Look, we get it. Your inbox is probably drowning in newsletters right now. Every publication, influencer, and their cousin’s dog walker has suddenly discovered the revolutionary concept of… sending you emails with stuff to read. Who could have predicted that people might want content delivered directly to them?
Well, actually, we could have. Because we’ve been doing this since 1997.
Here’s the thing that’s particularly amusing about the great newsletter “revolution” of the past few years: it’s being hailed as some brilliant innovation that will save media from the tyranny of social media algorithms and platform dependency. Meanwhile, we’ve been quietly proving that exact point for almost three decades.
Back when Techdirt started, it literally was a newsletter. Email was the primary way we distributed things for the first couple of years. But somewhere along the way, we kind of forgot to mention that we still send out a daily email with the full text of every single post. We just had a tiny email logo in the upper righthand corner, and many thousands of you actually subscribed to get those full text daily newsletters.
Not excerpts. Not teasers designed to drive clicks. The entire damn thing, delivered to your inbox every day.
While everyone else spent the last few years “discovering” that newsletters are the future of media (again), we just kept quietly sending ours out to all of you who had subscribed, but never once mentioning its existence in the past couple of decades.
We’ve finally updated the tools we use to manage and send the newsletter, which means we now have actual flexibility to do more interesting things with it. Previously, our newsletter was essentially “here’s today’s posts in email form”—which, to be clear, is still exactly what it is today. We made sure that step one was just recreating what we already had been sending, because why fix what isn’t broken?
But now we have the infrastructure to potentially experiment with different formats, frequencies, or focus areas if that’s what you want.
The core offering remains the same: subscribe, and every day you’ll get the full text of everything we published, delivered to your inbox.
Now that we have better tools, we’re curious about what else you might want to see from our newsletter. Weekly roundups? Deep dives into specific topics? Digest emails instead of full text?
We’ve got some ideas, but we’d rather hear from you. Drop a comment below and let us know what would make a Techdirt newsletter more valuable to you. Do you want more analysis, different formatting, or just more reminders of all the crazy stories we cover?
We’d like to hear from people who receive the current email with all our posts (are there other supplementary newsletters you’d want to sign up for as well?) and from those who aren’t interested in the current email (is there something else you would want to receive?)
For now, though, the main thing is this: if you want Techdirt delivered to your inbox every day, you can do that now, and it’s easier than before when you had to hunt around the site for that tiny email icon.
You can subscribe from this page, or by using the widget at the bottom of this post, or via the signup form in the right-hand navigation bar at the top of any page. It’s free, it’s daily, and it’s the full text of everything we publish.
And yes, we realize the irony of writing a blog post to promote our newsletter that will then be included in our newsletter. But let’s not get too deep in the weeds on that.
Now, what other newsletter features would actually be useful to you?
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Two Trump-appointed federal judges just decided that facts don’t matter when the President wants to send the military into American cities.
Donald Trump declared Portland a “war-ravaged” city requiring military intervention based on a few anti-ICE protests and imagery from five years ago on Fox News that he apparently thought was happening now. The actual threat? Police reports from the days before his deployment order show “approximately 8-15 people at any given time out front of ICE. Mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around.” One officer noted the protesters had “low energy” and “minimal activity.”
So Trump ordered military deployment against people in lawn chairs based on old Fox News footage. A Trump-appointed district court judge quickly issued an injunction, calling out the absolute insanity of military deployment based on complete fiction. She noted that Trump’s legal justification—that he was “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”—was “simply untethered to the facts.”
But two judges on the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court just dissolved that injunction, effectively ruling that the President gets to define his own reality when deploying troops against American citizens. And a third judge, Susan Graber, is calling out her colleagues in scathing terms for abandoning core constitutional principles.
While the district court cited this highly deferential standard, Oregon, 2025 WL 2817646, at *9, it erred by failing to apply it. Instead, the district court substituted its own assessment of the facts for the President’s assessment of the facts. This is the opposite of the significantly deferential standard of review that applies to the President’s decision to invoke § 12406(3) and federalize members of the National Guard.
The majority goes through a longer list of basically every time the small group of protesters got too loud or annoying for ICE, without bothering to explore if any of those protests violated the law, or actually got in the way of the execution of the law. It also dinged the (again, Trump-appointed) district court judge for actually paying attention to what Donald Trump was lying about on social media in making her determination:
Second, the district court erred by placing too much weight on statements the President made on social media. Oregon, 2025 WL 2817646, at *11. The district court interpreted President Trump characterizing Portland as “War ravaged,” as the equivalent of the President “ignoring the facts on the ground.” Id. As such, the district court relied on these statements to disregard other facts that do “reflect[] a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a range of honest judgment.”
The majority, made up of two Trump-appointed Ninth Circuit judges: Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade, insist that Trump’s lies should simply outweigh what anyone can plainly see with their own two eyes. It’s somewhat ridiculous.
And the third judge on the panel, Susan Graber, calls out the bullshit of her colleagues, in pretty strong language, while suggesting the rest of her colleagues on the Ninth Circuit should do an en banc review as soon as possible:
In the weeks preceding the President’s September 27 social media post proclaiming that Portland was “War ravaged” and authorizing Secretary Hegseth to deploy federalized Oregon National Guard members, demonstrations in Portland were non-disruptive and small. Notwithstanding the turbulent events that had occurred several months earlier, the record contains no evidence whatsoever that, on September 27, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) was unable either to protect its Portland facility or to execute the immigration laws it is charged with enforcing. But, in the statute invoked here, Congress has authorized the President to call up the National Guard only to repel a foreign invasion, quell a rebellion, or overcome an inability to execute the laws. Consequently, no legal or factual justification supported the order to federalize and deploy the Oregon National Guard.Given Portland protesters’ well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all when expressing their disagreement with the methods employed by ICE, observers may be tempted to view the majority’s ruling, which accepts the government’s characterization of Portland as a war zone, as merely absurd. But today’s decision is not merely absurd. It erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights to assemble and to object to the government’s policies and actions.
She’s exactly right. The ruling is an all-out attack on multiple things that have been considered settled US legal issues. The idea that the President gets to call out the National Guard to shut down some political protests is absolutely insane. The district court called it out, as does Judge Graber.
As she notes, it’s both obvious and important that there is no fucking “war zone” in Portland:
The district court’s factual findings, which the government does not challenge on appeal, and which are not clearly erroneous in any event, fully resolve this issue. In the two weeks leading up to the President’s September 27 social media post, there had not been a single incident of protesters’ disrupting the execution of the laws. Oregon, 2025 WL 2817646, at *10. I repeat: not a single incident for two weeks. Here are summaries from police reports for the five days preceding the President’s social media post.
September 22: Approx. 7-10 people. No calls.
September 23: Few people. No activity.
September 24: Approx. 10 people. No calls.
September 25: Approx. 20 people. No calls.
September 26: Approx. 15 people. Energy low, minimal activity. No incidents.
A police officer’s report from September 26 stated: “Throughout the day we observed approximately 8-15 people at any given time out front of ICE. Mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around.”
It is hard to understand how a tiny protest causing no disruptions could possibly satisfy the standard that the President is unable to execute the laws. The facts at issue in Newsom—significant, violent protests by hundreds of people in several locations the day before and the day of the President’s invocation of the statute—could not be further from the facts here—small gatherings in one location with “no activity” or “minimal activity,” low energy, and no calls for assistance for weeks.
While the majority called out random incidents of one or two protestors getting rowdy, Judge Graber says (1) those happened months ago and (2) none of them appeared to get in the way of ICE continuing to do its job. As she notes:
The legal basis for this argument is unclear.The trigger for federalizing the National Guard is an inability to execute the laws, not staffing difficulties that fall short of demonstrably resulting in an inability to execute the laws. The government has not explained how its purported staffing troubles were causing an inability to execute the laws on September 27. As explained above, the protests themselves—small, uneventful, low-energy—were not preventing execution of the laws at that time.The most that can be said is that, because FPS officers were stretched thin, if protests were to flare up in the future and if staffing woes were to lead to insufficient staffing, then an inability to execute the laws might arise at some hypothetical future time. But, as also explained above, subsection three of the statute requires a present-day inability to execute the laws; fear of a future inability is not enough. Nor could staffing difficulties alone support an inability to execute the laws; otherwise, the President could direct scores of FPS officers to a location with minimal security issues and then claim authority to call up the National Guard because those officers are needed elsewhere. In assessing whether the President had a colorable basis for concluding that the statutory requirements were met, we must consider the actual situation being addressed by the FPS officers.
She also dings her colleagues in the majority for being so desperate to help out Donald Trump that they made up an argument the DOJ never actually made:
The majority’s order spells out an argument that the government does not make, presumably because the government recognizes the lack of factual support. The argument in the majority’s order proceeds as follows. FPS has 776 officers, but only 497 officers are trained to protect federal buildings. Robert Cantu, the regional FPS director, asserted that, from June through September, “115 FPS officers have had to deploy to Portland.” The majority’s order first assumes that all 115 officers—nearly a quarter of the agency’s officers with relevant training— were stationed in Portland in late September. The majority’s order next reasons that such a diversion supports an inference that Portland is a significant source of staffing woes.
But that argument impermissibly adds facts to Director Cantu’s vague, carefully worded assertion. Crediting his assertion, we know that a total of 115 officers from elsewhere were deployed in Portland during the preceding four months. The record contains no information about how many officers were in Portland at any given time. For all we know, FPS sent a different 8 officers to Portland every week for 14 or 15 weeks, meaning that Portland’s drain on FPS’s staff from elsewhere on any particular day was 8 people, not 115. Indeed, the only description in the record of a “[s]urge” in officers was the deployment of 8 officers. The fact that there were 26 FPS officers on duty on September 6, as the majority’s order emphasizes, Order at 27 n.13, says nothing about whether any or all of those individuals were from somewhere other than Portland. The record does not reveal the number of local FPS officers
Even if we assume that FPS deployed all 115 officers in June, it strains credulity to assume that all 115 of them remained in Portland for four months. What were they doing during the month of August, for example, when there was only a single incident at the ICE facility during the entire month? The record does not tell us. Indeed, the record does not shine light on the most pertinent information: in the days leading up to September 27, how many FPS officers from elsewhere were in Portland? The only hint in the record is a reference to some officers from elsewhere leaving Portland and returning to their home stations.
She also mocks the idea that the National Guard deployment can be justified in response to “a rebellion”—an argument the majority decision didn’t even grapple with, saying they didn’t need to, given Trump can win with or without rebellion by just pointing (without evidence) to his supposed inability to execute the laws. But the lying about the rebellion kinda matters:
As an initial matter, the record contains no evidence that the sporadic violent events occurring over a handful of days during four months of otherwise peaceful protests were in any way organized. For example, there is no evidence of leadership, organizational structure, premeditation, or an overarching plan.
Even putting aside that deficiency, nothing in the record suggests that, on September 27, there was a rebellion or a danger of one. The same reasons given in Part I-A-1, above, apply here. In the two weeks leading up to September 27, there was not a single incident of “force and arms” against ICE’s personnel or facility. And going back more than two months, the record contains only “evidence of sporadic violence against federal officers and property damage to a federal building.”
Even considering all four months, the events as a whole did not rise to the level of an “unusual and extreme exigenc[y]” constituting a “rebellion.” Newsom, 141 F.4th at 1051. On almost every day during the four months preceding September 27, the record discloses ordinary political protests in Portland. Ordinary protests—quintessential First Amendment activity—obviously do not constitute a rebellion. See Illinois, 2025 WL 2937065, at *6 (“Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable daylight between protected speech and rebellion.”)
And while the majority tried to suggest that small rebellions like the Whiskey Rebellion, Shay’s Rebellion, or Fries’s Rebellion mean it’s fine to call the protests a rebellion, Judge Graber calls bullshit:
Those rebellions shared several salient characteristics, including a large number of participants relative to the population and to available law enforcement, a wide geographic scope, evident organization and leadership, widespread use of arms, intense ferocity, and the creation of extreme difficulty restoring control by means of ordinary law enforcement.
What occurred in Portland differed in every dimension. As already noted, there is no evidence of organization or leadership, widespread use of arms, ferocity, or difficulty exerting control by ordinary means. In addition, the population of the Portland metropolitan area exceeds two and a half million, spread across nearly 6,700 square miles. U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2024; U.S. Census Bureau, State and Metropolitan Area Data Book: 2010, at 110. At their height, the protests in Portland have involved 200 people, or about 0.008% of the population. And they have taken place exclusively around a single city block, or approximately 0.00002% of the Portland metro area. The few people who did commit sporadic acts of violence have been arrested, processed, and charged by regular law enforcement forces.
Finally, she points out that the government hasn’t shown what injury it will incur if its invasion is not stayed while the courts consider further evidence, while there is pretty fucking clear evidence that the people of Portland will be harmed by an invasion of the US military.
Plaintiff City of Portland has a strong interest in preserving the peace. As the district court found, the deployment of troops in Portland is likely (if not certain) to aggravate the situation at the ICE building. Id. Finally, nearby businesses have economic interests that are likely to be harmed by the deployment of troops.
Judge Graber, who is not someone prone to hyperbole, closes by calling out how fucking anti-American all of this is:
The Founders recognized the inherent dangers of allowing the federal executive to wrest command of the State militia from the States. Congress authorized the President to deploy the National Guard only in true emergencies— to repel an invasion, to suppress a rebellion, or to overcome an inability to execute the laws. 10 U.S.C. § 12406. Congress did not authorize deployment in merely inconvenient circumstances, and Congress unquestionably did not authorize deployment for political purposes. Article III commands that we enforce those limits. The majority’s order abdicates our judicial responsibility, permitting the President to invoke emergency authority in a situation far divorced from an enumerated emergency.
And she rightly calls on “partisans” to imagine how they would feel if a future President rolled out the National Guard over other issues. She knows, we know, and they all know, that the MAGA crowd would totally freak the fuck out if a Democratic President sought to federalize the National Guard and invade American cities and towns in any other circumstance.
Today’s President seeks to bring troops into one set of States to enforce one set of laws; a future President may seek to bring troops into a different set of States to enforce a different set of laws. Partisans who cheer this President’s use of troops to protect personnel who are enforcing federal immigration laws would do well to consider whether they would be equally pleased if a future President uses troops to protect personnel who are enforcing laws that they vehemently dislike. Cf. Greer v. Spock, 424 U.S. 828, 839 (1976) (noting “the American constitutional tradition of a politically neutral military establishment under civilian control”).
We don’t even have to speculate. For years, the MAGA world has spread a nonsense, debunked conspiracy theory about how a standard military training exercise was actually a plan to invade Texas and take away guns. Judge Graber is just pointing out that now that this is actually happening, it’s pretty fucking crazy that MAGA supports it.
Bunch of hypocrites.
Judge Graber calls on her colleagues to gather to overturn the majority’s ruling and issues a stark plea to those dismayed by this ridiculous result:
We have come to expect a dose of political theater in the political branches, drama designed to rally the base or to rile or intimidate political opponents. We also may expect there a measure of bending—sometimes breaking—the truth. By design of the Founders, the judicial branch stands apart. We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda. I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur. Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.
And it appears that at least one of her colleagues has already accepted the challenge. An unnamed judge on the Ninth Circuit has already requested a vote for an en banc rehearing before Portland or Oregon even asked for one. The court has already asked the parties to file briefs on this by tomorrow at midnight. (As a reminder, because the Ninth Circuit is ridiculously large and no one has the political will to break it up into multiple circuits, unlike other circuits where “en banc” means all the judges, in the Ninth it’s a random set of 10 judges, so it can be a bit of a crap shoot).
Either way, this is yet another fast-moving case in which the Trump administration and its DOJ are demanding crazy things, and (mostly Trump-appointed) judges are pretending it’s normal. Hopefully, the court agrees to do a quick en banc hearing and shuts this nonsense down.
For more than fifty years the U.S. right wing has embraced a neat trick: by claiming that literally anything in factual opposition to their beliefs is “biased” and therefore must be discarded as unreliable, they’ve bullied U.S. media into becoming a feckless mess terrified of accusations of “liberal bias.”
Of course, if you ask the actual media academics who study U.S. media bias, they’ll quickly tell you that the U.S. media generally veers toward center-right corporatism because we’ve let it consolidate at the hands of center-right billionaires. The obvious result is a hot feckless mess that lacks the courage to speak truth to power, something that became obvious to even the most obtuse with the rise of U.S. authoritarianism.
Still, this idea that the U.S. media is “too woke” and “has a liberal bias” is central to the generational Republican mission of creating a press that only exists to make affluent Conservatives happy.
“The inquiry was met with stunned awkwardness, according to three people who recounted details from the private session in Midtown Manhattan. The staff of “60 Minutes,” the nation’s most-watched news program, view their coverage as firmly nonpartisan and reject criticism from President Trump and his allies who argue that it has a liberal slant.”
60 Minutes is fairly centrist and tame. But it’s the same old trick: if you say things Republicans or corporate power don’t like, you’ll be branded as foundationally untrustworthy. That, more than anything, results in a broader public distrust in U.S. journalism, which the modern, corporatist, brunchlord, far right alliance then exploits and insists can only be fixed by pushing news coverage even further to the right.
Neat trick, right?
It’s worth reiterating that Weiss has no experience in real journalism. She doesn’t own a television. Her tenure at the New York Times involved writing a few opinion columns and helping to turn the New York Times’ op-ed section into a rightward-lurching contrarian troll farm. She’s been hired to turn CBS into the same thing, with the help of a Trump-appointed right wing “ombudsman” providing a fake veneer of authority with some feigned furrowed-brow seriousness.
The goal isn’t objective journalism, it’s to help center-right billionaires further put their thumb on the scale of the consensus definition of objective journalism, shoveling us deeper down the rabbit hole of an anti-democratic state run by the whims of our richest sociopaths. And while it’s only been a week or two, Weiss’ goal here is really not subtle, especially as it pertains to validating Netanyahu:
“As a Middle East peace deal came into view, Ms. Weiss shared numerous pro-Israel opinion pieces from The Free Press, and an editorial that said Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, had failed ‘the Hamas test.'”
If you want to remain employed in a highly consolidated U.S. journalism industry owned by rich oligarchs, you’re supposed to pretend none of this is happening, or that it’s perfectly normal to put a right wing troll with no journalism experience in charge of one of the nation’s biggest news operations. At worst, you might be allowed by your editors to hint that Weiss is “controversial” and “unconventional.”
But make no mistake: Weiss is being used as a prop by the billionaire Ellison family to encourage U.S. media’s steady lurch rightward as a necessary anti-woke corrective to mainstream media’s non-existent liberal bias. The primary goal is to undermine the kind of academics, progressive reformers, scientists and marginalized communities that actually speak truth to consolidated wealth and power.
You’d like to think, at some point, the American media and public could awake from this generational con. But the only way to truly fix the U.S. media’s real bias is to untether it from consolidated billionaire ownership and the distorted incentives created by advertising engagement. But because that’s going to make billionaires less money and result in real journalism, it’s always deemed a bridge too far.
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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