Just days after we wrote about the EU’s renewed push for chat control, Germany has delivered a very important “no” vote. During discussions with EU countries last Wednesday, Germany’s opposition was decisive enough to kill the proposal’s momentum and remove it from this week’s agenda for EU justice ministers.
But it wasn’t just a procedural objection—Germany’s Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig delivered a statement that drew a very clear and very important line regarding encryption:
“Private communication must never be under general suspicion,” she said, adding that “the state must also not force messengers to scan messages en-masse for suspicious content before sending them.”
This is exactly the kind of clear-eyed recognition of fundamental rights that’s been missing from much of the chat control debate. Hubig didn’t mince words about the broader principle at stake, calling chat control something that “must be a taboo in a state governed by the rule of law.”
The proposal that Germany torpedoed would have required messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal to scan messages and check for images, videos, and URLs that might contain child abuse content—including scanning through end-to-end encrypted communications.
Basically: government mandated spyware. You can understand why a country like Germany, with its history, might be quick to push back on such a thing.
The Netherlands joined Germany in opposition, so it wasn’t just Germany standing up on its own:
The Dutch government said in a letter to parliament late September that the current proposal failed to address its concerns about the protection of fundamental rights at stake, “particularly in the areas of privacy and the confidentiality of correspondence and telecommunications, and the security of the digital domain.”
What’s encouraging here isn’t just that the proposal failed—it’s how it failed. Rather than getting bogged down in technical debates about implementation details or carved-out exceptions, Germany and other opponents focused on the core principle: mass surveillance of private communications is incompatible with fundamental rights, full stop.
This stands in sharp contrast to the usual policy dance where politicians try to thread impossible needles, claiming they can somehow protect both privacy and enable mass scanning. Germany’s position recognizes what anyone with any knowledge of how encryption works has been saying for years: you can’t have secure communications and government backdoors at the same time.
Hopefully, that means countries will continue to take a hard line against chat control and other similar proposals that attack encryption.
The proposal isn’t dead—Denmark could put forward a revised version, and supporters like Bulgaria, France, Hungary and Ireland haven’t given up (it’s kind of amazing how bad France tends to be on this stuff). But Germany’s principled stance, backed actually understanding what this would mean for privacy, makes it much harder for chat control advocates to claim they’re just fine-tuning the details.
Germany’s opposition sends a clear message: some lines shouldn’t be crossed, even with good intentions. Here’s hoping other EU countries are paying attention.
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?
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.
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.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command…. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into history and became truth.” —George Orwell, 1984
This past weekend witnessed what may have been the largest single-day political protest in American history. The “No Kings” demonstrations drew an estimated 5.2 to 8.2 million people across all 50 states (according to G. Elliott Morris), with massive crowds filling the streets of major cities and surprisingly robust turnouts even in small, rural communities that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful—so much so that police in New York City, Austin, and San Diego all reported zero protest-related arrests, which is frankly remarkable given the scale of participation.
There were similar reports in other cities, including Washington DC, which is kinda notable given that the last time the MAGA crowd “protested” in DC, people died, and eventually over 1,200 people were convicted (even if Trump later pardoned them all).
Before the protests even happened, Republican politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson preemptively labeled them a “hate America rally” filled with potential “terrorists.” They were proven spectacularly wrong by the peaceful nature of the demonstrations, but their fear-mongering served its purpose: justifying the future mobilization of National Guard units in multiple states for what turned out to be entirely peaceful gatherings.
You’d think these basic facts would be hard to dispute. After all, millions of people witnessed the events firsthand, millions more saw the coverage, and the photographic and video evidence is overwhelming. But if you listened to Donald Trump’s response, you’d think you were living in an alternate reality.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump dismissed the massive demonstrations with a series of statements that were so obviously false they’d make a carnival barker blush:
Trump on No Kings: "It's a joke. I looked at the people. They are not representative of this country. And I looked at all the brand new signs I guess paid for by Soros and other radical left lunatics. We're checking it out. The demonstrations were very small. And the people were whacked out."
“I think it’s a joke. I looked at the people, they’re not representative of this country, and I looked at all the brand new signs paid for, I guess it was paid for by Soros and other radical left lunatics. It looks like it was, we’re checking it out. The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective, and the people who are whacked out. Would you look at those people. They’re not representative of the people of our country.”
Let’s break this down. “Very small”? We’re talking about potentially the largest single-day protest in American history. “Very ineffective”? The turnout exceeded even the organizers’ expectations and every previous protest against Trump including both the 2017 Women’s March and the earlier No Kings march a few months ago.
“Not representative of this country”? When millions of Americans from all 50 states show up, including in deep red rural areas, that’s about as representative as it gets. Anyone who looked at the photos from these protests could tell you that they were absolutely representative of this country. Indeed, there was a feeling of joy. People were joking and dancing and singing. If anything, the crowd skewed older, but that’s shocking in its own way, given that protests tend to be a younger person’s game.
Let’s go to just a tiny bit of the evidence: these were massive crowds, all over the country (including deeply Republican areas), with crowds that were incredibly representative of America:
This is Boise, Idaho one of the most Republican states in the US joining millions of protestors. The people have had enough of the Trump regime. #3E #NoKings #50501Movement #indivisible #wearetheflood
Democracy in action, Illinois.Proud of our state for peacefully showing up and speaking out together in one voice to fight back against Donald Trump’s takeover of our democracy.
World War 2 veterans, the original antifa, took part in the nationwide protests against the fascist Trump regime. #3E #NoKings #50501Movement #indivisible #wearetheflood
Provincetown has a year-round population of 3600.I'm guessing there were at least 1000 at No Kings today.Sorry I managed not to get the people in the inflatable lobster suits!
Protestors march through downtown Montgomery, Alabama on Oct. 18, 2025 holding a banner saying "No Kings In America." The protest drew more than 600 people. (Ralph Chapoco/Alabama Reflector)
No Kings Denver speaker Joe Salazar (fmr Dem state rep) tells me they estimate 25-30k gathered in Denver today, similar to the No Kings protest earlier this year. This view is from photographer Cheney Orr for the New York Times. #copolitics
I could go on. But you get the point. The point that Donald Trump is desperately trying to make sure you ignore or disbelieve. The evidence is overwhelming. From massive crowds in Chicago to rural communities in Iowa to even Trump’s own backyard in Florida, Americans showed up en masse for peaceful protests that were anything but “very small.” Anyone with functioning eyeballs can see this.
But the lies don’t stop there. Trump also claimed without evidence that the signs were paid for by George Soros and “radical left lunatics,” feeding into the same tired conspiracy theories his supporters always trot out when faced with genuine grassroots opposition they can’t explain away. And, once again, every accusation is a confession. The only ones known for buying and paying for signs at rallies are… the GOP.
Trump made it quite clear that his only motivation in governing is to try to attack those he perceives as disloyal, because rather than attempting to address the actual protests or the complaints, he posted to social media an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown, flying a fighter jet labeled “KING TRUMP,” and dumping what was clearly meant to be load of shit on protesters. Most media outlets, in their typical both-sides fashion, euphemistically described this as “brown liquid” or “brown substance,” apparently too squeamish to call out the obvious scatological nature of what Trump was depicting himself doing to American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
Honestly, the video was pathetic in multiple ways. It really felt like the kind of thing that a silly “resistance” type account might post to mock Trump, and there he was posting it himself. And it’s quite telling that his response to the “no kings” rally goes straight to his instinctual “if they say no kings, then I’m going to mock them by saying ‘yes, I want to be king, and yes, I want to shit on them.’“
That serves only one purpose: to excite his ever-dwindling set of immature fanboys on social media. It doesn’t show leadership. It doesn’t show himself as responsive to his constituents. It just makes him look like a sad, pathetic old man whose only move is to try to piss off the “right” people.
Meanwhile, if you want to talk about “hating America,” it’s hard to top the image of a president fantasizing about literally dumping shit on millions of his own citizens for the “crime” of peaceful protest.
I feel like we need to emphasize this: the President posted a video of himself dumping shit on people peacefully protesting. When Hillary Clinton suggested some of Trump’s followers were “deplorables,” it was a months-long story. When Biden was misleadingly and incorrectly accused of calling Trump supporters “garbage,” it was a constant news story. But when Trump literally fantasizes about dumping shit on people exercising their constitutional rights, it’s euphemized away, played down, and discounted.
This is what we’re dealing with: a president who can look at the largest protest in American history and declare it “very small” with a straight face, while the media largely lets him get away with it. It’s the kind of brazen reality-denial that would make Orwell’s Ministry of Truth proud.
It’s no surprise that Trump lies—we’ve known that for years. What’s insidious is how the lies are presented as just another side of a “he said, she said” story, rather than what they actually are: easily verifiable falsehoods about events that millions of people witnessed with their own eyes.
These aren’t just lies for their own sake. In that same Air Force One interview, Trump talked about invoking the Insurrection Act, falsely claiming that 50% of presidents have used it (they have not) and that “everybody agrees you’re allowed to use that” (they do not).
Trump: "I'm allowed as you know as president, like 50% of the presidents have used the Insurrection Act. Everybody agrees you're allowed to use that and there is no more court cases, there is no more anything. We're trying to do it in a nicer manner, but we can always use the Insurrection Act."
The lies about “very small” protests and “radical left lunatics” funded by Soros aren’t random bullshit—they’re the predicate for deploying military force against American cities. Trump is constructing an alternative reality that justifies authoritarian responses to constitutionally protected dissent.
The president is openly lying about easily verifiable facts that millions of people witnessed, and those lies are being used to justify sending in the fucking military. When millions of Americans exercise their constitutional right to peaceful protest, Trump’s response is to fantasize about dumping shit on them and then claim they don’t exist.
This is a direct assault on the concept of shared reality itself, and it’s being used to justify authoritarian crackdowns on dissent. The Orwell quote at the top isn’t literary flourish—it’s a roadmap that Trump is following step by step.
The evidence of our eyes and ears tells us that millions of Americans peacefully demonstrated this weekend. Trump told us to reject that evidence and accept his version of reality where massive protests are “very small” and peaceful demonstrators are “terrorists” requiring military intervention.
We are watching the systematic destruction of the idea that objective reality exists, and the media’s response is to treat it like just another political disagreement, another political horse race over who came out of this looking the best. That’s not journalism—it’s complicity.
This is not a drill. This is happening now. When a president can lie about events witnessed by millions and use those lies to justify military action against peaceful protesters, we’ve crossed a line that democracies don’t typically come back from. The question isn’t whether Trump is lying—the evidence is incontrovertible. The question is whether our institutions, our media, and ultimately we as citizens are going to allow him to get away with it.
Because if we do, then Orwell’s warning will have become our reality, and “the lie will have passed into history and become truth.”
In what may be the most legally absurd aftermath of a rap battle in hip-hop history, Drake’s preposterously silly lawsuit against Universal Music has met its predictable end. The artist sued his own record label—not Kendrick Lamar himself—for the crime of also distributing Lamar’s devastating diss track Not Like Us. The judge overseeing the case has now dismissed it entirely, delivering what amounts to a final judicial verse in this musical feud.
Judge Jeannette Vargas recognizes a killer song when she hears one:
This case arises from perhaps the most infamous rap battle in the genre’s history, the vitriolic war of words that erupted between superstar recording artists Aubrey Drake Graham (“Drake”) and Kendrick Lamar Duckworth (“Lamar” or “Kendrick Lamar”) in the spring of 2024. Over the course of 16 days, the two artists released eight so-called “diss tracks,” with increasingly heated rhetoric, loaded accusations, and violent imagery. The penultimate song of this feud, “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar, dealt the metaphorical killing blow. The song contains lyrics explicitly accusing Drake of being a pedophile, set to a catchy beat and propulsive bassline. “Not Like Us” went on to become a cultural sensation, achieving immense commercial success and critical acclaim.
When you sue over a song, and the judge notes that the song has a catchy beat and a propulsive bassline, let alone “dealt the metaphorical killing blow,” I don’t think your lawsuit is going to survive. The court dumps it while noting that just because randos commenting on social media now call Drake a pedophile based on the song, that doesn’t make the song defamatory:
The Court holds, based upon a full consideration of the context in which “Not Like Us” was published, that a reasonable listener could not have concluded that “Not Like Us” was conveying objective facts about Drake. The views expressed by users @kaioken8026, @mrright8439, and @ZxZNebula, and the other YouTube and Instagram commentators quoted in the Complaint, Am. Compl., ¶¶ 73-74, do not alter the Court’s analysis. In a world in which billions of people are active online, support for almost any proposition, no matter how farfetched, fantastical or unreasonable, can be found with little effort in any number of comment sections, chat rooms, and servers. “[T]hat some readers may infer a defamatory meaning from a statement does not necessarily render the inference reasonable under the circumstances.” Jacobus, 51 N.Y.S.3d at 336.
The artists’ seven-track rap battle was a “war of words” that was the subject of substantial media scrutiny and online discourse. Although the accusation that Plaintiff is a pedophile is certainly a serious one, the broader context of a heated rap battle, with incendiary language and offensive accusations hurled by both participants, would not incline the reasonable listener to believe that “Not Like Us” imparts verifiable facts about Plaintiff
The judge actually does a fairly complete and detailed history of the war of words between Drake and Kendrick, even explaining the nature of the insults that pass back and forth between the two. Here’s just one paragraph of that section, but if you weren’t full up on the beef, now you can catch up:
Lamar fired back at Drake in “Euphoria,” which was released on April 30, 2024. Req. J. Not. at 3. In the track, Lamar claims, “I make music that electrify ‘em, you make music that pacify ‘em” and that he would “spare [Drake] this time, that’s random acts of kindness.” Req. J. Not., Ex. K. He accuses Drake of fabricating his claims: “Know you a master manipulator and habitual liar too/But don’t tell no lie about me and I won’t tell truths ‘bout you.” Id; see also Am. Compl., ¶¶ 14, 77. He insults Drake’s fashion sense, Req. J. Not., Ex. K (“I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress”), further raps “I believe you don’t like women, it’s real competition, you might pop a** with ‘em,” and taunts Drake for being a coward with his responses, id. (“I hate the way that you sneak diss, if I catch flight, it’s gon’ be direct.”)
Of course, in any defamation case, there can be fights over whether or not statements are facts (which can be defamatory) or opinion (which can’t be defamatory). Drake’s legal team had tried to argue that the question of whether the statements in Not Like Us were fact or opinion was a question of fact for a jury. But that’s not how that works. It’s a question of law that judges decide in most cases:
Whether a challenged statement is fact or opinion is a legal question. Celle, 209 F.3d at 178. Plaintiff argues that it is inappropriate for the Court to determine, at the pleading stage, whether a reasonable listener would perceive the Recording as fact or opinion. Opp’n Br. at 13-14; Hr’g Tr. at 24:11-26:8. Yet, because this is a question of law, New York courts routinely resolve this question at the motion to dismiss stage. See, e.g., Brian v. Richardson, 87 N.Y.2d 46, 52 (1995) (holding, on a motion to dismiss, that challenged statement constitutes opinion); Dfinity Found. v. New York Times Co., 702 F. Supp. 3d 167, 174 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), aff’d, No. 23-7838- cv, 2024 WL 3565762 (2d Cir. July 29, 2024) (“Whether a statement is a “fact [or] opinion is ‘a question of law for the courts, to be decided based on what the average person hearing or reading the communication would take it to mean’ and is appropriately raised at the motion to dismiss stage.”); Greenberg v. Spitzer, 62 N.Y.S.3d 372, 385-86 (2d Dep’t 2017) (holding that, because whether a statement is defamatory “presents a legal issue to be resolved by the court,” defamation actions are particularly suitable for resolution on a motion to dismiss). “There is particular value in resolving defamation claims at the pleading stage, so as not to protract litigation through discovery and trial and thereby chill the exercise of constitutionally protected freedoms.” Dfinity Found., 702 F. Supp. 3d at 173 (cleaned up); accord Biro, 963 F. Supp. 2d at 279.
Also, in defamation cases, the context of the speech always matters quite a bit. And here, the context is a rap battle. The judge points out how silly it is to go to court just because you got dissed too hard:
This is precisely the type of context in which an audience may anticipate the use of “epithets, fiery rhetoric or hyperbole” rather than factual assertions. A rap diss track would not create more of an expectation in the average listener that the lyrics state sober facts instead of opinion than the statements at issue in those cases.
For example, in “Euphoria” Lamar calls Drake a “master manipulator and habitual liar” and “a scam artist.” Req. J. Not., Ex. K. Drake responds in “Family Matters” by heavily implying that Lamar is a domestic abuser. See id., Ex. M. He also raps that he “heard” that one of Lamar’s sons may not be biologically his. Id. (“Why you never hold your son and tell him, ‘Say cheese’?/We could’ve left the kids out of this, don’t blame me/. . . I heard that one of ‘em little kids might be Dave Free”).
In “Meet the Grahams,” Lamar takes issue with Drake involving his family members in their feud. Req. J. Not., Ex. N (“Dear Aubrey/I know you probably thinkin’ I wanted to crash your party/But truthfully, I don’t have a hatin’ bone in my body/This supposed to be a good exhibition within the game/But you f***ed up the moment you called out my family’s name/Why you had to stoop so low to discredit some decent people?”). In that same track, Lamar alleges that Drake uses the weight loss drug Ozempic. Id. (“Don’t cut them corners like your daddy did, f*** what Ozempic did/Don’t pay to play with them Brazilians, get a gym membership.”). Lamar also insinuates that Drake knowingly hires sexual offenders. See id. (“Grew facial hair because he understood bein’ a beard just fit him better/He got sex offenders on ho-VO that he keep on a monthly allowance.”).
While Drake argued that the judge should ignore the other songs in the battle, the judge knows that’s not how any of this works:
Plaintiff argues that the Court should ignore the songs that came before and assess “Not Like Us” as a “singular entity.” Hr’g Tr. at 39:14-15; see also Opp’n Br. at 15-17. Plaintiff argues that the average listener is not someone who is familiar with every track released as part of the rap battle before listening to the Recording. Hr’g Tr. at 32:17-33:2; 35:9-19. Because the Recording has achieved a level of “cultural ubiquity” far beyond the other seven songs, Plaintiff contends that Court should not consider those other tracks in assessing how the average listener of the Recording would perceive the allegations regarding Drake. Hr’g Tr. at 36:10- 19; id. at 39:11-17; see also Opp’n Br. at 15.
There are a number of flaws with this argument. “Not Like Us” cannot be viewed in isolation but must be placed in its appropriate factual context. Immuno AG. v. Moor-Jankowski, 77 N.Y.2d 235, 254 (1991) (“[S]tatements must first be viewed in their context in order for courts to determine whether a reasonable person would view them as expressing or implying any facts.”). Here, that factual context is the insults and trash talking that took place via these diss tracks in the days and weeks leading up to the publication of “Not Like Us.” The songs released during this rap battle are in dialogue with one another. They reference prior songs and then respond to insults and accusations made by the rival artist. See, e.g., Am. Compl., ¶ 63. The songs thus must be read together to fully assess how the general audience would perceive the statements in the Recording. See, e.g., Celle, 209 F.3d at 187 (holding that two newspaper articles had to be read together to understand full context).
Also, the judge points out that part of the reason the song was so famous in the first place was because of the wider rap battle:
Additionally, it was not just the Recording which gained a cultural ubiquity, but the rap battle itself. In deciding this motion to dismiss, the Court need not blind itself to the public attention garnered by this particular rap battle. The Court takes judicial notice of the extensive mainstream media reporting that surrounded the release of “Not Like Us” and the associated feud between Drake and Lamar.
Then there’s the incoherence of Drake claiming that UMG was liable (remember, Kendrick was not a defendant here) because it kept “republishing” the song as it got more and more popular. But, as the judge notes, the later popularity of the song should have no impact on whether or not the song is defamatory (and it’s not):
Plaintiff counters that, even if the Recording was protected opinion at the time of its initial publication, UMG’s republication of “Not Like Us” in the months following, after it achieved unprecedented levels of commercial success, exposes it to liability. Hr’g Tr. at 37:20-38:17. This argument is logically incoherent. If the Recording was nonactionable opinion at the time it was initially produced, then its republication would not expose UMG to liability. Republication cannot transform Lamar’s statement of opinion into UMG’s statement of fact
There were other arguments Drake made in there as well, but they all fared about as well as Drake did in his rap battle with Kendrick.
The end result is that the case is dismissed. And, I gotta say, when you lose a rap battle so hard that your lawsuit over it is dismissed with a judge praising the catchiness of the song that went viral… that seems like you’ve lost that rap battle harder than anyone has ever lost a rap battle.
Last week we covered how Trump’s immigration theater was pulling federal agents off child sex crimes, drug interdiction, and terrorism investigations to chase landscapers and line cooks instead. Turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. Now we’re learning the administration is also pulling hundreds of cybersecurity professionals away from defending America’s critical infrastructure so they can help process deportation paperwork.
Employees across various units of the Department of Homeland Security have been marked for reassignments to agencies focused on Trump-era border security and deportation work, and could be dismissed if they don’t comply, according to multiple people familiar with the matter and a copy of one notice viewed by Nextgov/FCW.
In recent weeks, hundreds of DHS employees have been directed to transfer to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Protective Service and Customs and Border Protection — the main units overseeing much of President Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation efforts.
The people being reassigned include staff from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the very federal agency, created during the first Trump administration, responsible for coordinating cybersecurity across federal agencies and helping protect America’s critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. This includes issuing emergency directives when vulnerabilities are discovered, coordinating incident response when breaches occur, and working with private sector operators of power grids, water systems, and financial networks—you know, the stuff that might actually matter for “national security.”
Compulsory reassignments have gone in recent weeks to workers within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, who had focused on issuing alerts about threats against US agencies and critical infrastructure, current and former employees said. They described the orders on condition of anonymity over fears of retaliation.
Affected CISA staffers have been shuffled to agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which received a $150 billion infusion to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown, the employees said. CISA workers have been moved to Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protective Service, a domestic police force working with ICE and CBP on deportations.
Changes have hit particularly hard in CISA’s Capacity Building team, which writes emergency directives and oversees cybersecurity for the government’s highest value assets, the employees said. Reassignments have largely targeted senior CISA staffers, who are forbidden from joining unions because they work on national security issues, according to one person.
So we’re specifically targeting the people whose job it is to improve the cybersecurity of federal agencies and coordinate with international partners on cybersecurity threats.
Once again, the Trump admin seems to time these things to highlight how messed up their priorities truly are. We’re still dealing with the fallout from the Salt Typhoon hack and we’re only just starting to get a sense of just how bad the recent Salesforce hack really is.
But sure, let’s pull the people who deal with those threats off their jobs so they can help arrest landscapers.
What could possibly go wrong?
This fits perfectly with the broader pattern we’ve already documented, where Trump’s immigration obsession is gutting federal law enforcement’s ability to tackle actual crimes that matter. As we covered recently, federal agents are being pulled off child trafficking cases, drug interdiction, and terrorism investigations so they can chase non-violent immigrants instead.
But there’s an extra layer of stupidity here, because CISA has become a target of right-wing conspiracy theories. Republicans have spent years claiming that CISA is actually a “censorship” agency rather than a cybersecurity one, because the agency had the audacity to set up a system to help local election officials alert social media companies of election misinformation around the time, place, and manner of voting.
Senator Rand Paul has been particularly vocal about wanting to eliminate CISA entirely. As Politico reported last year:
“I’d like to eliminate it,” Paul told POLITICO Thursday. “The First Amendment is pretty important, that’s why we listed it as the First Amendment, and I would have liked to, at the very least, eliminate their ability to censor content online.”
Of course, CISA doesn’t actually censor content online. That’s not what the agency does. But when you’re dealing with people who think everything is a grand conspiracy, facts tend to be inconvenient.
The reality is that CISA was created in 2018 under Trump himself, and its actual mission is defending critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. You know, the kind of attacks that could actually shut down hospitals, banks, and power plants. The kind of attacks that represent genuine national security threats, as opposed to someone trying to mow your lawn without the right paperwork.
But with the MAGA GOP’s bizarre obsession with CISA, reassigning actual cybersecurity experts to bogus immigration jobs is hardly surprising. The weird obsession with CISA is causing all sorts of stupid decisions, including Rand Paul making sure a different “CISA” (the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015) basically expired, in part because Paul seemed unwilling to recognize the two CISAs are different things:
Senate aides echoed concerns that cybersecurity industry stakeholders have also shared with Axios: That Paul is conflating CISA the agency with the information-sharing program, which shares the same acronym.
When you’re more concerned with feeding red meat to your base than actually protecting the country, these distinctions don’t matter much.
The human cost of this bureaucratic madness is becoming clear. As Nextgov reports:
The shifts could slow ongoing responses to cyber threats that have targeted the federal enterprise.
CISA personnel are addressing aCisco vulnerability— recently exploited by a hacking group potentially linked to China — that predominantly affects government networks. And over the summer, a hacker stole employee data from both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and CBP, Nextgov/FCWfirst reported.
So while CISA personnel are being reassigned to help with deportations, actual foreign adversaries are actively exploiting vulnerabilities in government networks. But I’m sure the Chinese hackers will politely wait until we’re done processing paperwork on restaurant workers.
The DHS response to this criticism is predictably tone-deaf and filled with culture war nonsense, rather than actually addressing the underlying issues:
“DHS routinely aligns personnel to meet mission priorities while ensuring continuity across all core mission areas,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Any notion that DHS is unprepared to handle threats to our nation because of these realignments is ludicrous, especially given the abject failure at the hands of CISA in the last administration.”
“CISA was adrift and was focused on censorship, branding, and electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure. Today, CISA is focused squarely on executing its statutory mission: serving as the national coordinator for securing and protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure and is delivering timely, actionable cyber threat intelligence, supporting federal, state and local partners, and defending against both nation-state and criminal cyber threats,” she added.
Ah yes, the “abject failure” of… defending critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. Because apparently the real threat to America isn’t foreign hackers potentially shutting down our power grid, it’s people trying to work in agriculture and construction.
This is what happens when you let people who fundamentally don’t understand how anything works make decisions about complex systems. They see an agency that viewed foreign influence attacks on elections and assume it must be part of some grand conspiracy to silence red-blooded Americans on social media.
The end result is that we’re making America demonstrably less safe in the name of political theater. When you pull cybersecurity experts off incident response and vulnerability management so they can help with deportation paperwork, you’re not making the country more secure. You’re just making it easier for foreign adversaries to exploit the next zero-day vulnerability, breach more federal systems, or potentially disrupt critical infrastructure.
But hey, at least the people cheering this on will have someone to blame when the lights go out.
JD Vance thinks praising Hitler and talking about putting political enemies into death chambers is harmless “kids being kids,” but criticizing Charlie Kirk is somehow deserving of state-supported punishment.
It sure looks like he’s got quite the double standard.
Yesterday, Vance defended Young Republican leaders who were caught in leaked chat logs making racist, antisemitic, and pro-Nazi comments, dismissing their behavior as harmless kids being edgy. But just a month ago, this very same JD Vance was calling for people to be reported to their employers for making far milder comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. And this week, his administration revoked visas from foreigners who criticized Kirk online.
Let’s start with what Vance said yesterday about the Young Republicans scandal. When asked about leaked Telegram messages showing Republican leaders joking about gas chambers, expressing love for Hitler, and using racial slurs more than 250 times, Vance had this to say:
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives. At some point, we’re all going to have to say, ‘enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not ok.
You can see that video at the end of this clip here:
JD Vance dismisses Young Republicans who in a group chat said "I love Hitler" and joked about slavery and rape as "a bunch of kids" who "told stupid jokes" and adds that "most of the stupid things I did when I was a teenager and young adult, they're not on the internet."
There are several problems with this defense. First, these weren’t “kids”—many of the participants were in their twenties and thirties, and some held high-level government positions. Peter Giunta was chief of staff to a New York assemblymember. William Hendrix worked for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. Michael Bartels serves as a senior adviser in the Trump administration’s Small Business Administration.
Second, these weren’t just “stupid jokes.” The leaked messages included participants saying “I love Hitler,” joking about putting political opponents in gas chambers, using racial slurs hundreds of times, and discussing rape as “epic.” One participant wrote about creating “the greatest physiological torture methods known to man” for political opponents.
But the bigger issue isn’t Vance’s factual errors—it’s his breathtaking hypocrisy.
Just last month, Vance guest-hosted Charlie Kirk’s radio show and had a very different message about “edgy, offensive” comments. When people made critical remarks about Kirk’s death, Vance urged listeners to hold them accountable:
Call them out, and hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.
This wasn’t theoretical. Many people lost their jobs after Vance’s call to action. Apparently, their “edgy, offensive” jokes were uncivil and unacceptable, and a perfectly good reason to “ruin their lives,” but when it’s pro-Nazi (!!!) content, suddenly Vance wants to give it a pass? Come on.
And this week, Vance’s own administration took it even further. The State Department revoked visas from at least six foreigners who made critical comments about Kirk’s death on social media. The department explicitly stated as much in a tweet:
If you can’t read that, it says:
The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans.
The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk. Here are just a few examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the U.S.
It then proceeded to show the posts from people whose visas it had revoked, making it blatantly clear that they were deciding to punish people in America for their speech, an unambiguous First Amendment violation. The State Department then showed social media posts from some of those whose visas were revoked, and they appeared way less “edgy” and “offensive” than anything that was revealed in that Young Republicans chat.
So let’s be clear about the double standard here: When Young Republicans joke about Hitler and gas chambers, they’re just “kids” telling “edgy, offensive jokes” that we shouldn’t ruin their lives over. But when foreigners or Americans criticize a conservative influencer—with comments that were objectively far milder than “I love Hitler”—they deserve to lose their jobs, their visas, and their livelihoods.
And, of course, this is a regular pattern from the Trump administration. Graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was literally kidnapped off the street for writing a mild op-ed in support of Palestine. The administration has revoked over 6,000 student visas this year, sometimes targeting students who protested in support of Palestine (the State Dept. falsely said it was for “terrorist activity.”) Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off the air over an extremely mild joke about MAGA’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death.
And there are many more examples as well.
Hell, there are even more examples of Vance trying to dismiss horrible things his friends say as “kids being kids.” Remember Marko Elez, the 25-year-old DOGE bro who was found to have posted a ton of truly racist shit just last year? After the tweets came out, Elez resigned, but JD Vance quickly stepped up to defend the tweets as some form of youthful edgy indiscretion:
So, again, when it’s blatantly racist, hateful shit, Vance’s response is:
I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.
The pattern is unmistakable: pro-Nazi, blatantly hateful rhetoric from Republican allies gets dismissed as harmless fun, while even mild criticism of conservative figures or support for Palestinian rights gets you targeted for life-ruining punishment by federal agencies.
Vance owes the American people an explanation that he will never give. When exactly are “edgy, offensive jokes” acceptable, and when do they deserve government retaliation? Because right now, it appears the only rule is that it’s all in good fun if your hateful, pro-Nazi posts are in support of the MAGA plan. And simply cannot be allowed if they call out bad behavior on the part of MAGA folks.
If joking about Hitler and gas chambers is just boys being boys, then surely criticizing a political commentator should barely register as offensive speech. Yet somehow, the people making Nazi jokes get Vice Presidential protection while their critics get federal persecution.
This is the MAGA world view: hateful neo-Nazi supporting bigotry is all cool if you’re doing so in support of team MAGA. But if you’re not on the team, then it’s fine to weaponize the entire government against your political views. This is the very blueprint for authoritarian control of speech.
Vance knows full well that he’s using a double standard here. But that’s part of his fascistic view of the world. He’s flaunting the fact that he will abuse his position to protect his friends, while eagerly punishing his political opponents for doing way less. It’s right out of the fascist playbook.
Vance finds it hilarious that he’s getting away with such a double standard, but that doesn’t mean anyone else needs to play along. Keep calling it out. And if there are any true reporters left, they should keep asking him about this double standard over and over again.
When a school district sues social media companies claiming they can’t educate kids because Instagram filters exist, that district is announcing to the world that it has fundamentally failed at its core mission. That’s exactly what New York City just did with its latest lawsuit against Meta, TikTok, and other platforms.
The message is unmistakable: “We run the largest school system in America with nearly a million students, but we’re unable to teach children that filtered photos aren’t real or help them develop the critical thinking skills needed to navigate the modern world. So we’re suing someone else to fix our incompetence.”
This is what institutional failure looks like in 2025.
NYC first got taken in by this nonsense last year, as Mayor Adams said all social media was a health hazard and toxic waste. However, that lawsuit was rolled into the crazy, almost impossible to follow, consolidated version of that lawsuit in California that currently has over 2300 filings on the docket. So, apparently, NYC dropped that version, and has now elected to sue, sue again. With the same damn law firm, Keller Rohrback, that kicked off this trend and are the lawyers behind a big chunk of these lawsuits.
The actual complaint is bad, and everyone behind it should feel bad. It’s also 327 pages, and there’s no fucking way I’m going to waste my time going through all of it, watching my blood pressure rise as I have to keep yelling at my screen “that’s not how any of this works.”
The complaint leads with what should be Exhibit A for why NYC schools are failing their students—a detailed explanation of adolescent brain development that perfectly illustrates why education matters:
Children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to developing harmful behaviors because their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed. Indeed, it is one of the last regions of the brain to mature. In the images below, the blue color depicts brain development.
Because the prefrontal cortex develops later than other areas of the brain, children and adolescents, as compared with adults, have less impulse control and less ability to evaluate risks, regulate emotions and regulate their responses to social rewards.
Stop right there. NYC just laid out the neurological case for why education exists. Kids have underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes? They struggle with impulse control, risk evaluation, and emotional regulation? THAT’S LITERALLY WHY WE HAVE SCHOOLS.
The entire premise of public education is that we can help children develop these exact cognitive and social skills. We teach them math because their brains can learn mathematical reasoning. We teach them history so they can evaluate evidence and understand cause and effect. We teach them literature so they can develop empathy and critical thinking.
But apparently, when it comes to digital literacy—arguably one of the most important skills for navigating modern life—NYC throws up its hands and sues instead of teaches.
This lawsuit is a 327-page confession of educational malpractice.
The crux of the lawsuit is, effectively, “kids like social media, and teachers just can’t compete with that shit.”
In short, children find it particularly difficult to exercise the self-control required to regulate their use of Defendants’ platforms, given the stimuli and rewards embedded in those platforms, and as a foreseeable and probable consequence of Defendants’ design choices tend to engage in addictive and compulsive use. Defendants engaged in this conduct even though they knew or should have known that their design choices would have a detrimental effect on youth, including those in NYC Plaintiffs’ community, leading to serious problems in schools and the community.
By this logic, basically any products that children like are somehow a public nuisance.
This lawsuit is embarrassing to the lawyers who brought it and to the NYC school system.
Take the complaint’s hysterical reaction to Instagram filters, which perfectly captures the educational opportunity NYC is missing:
Defendants’ image-altering filters cause mental health harms in multiple ways. First, because of the popularity of these editing tools, many of the images teenagers see have been edited by filters, and it can be difficult for teenagers to remain cognizant of the use of filters. This creates a false reality wherein all other users on the platforms appear better looking than they actually are, often in an artificial way. As children and teens compare their actual appearances to the edited appearances of themselves and others online, their perception of their own physical features grows increasingly negative. Second, Defendants’ platforms tend to reward edited photos, through an increase in interaction and positive responses, causing young users to prefer the way they look using filters. Many young users believe they are only attractive when their images are edited, not as they appear naturally. Third, the specific changes filters make to individuals’ appearances can cause negative obsession or self-hatred surrounding particular aspects of their appearance. The filters alter specific facial features such as eyes, lips, jaw, face shape, and face slimness—features that often require medical intervention to alter in real life
Read that again. The complaint admits that “it can be difficult for teenagers to remain cognizant of the use of filters” and that kids struggle to distinguish between edited and authentic images.
That’s not a legal problem. That’s a curriculum problem.
A competent school system would read that paragraph and immediately start developing age-appropriate digital literacy programs. Media literacy classes. Critical thinking exercises about online authenticity. Discussions about self-image and social comparison that have been relevant since long before Instagram existed.
Instead, NYC read that paragraph and decided the solution is to sue the companies rather than teach the kids.
This is educational malpractice masquerading as child protection. If you run a million-student school system and your response to kids struggling with digital literacy is litigation rather than education, you should resign and let someone competent take over.
They’re also getting sued for… not providing certain features, like age verification. Even though, as we keep pointing out, age verification is (1) likely unconstitutional outside of the narrow realm of pornographic content, and (2) a privacy and security nightmare for kids.
The broader tragedy here extends beyond one terrible lawsuit. NYC is participating in a nationwide trend of school districts abandoning their educational mission in favor of legal buck-passing. These districts, often working with the same handful of contingency-fee law firms, have decided it’s easier to blame social media companies than to do the hard work of preparing students for digital citizenship.
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what schools are supposed to do. We don’t shut down the world to protect children from it—we prepare children to navigate the world as it exists. That means teaching them to think critically about online content, understand privacy and security, develop healthy relationships with technology, and build the cognitive skills to resist manipulation.
Every generation gets a moral panic or two, and apparently “social media is destroying kids’ brains” is our version of moral panics of years past. We’ve seen this movie before: the waltz would corrupt young women’s morals, chess would stop kids from going outdoors, novels would rot their brains on useless fiction, bicycles would cause moral decay, radio would destroy family conversation, pinball machines would turn kids into delinquents, television would make them violent, comic books would corrupt their minds, and Dungeons & Dragons would lead them to Satan worship.
As society calmed down, eventually, after each of those, we now look back on those moral panics as silly, hysterical overreactions. You would hope that a modern education system would take note that they have an opportunity to use these new forms of media as a learning opportunity.
But faced with social media, America’s school districts have largely given up on education and embraced litigation. That should terrify every parent more than any Instagram filter ever could.
The real scandal isn’t that social media exists. It’s that our schools have become so risk-averse and educationally bankrupt that they’ve forgotten their core purpose: preparing young people to be thoughtful, capable adults in the world they’ll actually inherit.
