Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir

from the surveillance-streisand dept

If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it.

And yet, here we are.

Palantir Technologies, the infamous surveillance and data analytics giant chaired by Peter Thiel, has filed a lawsuit against Republik, a small Swiss online magazine, over a pair of investigative articles published in December. The articles, produced in collaboration with the investigative collective WAV, detailed a years-long, multi-ministry charm offensive by Palantir to sell its software to Swiss federal authorities. The campaign was, by all accounts, a comprehensive failure. Swiss agencies rejected Palantir at least nine times, with concerns ranging from data sovereignty to reputational risk to the simple fact that nobody needed the product.

The reporting was based on documents obtained through 59 freedom of information requests filed with Swiss federal agencies. The key finding was an internal Swiss Armed Forces report that concluded Palantir’s software posed unacceptable risks because sensitive military data could potentially be accessed by U.S. government intelligence agencies. As the Republik article details:

The authors of the report state that using Palantir’s software would increase dependence on a U.S. provider. It also poses the risk of losing data sovereignty and thereby national sovereignty.

Above all, however, the army’s staff experts say it remains unclear who has access to data shared with Palantir. The following sentence from the Swiss Army report is particularly relevant: “Palantir is a U.S.-based company, which means there is a possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services.”

As if it’s any sort of surprise that European governments are wary of betting on US tech companies with close ties to the US government. It’s not like reports of US spies co-opting US tech companies for surveillance efforts haven’t been front page news over the past twenty years. And now, this administration—with its willingness to antagonize everyone in Europe, and its close ties to Palantir and Thiel? It’s no freaking wonder that the Swiss government was like “yo, maybe pass.”

So how does a sophisticated data intelligence company respond to well-sourced investigative journalism based on official government documents?

By suing the journalists, of course.

But here’s the thing that makes this even more absurd: Palantir isn’t even claiming the articles are false. The company isn’t suing for defamation. It isn’t seeking damages. Instead, it’s invoking a Swiss “right of reply” statute, alleging that Republik didn’t give the company a sufficient opportunity to respond. Palantir wants the court to force the magazine to publish lengthy counter-statements to each article.

According to the FT:

Palantir’s lawsuit, filed in January, is not seeking damages or making libel claims against Republik, but instead alleges that the company was not given sufficient right to reply under Swiss media law. The company objects to Republik’s presentation of the public documents and believes its right to reply has been wrongfully denied.

….

Republik’s managing director Katharina Hemmer said Palantir had wanted the magazine to publish a very lengthy counterstatement to each article. Republik believed the proposed statements did not fairly address or rebut the reporting, she said, adding that the magazine stands by its reporting.

To which I say: good. Because Palantir’s demand here is absurd. Oh boo-fucking-hoo, the big defense contractor didn’t like the coverage? Pull on your big boy pants and get over it. Switzerland’s right of reply law exists so people can correct factual errors, not so corporations can force publications to run PR copy because they didn’t like the tone of accurate, document-based reporting.

And it’s worth noting: Palantir has already used other avenues to respond. The company published a blog post complaining that the Republik article “paints a false and misleading picture” and “hinders important discussions about the modernization of European software.” They’ve got the platform. If Palantir wants to push back on the story, they have many methods of doing so. Hell, they can do so on X any time they want—on what Musk and company like to call the global town square for free speech.

But that’s apparently not enough. Instead, a multibillion-dollar American defense and intelligence contractor is hauling a small independent Swiss magazine into court, not because anything the magazine published was wrong, but because Palantir wants to force the publication to run its talking points under legal compulsion.

Compelled speech isn’t free speech, guys. And this is nothing more than a blatant intimidation campaign to frighten away reporters from reporting the truth about Palantir.

The European Federation of Journalists has called this exactly what it is: a SLAPP suit—a strategic lawsuit against public participation, designed to use the weight and cost of litigation to intimidate and punish journalists for doing their jobs.

“The investigation conducted by WAV and Republik into Palantir is largely based on official documents that journalists were able to access thanks to Swiss freedom of information law,” notes EFJ President Maja Sever. “The legal action brought by this powerful multinational firm against a small Swiss media start-up is, in our view, an attempt at intimidation aimed at discouraging any critical analysis of Palantir’s activities.”

And in case you didn’t catch the irony: the Swiss military rejected Palantir in part because of fears about a heavy-handed American entity with uncomfortably close ties to U.S. intelligence. Palantir’s response to the reporting of that rejection? Behave like a heavy-handed American entity trying to bully a small foreign publication into submission. If anyone at Palantir had run this decision through their own pattern-recognition software, you’d hope a few red flags would have popped up.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit has done exactly what anyone with a passing familiarity with the Streisand Effect could have predicted. The original Republik articles were about the Swiss government politely but firmly declining Palantir’s advances—an embarrassing but relatively contained story.

Now, thanks to the lawsuit, the story has gone international. The Financial Times is covering it. The European Federation of Journalists is covering it. A UK member of parliament has already cited the Republik investigation during a debate on British defense contracts with Palantir, using the story to suggest that the British government “pivot away” from Palantir.

The Republik investigation itself is genuinely worth reading, and not just because Palantir desperately doesn’t want you to.

It paints a picture of a company that spent seven years working every angle to get Swiss federal agencies to buy its products—approaching the Federal Chancellery during COVID, pitching the Federal Office of Public Health on contact tracing, presenting anti-money laundering software to financial regulators, making repeated runs at the military—and getting turned away at every door. Sometimes embarrassingly, such as the Federal Statistical Office director apparently just ignoring Palantir’s outreach entirely.

For a company that brags about its ability to “optimize the kill chain” and whose CEO once told investors that “Palantir is here to disrupt… and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and occasionally kill them,” getting politely rejected by the Swiss statistical office has to sting a little.

But suing the journalists who reported on it? When the entire basis of your lawsuit is “we want you to publish our talking points” rather than “anything you published was wrong,” it makes pretty clear you don’t actually have a substantive response to the reporting. If Palantir thinks the picture is false, the remedy is to demonstrate that the documents are wrong—not to drag a small magazine through expensive litigation until it capitulates or goes broke.

Seriously, how fucking fragile are the egos in the Palantir executive suite that they can’t handle a bit of mildly embarrassing reporting? Grow up.

A Zurich court is expected to rule on the case in March. Whatever the outcome, Palantir has already lost the only contest that matters: the one for public perception. For a company that sells the ability to see around corners, they apparently never thought to search “The Streisand Effect.”

Filed Under: chilling effects, free speech, journalism, right to reply, swiss government, switzerland
Companies: palantir, republik

Trump FCC Demands ‘Pro-America’ Media Programming All Summer Long

from the dear-leader dept

Most of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr’s time lately has been split between destroying all consumer protection oversight and threatening media companies with fake investigations if they’re not appropriately deferential to our mad idiot king. The latter has tended to overshadow the former, but it’s all been an ugly combination of authoritarianism, regulatory capture, and rank corruption.

But every so often Carr pauses to do other stuff to show daddy Trump he’s a very good boy. Like his latest announcement that he’s creating a new “Pledge America Campaign” ahead of the country’s 250th birthday this July 4th. The campaign features a demand by Carr that U.S. media outlets make sure they’re airing “pro-America” programming through the summer holiday:

“Consistent with their longstanding public interest obligations, America’s broadcasters play a key role in educating, informing, and entertaining viewers and listeners all across America, and they are particularly well suited to air programming that is responsive to the needs and
interests of their local communities.

The Pledge America Campaign enables broadcasters to lend their voices in support of Task Force 250 and the celebration of America’s 250th birthday by airing patriotic, pro-America content that celebrates the American journey and inspires its citizens by highlighting the historic accomplishments of this great nation from our founding through the Trump Administration today.”

This would obviously be far less ominous if Carr hadn’t spent much of the last year trampling all over the First Amendment, trying to censor comedians who make fun of Trump, threatening talk shows with fake investigations if they’re not friendly to Republicans, and abusing the FCC merger approval process to try and force large companies to be more racist and sexist.

While this is framed as a “voluntary initiative,” Carr’s recent history of launching costly and pointless investigations into companies that aren’t dutifully obedient lurks quietly in the background. You can clearly infer that Carr defines “programming that is responsive to the needs and interests of their local communities” as programming that kisses Republican ass and ignores criticism of Republican policy.

You’ll notice that Carr specifically singles out broadcasters because he’s trying to abuse the FCC’s public interest standard control over “publicly owned” airwaves:

“If Carr’s pledge is truly voluntary, there would be no reason to limit it to broadcasters, said Harold Feld, a longtime telecom attorney who is senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “If this were genuinely intended as voluntary, and genuinely about celebrating America, there is no reason to limit this to broadcasters,” Feld told Ars. “Cable operators are equally free to celebrate America, as are podcasters for that matter.”

The Trump FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner (the authoritarians refuse to fill the other vacant commission seat), Anna Gomez, had this to say about the campaign over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website:

Carr’s other effort to “empower local communities” has involved destroying popular media consolidation limits so that Trump-friendly broadcasters like Sinclair can merge and become more powerful than ever. It’s really not subtle how badly the MAGA movement wants a North Korea, Hungary, or Russia style media that delivers nothing but 24/7 agitprop blindly praising dear leader.

They’ll keep pushing toward their goal until they run into something other than soft pudding in response.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, agitprop, anna gomez, authortarian, brendan carr, broadcasters, consolidation, donald trump, fcc, media, pledge america campaign, propaganda

Administration Says DHS Can Demand Social Media Info From Legal Immigrants And US Citizens

from the surveillance-creeps dept

Well, we always knew it would come to this.

In a blow to the First Amendment and privacy, the Trump administration last week approved a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) plan to collect social media handles from people applying to change their immigration status. The new requirement, which was approved for one year, comes after the administration has openly declared its intent to use social media handles to screen people for speech it dislikes.

That’s from the Brennan Center report published earlier this month. What was once limited to people seeking visas, asylum, or work permits is now being foisted on people who have been here legally for years, including US citizens.

Anyone could have seen this coming. The DHS has gradually expanded its biometric program from targeting foreign arrivals at US airports to pretty much everyone who utilizes an international airport, even while traveling entirely domestically. The end goal is biometric scanners in every US airport for no real reason other than the DHS wants to do this.

This sure as shit doesn’t sound like America:

The more than 3 million people applying each year for immigration status changes — such as seeking work or travel authorization, a green card, or citizenship — will now be required to give the government their social media handles. In some cases, they must also provide the handles of their young children, spouses, and parents, many of whom are U.S. citizens, green card holders, or are otherwise in the United States legally. The new rules will require them to submit any social media handles they have used over the past five years, whether used in a personal or professional capacity or even on behalf of an organization. This covers platforms including Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube as well as messaging services such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and GroupMe.

The underlying message is clear: if you want to live in America, you have to play by the rules the administration sets down. To be part of Trump’s version of the United States, you are expected to constantly run towards goalposts that keep moving deeper into the surveillance state. It’s all very reminiscent of every authoritarian regime that knew the only way to stay in power was to keep increasing the size of the jackboot.

This would be terrible enough in isolation. But this comes on top of the DHS sending subpoenas to tech companies in hopes of unmasking social media account owners who have done nothing more than engage in protected speech. And that’s on top of multiple moves made by the DHS and other federal agencies to nudge people towards engaging in self-censorship or “self-deportation.”

And, just in case you might think the government is too clumsy and inefficient to turn this into the oppression it clearly desires it to be, may I remind you that ICE, CBP, and the DHS itself have access (or are seeking to acquire) multiple forms of always-on social media surveillance tools to keep tabs on what this administration considers to be “anti-American” sentiment. That it’s actually “anti-this-fucking-administration” sentiment makes no difference to the Administrator in Chief, who not only thinks he’s a king, but expects everyone from cabinet members to taxpayers to treat him as one.

If there’s any silver lining here, it’s that this sort of thing doesn’t really work. As the Brennan Center report points out, the administration should already know this. Trump was briefed back in 2016 that social media “vetting” rarely returned anything of value in terms of national security. These findings were reiterated in a report delivered by government officials in 2021, who stated social media disclosure “added no value” to existing vetting efforts.

But things have changed. Trump, in particular, doesn’t actually care whether or not it adds any national security value. He only cares that it might help him hunt down his critics and/or encourage them to speak up less loudly and/or frequently.

In reviving the proposal this year, USCIS said that gathering social media handles is necessary to comply with the administration’s new policy of screening people in the United States for “hostile attitudes” or “hateful ideology” toward Americans or U.S. culture and institutions. 

Oh, if only irony meant anything. The people with the most “hostile attitude” towards Americans and American culture and institutions are the MAGA fiends running the nation. This is nothing more than a particularly right-wing take on “better red than dead.” With any luck, this version of the GOP will get kicked to the curb forever, replaced by better people who will never abuse the expansive powers the departing despots leave behind.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, border patrol, cbp, dhs, ice, oppression, social media, surveillance state, trump administration, uscis

Texas Spent Years Screaming About ‘Snowflakes’ On Campus. Now It’s Building The World’s Biggest Safe Space.

from the triggered-much? dept

For the better part of a decade, conservative politicians—and Texas politicians in particular—have been absolutely apoplectic about the state of free speech on college campuses. You’ve heard the greatest hits: students are coddled snowflakes who can’t handle the real world, trigger warnings are destroying intellectual rigor, safe spaces are turning universities into daycare centers, and the real threat to America is that professors might have opinions that lean left.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott was so concerned about this supposed crisis that he signed a campus free speech bill in 2019. The whole thing was framed as a brave stand for open inquiry and the marketplace of ideas. As state Senator Joan Huffman said at the time:

“Our college students, our future leaders, they should be exposed to all ideas, I don’t care how liberal they are or how conservative they are.”

What a beautiful sentiment. Truly inspiring stuff.

So naturally, the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents just voted unanimously to ensure students can graduate without being exposed to ideas that might make someone uncomfortable.

The University of Texas System’s Board of Regents unanimously approved Thursday a rule requiring its universities to ensure students can graduate without studying “unnecessary controversial subjects,” despite warnings it could leave them less prepared for the real world.

The rule also requires faculty to disclose in their syllabi the topics they plan to cover and adhere to the plan, and says that when courses include controversial issues, instructors must ensure a “broad and balanced approach” to the discussion.

If you had described this policy to any Texas Republican in 2018 and told them a bunch of liberal professors had come up with it, they would have been on Fox News within the hour screaming about the death of Western civilization. The words “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and “cancel culture” would have been deployed at machine-gun pace all surrounded with high-minded claims about “free speech” and “academic freedom.”

But when it’s governor-appointed regents doing it? When the people being “protected” from uncomfortable ideas are conservative students and donors rather than marginalized communities? Well, then it’s just good governance.

The truly revealing moment came from Board Chair Kevin Eltife, who was asked about the fact that the policy doesn’t bother to define what “controversial” means or what a “broad and balanced approach” actually looks like. His response should be printed on a plaque and hung in the Museum of Political Cowardice:

“We are in difficult times,” he said. “Vagueness can be our friend.”

Ah yes. Vagueness. The chairman of a board governing one of the nation’s largest public university systems—more than 260,000 students across nine campuses—is openly admitting that the entire point of the policy is that nobody knows what it means. He’s saying the quiet part loud: the vagueness is a feature, not a bug.

And of course it is. Because when you leave “controversial” undefined, you don’t need to go through the messy business of actually banning specific topics, which might allow everyone to call you out on your hypocrisy and highlight the subjects you hope to censor.

You just create a system where every professor has to wonder, before every lecture, whether today’s lesson is the one that gets them hauled before an administrator. The chilling effect does all the work for you.

As UT-Austin physics professor Peter Onyisi pointed out during public testimony:

“Will they (administrators) be experts in the relevant disciplines or will they just seek to avoid unpleasant publicity?”

We all know the answer to that question. When a policy gives administrators the power to decide what counts as “unnecessarily controversial” without any definition whatsoever, administrators are going to do what administrators always do: minimize risk. That means the most easily-offended person in the room—or more precisely, the most politically connected complainant—effectively gets a veto over what gets taught. It’s a heckler’s veto laundered through bureaucratic process.

There are legitimate debates about how universities should approach controversial material in the classroom. But any time anyone has brought any of those up for serious debate over the last few decades, they were mocked as “woke snowflakes” who need their “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

This is the exact dynamic that conservatives spent years claiming to oppose. The whole argument against “political correctness” and “cancel culture” was supposedly that small groups of oversensitive people shouldn’t be able to dictate what ideas are permissible in public discourse. The argument against trigger warnings was that adults should be able to encounter difficult material without having their hands held. The argument against safe spaces was that the university should be a place of intellectual challenge, not comfort.

Now Texas has built a taxpayer-funded safe space spanning nine campuses and four medical centers, complete with government-mandated trigger warnings (the syllabus disclosure requirement) and an institutionalized process for anyone who finds course material too upsetting to lodge a complaint. How very snowflake of Texas. The only difference here is who gets to be upset.

And then there’s the “broad and balanced approach” requirement, which sounds perfectly reasonable until you think about it for more than three seconds. What does “balance” look like when you’re teaching about the Holocaust? About slavery? The “germ theory” of disease? If a history professor is covering Jim Crow, are they now required to present the segregationist perspective with equal weight in the name of “balance”?

That sounds absurd, and it is. When you refuse to define “controversial” and then mandate “balance” for anything that falls under that undefined umbrella, you’ve created a system where any topic with a political dimension—which is basically every topic in the humanities, social sciences, and increasingly the natural sciences—becomes a minefield.

Allen Liu, policy counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said it could lead to “viewpoint discrimination” and disproportionately affect Black students and faculty by discouraging teaching about slavery, segregation and other subjects central to Black history.

To which, I would imagine, many of the UT Board of Regents would quietly admit among friends “well, yeah, that’s the fucking point.”

It’s also worth noting the broader context in which this is happening:

The vote comes a week after UT-Austin announced it will consolidate its African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments into a new Social and Cultural Analysis department. More than 800 students are pursuing majors, minors and graduate degrees in the affected programs.

Ah yes. Basically anything that is not white European heterosexual male focused, all gets shoved into one “those other people over there” department.

Meanwhile, the school is absolutely expanding programs that align with a very particular set of priorities. See if you can figure out which ones:

Last year, UT-Austin was also one of nine universities offered preferential access to federal funding in exchange for agreeing to ensure departments reflect a mix of perspectives and promote civic values and Western civilization, among other requirements.

Some students argue that even without formally signing the agreement, UT-Austin is already moving in that direction. Alfonso Ayala III, a doctoral student in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at UT-Austin, pointed to the university expanding the conservative-backed School of Civic Leadership as his department loses autonomy.

“It’s hard to understand this as anything other than ideological and political,” Ayala said.

No shit.

And this is just the latest chapter in what has become a remarkable saga of Texas Republicans dismantling the very speech protections they once championed. As we wrote about last year, that 2019 campus free speech law—the one that was supposed to ensure all viewpoints could be heard—suddenly became a problem when pro-Palestinian protesters started using it.

Texas Republicans couldn’t have that.

The original 2019 law was passed specifically because Texas A&M had canceled a white nationalist rally and Texas Southern University had scrapped a conservative speaker’s appearance. The legislature was furious. Free speech must be protected!

But when the same protections enabled pro-Palestinian encampments, suddenly the legislature couldn’t pass restrictions fast enough. New rules on where you can protest, bans on amplification devices during class hours, prohibitions on overnight encampments, restrictions on wearing masks. All the things that were never a problem in the five years between the law’s passage and the moment students started saying things Texas Republicans didn’t want to hear.

So let’s trace the arc here. In 2019, the Texas legislature mandated that universities must allow protests and controversial speakers because free speech is sacred. In 2025, the Texas legislature rolled that back because the wrong people were speaking. And now in 2026, the UT Board of Regents is mandating that professors can’t even teach “unnecessarily controversial” material in their own classrooms—a phrase so deliberately vague that the board chair openly celebrates its ambiguity.

Senator Huffman, who authored the 2019 free speech law and proclaimed that students “should be exposed to all ideas,” voted in favor of restricting protest rights last year and appears to have raised no objection to the new UT policy. Let’s go out on a limb here and say it: the 2019 law was never about ensuring exposure to all ideas. It was about ensuring that a specific set of speakers (white nationalists) saying a specific set of things (racist shit) would have access to university campuses. Once the same mechanism started working for the “wrong” people, it became disposable.

The UT regents will tell you this policy is about “balance.” That it’s about making sure professors stick to their areas of expertise and don’t wander off into political editorializing. But if that were the actual concern, you’d write a clear, specific policy. You’d define your terms. You’d create transparent standards that professors could understand and follow. You would absolutely not describe your own vagueness as a strategic asset.

“Vagueness can be our friend” is what you say when the goal is discretionary power—the ability to punish the speech you don’t like while leaving the speech you do like untouched.

For all the years of rhetoric about snowflakes and safe spaces and the coddled minds of American youth, the actual policy goal was never intellectual rigor. It was control. Control over which ideas get aired, which histories get taught, which perspectives get treated as legitimate, and which get quietly filed under “unnecessarily controversial” and removed from the curriculum.

The people who spent a decade mocking trigger warnings just voted unanimously to impose the biggest trigger warning in the history of American higher education: Warning: This university has been certified free of unnecessary controversy by the State of Texas.

I guess everything really is bigger in Texas. Including the censorship.

Filed Under: academic freedom, cancel culture, controversial topics, free speech, greg abbott, joan hoffman, kevin eltife, safe spaces, texas, vagueness
Companies: university of texas

Yes, Section 230 Should Apply Equally To Algorithmic Recommendations

from the it-won't-do-what-you-think-if-you-remove-it dept

If you’ve spent any time in my Section 230 myth-debunking guide, you know that most bad takes on the law come from people who haven’t read it. But lately I keep running into a different kind of bad take—one that often comes from people who have read the law, understand the basics passably well, and still say: “Sure, keep 230 as is, but carve out algorithmically recommended content.”

Unlike the usual nonsense, this one is often (though not always) offered in good faith. That makes it worth engaging with seriously.

It’s still wrong.

Let’s start with the basics: as we’ve described at great length, the real benefits of Section 230 are its procedural protections, which make it so that vexatious cases get tossed out at the earliest (i.e., cheapest) stage. That makes it possible for sites that host third party content to do so in a way that they won’t get sued out of existence any time anyone has a complaint about someone else’s content being on the site. This important distinction gets lost in almost every 230 debate, but it’s important. Because if the lawsuits that removing 230 protections would enable would still eventually win on First Amendment grounds, the only thing you’re doing in removing 230 protections is making lawsuits impossibly expensive for individuals and smaller providers, without doing any real damage to large companies, who can survive those lawsuits easily.

And that takes us to the key point: removing Section 230 for algorithmic recommendations would only lead to vexatious lawsuits that will fail.

But what about [specific bad thing]?

Before diving into the legal analysis, let’s engage with the strongest version of this argument. Proponents of carving out algorithmic recommendations typically aren’t imagining ordinary defamation suits. They’re worried about something more specific: cases where an algorithm itself arguably causes harm through its recommendation patterns—radicalization pipelines, engagement-driven amplification of dangerous content, recommendation systems that push vulnerable users toward self-harm.

The theory goes something like this: maybe the underlying content is protected speech, but the act of recommending it—especially when the algorithm was designed to maximize engagement and the company knew this could cause harm—should create liability, usually as some sort of “products liability” type complaint.

It’s a more sophisticated argument than “platforms are publishers.” But it still fails, for reasons I’ll explain below. The short version: a recommendation is an opinion, opinions are protected speech, and the First Amendment doesn’t carve out “opinions expressed via algorithm” as a special category.

A short history of algorithmic feeds

To understand why removing 230 from algorithmic recommendations would be such a mistake, it helps to remember the apparently forgotten history of how we got here. In the pre-social media 2000s, “information overload” was the panic of the moment. Much of the discussion centered on the “new” technology of RSS feeds, and there were plenty of articles decrying too much information flooding into our feed readers. People weren’t worried about algorithms—they were desperate for them. Articles breathlessly anticipated magical new filtering systems that might finally surface what you actually wanted to see.

The most prominent example was Netflix, back when it was still shipping DVDs. Because there were so many movies you could rent, Netflix built one of the first truly useful recommendation algorithms—one that would take your rental history and suggest things you might like. The entire internet now looks like that, but in the mid-2000s, this was revolutionary.

Netflix’s approach was so novel that they famously offered $1 million to anyone who could improve their algorithm by 10%. We followed that contest for years as it twisted and turned until a winner was finally announced in 2009. Incredibly, Netflix never actually implemented the winning algorithm—but the broader lesson was clear: recommendation algorithms were valuable, and people wanted them.

As social media grew, the “information overload” panic of the blog+RSS era faded, precisely because platforms added recommendation algorithms to surface content users were most likely to enjoy. The algorithms weren’t imposed on users against their will—they were the answer to users’ prayers.

Public opinion only seemed to shift on “algorithms” after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Many people wanted something to blame, and “social media algorithms” was a convenient excuse.

Algorithmic feeds: good or bad?

Many people claim they just want a chronological feed, but studies consistently show the vast majority of people prefer algorithmic recommendations, because they surface more of what users actually want, compared to chronological feeds.

That said, it’s not as simple as “algorithms good.” There’s evidence that algorithms optimized purely for engagement can push emotionally charged political content that users don’t actually want (something Elon Musk might take notice of). But there’s also evidence that chronological feeds expose users to more untrustworthy content, because algorithms often filter out garbage.

So, algorithms can be good or bad depending on what they’re optimized for and who controls them. That’s the real question: will any given regulatory approach give more power to users, to companies, or to the government?

Keep that frame in mind. Because removing 230 protections for algorithmic recommendations shifts power away from users and toward incumbents and litigants.

The First Amendment still exists

As mentioned up top, the real role of Section 230 is providing a procedural benefit to get vexatious lawsuits tossed well before (and at much lower cost) they would get tossed anyway, under the First Amendment. With Section 230, you can get a case dismissed for somewhere in the range of $50k to $100k (maybe up to $250k with appeals and such). If you have to rely on the First Amendment, it’s up in the millions of dollars (probably $5 to $10 million).

And, the crux of this is that any online service sued over an algorithmic recommendation, even for something horrible, would almost certainly win on First Amendment grounds.

Because here’s the key point: a recommendation feed is a website’s opinion of what they think you want to see. And an opinion is protected speech. Even if you think it’s a bad or dangerous opinion. One thing that the US has been pretty clear on is that opinions are protected speech.

Saying that an internet service can be held liable for giving its opinion on “what we think you’d like to see” would be earth shatteringly problematic. As partly discussed above, the modern internet today relies heavily on algorithms recommending stuff, giving opinions. Every search result is just that, an opinion.

This is why the “algorithms are different” argument fails. Yes, there’s a computer involved. Yes, the recommendation emerges from machine learning rather than a human editor’s conscious decision. But the output is still an expression of judgment: “Based on what we know, we think you’ll want to see this.” That’s an opinion. The First Amendment doesn’t distinguish between opinions formed by editorial meetings and opinions formed by trained models.

In the earlier internet era, there were companies that sued Google because they didn’t like how their own sites appeared (or didn’t appear) in Google search results. The E-Ventures v. Google case here is instructive. Google determined that E-Venture’s “SEO” techniques were spammy, and de-indexed all its sites. E-Ventures sued. Google (rightly) raised a 230 defense which (surprisingly!) a court rejected.

But the case went on longer, and after lots more money on lawyers was spent, Google did prevail on First Amendment grounds.

This is exactly what we’re discussing here. Google search ranking is an algorithmic recommendation engine, and in this one case a court (initially) rejected a 230 defense, causing everyone to spend more money… to get to the same basic result in the long run. The First Amendment protects a website using algorithms to express an opinion over what it thinks you’ll want… or not want.

Who has agency?

This brings us back to the steelman argument I mentioned above: what about cases where an algorithm recommends something genuinely dangerous?

Our legal system has a clear answer, and it’s grounded in agency. A recommendation feed is not hypnotic. If an algorithm surfaces content suggesting you do something illegal or dangerous, you still have to make the choice to do the illegal or dangerous thing. The algorithm doesn’t control you. You have agency.

But there’s a stronger legal foundation here too. Courts have consistently found that recommending something dangerous is still protected by the First Amendment, particularly when the recommender lacks specific knowledge that what they’re recommending is harmful.

The Winter v. GP Putnam’s Sons case is instructive here. The publisher of a mushroom encyclopedia included recommendations to eat mushrooms that turned out to be poisonous—very dangerous! But the court found the publisher wasn’t liable because they didn’t have specific knowledge of the dangerous recommendation. And crucially, the court noted that the “gentle tug of the First Amendment” would block any “duty of care” that would require publishers to verify the safety of everything they publish:

The plaintiffs urge this court that the publisher had a duty to investigate the accuracy of The Encyclopedia of Mushrooms’ contents. We conclude that the defendants have no duty to investigate the accuracy of the contents of the books it publishes. A publisher may of course assume such a burden, but there is nothing inherent in the role of publisher or the surrounding legal doctrines to suggest that such a duty should be imposed on publishers. Indeed the cases uniformly refuse to impose such a duty. Were we tempted to create this duty, the gentle tug of the First Amendment and the values embodied therein would remind us of the social costs.

Now, I should acknowledge that Winter was a products liability case involving a physical book, not a defamation or tortious speech case involving an algorithm, but almost all of the current cases challenging social media are self-styled as product liability cases to try (usually without success) to avoid the First Amendment. And that’s all they would be regarding algorithms as well.

The underlying principle remains the same whether you call it a products liability case or one officially about speech: the First Amendment bars requirements that publishing intermediaries must “investigate” whether everything they distribute is accurate or safe. The reason is obvious—such liability would prevent all sorts of things from getting published in the first place, putting a massive damper on speech.

Apply that principle to algorithmic recommendations, and the answer is clear. If a book publisher can’t be required to verify that every mushroom recommendation is safe, a platform can’t be required to verify that every algorithmically surfaced piece of content won’t lead someone to harm.

The end result?

So what would it mean if we somehow “removed 230 from algorithmic recommendations”?

Practically, it means that if companies have to rely on the First Amendment to win these cases, only the biggest companies can afford to do so. The Googles and Metas of the world can absorb $5-10 million in litigation costs. For smaller companies, those costs are existential. They’d either exit the market entirely or become hyper-aggressive about blocking content at the first hint of legal threat—not because the content is harmful, but because they can’t afford to find out in court.

The end result would be that the First Amendment still protects algorithmic recommendations—but only for the very biggest companies that can afford to defend that speech in court.

That means less competition. Fewer services that can recommend content at all. More consolidation of power in the hands of incumbents who already dominate the market.

Remember the frame from earlier: does this give more power to users, companies, or the government? Removing 230 from algorithmic recommendations doesn’t empower users. It doesn’t make platforms more “responsible.” It just makes it vastly harder for anyone other than the giant platforms to exist while also giving more power to governments, like the one currently run by Donald Trump, to define what things an algorithm can, and cannot, recommend.

Rather than diminishing the power of billionaires and incumbents, this would massively entrench it. The people pushing for this carve-out often think they’re fighting Big Tech. In reality, they’re fighting to build Big Tech a new moat.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, algorithmic feeds, algorithmic recommendations, algorithms, feeds, free speech, opinion, section 230

Bondi Bragged About Forcing Facebook To Censor Speech. Now FIRE Is Suing.

from the every-accusation-is-a-confession-tweeted-out dept

I seem to recall a years-long freakout among MAGA folks about the Biden administration pressuring social media companies to remove content. You may have heard about it.

Anyway. In unrelated news FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), has filed suit against Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on behalf of Kassandra Rosado, who ran a 100,000-member Facebook group called “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland,” and Mark Hodges, who created the Eyes Up app for documenting and archiving videos of ICE enforcement activity.

The suit alleges that Bondi and Noem coerced Facebook into disabling the group and coerced Apple into pulling the app from its App Store, in direct violation of the First Amendment. Because, you know, government officials calling social media companies and demanding they remove content is… bad.

The legal theory is straightforward, the evidence is overwhelming, and perhaps most remarkably, the government handed FIRE much of its case on a silver platter. In other words, for all the talk of “censorship” during the Biden admin, which went nowhere due to the lack of any actual evidence, here there not only is evidence, it was eagerly and readily provided by Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem themselves. In public. Repeatedly. Proudly.

Let’s start with the basics of what actually happened, because the facts here are almost embarrassingly damning. Kassandra Rosado created her Facebook group in January 2025, initially as a small community resource for Chicago-area small business owners trying to understand how ICE raids were affecting foot traffic and community events. The group grew to nearly 100,000 members by October as ICE enforcement escalated under what the agency publicly branded “Operation Midway Blitz.” According to the complaint, Facebook’s own moderators reviewed thousands of posts and found exactly five that violated its guidelines. Just five. Which Facebook removed, telling Rosado that participants acting badly don’t impact the group themselves (a good policy!).

Out of thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments that members of the Chicagoland group created through October 2025, Facebook’s own moderators found and removed only five purportedly violating its guidelines.

Even as to these five posts, Facebook advised Rosado that they were “participant violations” that “don’t hurt your group.” Facebook further explained: “Groups aren’t penalized when members or visitors break the rules without admin approval.”

Then, on October 12, 2025, Laura Loomer tagged Noem and Bondi in a social media post flagging the group. Loomer’s role here deserves a moment of appreciation. This is a person who sued Facebook, claiming it was literally RICO to moderate her posts. Who sued all the major tech companies, arguing that content moderation violated her First Amendment rights. Her entire public identity has been built on the premise that private platforms moderating her speech is unconstitutional censorship.

And here she is, tagging federal officials to demand they force Facebook to suppress other people’s speech. The First Amendment, which constrains government action, apparently only matters when Loomer is the one being moderated. When she wants someone else silenced, she calls in the actual state.

The next day, a DOJ source confirmed to Loomer that DOJ had contacted Facebook to demand removal.

That same day, Facebook disabled the entire group. Then Bondi posted on social media claiming credit:

That’s the AG admitting to a pretty clear First Amendment violation. Not in a leaked email discovered through litigation. Not in a deposition. On X, taking credit. Proudly.

Today following outreach from @thejusticedept, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target @ICEgov agents in Chicago.

…. The Department of Justice will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.

Noem piled on with her own post, crediting the DOJ for the takedown.

That’s the Secretary of Homeland Security saying:

Anti-ICE radicals are using social media apps to dox, threaten, and terrorize the brave men and women of ICE and their families.

Today, thanks to @POTUS Trump’s @TheJusticeDept under the leadership of @AGPamBondi, Facebook removed a large page being used to dox and threaten our ICE agents in Chicago.

These officers risk their lives every day arresting murderers, rapists, and gang members to protect our homeland. Platforms like Facebook must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing of our @ICEgov law enforcement.

We will prosecute those who dox our agents to the fullest extent of the law.

The Eyes Up situation is even more instructive. Mark Hodges built Eyes Up specifically as a documentation and archiving tool for videos of ICE enforcement activity. The app uses manual moderation—meaning Hodges or other moderators personally review every video before it becomes publicly accessible.

The complaint specifically notes that:

Eyes Up is not useful for tracking ICE location or movement in real time. Because Hodges or other moderators manually review each video before it becomes publicly available, any ICE officers would be long gone by the time a video is posted.

Apple had independently reviewed and approved Eyes Up for the App Store in August 2025, raising no concerns about the content. On October 3, Apple removed it anyway—citing “information provided by law enforcement” that the app violated its guidelines on “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content.”

Bondi again made no effort to be subtle about DOJ’s role, gleefully telling Fox News:

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.”

She later boasted at a roundtable that:

“We had Apple and Google take down the ICEBlock apps.”

For years, MAGA world has treated Murthy v. Missouri as a foundational text of government overreach—proof that the Biden administration ran a sophisticated censorship operation by pressuring social media companies to remove content. Jim Jordan convened hearings. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, though MAGA folks love to ignore or downplay what the Supreme Court decision actually said about the case. The argument, reduced to its essence, was that White House officials sending emails asking platforms to review posts against their existing policies constituted unconstitutional “jawboning.”

The Supreme Court threw the case out because the plaintiffs couldn’t prove that the government’s communications actually caused the platforms to take action. The majority opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett found that the platforms were making their own independent decisions, often rejecting the government’s requests, and that the plaintiffs couldn’t trace any specific content removal directly to government coercion. The evidence, the Court concluded, just wasn’t there. Barrett’s opinion uses the phrase “no evidence” five times. And the little evidence plaintiffs did offer? She called it out as “unfortunately appear[ing] to be clearly erroneous.”

Bondi and Noem have now done something remarkable: they have provided, entirely on their own initiative and through public statements made to friendly media outlets, every single piece of evidence that was missing in Murthy.

Traceability? Bondi literally said “We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app—and Apple did so.” Coercion versus mere persuasion? The complaint details how Noem announced she was “working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute” app developers, how Bondi told Fox News that ICEBlock’s creator “better watch out” because the speech was “not protected,” and how these explicit criminal threats preceded the removals.

The NRA v. Vullo standard, which the Supreme Court articulated just before the Murthy ruling (on a case they heard the same day as Murthy), holds clearly that a government official cannot use “the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression” through third-party intermediaries. The complaint quotes this directly. There is no ambiguity here about what happened or who caused it.

In Murthy, investigators spent years poring over internal communications trying to find proof that the government’s requests had actually caused the platforms to act. And found nothing concrete. Here, the government’s own press releases and Fox News appearances serve that function. You don’t need subpoenas or discovery depositions when the Attorney General is posting on X to take credit.

The complaint captures the legal significance:

Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem want to control what the public can see, hear, or say about ICE operations. Wielding the power of federal criminal law, they coerced Facebook to disable Rosado’s Facebook group and coerced Apple to remove Kreisau Group’s Eyes Up app from its App Store. That’s unconstitutional. The First Amendment prohibits the government from coercing companies to censor protected speech. NRA v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 190–91 (2024) (“[A] government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.”). Without this Court’s intervention, this unconstitutional coercion will continue.

That last line is important as well, because a key piece of Murthy was that to get an injunction, the plaintiffs had to show that these suppression efforts were likely to continue. That wasn’t there in Murthy. But here, we (again) have Noem and Bondi screaming to the heavens that they’re going to keep doing this.

The “officer safety” justification doesn’t survive contact with the actual facts. An app that archives manually reviewed videos of past ICE activity cannot be used to track officers in real time. The complaint notes that Apple had previously approved the app with full knowledge of what it did, then reversed course only after receiving “information from law enforcement”—which appears to mean a phone call from Bondi’s DOJ:

Apple cited its app review guideline 1.1.1, which prohibits “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.”

Apple had never previously stated that Eyes Up purportedly violated guideline 1.1.1 or included “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content.”

In fact, when Apple had independently reviewed Kreisau Group’s application to include Eyes Up in the App Store in August 2025, Apple did not conclude that Eyes Up violated guideline 1.1.1. During that review, Eyes Up was already available on its website, and Apple had full knowledge of the purpose of Eyes Up, of actual videos available on it, and of how it worked (including its location features). Apple flagged some unrelated issues, which Kreisau Group resolved before Apple approved the app. Apple raised no concern that Eyes Up contained “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited” content in violation of guideline 1.1.1.

This appears to be the exact opposite of the situation in Murthy, where tech companies frequently rejected government requests if they didn’t violate policies. Here, it appears that, under pressure from Bondi, Apple changed its interpretation of the policies in a weak pretext to justify the government-led censorship.

And it was so clearly pretext:

Apple’s transparency reports show that from 2022 to 2024, it almost never removed apps for “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited” content under guideline 1.1.1. Apple removed only three apps by US-based creators under guideline 1.1.1 in 2022, four apps in 2023, and none in 2024.

Eyes Up was not tracking anyone. It was creating an archive of documented government behavior in public spaces, exactly the kind of activity the First Amendment—and the Seventh Circuit’s precedent in ACLU v. Alvarez—exists to protect.

The viewpoint discrimination point in the complaint is also notable. The government targeted speech that was critical of ICE operations, while ICE itself actively posts on social media about its own enforcement activities, including specific locations and neighborhoods:

Bondi and Noem are not suppressing laudatory speech about ICE’s operations. ICE’s own social media accounts, for example, frequently share videos and photos of ICE arrests and other information indicating where enforcement operations occurred. Bondi and Noem only target such speech, like with Rosado’s Facebook group, that shares information about ICE operations in ways that are critical of those operations or that defendants perceive as such.

The same footage, in the government’s hands, becomes a success story, which make it textbook viewpoint discrimination.

Which brings us back to the political context that makes this so extraordinary to watch.

The people who spent years insisting that Biden’s White House committed the gravest sin against free speech in living memory by asking Twitter to look at some posts about COVID vaccines are, by and large, completely untroubled by Pam Bondi going on Fox News to brag about forcing Apple to remove an app.

The people who elevated Murthy v. Missouri into a constitutional crisis, who convened hearings and issued subpoenas and demanded that the “censorship industrial complex” be dismantled, have found absolutely nothing to say about a case where the Attorney General of the United States explicitly announced that she demanded a tech company remove an application and the company complied within hours.

Their position was, of course, never really about the principle. It was always about which direction the government’s thumb was pressing. When the Biden administration asked platforms to review COVID misinformation posts against their own existing policies—and platforms rejected the vast majority of those requests—that was tyranny.

When Bondi demands Apple remove an app and Apple does it the same day, that’s apparently just law enforcement doing its job.

The lawsuit asks for declaratory relief and injunctions preventing Bondi and Noem from continuing to coerce Apple and Facebook into suppressing this speech.

These irreparable harms will continue absent declaratory and prospective injunctive relief.

At no point have Bondi or Noem backtracked from their position that any involvement in ICE-tracking speech exposes an individual or business to criminal prosecution, nor from their demands that Apple and Facebook suppress such speech.

Accordingly, Bondi and Noem’s threats continue to hang over Apple and Facebook, who would risk adverse government action were they to reinstate Kreisau Group’s app or Rosado’s Facebook group

FIRE’s complaint frames the stakes with appropriate directness:

Our First Amendment right to speak “to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.” City of Houston v. Hill, 482 U.S. 451, 462–63 (1987). Plaintiffs bring this case to preserve our country’s fundamental character as a free nation, asking this Court to protect the basic First Amendment right to share information about our government and its activities.

The MAGA world spent four years constructing an elaborate theory of shadow-government censorship—one that required stretching reality to its breaking point, cherry-picked emails, and ultimately couldn’t survive Supreme Court scrutiny—when the actual government censorship they always claimed to fear was apparently just one phone call from the AG’s office away. They finally got the “coercive jawboning” they warned everyone about. Bondi and Noem are doing it out in the open, on television, and bragging about it in official social media posts.

And the free speech warriors have nothing to say.

Which tells you everything you need to know about what they actually believed all along. The principle was never “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove speech.” The principle was “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove our speech.” Now that the thumb is pressing in the direction they like, the constitutional crisis has mysteriously resolved itself.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, eyes up, free speech, ice sightings, iceblock, jawboning, kasandra rosado, kristi noem, laura loomer, mark hodges, pam bondi
Companies: apple, facebook, fire, meta

Newsmax Didn’t Like Its NewsGuard Rating, So The FTC Attacked NewsGuard, And Now NewsGuard Is Suing

from the found-the-censorship-industrial-complex dept

We’ve written a few times now about how the GOP’s “free speech warriors” have been waging an absolutely absurd campaign against NewsGuard, a company whose entire business model is… expressing opinions about the reliability of news sources. You know, speech. The kind of thing that’s supposed to be protected by that First Amendment thing the GOP pretends to care so much about.

As we noted back in 2024, the entire complaint about NewsGuard boils down to: some conservative news sites got poor ratings, and that made people who relied on those ratings less likely to advertise on those sites. It’s funny how MAGA seems to get so upset about the “marketplace of ideas” when their own ideas get rejected. NewsGuard says “we think this source is unreliable,” advertisers say “okay, we’d rather not be associated with unreliable sources,” and the rated sites get mad about it.

But now the Trump administration’s FTC, led by Chairman Andrew Ferguson, has decided to transform that complaint into an actual government censorship campaign. And NewsGuard, represented by FIRE’s lawyers, is suing to stop it, as first reported in the Washington Post.

The complaint lays out a fairly astonishing abuse of government power. Let’s start with the Civil Investigative Demand (fancy term for a subpoena) the FTC sent to NewsGuard last May. It’s basically a demand for every document the company has ever created or received since its founding in 2018:

The CID requires production of “all documents relating to NewsGuard’s News Reliability Ratings and any other rating[s];” identification of all NewsGuard customers; and essentially all communications from or to NewsGuard.

And it gets worse:

The Specifications go further, demanding all materials about NewsGuard’s work product and methodology, including data sets; all documents about websites and news sources rated; all ratings and reviews issued; all communications regarding ratings; any and all analyses of the effects of NewsGuard’s ratings on advertisers and publishers; and any studies relating to social media or digital advertising

Among its all-inclusive document demands, the CID also requires production of information, materials, and communications relating to NewsGuard’s journalism and reporting, including reporters’ notes and sources.

The FTC is demanding reporters’ notes. From a journalism organization. Because it doesn’t like the opinions that organization expresses. That should be a First Amendment five-alarm fire. I mean, imagine the years of screaming we’d all be subjected to if the Biden admin had demanded reporters’ notes from Fox News.

Oh, and what was the stated basis for this investigation? According to NewsGuard’s complaint, the FTC wouldn’t even tell them, despite it being required by law.

Under the FTC Act, the agency was required to state the specific conduct constituting an alleged violation that is the subject of investigation and the provision of law applicable to such violation. 15 U.S.C. § 57b-1(c)(2). The FTC did not do that in the NewsGuard CID, leaving the company to guess about what the agency alleged was at issue or how it could have anything to do with legitimate enforcement of antitrust or competition laws.

In other words: “we’re investigating you, but we won’t tell you why or what law you allegedly violated.”

Right about here I’ll remind you that when FTC chair Andrew Ferguson applied for the job he promised to “protect freedom of speech” and “end… politically motivated investigations.” Of course, the full quote was “end Lina Khan’s politically motivated investigations”—leaving his own politically motivated investigations as fair game.

NewsGuard tried to work with the FTC for seven months, participating in ten meet-and-confer discussions and producing over 40,000 pages of documents. And what did the FTC do? Kept demanding more, including those customer lists and communications, while refusing to explain what any of this had to do with antitrust law.

Remember, NewsGuard’s share of the “brand safety” market is, according to the complaint, less than 0.1%. The idea that this tiny company is somehow engaged in anticompetitive behavior that requires the FTC to demand every document it’s ever created is absurd on its face.

Then, while NewsGuard was trying to cooperate with the investigation, the FTC was also using its merger review authority to create what amounts to a government blacklist of NewsGuard.

When advertising giants Omnicom and IPG wanted to merge, the FTC conditioned approval on the companies agreeing not to use any service that “reflects viewpoints as to the veracity of news reporting and adherence to journalistic standards or ethics.”

That’s not particularly subtle. That’s a condition specifically designed to prevent Omnicom from doing business with NewsGuard. The complaint notes that the original draft order didn’t quite capture NewsGuard, so Newsmax—yes, the same Newsmax that’s been mad about its poor NewsGuard rating—filed comments urging the FTC to expand the language. And the FTC did exactly that.

Newsmax was not subtle about its aim. Its fourteen-page letter mentioned NewsGuard more than a dozen times. Newsmax echoed Chairman Ferguson’s repeated statements that NewsGuard’s reviews and ratings of news sources based on journalistic standards were “biased” because some conservativeleaning websites and publications scored poorly.

Not content to rely on the official FTC comment process, Newsmax took to the internet to lobby Chairman Ferguson, members of Congress, and the President. In posts on X directed to Chairman Ferguson, Newsmax asserted the FTC’s proposed order was inadequate because it “makes no mention of ‘censorship’ or ‘targeting conservatives’ and ‘[f]ully allows Omnicom to use left-wing NewsGuard.” Newsmax admitted its comments and advocacy to the FTC were specifically targeted at NewsGuard.

[….]

The FTC subsequently issued a revised order removing terms about using third-party services with “political or ideological bias.” Instead, the FTC revised the Consent Order to prohibit the merged Omnicom entity or its ad agencies from using third-party services that evaluate “viewpoints as to the veracity of news reporting” and “adherence to journalistic standards or ethics.”

In its press release announcing the final Consent Order, the FTC stated that it revised the order “in response to public comments.” But the only public comments advocating such censure came from Newsmax and groups it funds…

The complaint notes, somewhat dryly, that First Amendment scholars and free speech organizations had also submitted comments pointing out how the proposed order was unconstitutional. But somehow, Ferguson and the FTC ignored those. The only change they made seemed to be the one Newsmax and friends demanded: the punishment of NewsGuard for its First Amendment-protected speech.

So let’s be clear about what happened here: A news organization that gives ratings to other news organizations gave a bad rating to Newsmax based on its own criteria. (Shocking, I know, given Newsmax’s sterling commitment to journalistic standards.) Newsmax complained to the government. The government then used its regulatory power to (1) launch a burdensome fishing expedition designed to bleed NewsGuard financially, and (2) literally prohibit a major potential customer from doing business with NewsGuard.

This is textbook First Amendment retaliation. The government is using its regulatory power to punish a private company for expressing opinions it disagrees with.

And Chairman Ferguson hasn’t exactly been coy about his intentions. Even before becoming FTC chair, he was publicly stating that the FTC should use its “tremendous array of investigative tools” and “coercive power” to get companies to “Do what we say.” As the complaint notes:

In an April 2025 interview, Chairman Ferguson explained how the FTC could use its “tremendous array of investigative tools” and “coercive power—formal and informal” to demand compliance to its views about supposed online “censorship.” Ferguson laid out a roadmap of the tactics his FTC would ultimately use against NewsGuard: “The regulators can show up, they can audit, they can investigate, they can cost you a lot of money, and the path of least resistance is: ‘Do what we say’.”

And:

Ferguson’s comments are similar to not-so-veiled threats by FCC Chairman Carr about Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night comedy monologue mentioning Charlie Kirk, which the administration found objectionable. Carr stated that ABC and its affiliates had to “find ways to change conduct and take action … on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” and “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

This is the “free speech” party. This is what they mean by free speech: the freedom to agree with them, or face the consequences, brought to you mob-style.

The legal case here seems pretty straightforward. The DC Circuit already ruled last year, in the somewhat similar Media Matters case, that the FTC’s similar investigation of that organization was “a government campaign of retaliation” that was “infringing exercise of their First Amendment rights.” The district court in DC has already granted a preliminary injunction halting the FTC’s investigation of Media Matters.

NewsGuard’s case involves basically the same playbook. Government officials publicly expressed hostility to NewsGuard’s speech. Then they launched an investigation with demands far beyond any legitimate regulatory purpose. Then they used their merger review authority to directly prohibit companies from doing business with NewsGuard.

The Supreme Court was unanimous in the Vullo case in 2024 that government officials can’t “coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf.” Using merger conditions to blacklist a company because you don’t like its journalism is exactly that.

It’s genuinely good to see NewsGuard fight back here. I’ve been somewhat critical of NewsGuard’s methodology in the past, but their right to express their opinions about news sources is protected speech, full stop. The government doesn’t get to punish them because some of those opinions hurt the feelings of conservative media outlets. (Also, as I always point out, NewsGuard was founded by the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, the idea that he’s some “woke leftist” trying to suppress “conservative” news orgs is silly on its face).

And, honestly, this case reveals just how absurd the whole “censorship industrial complex” narrative has always been. The actual censorship happening here isn’t NewsGuard expressing opinions about news quality. It’s the government using its regulatory power to punish NewsGuard for expressing those opinions.

As the complaint aptly notes:

By accusing NewsGuard of providing “biased” evaluations of news sites, Chairman Ferguson has inverted the relationship between the government and the First Amendment. NewsGuard is a private business that offers assessments of the quality of news sites based on disclosed journalistic criteria. As a matter of law, NewsGuard cannot be a censor. But by asserting FTC control over the market for NewsGuard’s services, Chairman Ferguson has embraced the censor’s role

That’s exactly right. The government using its power to punish private companies for expressing opinions is censorship. Private companies expressing opinions is not.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, andrew ferguson, antitrust, censorship, ftc, investigation, news ratings, opinions
Companies: newsguard, newsmax, omnicom

The ‘Most Massive Attack On Free Speech’ Is Happening Right Now, And The Twitter Files Crew Is Mighty Quiet

from the hypocrisy-as-a-service dept

For the last five years, we had to endure an endless, breathless parade of hyperbole regarding the so-called “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, repeatedly and at high volume, that the Biden administration flagging content for review by social media companies constituted a tyrannical overthrow of the First Amendment.

In the Missouri v. Biden (later Murthy v. Missouri) case, Judge Terry Doughty—in a ruling that seemed to consist entirely of Twitter threads pasted into a judicial ruling—declared that the White House sending angry emails to Facebook “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Never mind that the Supreme Court later reviewed the evidence and found that the platforms frequently ignored those emails, showing a lack of coercion, leading them to reverse the lower courts for lack of standing. To the “Twitter Files” crowd and the self-anointed “free speech absolutists,” the mere existence of government officials simply requesting private companies to look at terms of service violations was a sign of the end of the Republic.

So, surely, now that the Department of Homeland Security is issuing administrative subpoenas—legal demands that bypass judges entirely—to unmask the identities of anonymous political critics, these same warriors are storming the barricades, right?

Right? Riiiiight?

According to a disturbing new report from the New York Times, DHS is aggressively expanding its use of administrative subpoenas to demand the names, addresses, and phone numbers of social media users who simply criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.

This is not a White House staffer emailing a company to say, “Hey, this post seems to violate your COVID misinformation policy, can you check it?” This is the federal government using the force of law—specifically a tool designed to bypass judicial review—to strip the anonymity from domestic political critics.

If Judge Doughty thought ignored emails were the “most massive attack on free speech in history,” I am curious what he would call the weaponization of the surveillance state to dox critics of law enforcement. Or… would he think it’s fine, because it’s coming from his team?

As the Times reveals, this is really all about intimidation.

Mr. Loney of the A.C.L.U. said avoiding a judge’s ruling was important for the department to keep issuing the subpoenas without a legal order to stop. “The pressure is on the end user, the private individual, to go to court,” he said.

The DHS claims this is about “officer safety,” but documenting the public actions of law enforcement officers in public spaces is a foundational First Amendment right. The moment these subpoenas are actually challenged in court by competent lawyers, the DHS cuts and runs.

The account owner alerted the A.C.L.U., which filed a motion on Oct. 16 to quash the government’s request. In a hearing on Jan. 14 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the A.C.L.U. argued that the government was using administrative subpoenas to target people whose speech it did not agree with.

[….]

Two days later, the subpoena was withdrawn.

This is the government effectively admitting that its demands are legally baseless. They are relying on the high cost of litigation to intimidate both the companies and the individuals. It is a bluff backed by the seal of the Department of Homeland Security.

And this brings us to the most glaring hypocrisy of the current moment: the absolute silence of Elon Musk and X.

Years ago, the “old” Twitter—the one Musk falsely derided as a haven for censorship—was the gold standard for fighting these exact types of demands. In 2017, Twitter famously sued the federal government to stop an administrative subpoena that sought to unmask an anonymous account critical of the Trump administration. Twitter argued, correctly, that unmasking a critic violated the First Amendment. They won. The government withdrew the subpoena.

Twitter (the old company, not the new monstrosity known as X) has a long history of this. In 2012, they challenged a court ruling that said users had no standing to protect their data. In 2014, they sued the DOJ for the right to be transparent about surveillance requests.

Contrast that with today. The Times report notes that Google, Meta, and Reddit have received these subpoenas. It mentions that Twitter previously fought them. But there is zero indication that Elon Musk’s X—the platform ostensibly dedicated to “free speech absolutism”—is lifting a finger to stop this.

While Musk is busy personally promoting racist ahistorical nonsense, the actual surveillance state is knocking on the door, demanding the identities of political critics. And we’ve yet to see anything suggesting Elon is even remotely willing to push back on his friends in the administration he helped get elected, and then gleefully was a part of for a few months.

And where are the scribes of the “Twitter Files”? Where is the outrage from the people who told us that the FBI warning platforms about foreign influence operations was a crime against humanity?

Matt Taibbi, who has spent the last few years on the confused idea that platform moderation is state censorship, offered a tepid, hedging response on X, saying “if true” this is terrible, before immediately pivoting to a strange whataboutism regarding investigations into actual proven Russian attempts at election interference.

It is true, Matt. The New York Times saw the subpoenas. The ACLU is fighting them in court. This isn’t a vague “if.” This is the government using administrative power to bypass the Fourth Amendment to violate the First Amendment.

It seems like we actually found that “censorship industrial complex,” huh?

Meanwhile, Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss seem to have nothing to say. Weiss now runs CBS News, which has its own problems with government pressure on speech—the network just pulled a Colbert interview with a Democratic politician after Brendan Carr threatened consequences for talk shows that don’t coddle Republicans. As far as I can tell, neither CBS News nor Weiss’s Free Press has mentioned the DHS subpoena story. The Free Press is instead running think pieces on how we may “regret” the release of the Epstein files.

Really speaking truth to power there.

This is what so many of us kept pointing out throughout the “Twitter Files” hysteria: the “free speech” grift was never about protecting individuals from the state. It was about protecting a specific type of speaker from the social consequences of their speech. The framework was always selectively deployed—outrage when a platform enforces its own rules against their allies, silence when the surveillance state comes for their critics.

The Trump administration is betting on that asymmetry. They’re betting that Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord will quietly comply rather than spend millions in litigation over users who aren’t famous enough to generate headlines. They’re betting that the “free speech absolutists” will look the other way because the targets are the wrong kind of dissident.

Right now, the only institution consistently fighting these subpoenas is the ACLU. The platforms are folding. The “Twitter Files” journalists are hedging. And the man who bought a social media company specifically to be a “free speech” champion is busy posting memes.

Turns out we found the censorship industrial complex. And everyone who spent years warning us about it just shrugged.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, administrative subpoenas, censorship industrial complex, dhs, free speech, ice, intimidation, twitter files
Companies: cbs, discord, google, meta, reddit, twitter, x

Cowardly And Complicit CBS Pulls Colbert Interview With Dem Politician To Please Republicans

from the "pathetic,"-said-eeyore dept

The right wing extremist takeover of CBS continues to go just about how you thought it might.

CBS is under fire yet again, this time for forcing Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” to cancel a scheduled appearance with Texas Democratic State Representative James Talarico because it might upset our full-diapered president. Colbert acknowledged the cancellation on his Monday evening show, saying CBS lawyers explicitly forbade him from broadcasting the interview:

“He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast.”

Colbert says he was also told by network lawyers that he also couldn’t mention he was told by CBS to not have him on, a request he proceeded to immediately ignore in a lengthy rant about Brendan Carr and the censorial, authoritarian, and pathetic Trump FCC:

“Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV, OK? He’s like a toddler with too much screen time. He gets cranky and then drops a load in his diaper.”

As we’ve noted previously, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been threatening to leverage the “equal time” rule embedded in Section 315 of the Communications Act to take action against daytime and late night talk shows that don’t provide “equal” time to Republican ideology. He most recently tried to threaten ABC’s The View.

Carr’s goal isn’t equality; it’s the disproportionate coddling and normalization of an extremist U.S. right wing political movement that’s increasingly despised by the actual public. It’s also an attempt to create a climate where media giants are afraid to host voices critical of the president for fear of being drawn into expensive and costly legal battles, even though Carr has little hope of actually winning any.

The “equal time” rule is a dated relic that would be largely impossible for the Trump court-eviscerated FCC to actually enforce. The rule was originally created to apply specifically to political candidate appearances on broadcast television, since back then, pre-internet, a TV appearance on one of the big three networks could make or break and politician attempting to run for office.

In the years since, the rule has seen numerous exemptions and, with the steady evisceration of the regulatory state by the right wing, is not something viewed as seriously enforceable.

Enter Carr, who is distorting this rule to suggest that it needs to apply to every guest a late-night talk show has. It’s a lazy effort by Carr to pretend his censorship effort sits on solid legal footing. It does not. The FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner accurately pointed out that Carr has no authority to do any of this:

CBS is fully protected under the First Amendment to determine what interviews it airs. That makes its decision to yield to political pressure all the more disappointing.Corporate interests cannot justify retreating from airing newsworthy content.

— FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez (@agomezfcc.bsky.social) 2026-02-17T17:07:30.811Z

It’s a legal fight that CBS could easily win, but because the network is owned by Trump billionaire donor Larry Ellison, it’s too feckless, pathetic, and corrupted to bother. Ellison very clearly purchased CBS (and installed contrarian troll Bari Weiss at CBS News) to create a safe space for right wing interests; one of his first orders of business was firing Colbert last year. His show is now scheduled to end in May.

Ellison has been hoping the Trump DOJ will scuttle Netflix’s pending merger with Warner Brothers so that Ellison can further expand his planned media empire with the inclusion of Warner IP, CNN, and HBO. To gain approval of that transition, CBS lawyers and executives are further incentivized to be abject cowards.

The ham-fisted effort by Trump and his FCC earlobe nibblers will, of course, only act to drive more attention to Colbert’s interview with Talarico on YouTube. As of my writing this sentence, the video has over a million and a half views, a number I suspect will be significantly higher in short order. The comment section is filled with people with lots of nice things to say about CBS and Brendan Carr:

Obviously this is an ugly assault on free speech and the First Amendment by a sad and desperate authoritarian government, but at its heart it’s just foundationally, historically pathetic. It’s also another sad chapter in the embarrassing capitulation of what’s left of modern corporate broadcast media, which is positively begging for irrelevance at the hands of more modern alternatives.

Filed Under: brendan carr, censorship, equal time, fcc, first amendment, free speech, james talarico, media, stephen colbert, trump
Companies: cbs

Trump FTC Threatens Apple With A Fake Investigation Into Its Nonexistent ‘Liberal News Bias’

from the fake-investigations,-real-harm dept

Here we go again.

The Trump FTC has threatened Apple and CEO Tim Cook with a fake investigation claiming that Apple News doesn’t do a good enough job coddling right wing, Trump-friendly ideology.

The announcement and associated letter pretends that Apple is violating Section 5 of the FTC Act (which “prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices”) because it’s not giving right wing propaganda outlets the same visibility as other media in the Apple News feed (which the letter falsely claims are “left wing”):

“Recently, there have been reports that Apple News has systematically promoted news
articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative
publications. Indeed, multiple studies have found that in recent months Apple News has chosen not to feature a single article from an American conservative-leaning news source, while simultaneously promoting hundreds of articles from liberal publications.”

This is all gibberish and bullshit. Their primary evidence is a shitty article from Rupert Murdoch’s right wing rag The New York Post, which in turn leans on a laughable study by the right wing Media Research Center. That “study” looked at a small sample size of 620 articles promoted by Apple News, randomly and arbitrarily declared 440 of them as having a “liberal bias,” and then concluded Apple was up to no good.

Among the outlets derided as “liberal” sits papers like the Washington Post, which has been tripping over itself to appease Trump and become, very obviously, more right wing and corporatist than ever under its owner Jeff Bezos, who recently vastly overpaid Donald Trump’s wife to make a “documentary” about her.

The FTC’s fake investigation obviously violates the First Amendment. Even if it were true that Apple was biased in what sources it had in Apple News (which the evidence doesn’t actually support), that’s… still legal, based on Apple’s First Amendment rights. If the Biden FTC had gone after Fox News for “anti-liberal bias” everyone (including many Democrats) would call out the obvious First Amendment problem. But even ignoring the First Amendment problems of all this, claiming that this is covered by Section 5 is laughable. I’ve watched for years as the FTC has struggled to legally defend genuine investigations into obvious corporate instances of very clear fraud and still come out on the losing end due to the murky construction of the law.

This inquiry has no legal legs to stand on.

I suspect FTC boss Andrew Ferguson is leaving soon and wanted an opportunity to put his name in lights across the right wing propaganda echoplex as somebody who is “doing something to combat the wokes” with a phony investigation, much like the FCC’s Brendan Carr does. It’s likely this is mostly being driven by partisan ambition.

There doesn’t need to be any legally supporting evidence (or hell even an actual investigation), the point is to have the growing parade of right-wing friendly media make it appear as if key MAGA zealots are doing useful things in service of the cause. And to threaten companies with costly and pointless headaches if they don’t pathetically bend the knee to Trumpism (which Cook has been very good at so far).

So while the “investigation” may be completely bogus, the threat of it still has a dangerous impact on free expression in a country staring down the barrel of authoritarianism. Somewhere, Tim Cook is shopping around for another shiny bauble to throw at the feet of our mad, idiot king.

Here’s where I’ll mention that if you ask an actual, objective media scholar here on planet Earth, they’ll be quick to inform you that U.S. media and journalism pretty consistently has a center-right, corporatist bias.

As the ad-driven U.S. media consolidates under corporate control, it largely functions less and less as a venue for real journalism and informed democratic consensus, and more as either an infotainment distraction mechanism to keep the plebs busy, or as a purveyor of corporate-friendly agitprop that coddles the narratives surrounding unchecked wealth accumulation by the extraction class.

From the Washington Post to CBS, from Twitter to TikTok, to consolidation among local right wing broadcasters, the U.S. right wing is very clearly buying up U.S. media in the pursuit of the same sort of autocratic state television we’ve seen arise in countries like Russia and Hungary.

This effort is propped up by an endless barrage of claims that the already corporatist, center-right U.S. press is secretly left wing, and that the only solution is to shift the editorial Overton window even further to the right. These folks genuinely will not be satisfied until the entirety of U.S. media resembles the sort of fawning, mindless agitprop we see in countries like North Korea.

This is not hyperbole. They’re building it right in front of your noses. It’s yet to be seen if fans of free speech, democratic norms, and objective reality can muster any sort of useful resistance.

Filed Under: andrew ferguson, apple, bias, first amendment, free speech, ftc, journalism, media, propaganda, section 5, tim cook
Companies: apple