracy under section 230, you cannot successfully sue tech companies for defamation, even if they spread lies about you. You can’t sue them for pushing a terror recruitment video on someone who then goes and kills your family member. You can’t sue them for bombarding your kids. with videos that promote eating disorders or that share suicide methods or sexual content.
First off, much of what he describes is First Amendment protected speech. Second, he ignores that Section 230 doesn’t apply to federal criminal law, which is what things like terrorist content would likely cover (I’m guessing he’s confused based on the Supreme Court cases from a few years ago, where 230 wasn’t the issue—the lack of any traceability of the terrorist attacks to the websites was).
But, generally speaking, if you’re advocating for legal changes, you should be specific in what you want changed and why. Putting out a big list of stuff, some of which would be protected, some of which would not be, as well as some that the law covers and some it doesn’t… isn’t compelling. It suggests you don’t understand the basics. Furthermore, lumping things like eating disorders in with defamation and terrorist content, suggests an unwillingness to deal with the specifics and the complexities. Instead, it suggests a desire for a general “why can’t we pass a law that says ‘bad stuff isn’t allowed online?'” But that’s a First Amendment issue, not a 230 issue (as we’ll explain in more detail below).
Reed also, unfortunately, seems to have been influenced by the blatantly false argument that there’s a platform/publisher distinction buried within Section 230. There isn’t. But it doesn’t stop him from saying this:
I’m going to keep reminding you what Section 230 is, as we covered on this show, because I want it to stick. Section 230, small provision in a law Congress passed in 1996, just 26 words, but words that were so influential, they’re known as the 26 words that created the internet.
Quick fact check: Section 230 is way longer than 26 words. Yes, Section (c)(1) is 26 words. But, the rest matters too. If you’re advocating to repeal a law, maybe read the whole thing?
Those words make it so that internet platforms cannot be treated as publishers of the content on their platform. It’s why Sandy Hook parents could sue Alex Jones for the lies he told, but they couldn’t sue the platforms like YouTube that Jones used to spread those lies.
And there is a logic to this that I think made sense when Section 230 was passed in the ’90s. Back then, internet companies offered chat rooms, message boards, places where other people posted, and the companies were pretty passively transmitting those posts.
Reed has this completely backwards. Section 230 was a direct response to Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, where a judge ruled that Prodigy’s active moderation to create a “family friendly” service made it liable for all content on the platform.
The two authors of Section 230, Ron Wyden and Chris Cox, have talked about this at length for decades. They wanted platforms to be active participants and not dumb conduits passively transmitting posts. Their fear was without Section 230, those services would be forced to just be passive transmitters, because doing anything to the content (as Prodigy did) would make them liable. But given the amount of content, that would be impossible.
So Cox and Wyden’s solution to encourage platforms to be more than passive conduits was to say “if you do regular publishing activities—such as promoting, rearranging, and removing certain content then we won’t treat you like a publisher.”
The entire point was to encourage publisher-like behavior, not discourage it.
Reed has the law’s purpose exactly backwards!
That’s kind of shocking for someone advocating to overturn the law! It would help to understand it first! Because if the law actually did what Reed pretends it does, I might be in favor of repeal as well! The problem is, it doesn’t. And it never did.
One analogy that gets thrown around for this is that the platforms, they’re like your mailman. They’re just delivering somebody else’s letter about the Sandy Hook conspiracy. They’re not writing it themselves. And sure, that might have been true for a while, but imagine now that the mailman reads the letter he’s delivering, sees it’s pretty tantalizing. There’s a government conspiracy to take away people’s guns by orchestrating a fake school shooting, hiring child actors, and staging a massacre and a whole 911 response.
The mailman thinks, “That’s pretty good stuff. People are going to like this.” He makes millions of copies of the letter and delivers them to millions of people. And then as all those people start writing letters to their friends and family talking about this crazy conspiracy, the mailman keeps making copies of those letters and sending them around to more people.
And he makes a ton of money off of this by selling ads that he sticks into those envelopes. Would you say in that case the mailman is just a conduit for someone else’s message? Or has he transformed into a different role? A role more like a publisher who should be responsible for the statements he or she actively chooses to amplify to the world. That is essentially what YouTube and other social media platforms are doing by using algorithms to boost certain content. In fact, I think the mailman analogy is tame for what these companies are up to.
Again, the entire framing here is backwards. It’s based on Reed’s false assumption—an assumption that any expert in 230 would hopefully disabuse him of—that the reason for 230 was to encourage platforms to be “passive conduits” but it’s the exact opposite.
Cox and Wyden were clear (and have remained clear) that the purpose of the law was exactly the opposite. It was to give platforms the ability to create different kinds of communities and to promote/demote/moderate/delete at will.
The key point was that, because of the amount of content, no website would be willing and able to do any of this if they were potentially held liable for everything.
As for the final point, that social media companies are now way different from “the mailman,” both Cox and Wyden have talked about how wrong that is. In an FCC filing a few years back, debunking some myths about 230, they pointed out that this claim of “oh sites are different” is nonsense and misunderstands the fundamentals of the law:
Critics of Section 230 point out the significant differences between the internet of 1996 and today.Those differences, however, are not unanticipated. When we wrote the law, we believed the internet of the future was going to be a very vibrant and extraordinary opportunity for people to become educated about innumerable subjects, from health care to technological innovation to their own fields of employment. So we began with these two propositions: let’s make sure that every internet user has the opportunity to exercise their First Amendment rights; and let’s deal with the slime and horrible material on the internet by giving both websites and their users the tools and the legal protection necessary to take it down.
The march of technology and the profusion of e-commerce business models over the last two decadesrepresent precisely the kind of progress that Congress in 1996 hoped would follow from Section 230’s protectionsfor speech on the internet and for the websites that host it. The increase in user-created content in the years since then is both a desired result of the certainty the law provides, and further reason that the law is needed more than ever in today’s environment.
The Understanding of How Incentives Work Under the Law is Wrong
Here’s where Reed’s misunderstanding gets truly dangerous. He claims Section 230 removes incentives for platforms to moderate content. In reality, it’s the opposite: without Section 230, websites would have less incentive to moderate, not more.
Why? Because under the First Amendment, you need to show that the intermediary had actual knowledge of the violative nature of the content. If you removed Section 230, the best way to prove that you have no knowledge is not to look, and not to moderate.
You potentially go back to a Stratton Oakmont-style world, where the incentives are to do less moderation because any moderation you do introduces more liability. The more liability you create, the less likely someone is to take on the task. Any investigation into Section 230 has to start from understanding those basic facts, so it’s odd that Reed so blatantly misrepresents them and suggests that 230 means there’s no incentive to moderate:
We want to make stories that are popular so we can keep audiences paying attention and sell ads—or movie tickets or streaming subscriptions—to support our businesses. But in the world that every other media company occupies, aside from social media, if we go too far and put a lie out that hurts somebody, we risk getting sued.
It doesn’t mean other media outlets don’t lie or exaggerate or spin stories, but there’s still a meaningful guard rail there. There’s a real deterrent to make sure we’re not publishing or promoting lies that are so egregious, so harmful that we risk getting sued, such as lying about the deaths of kids who were killed and their devastated parents.
Social media companies have no such deterrent and they’re making tons of money. We don’t know how much money in large part because the way that kind of info usually gets forced out of companies is through lawsuits which we can’t file against these tech behemoths because of section 230. So, we don’t know, for instance, how much money YouTube made from content with the Sandy Hook conspiracy in it. All we know is that they can and do boost defamatory lies as much as they want, raking cash without any risk of being sued for it.
But this gets at a fundamental flaw that shows up in these debates: that the only possible pressure on websites is the threat of being sued. That’s not just wrong, it, again, totally gets the purpose and function of Section 230 backwards.
There are tons of reasons for websites to do a better job moderating: if your platform fills up with garbage, users start to go away. As do advertisers, investors, other partners as well.
This is, fundamentally, the most frustrating part about every single new person who stumbles haphazardly into the Section 230 debate without bothering to understand how it works within the law. They get the incentives exactly backwards.
230 says “experiment with different approaches to making your website safe.” Taking away 230 says “any experiment you try to keep your website safe opens you up to ruinous litigation.” Which one do you think leads to a healthier internet?
It Misrepresents how Companies Actually Work
Reed paints tech companies as cartoon villains, relying on simplistic and misleading interpretations of leaked documents and outdated sources. This isn’t just sloppy—it’s the kind of manipulative framing he’d probably critique in other contexts.
For example, he grossly misrepresents (in a truly manipulative way!) what the documents Frances Haugen released said, just as much of the media did. For example, here’s how Reed characterizes some of what Haugen leaked:
Haugen’s document dump showed that Facebook leadership knew about the harms their product is causing, including disinformation and hate speech, but also product designs that were hurting children, such as the algorithm’s tendency to lead teen girls to posts about anorexia. Francis Haugen told lawmakers that top people at Facebook knew exactly what the company was doing and why it was doing.
Except… that’s very much out of context. Here’s how misleading Reed’s characterization is. The actual internal research Haugen leaked—the stuff Reed claims shows Facebook “knew about the harms”—looked like this:
The headline of that slide sure looks bad, right? But then you look at the context, which shows that in nearly every single category they studied across boys and girls, they found that more users found Instagram made them feel better, not worse. The only category where that wasn’t true was teen girls and body image, where the split was pretty equal. That’s one category out of 24 studied! And this was internal research calling out that fact because the point was to convince the company to figure out ways to better deal with that one case, not to ignore it.
And, what we’ve heard over and over again since all this is that companies have moved away from doing this kind of internal exploration, because they know that if they learn about negative impacts of their own service, it will be used against them by the media.
Reed’s misrepresentation creates exactly the perverse incentive he claims to oppose: companies now avoid studying potential harms because any honest internal research will be weaponized against them by journalists who don’t bother to read past the headline. Reed’s approach of getting rid of 230’s protections would make this even worse, not better.
Because as part of any related lawsuit there would be discovery, and you can absolutely guarantee that a study like the one above that Haugen leaked would be used in court, in a misleading way, showing just that headline, without the necessary context of “we called this out to see how we could improve.”
So without Section 230 and with lawsuits, companies would have much less incentive to look for ways to improve safety online, because any such investigation would be presented as “knowledge” of the problem. Better not to look at all.
There’s a similar problem with the way Reed reports on the YouTube algorithm. Reed quotes Guillaume Chaslot but doesn’t mention that Chaslot left YouTube in 2013—12 years ago. That’s ancient history in tech terms. I’ve met Chaslot and been on panels with him. He’s great! And I think his insights on the dangers of the algorithm in the early days were important work and highlighted to the world the problems of bad algorithms. But it’s way out of date. And not all of the algorithms are bad.
Conspiracy theories are are really easy to make. You can just make your own conspiracy theories in like one hour shoot it and then it get it can get millions of views. They’re addictive because people who live in this filter bubble of conspiracy theories and they don’t watch the classical media. So they spend more time on YouTube.
Imagine you’re someone who doesn’t trust the media, you’re going to spend more time on YouTube. So since you spend more time on YouTube, the algorithm thinks you’re better than anybody else. The definition of better for the algorithm, it’s who spends more time. So it will recommend you more. So there’s like this vicious call.
It’s a vicious circle, Chaslot says, where the more conspiratorial the videos, the longer users stay on the platform watching them, the more valuable that content becomes, the more YouTube’s algorithm recommends the conspiratorial videos.
Since Chaslot left YouTube, there have been a series of studies that have shown that, while some of that may have been true back when Chaslot was at the company, it hasn’t been true in many, many years.
A study in 2019 (looking at data from 2016 onwards) found that YouTube’s algorithm actually pushed people away from radicalizing content. A further study a couple of years ago similarly found no evidence of YouTube’s algorithm sending people down these rabbit holes.
It turns out that things like Chaslot’s public berating of the company, as well as public and media pressure, not to mention political blowback, had helped the company re-calibrate the algorithm away from all that.
And you know what allowed them to do that? The freedom Section 230 provided, saying that they wouldn’t face any litigation liability for adjusting the algorithm.
A Total Misunderstanding of What Would Happen Absent 230
Reed’s fundamental error runs deeper than just misunderstanding the law—he completely misunderstands what would happen if his “solution” were implemented. He claims that the risk of lawsuits would make the companies act better:
We need to be able to sue these companies.
Imagine the Sandy Hook families had been able to sue YouTube for defaming them in addition to Alex Jones. Again, we don’t know how much money YouTube made off the Sandy Hook lies. Did YouTube pull in as much cash as Alex Jones, five times as much? A hundred times? Whatever it was, what if the victims were able to sue YouTube? It wouldn’t get rid of their loss or trauma, but it could offer some compensation. YouTube’s owned by Google, remember, one of the most valuable companies in the world. More likely to actually pay out instead of going bankrupt like Alex Jones.
This fantasy scenario has three fatal flaws:
First, YouTube would still win these cases. As we discussed above, there’s almost certainly no valid defamation suit here. Most complained about content will still be First Amendment-protected speech, and YouTube, as the intermediary, would still have the First Amendment and the “actual knowledge” standard to fall back on.
The only way to have actual knowledge of content being defamatory is for there to be a judgment in court about the content. So, YouTube couldn’t be on the hook in this scenario until after the plaintiffs had already taken the speaker to court and received a judgment that the content was defamatory. At that point, you could argue that the platform would then be on notice and could no longer promote the content. But that wouldn’t stop any of the initial harms that Reed thinks they would.
Second, Reed’s solution would entrench Big Tech’s dominance. Getting a case dismissed on Section 230 grounds costs maybe $50k to $100k. Getting the same case dismissed on First Amendment grounds? Try $2 to $5 million.
For a company like Google or Meta, with their buildings full of lawyers, this is still pocket change. They’ll win those cases. But it means that you’ve wiped out the market for non-Meta, non-Google sized companies. The smaller players get wiped out because a single lawsuit (or even a threat of a lawsuit) can be existential.
The end result: Reed’s solution gives more power to the giant companies he paints as evil villains.
Third, there’s vanishingly little content that isn’t protected by the First Amendment. Using the Alex Jones example is distorting and manipulative, because it’s one of the extremely rare cases where defamation has been shown (and that was partly just because Jones didn’t really fight the case).
Reed doubles down on these errors:
But on a wider scale, The risk of massive lawsuits like this, a real threat to these companies’ profits, could finally force the platforms to change how they’re operating. Maybe they change the algorithms to prioritize content from outlets that fact check because that’s less risky. Maybe they’d get rid of fancy algorithms altogether, go back to people getting shown posts chronologically or based on their own choice of search terms. It’d be up to the companies, but however they chose to address it, they would at least have to adapt their business model so that it incorporated the risk of getting sued when they boost damaging lies.
This shows Reed still doesn’t understand the incentive structure. Companies would still win these lawsuits on First Amendment grounds. And they’d increase their odds by programming algorithms and then never reviewing content—the exact opposite of what Reed suggests he wants.
And here’s where Reed’s pattern of using questionable sources becomes most problematic. He quotes Frances Haugen advocating for his position, without noting that Haugen has no legal expertise on these issues:
For what it’s worth, this is what Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen argued for in Congress in 2021.
I strongly encourage reforming Section 230 to exempt decisions about algorithms. They have 100% control over their algorithms and Facebook should not get a free pass on choices it makes to prioritize growth and virality and reactiveness over public safety. They shouldn’t get a free pass on that because they’re paying for their profits right now with our safety. So, I strongly encourage reform of 230 in that way.
But, as we noted when Haugen said that, this is (again) getting it all backwards. At the very same time that Haugen was testifying with those words, Facebook was literally running ads all over Washington DC, encouraging Congress to reform Section 230 in this way. Facebook wants to destroy 230.
Why? Because Zuckerberg knows full well what I wrote above. Getting rid of 230 means a few expensive lawsuits that his legal team can easily win, while wiping out smaller competitors who can’t afford the legal bills.
Meta’s usage has been declining as users migrate to smaller platforms. What better way to eliminate that competition than making platform operation legally prohibitive for anyone without Meta’s legal budget?
Notably, not a single person Reed speaks to is a lawyer. He doesn’t talk to anyone who lays out the details of how all this works. He only speaks to people who dislike tech companies. Which is fine, because it’s perfectly understandable to hate on big tech companies. But if you’re advocating for a massive legal change, shouldn’t you first understand how the law actually works in practice?
For a podcast about improving journalism, this represents a spectacular failure of basic journalistic practices. Indeed, Reed admits at the end that he’s still trying to figure out how to do all this:
I’m still trying to figure out how to do this whole advocacy thing. Honestly, pushing for a policy change rather than just reporting on it. It’s new to me and I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. Should I be launching a petition, raising money for like a PAC? I’ve been talking to marketing people about slogans for a campaign. We’ll document this as I stumble my way through. It’s all a bit awkward for me. So, if you have ideas for how you can build this movement to be able to sue big tech. Please tell me.
There it is: “I’m still trying to figure out how to do this whole advocacy thing.” Reed has publicly committed to advocating for a specific legal change—one that would fundamentally reshape how the internet works—while admitting he doesn’t understand advocacy, hasn’t talked to experts, and is figuring it out as he goes. Generally it’s a bad idea to come up with a slogan when you still don’t even understand the thing you’re advocating for.
This is advocacy journalism in reverse: decide your conclusion, then do the research. It’s exactly the kind of shoddy approach that Reed would rightly criticize in other contexts.
I have no problem with advocacy journalism. I’ve been doing it for years. But effective advocacy starts with understanding the subject deeply, consulting with experts, and then forming a position based on that knowledge. Reed has it backwards.
The tragedy is that there are so many real problems with how big tech companies operate, and there are thoughtful reforms that could help. But Reed’s approach—emotional manipulation, factual errors, and backwards legal analysis—makes productive conversation harder, not easier.
Maybe next time, try learning about the law first, then deciding whether to advocate for its repeal.
That’s not the sort of thing that’s happening these days. In fact, the current administration is more like the current Vietnam government than it would care to admit, especially when it rails against socialism while taking controlling interests in US companies. I mean…
Although the constitution provides for independent judges and lay assessors (who lack administrative training), the United States Department of State maintains that Vietnam lacks an independent judiciary, in part because the Communist Party selects judges and vets them for political reliability.
Anyway, we’ve finally reached the end of the insanity introduced by DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth late last month. The rebranded (but not by Congress) “Department of War” dropped a new set of guidelines for journalists that not only restricted which areas of the Pentagon they could access and who they could talk to, but made it clear (without saying in so many words) that the only press agencies that would be given access would be those that printed whatever the government said without asking too many questions or doing too much editorializing.
The fallout is over. There’s nearly no one left in the Pentagon press office. Every legitimate news agency has left, along with a few unexpected ex-pats.
Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon on Wednesday rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work, pushing journalists who cover the American military further from the seat of its power. The nation’s leadership called the new rules “common sense” to help regulate a “very disruptive” press.
News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.
Among those you may not have expected to reject direct control of the press include longtime Trump bullhorns Fox News and Newsmax. Only 15 journalists (out of hundreds) signed this access journalism pledge. Eleven of those were reporters for foreign-based news organizations and a couple of entities whose only news outlet appears to be social media posts.
Of those signatories, two are from the pro-Trump cable channel, One America News; one is from right-wing website The Federalist; and another is from ultra-conservative newspaper The Epoch Times.
OAN is even further right than Fox or Newsmax. It’s half-content farm, half-conspiracy theory factory. The Epoch Times is nothing buta conspiracy theory factory, but with ties to the Chinese Falun Gong religious movement. And The Federalist… well, just click through and doom scroll through the headlines and you’ll see for yourself. It’s basically the Trump administration after a few writing classes.
The Federalist has defended itself (I mean, I imagine it thinks it has) with a long, not-at-all unhinged post by editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway on X, because of course it did. According to Hemingway, it was the ultimate act of bravery to agree to allow the Defense Department to tell The Federalist what it can and can’t print. It’s a super weird thing to go on main and declare yourself proud to be a propagandist, but then again, it’s not every day someone discovers they have a fetish for boot heels and they’ll be damned if anyone’s going to criticize them for it.
Say what you will about the sorry state of the US press in general, but this nearly-universal walkout is a heartening show of solidarity against the power grabs of an authoritarian regime. The truth will still manage to make its way out of the Pentagon, despite these efforts. And anyone still working from the inside has already demonstrably proven they can’t be trusted to handle the truth.
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“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command…. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into history and became truth.” —George Orwell, 1984
This past weekend witnessed what may have been the largest single-day political protest in American history. The “No Kings” demonstrations drew an estimated 5.2 to 8.2 million people across all 50 states (according to G. Elliott Morris), with massive crowds filling the streets of major cities and surprisingly robust turnouts even in small, rural communities that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful—so much so that police in New York City, Austin, and San Diego all reported zero protest-related arrests, which is frankly remarkable given the scale of participation.
There were similar reports in other cities, including Washington DC, which is kinda notable given that the last time the MAGA crowd “protested” in DC, people died, and eventually over 1,200 people were convicted (even if Trump later pardoned them all).
Before the protests even happened, Republican politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson preemptively labeled them a “hate America rally” filled with potential “terrorists.” They were proven spectacularly wrong by the peaceful nature of the demonstrations, but their fear-mongering served its purpose: justifying the future mobilization of National Guard units in multiple states for what turned out to be entirely peaceful gatherings.
You’d think these basic facts would be hard to dispute. After all, millions of people witnessed the events firsthand, millions more saw the coverage, and the photographic and video evidence is overwhelming. But if you listened to Donald Trump’s response, you’d think you were living in an alternate reality.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump dismissed the massive demonstrations with a series of statements that were so obviously false they’d make a carnival barker blush:
Trump on No Kings: "It's a joke. I looked at the people. They are not representative of this country. And I looked at all the brand new signs I guess paid for by Soros and other radical left lunatics. We're checking it out. The demonstrations were very small. And the people were whacked out."
“I think it’s a joke. I looked at the people, they’re not representative of this country, and I looked at all the brand new signs paid for, I guess it was paid for by Soros and other radical left lunatics. It looks like it was, we’re checking it out. The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective, and the people who are whacked out. Would you look at those people. They’re not representative of the people of our country.”
Let’s break this down. “Very small”? We’re talking about potentially the largest single-day protest in American history. “Very ineffective”? The turnout exceeded even the organizers’ expectations and every previous protest against Trump including both the 2017 Women’s March and the earlier No Kings march a few months ago.
“Not representative of this country”? When millions of Americans from all 50 states show up, including in deep red rural areas, that’s about as representative as it gets. Anyone who looked at the photos from these protests could tell you that they were absolutely representative of this country. Indeed, there was a feeling of joy. People were joking and dancing and singing. If anything, the crowd skewed older, but that’s shocking in its own way, given that protests tend to be a younger person’s game.
Let’s go to just a tiny bit of the evidence: these were massive crowds, all over the country (including deeply Republican areas), with crowds that were incredibly representative of America:
This is Boise, Idaho one of the most Republican states in the US joining millions of protestors. The people have had enough of the Trump regime. #3E #NoKings #50501Movement #indivisible #wearetheflood
Democracy in action, Illinois.Proud of our state for peacefully showing up and speaking out together in one voice to fight back against Donald Trump’s takeover of our democracy.
World War 2 veterans, the original antifa, took part in the nationwide protests against the fascist Trump regime. #3E #NoKings #50501Movement #indivisible #wearetheflood
Provincetown has a year-round population of 3600.I'm guessing there were at least 1000 at No Kings today.Sorry I managed not to get the people in the inflatable lobster suits!
Protestors march through downtown Montgomery, Alabama on Oct. 18, 2025 holding a banner saying "No Kings In America." The protest drew more than 600 people. (Ralph Chapoco/Alabama Reflector)
No Kings Denver speaker Joe Salazar (fmr Dem state rep) tells me they estimate 25-30k gathered in Denver today, similar to the No Kings protest earlier this year. This view is from photographer Cheney Orr for the New York Times. #copolitics
I could go on. But you get the point. The point that Donald Trump is desperately trying to make sure you ignore or disbelieve. The evidence is overwhelming. From massive crowds in Chicago to rural communities in Iowa to even Trump’s own backyard in Florida, Americans showed up en masse for peaceful protests that were anything but “very small.” Anyone with functioning eyeballs can see this.
But the lies don’t stop there. Trump also claimed without evidence that the signs were paid for by George Soros and “radical left lunatics,” feeding into the same tired conspiracy theories his supporters always trot out when faced with genuine grassroots opposition they can’t explain away. And, once again, every accusation is a confession. The only ones known for buying and paying for signs at rallies are… the GOP.
Trump made it quite clear that his only motivation in governing is to try to attack those he perceives as disloyal, because rather than attempting to address the actual protests or the complaints, he posted to social media an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown, flying a fighter jet labeled “KING TRUMP,” and dumping what was clearly meant to be load of shit on protesters. Most media outlets, in their typical both-sides fashion, euphemistically described this as “brown liquid” or “brown substance,” apparently too squeamish to call out the obvious scatological nature of what Trump was depicting himself doing to American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
Honestly, the video was pathetic in multiple ways. It really felt like the kind of thing that a silly “resistance” type account might post to mock Trump, and there he was posting it himself. And it’s quite telling that his response to the “no kings” rally goes straight to his instinctual “if they say no kings, then I’m going to mock them by saying ‘yes, I want to be king, and yes, I want to shit on them.’“
That serves only one purpose: to excite his ever-dwindling set of immature fanboys on social media. It doesn’t show leadership. It doesn’t show himself as responsive to his constituents. It just makes him look like a sad, pathetic old man whose only move is to try to piss off the “right” people.
Meanwhile, if you want to talk about “hating America,” it’s hard to top the image of a president fantasizing about literally dumping shit on millions of his own citizens for the “crime” of peaceful protest.
I feel like we need to emphasize this: the President posted a video of himself dumping shit on people peacefully protesting. When Hillary Clinton suggested some of Trump’s followers were “deplorables,” it was a months-long story. When Biden was misleadingly and incorrectly accused of calling Trump supporters “garbage,” it was a constant news story. But when Trump literally fantasizes about dumping shit on people exercising their constitutional rights, it’s euphemized away, played down, and discounted.
This is what we’re dealing with: a president who can look at the largest protest in American history and declare it “very small” with a straight face, while the media largely lets him get away with it. It’s the kind of brazen reality-denial that would make Orwell’s Ministry of Truth proud.
It’s no surprise that Trump lies—we’ve known that for years. What’s insidious is how the lies are presented as just another side of a “he said, she said” story, rather than what they actually are: easily verifiable falsehoods about events that millions of people witnessed with their own eyes.
These aren’t just lies for their own sake. In that same Air Force One interview, Trump talked about invoking the Insurrection Act, falsely claiming that 50% of presidents have used it (they have not) and that “everybody agrees you’re allowed to use that” (they do not).
Trump: "I'm allowed as you know as president, like 50% of the presidents have used the Insurrection Act. Everybody agrees you're allowed to use that and there is no more court cases, there is no more anything. We're trying to do it in a nicer manner, but we can always use the Insurrection Act."
The lies about “very small” protests and “radical left lunatics” funded by Soros aren’t random bullshit—they’re the predicate for deploying military force against American cities. Trump is constructing an alternative reality that justifies authoritarian responses to constitutionally protected dissent.
The president is openly lying about easily verifiable facts that millions of people witnessed, and those lies are being used to justify sending in the fucking military. When millions of Americans exercise their constitutional right to peaceful protest, Trump’s response is to fantasize about dumping shit on them and then claim they don’t exist.
This is a direct assault on the concept of shared reality itself, and it’s being used to justify authoritarian crackdowns on dissent. The Orwell quote at the top isn’t literary flourish—it’s a roadmap that Trump is following step by step.
The evidence of our eyes and ears tells us that millions of Americans peacefully demonstrated this weekend. Trump told us to reject that evidence and accept his version of reality where massive protests are “very small” and peaceful demonstrators are “terrorists” requiring military intervention.
We are watching the systematic destruction of the idea that objective reality exists, and the media’s response is to treat it like just another political disagreement, another political horse race over who came out of this looking the best. That’s not journalism—it’s complicity.
This is not a drill. This is happening now. When a president can lie about events witnessed by millions and use those lies to justify military action against peaceful protesters, we’ve crossed a line that democracies don’t typically come back from. The question isn’t whether Trump is lying—the evidence is incontrovertible. The question is whether our institutions, our media, and ultimately we as citizens are going to allow him to get away with it.
Because if we do, then Orwell’s warning will have become our reality, and “the lie will have passed into history and become truth.”
Whoops! Some Jeep Wrangler 4xe hybrid owners were stranded after the company pushed out a buggy software update that prevented the vehicles from running, and, at least according to one Reddit poster, resulted in the vehicle shutting off in the middle of a highway:
“I was driving 65 on the left lane of the highway when my car started slowing down. It started saying to put it into P and to push to start. The car was off and I couldn’t accelerate! I almost crashed trying to get onto the right lane shoulder 4 lanes over before it completely stopped and caused a huge accident.”
Several additional Reddit posters made unverified claims that they experienced similar problems.
According to Ars Technica, the company pushed out an uncooked telematics update for the Jeep Uconnect infotainment system last Friday. Major Friday updates are generally not the best choice given a reduction in support staff for major companies over the weekend (see: last year’s massive Crowdstrike outage).
Jeep pulled the update, but not before an unknown number of customers installed it. Jeep parent company Stellantis’ social engagement team told 4xe owners at a Jeep forum to ignore the update pop-up if they haven’t installed it yet, and avoid using either hybrid or electric mode if they had:
“Earlier today we had success with customers not using hybrid or electric mode. Please exercise extreme caution this evening if you have completed the update. If you have NOT completed the update and see the pop-up, please continue deferring so that the update does not go through. For a telematics box module update, you can defer infinitely, and it will expire within 30 days.”
