Welcome to the arena, Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society! Here’s your Streisand Beachfront Property commemorative dinner plates which, we must inform you, contain massive amounts of lead and should never, for any reason, be used as dinner plates.
PTK (as its abbreviated everywhere, even by the “society” itself) considers itself to be above the frat fray, despite its liberal use of the Greek alphabet. Instead, it’s a “society” that helps colleges students help themselves without having to resort to blackout drinking or ill-advised mascot thievery.
But it’s not quite smart enough. Toni Marek — a former volunteer who worked for PTK — is publishing a book based on her experiences there. Those experiences weren’t pleasant. She attended a dinner for the society, during which PTK Executive Director Rod Risely, allegedly forcibly pushed his hand between her legs. This followed several other sexual transgressions from Risely, ranging from the verbal to the physical during Marek’s brief tenure with PTK.
Marek intended to release her book (for free) on April 3, 2025, a date that deliberately coincided with PTK’s national convention in Kansas City, Missouri. Just as deliberately, PTK sought a restraining order blocking the book’s release prior to that date but extending past the end of its national convention.
PTK got what it wanted: a compliant judge. County Judge Kemper Stephen Williams not only bought everything PTK was selling in its unopposed motion, but granted a temporary restraining order that prevents Marek from distributing her book during the crucial PR period surrounding the society’s national convention. (h/t Popehat)
The opening paragraph of the prior restraint order [PDF] (call it what it is, folks) is pure frontier judicial gibberish:
On this date the Court heard Plaintiff Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s (“PTK”) application for a temporary restraining order against Defendant Toni Marek. The application was presented ex parte without notice to the Defendant. The Court, after considering Plaintiff’s TRO application, the pleadings, the declarations, other evidence submitted, and arguments of counsel, finds that the application is well-taken and should be in all things GRANTED.
I’m sorry, but all of these things cannot be true. An “ex parte” presentation only involves one party. So, there’s no way the judge can claim he truly considered everything that needed to be considered before John Hancocking PTK’s pre-written TRO pretty much unaltered. At this point, the judge only has one set of pleadings, declarations, evidence, and a single set of counsel. There was no emergency here, so there was no reason to keep Toni Marek and her counsel from being heard.
This is just a judge deciding the everything he just read must be true, even though it’s pretty clear the facts PTK presented aren’t actually facts.
However you may personally feel about Marc Randazza, one thing he does really well is embarrass courts that engage in clearly unconstitutional actions. Randazza’s motion [PDF] to revoke the order sets Judge Williams and his assertions on fire.
This aggression will not stand:
The TRO forbids Ms. Marek from publishing a book and states that she will not be permitted to publish her book until she hands it to PTK and allows PTK to determine what further prior restraints it wants from this Court. This is not just an unlawful prior restraint, but a never-before-seen type of prior restraint that acts in anticipation of a further prior restraint. It should never have been issued, and it must be dissolved.
So, clearly nothing justifies this prior restraint. But even the allegations are sketchy as hell. If this looks like a SLAPP suit, it’s because it’s a SLAPP suit. PTK is trying to prevent Marek from publishing a book that is, in part, based on records literally everyone already has access to.
PTK alleges, without proof, that some of the information in Marek’s book “is confidential and protected by non-disclosure agreements” and “is protected by the attorney-client privilege and/or work product doctrine.” It is not only without proof, but PTK’s very complaint makes it clear that this is false. PTK acknowledges that Ms. Marek obtained the information legally through interviews with third parties and public records requests. Let that sink in. PTK seeks to censor the publication of information received from public records requests.
Finally, there’s this part, which isn’t going to be fun for the judge to read, but needs to be said this pointedly and clearly to ensure he doesn’t double-down on the unconstitutionality.
Here, we have an injunction, based entirely upon anticipated protected speech by Defendant Marek, that contains a double prior restraint. It not only prohibits her from publishing her book as intended on April 3, 2025, but also provides Plaintiff with the sole discretion to determine what she is and is not allowed to say in her book. See TRO, ¶¶ A, B. Meanwhile, even if a tiny portion of the book were legally unpublishable (which is absurd), the Court enjoined the entire book from publication, and the Court has been manipulated by PTK into doing so for no better reason than to help PTK avoid embarrassment during its conference. The Order is wrong and PTK could not have possibly been ignorant to that fact.
That’s why PTK sought the smallest venue it could find to engage in this CYA Hail Mary play. It went to a county court solely because it increased its chances of slipping something past a judge unlikely to have racked up a lot of experience in First Amendment cases. It worked. This judge not only allowed PTK to present its case completely unopposed, he gave it everything it asked for, presumably deciding that whatever real justice might be applied could always wait until later.
If PTK had just sat back and allowed Marek to publish her book, it likely would have walked away from this pretty much unscathed. After the initial interest died down, PTK could go back to business as usual. Instead, it chose to be a bully, punching down in hopes of silencing a single critic for good. Because it chose this path, it will reap what it has sown: the resurgence of public discussion involving allegations that are now at least a decade old. And its extreme defensiveness in the face of this very minor threat makes an implicit statement that backs up Marek’s allegations. After all, if there were no truth to them, PTK would have nothing to worry about, much less sue about.
I realize that using the word “racist” to describe an ExTwitter account is pretty much redundant at this point, but there’s something more to this story. It’s not that a racist is using ExTwitter to make racist posts. It’s that a prosecutor working for ICE is, and has been, posting racist content for years on the platform.
And yet, here we are, thanks to this reporting, which shows ICE assistant chief counsel Jim Rodden runs the infamous GlomarResponder ExTwitter account. This is the sort of content that’s not only allowed by platform under Elon Musk, but encouraged by the platform’s pay-to-play verification and Musk’s support and adoration of anything that contains a bunch of bigotry.
Since GlomarResponder was first created in 2012, the account has posted hateful, xenophobic, and pro-fascist content. “America is a White nation, founded by Whites. … Our country should favor us,” GlomarResponder wrote last month. “All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck,” the account posted in September of last year. “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” GlomarResponder wrote four months prior, further clarifying the post was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a reply to a comment. “I’m not a commie, I’m a fascist,” GlomarResponder posted a couple weeks later. “Fascists solve communist problems. Get your insults right, retard.”
In August, GlomarResponder posted: “‘Migrants’ are all criminals.” Two months later, GlomarResponder shared an image that reads: “It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes.” Some GlomarResponder posts evoke anti-immigrant violence: “Nobody is proposing feeding migrants into tree shredders,” the account posted in March 2024. “Yet. Give it a few more weeks at this level of invasion, and that will be the moderate position.” And in January: “My WWII vet grandfather didn’t get a chance to kill asians, so he volunteered for Korea. He’d be asking for a short term job with ICE kicking doors and swinging a baton.”
Pretty nasty stuff. Most people wouldn’t want their real names associated with this garbage. People working for the government — especially those handling immigration prosecutions — would definitely not want to be linked to their bigoted social media spewing.
But Jim Rodden fucked up. He carelessly provided enough hints about his current employment and employer that he was sniffed out by the Texas Observer.
“Yeah, I’m in a courthouse wating [sic] on warrants,” GlomarResponder wrote. “Turns out there’s a lot of bitch work to be done to make mass deportations happen.” One day prior, GlomarResponder had posted that he “Can confirm all of those,” regarding a list of cities where ICE was expected to begin deportation operations the next day. “May have a betting pool to see who can guess which one I’m at on any particular day, based on the news,” GlomarResponder wrote.
The paper also used a lawsuit filed in 2021 challenging government mask mandates to nail down GlomarResponder’s real identity. The account mentioned being “party to a lawsuit” involving vaccine mandates. Months down the road, he complained the lawsuit had been vacated by the court. The lawsuit’s formal title? James Joseph Rodden, et al v. Dr. Anthony Fauci.
It should be clear from Rodden’s own posts that he’s incapable of engaging impartially in immigration proceedings. Unfortunately, there’s really not a Brady list equivalent for prosecutors (these lists only prevent or discourage law enforcement officers from testifying in court). And the Supreme Court has made it pretty much impossible to sue any federal official or officer for rights violations, so it’s unlikely Rodden’s bigotry will prevent him from engaging in future prosecutions.
The only hope now is that ICE itself will seek to have him removed. But, given the current administration’s hatred for immigrants and its willingness to turn its bigotry into action, it hardly seems likely ICE supervisors will consider Rodden an impediment to its goals. If anything, officials may see this open bigotry as a force multiplier — one that will ensure maximum cruelty and efficiency as this administration moves forward with its plan to eliminate a large portion of what actually makes this country great: a melting pot that has provided multiple large US companies with reliable employees while simultaneously providing millions of immigrants with more safety and security (job or otherwise) than they could find in their own countries.
I’m not crazy about writing about a Supreme Court oral argument if the Court is just going to make a fool out of me by doing something they know is wrong and completely divorced from the argument they heard, which laid before them everything they needed to reach a decision that adhered to constitutional precedent.
And yet here I am writing again about another oral argument, this time in the case of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which the Court heard last week. This case addresses the law that Texas passed requiring the age-gating of certain Internet sites, even though previous Supreme Court precedent said that such efforts were unconstitutional. This law challenges at least two previously established tenets: that adult expression is ordinarily protected, except under limited circumstances, and that age-gating the Internet is not. And this challenge implicated yet one more: that the law was subject to strict scrutiny. But all these things went out the window when the Fifth Circuit got its hands on it, and, using rational basis scrutiny instead, decided that the law was just fine, thereby tossing the injunction the district court had put on the law. As a result, this unconstitutional law has now already been in effect causing constitutional harm.
Eventually, though, the challenge made its way to the Supreme Court, and what is pending before it is yet another choice for whether it would rather stick with clear precedent or take yet another huge bite out of the First Amendment’s previously clear protections because, like with TikTok, there is something about the subject matter that the government chose to regulate that it doesn’t like either. With TikTok it was because it believed the Chinese were doing something sinister with our data (which, even if true, does not mean we should trash the First Amendment and its protections for expression). Whereas with this case because it involves icky adult expression, the scary Internet, and children who need to be thought of—even though the Court has already considered cases involving such things and decided the Constitution still applies. What oral argument revealed is that a lot of the Court wants to change its mind and plunge us all into a world where the First Amendment now protects much less than it used to.
But such a rollback was not supposed to be on the table right now. As Justice Sotomayor reminded, as the argument seemed to be going off the rails having to defend the very notion that precedent meant the First Amendment applied here, the only question before the Court was whether the Fifth Circuit erred in applying only rational basis scrutiny to stay the district court’s injunction.
Unfortunately, what should have been an easy, “yes,” did not seem to be so easy for at least a number of justices to accept. The Court asked FSC, who was challenging the law on behalf of a group of affected sites, what would happen if it decided the Fifth Circuit had erred. Its decision staying the injunction would be vacated, came the answer. The injunction would come back into effect, and the Fifth Circuit would take another crack at reviewing the matter while applying the correct strict scrutiny standard—which of course probably means we’ll all be back here when the Fifth Circuit inevitably gets it wrong again, but nevertheless vacating the earlier Fifth Circuit decision would still be the right way to proceed and at least then maybe it would at least be willing to leave the injunction in place while SCOTUS reviews it.
But some justices, like Justice Kavanaugh, kept wanting to return to the merits now to decide whether the law was constitutional, because vacating would restore the preliminary injunction, and preliminary injunctions are supposed to be (at least partially) predicated on the likelihood of success on the merits. So surely we need to consider the merits now too to address that likelihood, wondered Kavanaugh out loud. No, argued FSC, pointing out that the district court had found a likelihood of success, and that was just on a preliminary record. If more is needed to sustain a permanent injunction later, then that’s what the rest of the litigation is for. The point of a preliminary injunction is just to press pause on everything, so that if the challenged act is unconstitutional, no harm will accrue while we sort everything out, and it can inherently only be based on a best guess given what is known at that stage of the litigation. We continue to litigate before an injunction becomes permanent to make sure we’re right, but at that point the decision whether to make the injunction permanent will be based on a fuller record and much more briefing.
What Kavanaugh and others seemed to be doing, again (because it happened in TikTok by not issuing an injunction to give it time to hear the case properly), was trying to short circuit the normal path a constitutional challenge takes. And as we learned with TikTok we take these shortcuts at our peril. We can only hope that there are at least five votes not to make the same mistake again here. These issues underlying the case here are too important for the Supreme Court to summarily dispense with at such a premature stage of the challenge that this moment is.
I know that Mark Zuckerberg no longer likes fact-checking, but it’s not going to stop me from continuing to fact-check him. I’m going to rate his claimed plans of moving trust & safety and content moderation teams away from California to Texas as not just an obnoxiously stupid political suck-up, but also something that increasingly appears to be just a flat out lie.
As you may recall, as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to do away with fact-checking, enable more hatred, and just generally suck up to the Trump administration, there was the weird promise that because California content moderation and trust & safety teams were too “biased,” they would be moved to Texas.
Texas is, apparently, famous for its unbiased, neutral residents, as compared to California, where it is constitutionally impossible to be unbiased. Or something.
Former Facebook employees say, however, that the move-to-Texas announcement rings hollow. That’s because Meta already has major content moderation and trust and safety operations in the state. They say the move is nothing more than a blatant appeal to Donald Trump. Facebook’s former head of content standards said he helped set up those teams in Texas more than a decade ago.
“They made a lot of hay of: ‘Oh, we’re worried about bias, we’re moving all these content moderation teams to other places,’” Dave Willner said during a Lawfare panel last week. “As far as I’ve been able to figure out, that is mostly fake.”
Three other former Facebook employees who worked on the trust and safety teams in Texas told the Guardian the same. One said many people across Meta’s various divisions did trust and safety work in the company’s Austin offices. Another said that many content moderators, including those allocated to the trust and safety teams, have been in Austin for a long time.
So many of the people were already in Texas. What about the folks in California who were told they’d have to move? According to Wired, most have been told the mandate doesn’t actually apply to them.
Last Thursday during a town hall call for Meta employees working under Guy Rosen, the company’s chief information security officer, executives said that no one in Rosen’s organization would have to move to Texas, according to two people in attendance. This exempts from relocation employees who work on Meta’s safety, operations, and integrity teams, which collectively help enforce the company’s content policies.
The changes also do not affect a portion of Meta’s US-based content policy team, which works under chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, because many members are already located outside of California, including in Washington, DC, New York City, and Austin, Texas, the employees say. That includes key decisionmakers such as Neil Potts, vice president of public policy. Many of the company’s content moderators are contractors based out of hubs beyond California such as San Antonio, Texas.
So it sure sounds like the big announcement of how content moderation and trust & safety were moving to Texas was a load of garbage. Many of those people are already there.
The whole thing, as expected, was about making a fake public concession to Donald Trump in an attempt to curry political favor.
While Zuckerberg’s motivations here seem transparently political, the broader implications remain concerning. It’s especially worrying given how a ton of people are going around falsely claiming Zuckerberg caved to pressure from Biden, while everyone seems to be ignoring the much more blatant act of him actually caving to Trump.
Moving critical trust & safety functions to appease partisan interests sets a troubling precedent. It’s a short-sighted move that prioritizes political expediency over principled policymaking. But that’s the world Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to embrace.
When the NY Times declared in September that “Mark Zuckerberg is Done With Politics,” it was obvious this framing was utter nonsense. It was quite clear that Zuckerberg was in the process of sucking up to Republicans after Republican leaders spent the past decade using him as a punching bag on which they could blame all sorts of things (mostly unfairly).
Now, with Trump heading back to the White House and Republicans controlling Congress, Zuck’s desperate attempts to appease the GOP have reached new heights of absurdity. The threat from Trump that he wanted Zuckerberg to be jailed over a made-up myth that Zuckerberg helped get Biden elected only seemed to cement that the non-stop scapegoating of Zuck by the GOP had gotten to him.
Since the election, Zuckerberg has done everything he can possibly think of to kiss the Trump ring. He even flew all the way from his compound in Hawaii to have dinner at Mar-A-Lago with Trump, before turning around and flying right back to Hawaii. In the last few days, he also had GOP-whisperer Joel Kaplan replace Nick Clegg as the company’s head of global policy. On Monday it was announced that Zuckerberg had also appointed Dana White to Meta’s board. White is the CEO of UFC, but also (perhaps more importantly) a close friend of Trump’s.
Some of the negative reactions to the video are a bit crazy, as I doubt the changes are going to have that big of an impact. Some of them may even be sensible. But let’s break them down into three categories: the good, the bad, and the stupid.
The Good
Zuckerberg is exactly right that Meta has been really bad at content moderation, despite having the largest content moderation team out there. In just the last few months, we’ve talked about multiple stories showcasing really, really terrible content moderation systems at work on various Meta properties. There was the story of Threads banning anyone who mentioned Hitler, even to criticize him. Or banning anyone for using the word “cracker” as a potential slur.
It was all a great demonstration for me of Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem of dealing with content moderation at scale, and how mistakes are inevitable. I know that people within Meta are aware of my impossibility theorem, and have talked about it a fair bit. So, some of this appears to be them recognizing that it’s a good time to recalibrate how they handle such things:
In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.
Leaving aside (for now) the use of the word “censored,” much of this isn’t wrong. For years it felt that Meta was easily pushed around on these issues and did a shit job of explaining why it did things, instead responding reactively to the controversy of the day.
And, in doing so, it’s no surprise that as the complexity of its setup got worse and worse, its systems kept banning people for very stupid reasons.
It actually is a good idea to seek to fix that, and especially if part of the plan is to be more cautious in issuing bans, it seems somewhat reasonable. As Zuckerberg announced in the video:
We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower-severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So, by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
Zuckerberg’s announcement is a tacit admission that Meta’s much-hyped AI is simply not up to the task of nuanced content moderation at scale. But somehow that angle is getting lost amidst the political posturing.
Some of the other policy changes also don’t seem all that bad. We’ve been mocking Meta for its “we’re downplaying political content” stance from the last few years as being just inherently stupid, so it’s nice in some ways to see them backing off of that (though the timing and framing of this decision we’ll discuss in the latter sections of this post):
We’re continually testing how we deliver personalized experiences and have recently conducted testing around civic content. As a result, we’re going to start treating civic content from people and Pages you follow on Facebook more like any other content in your feed, and we will start ranking and showing you that content based on explicit signals (for example, liking a piece of content) and implicit signals (like viewing posts) that help us predict what’s meaningful to people. We are also going to recommend more political content based on these personalized signals and are expanding the options people have to control how much of this content they see.
Finally, most of the attention people have given to the announcement has focused on the plan to end the fact-checking program, with a lot of people freaking out about it. I even had someone tell me on Bluesky that Meta ending its fact-checking program was an “existential threat” to truth. And that’s nonsense. The reality is that fact-checking has always been a weak and ineffective band-aid to larger issues. We called this out in the wake of the 2016 election.
This isn’t to say that fact-checking is useless. It’s helpful in a limited set of circumstances, but too many people (often in the media) put way too much weight on it. Reality is often messy, and the very setup of “fact checking” seems to presume there are “yes/no” answers to questions that require a lot more nuance and detail. Just as an example of this, during the run-up to the election, multiple fact checkers dinged Democrats for calling Project 2025 “Trump’s plan”, because Trump denied it and said he had nothing to do with it.
But, of course, since the election, Trump has hired on a bunch of the Project 2025 team, and they seem poised to enact much of the plan. Many things are complex. Many misleading statements start with a grain of truth and then build a tower of bullshit around it. Reality is not about “this is true” or “this is false,” but about understanding the degrees to which “this is accurate, but doesn’t cover all of the issues” or deal with the overall reality.
So, Zuck’s plan to kill the fact-checking effort isn’t really all that bad. I think too many people were too focused on it in the first place, despite how little impact it seemed to actually have. The people who wanted to believe false things weren’t being convinced by a fact check (and, indeed, started to falsely claim that fact checkers themselves were “biased.”)
Indeed, I’ve heard from folks at Meta that Zuck has wanted to kill the fact-checking program for a while. This just seemed like the opportune time to rip off the band-aid such that it also gains a little political capital with the incoming GOP team.
On top of that, adding in a feature like Community Notes (née Birdwatch from Twitter) is also not a bad idea. It’s a useful feature for what it does, but it’s never meant to be (nor could it ever be) a full replacement for other kinds of trust & safety efforts.
The Bad
So, if a lot of the functional policy changes here are actually more reasonable, what’s so bad about this? Well, first off, the framing of it all. Zuckerberg is trying to get away with the Elon Musk playbook of pretending this is all about free speech. Contrary to Zuckerberg’s claims, Facebook has never really been about free speech, and nothing announced on Tuesday really does much towards aiding in free speech.
I guess some people forget this, but in the earlier days, Facebook was way more aggressive than sites like Twitter in terms of what it would not allow. It very famously had a no nudity policy, which created a huge protest when breastfeeding images were removed. The idea that Facebook was ever designed to be a “free speech” platform is nonsense.
Indeed, if anything, it’s an admission of Meta’s own self-censorship. After all, the entire fact-checking program was an expression of Meta’s own position on things. It was “more speech.” Literally all fact-checking is doing is adding context and additional information, not removing content. By no stretch of the imagination is fact-checking “censorship.”
Of course, bad faith actors, particularly on the right, have long tried to paint fact-checking as “censorship.” But this talking point, which we’ve debunked before, is utter nonsense. Fact-checking is the epitome of “more speech”— exactly what the marketplace of ideas demands. By caving to those who want to silence fact-checkers, Meta is revealing how hollow its free speech rhetoric really is.
Also bad is Zuckerberg’s misleading use of the word “censorship” to describe content moderation policies. We’ve gone over this many, many times, but using censorship as a description for private property owners enforcing their own rules completely devalues the actual issue with censorship, in which it is the government suppressing speech. Every private property owner has rules for how you can and cannot interact in their space. We don’t call it “censorship” when you get tossed out of a bar for breaking their rules, nor should it be called censorship when a private company chooses to block or ban your content for violating its rules (even if you argue the rules are bad or were improperly enforced.)
The Stupid
The timing of all of this is obviously political. It is very clearly Zuckerberg caving to more threats from Republicans, something he’s been doing a lot of in the last few months, while insisting he was done caving to political pressure.
I mean, even Donald Trump is saying that Zuckerberg is doing this because of the threats that Trump and friends have leveled in his direction:
Q: Do you think Zuckerberg is responding to the threats you've made to him in the past?TRUMP: Probably. Yeah. Probably.
I raise this mainly to point out the ongoing hypocrisy of all of this. For years we’ve been told that the Biden campaign (pre-inauguration in 2020 and 2021) engaged in unconstitutional coercion to force social media platforms to remove content. And here we have the exact same thing, except that it’s much more egregious and Trump is even taking credit for it… and you won’t hear a damn peep from anyone who has spent the last four years screaming about the “censorship industrial complex” pushing social media to make changes to moderation practices in their favor.
Turns out none of those people really meant it. I know, not a surprise to regular readers here, but it should be called out.
Also incredibly stupid is this, which we’ll quote straight from Zuck’s Threads thread about all this:
That’s Zuck saying:
Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
There’s a pretty big assumption in there which is both false and stupid: that people who live in California are inherently biased, while people who live in Texas are not. People who live in both places may, in fact, be biased, though often not in the ways people believe. As a few people have pointed out, more people in Texas voted for Kamala Harris (4.84 million) than did so in New York (4.62 million). Similarly, almost as many people voted for Donald Trump in California (6.08 million) as did so in Texas (6.39 million).
There are people with all different political views all over the country. The idea that everyone in one area believes one thing politically, or that you’ll get “less bias” in Texas than in California, is beyond stupid. All it really does is reinforce misguided stereotypes.
The whole statement is clearly for political show.
It also sucks for Meta employees who work in trust & safety, who want access to certain forms of healthcare or want net neutrality, or other policies that are super popular among voters across the political spectrum, but which Texas has decided are inherently not allowed.
Finally, there’s this stupid line in the announcement from Joel Kaplan:
We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.
I’m sure that sounded good to whoever wrote it, but it makes no sense at all. First off, thanks to the Speech and Debate Clause, literally anything is legal to say on the floor of Congress. It’s like the one spot in the world where there are no rules at all over what can be said. Why include that? Things could literally be said on the floor of Congress that would violate the law on Meta platforms.
Also, TV stations literally have restrictions known as “standards and practices” that are way, way, way more restrictive than any set of social media content moderation rules. Neither of these are relevant metrics to compare to social media. What jackass thought that using examples of (1) the least restricted place for speech and (2) a way more restrictive place for speech made this a reasonable argument to make here?
In the end, the reality here is that nothing announced this week will really change all that much for most users. Most users don’t run into content moderation all that often. Fact-checking happens but isn’t all that prominent. But all of this is a big signal that Zuckerberg, for all his talk of being “done with politics” and no longer giving in to political pressure on moderation, is very engaged in politics and a complete spineless pushover for modern Trumpist politicians.
You ain’t seen nothing yet regarding how some MAGA politicians are going to harass and attack journalists. This week, it was revealed that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who already has a history of trying to punish speech he dislikes) had issued a subpoena to 404 Media, an independent, journalist-owned-and-run news site that we link to frequently, in a blatant attempt to intimidate and harass them for their reporting.
Paxton is seeking 404 Media reporting materials and documents related to an internalGoogle privacy incident databasethat 404 Media reported on in June. He has demanded these documents aspart of a broader lawsuit against Googlethat claims the company has violated a Texas biometric privacy law that has nothing to do with 404 Media.
As 404 Media notes, Paxton could have easily sought this information directly from Google itself rather than targeting journalists. The fact that he chose to subpoena 404 Media instead strongly suggests his true motive is intimidation, not legitimate fact-finding.
At the time, we did not publish the full database because it contains the personal information of potentiallythousands of Google customers and employees, and cannot be reasonably redacted. The subpoena threatens to hold us in contempt of court if we do not comply with its subpoena.
Friday,our lawyers objected to the subpoenaon the grounds that it is “oppressive” and because our confidential reporting is protected under the California Shield Law (404 Media is incorporated as Dark Mode LLC in the state of California). “The information and materials sought by the Subpoena are absolutely protected from compelled disclosure by the California Shield Law,” our attorneys wrote. “Dark Mode further objects to the Subpoena on the grounds that it calls for the disclosure of unpublished information that is independently protected from compelled disclosure under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 2(a) of the California Constitution.”
Simply put: If Ken Paxton wants Google’s privacy incident database, he should get it directly from Google, not from us.
This subpoena appears to be nothing more than an attempt to intimidate and harass journalists for reporting on matters of public interest. Really, this is just another example of harassing journalists with legally threatening nonsense.
As 404 notes, they’re using California’s Shield Law to protect their sources and unpublished materials.
This incident underscores the importance of strong legal protections for journalists, like shield laws. It’s worth noting that a federal shield law, the PRESS Act, had widespread bipartisan support until Donald Trump told Republicans to kill it. Apparently, Republicans only like press freedom when it applies to their favored parts of the media ecosystem. Without such protections, politically motivated harassment of the press, like Paxton’s subpoena, becomes much easier.
In the end, this is yet another example of Republicans who publicly claim they’re all about supporting free speech, then turning around and using the power of the state to harass and attack speech they dislike. It’s rank hypocrisy, and we must call it out as such.
In May 2022 Thierry Breton, at the time a prominent European Commissioner, went to Texas and dropped in on Elon Musk, who was then on his way to buying Twitter. During his visit, Breton did something remarkable: he showed that Elon, whatever his other accomplishments, is a sucker’s sucker. In a video posted on social media, Breton got Musk to say that the European Union’s forthcoming Digital Services Act was “exactly aligned” with his “thinking.”
Once he took the helm at Twitter, Musk’s chaotic style of management was obviously going to clash with the EU’s meddlesome style of governance. And so it proved. After the DSA took effect, the social media platform now known as X wasthe first company charged with violating it. The European Commission is currently weighing whether to impose what amounts to personal liability on Musk. The fines could total six percent of the annual revenue of Musk’s closely held firms (SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, and the Boring Company). In a separate spat over the law’s enforcement, Musk told Breton to “fuck your own face.”
All of this is to say that, when it comes to understanding and navigating social media regulations, Elon Musk needs all the help he can get.
If Elon cared to listen, I’d tell him this: He should start talking, loudly and often, about the threat that Florida’s and Texas’s social media laws, SB 7072 and HB 20, pose to X.
Florida’s SB 7072 Texas’s HB 20 were enacted in 2021, and they’ve already been the subject of extensive litigation. They’ve already been to the Supreme Court, in fact, where, last summer, the justices addressed lawsuits challenging the two laws inMoody v. NetChoice. That decision does some very good things. It confirms that the First Amendment protects curated collections of third-party speech. It finds that social media newsfeeds are exactly that sort of protected expressive compilation. And it concludes that “a state may not interfere” with such feeds “to advance its own vision of ideological balance.”
But Moody is not the final word. The justices were reviewing a pair of interlocutory appeals; they were explaining only what was “likely” to happen, in the two cases, on the merits. What’s more, the decision addresses only what social media platforms do “on their main feeds.” Texas and Florida are “not likely to succeed in enforcing” their laws, the Court declared, “against the platforms’ application of their content-moderation policies to the feeds that were the focus of the proceedings below” (emphasis mine). The Court offered no opinion on whether SB 7072 and HB 20 are constitutional as applied to user profiles, direct messaging, group chats, or event functions. Instead, it sent the cases back to their respective trial courts for further fact-finding through discovery.
In a nutshell, SB 7072 and HB 20 require large social media platforms (1) to carry and promote content against their will and (2) to fulfill onerous transparency requirements. Even if the conclusion that they do not govern content moderation on newsfeeds holds (no sure bet—a point to which I shall return), these two laws could cause huge headaches for Musk and X.
Musk styles himself a “free-speech absolutist,” and this might make it seem as though he has little to fear from SB 7072 and HB 20, which seek to expand the amount of content platforms must carry. But Musk treats X less as a free-speech platform than as a personal plaything. When journalists annoy him—as by interviewing the owner of an account that tracked his private jet—Musk has them banned. When material surfaces that embarrasses his friends—as when a reporter posted pictures of Sen. Ted Cruz’s notes for meetings with donors—Musk has it suppressed. Recently, Musk warned that the “Hammer of Justice is coming” for “those who pushed foreign interference hoaxes.” Maybe he did not mean that such “Justice” will be served on X, but that was the fair implication (X is where he posted the comment, after all). It is easy to picture him embarking on a witch hunt, banning the accounts of users he believes, rightly or wrongly, to have “pushed” such “hoaxes.”
HB 20 bars a platform from “censoring” a user based on “viewpoint.” It defines “censor” as “to block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against.” It does not elaborate on what constitutes a “viewpoint.” SB 7072, meanwhile, requires platforms to “apply censorship, deplatforming, and shadow banning standards in a consistent manner.” It does not elaborate on what “consistent” content moderation looks like. SB 7072 also bars a platform from “tak[ing] any action to censor, deplatform, or shadow ban a journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast.” “Journalistic enterprise” is defined broadly to encompass any popular website. A similar but weaker provision protects content “by or about” political candidates.
Neither law can stop a platform from removing unlawful content, and each acknowledges that it cannot impose liability for acts of content moderation protected by Section 230. Because Section 230 protects platforms from liability for most content moderation of lawful content, Section 230 should essentially nullify SB 7072’s and HB 20’s (anti-)content moderation rules. But for rightwing critics of so-called Big Tech censorship, gutting Section 230 is part of the plan. Without strong Section 230 protection, SB 7072 and HB 20 would stretch to cover almost every otherwise lawful content moderation decision platforms make.
Even with Moody in place, in other words, a platform would expose itself to potential liability nearly every time it blocked a post or banned a user (acts Moody, with its focus on newsfeeds, did not address) due to hate speech, disinformation, or other lawful but awful content. Any user whose post or profile was taken down could make a colorable claim to have promoted some “viewpoint” that stands opposed to some other “viewpoint” a platform leaves up. (A user punished for publishing Ted Cruz’s donor notes could claim that the “viewpoint” being discriminated against is a commitment to putting the powerful under a microscope, a belief that money should be removed from politics, a conviction that the GOP is a rotten political party, or a recognition that Ted Cruz is a ridiculous person.) Similarly, any user could concoct a story about why taking her posts or profile down is “inconsistent” with leaving some other user’s posts or profile up. (Platforms make billions of content moderation decisions, many of which are subjective and value-laden. Of course these decisions are not fully “consistent,” even apart from the fact that theoretical “consistency” is impossible to define.) Meanwhile, many accounts would qualify as “journalistic enterprises,” and much content as “by or about” a political candidate, making a host of profiles and posts privileged or virtually untouchable.
Although state actors can enforce SB 7072 and HB 20, let’s indulge for the moment the modest assumption that Florida and Texas will enforce their laws in bad faith, persecuting their perceived Big Tech enemies while leaving X untouched. This wouldn’t get Musk out of the woods. Both laws provide aggrieved users avenues by which to sue. SB 7072 creates a private right of action for violations of the consistency provision. HB 20 creates a private right of action for violations of its content moderation rules “with respect to the user” bringing the suit. This broad framing appears to enable a user in Texas to sue a platform for removing any post the user wants to see.
Even without touching newsfeeds, in short, SB 7072’s and HB 20’s content moderation rules could subject X to swarms of nuisance suits, not to mention drastically curtail Musk’s cherished ability to operate X however he wants.
The transparency provisions of the two statutes differ in their particulars, but their general thrust is the same. Both laws require platforms (1) to set forth in detail the rules and methods by which they moderate content, (2) to adhere to those rules and methods (i.e., what they disclose must be accurate), and (3) to explain in detail decisions to remove—and, for SB 7072, downrank or label—a piece of content. The Supreme Court did not opine in Moody on whether these requirements can constitutionally be applied to newsfeeds.
Making a platform explain in detail its millions of daily content moderation decisions would, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit dryly noted in its opinion on SB 7072, entail “potentially significant implementation costs.” It would also expose platforms “to massive liability.” SB 7072 “provides for up to $100,000 in statutory damages per claim and pegs liability to vague terms like ‘thorough’ and ‘precise.’” A “platform could,” the Eleventh Circuit understood, “be slapped with millions, or even billions, of dollars in statutory damages” for failing, in the eyes of a Florida court, to “provide sufficiently ‘thorough’ explanations” when removing, downranking, or labeling posts.
While Musk might not flinch at the expense of supplying countless detailed explanations for content moderation decisions, he would surely hate having to adhere to X’s terms of service. As the tech writer Alex Hern points out, Musk has tended to treat his platform’s “written rules” as “a polite fiction”—a “fig leaf” over his “capricious whims.” Consider the private jet episode—a good illustration of what, with SB 7072 or HB 20 in place, Musk would not be allowed to do. Musk pledged not to ban the “ElonJet” account that tracked his private flights. Later, though, he did just that, even though the account was not in violation of then-still-Twitter’s written rules. Twitter then changed the rules to ban posts that disclose a person’s “live location” or that contain images or videos of a person without her consent. This newrule was so broad that Musk promptly broke it himself, by posting a picture of a person (a stalker, according to Musk) sitting on his car.
Now imagine that SB 7072 or HB 20 had been in place. The banning of the ElonJet account revealed that the Twitter rules, as they existed before the ban, were incomplete. And there was no way the platform was ever going to engage in more than haphazard enforcement of the location-sharing and depiction-without-consent bans. SB 7072 and HB 20 don’t appear to allow private enforcement of their “follow your own rules” provisions; but if you’re Musk, do you really want the governments of Florida and Texas to have, sitting in their back pockets, a handy tool for making you operate your platform how they want? You never know when you might have a falling out with a cynical and capricious character like Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. To avoid the possibility of large fines, injunctions, and contempt proceedings, Musk would have to obey X’s written rules, and X’s written rules would have to become far more detailed. X would have to undertake what Musk would undoubtedly view as a heinous routinization and bureaucratization of its content moderation process.
The Supreme Court’s protection of content moderation on newsfeeds is likely to hold, but it is by no means guaranteed to hold. Recall that the Court was applying only the “likelihood of success” standard that governs motions for preliminary injunction. The Court further opened the door to a change of result, following discovery, by acknowledging that “the record is incomplete” even as to “the major social-media platforms’ main feeds.” Adding to the uncertainty, Justice Alito, writing for himself and Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, issued a concurrence laden with suggestions for how the lower courts might evade the majority’s ruling.
And if SB 7072 and HB 20 were to sink their teeth into newsfeeds after all, that would be a disaster for Musk. Forced under SB 7072 to act in a “consistent” manner, and forced under HB 20 never to deny “equal access or visibility to,” or “otherwise discriminate against,” content, Musk would have to fundamentally change how he runs X. He could no longer weight X’s algorithm in favor of his political interests (thereby discriminating against Democrats) or himself (thereby discriminating against literally everyone else). His beloved community notes would draw lawsuits, with plaintiffs claiming the notes aren’t consistent or viewpoint neutral. Under SB 7072, X would additionally have to let users opt out of the platform’s recommendation algorithm altogether, leaving Musk unable to continue force-feeding users the posts he wants them to see.
Even if, despite everything, Musk isn’t worried about SB 7072 or HB 20, he still has good reason to oppose them. For if SB 7072 and HB 20 are valid under the First Amendment, other intrusive regulations of social media will be too. New statutes will be sure to pop up. Blue states will enact laws that force X to engage in more content moderation. Some commentators cite Musk as the reason such laws are needed. “There is a liberal/progressive case to be made” for “regulating content moderation,” argues professor Michael Dorf, that stands in part on the fact that “Musk ha[s] bought Twitter, rebranded it X, and turned it into [a] cesspool of misinformation, hate, and stupidity.” If Musk wants to avoid leftwing regulation of his platform, he’d be wise to oppose rightwing regulation of his platform as well.
Suffice it to say that this is not what Musk to this point has done. What he has done instead is resist or accede to state action based on whether he likes the politics of the government in question. X complied with the Indian government’s demand that it take down a documentary critical of rightwing prime minister Narendra Modi; but it defied (at least for a time) a Brazilian Supreme Court justice’s demand that it ban accounts accused of spreading misinformation in support of rightwing former president Jair Bolsonaro. X has sued to block social media regulations enacted by blue California, yet Musk is not voicing opposition to the social media regulations enacted by red Florida and Texas. (X is technically involved in opposing SB 7072 and HB 20 through its membership in NetChoice, one of the trade groups challenging the laws. But my point all along has been that Musk should be tapping his personal clout here.)
As I said at the outset, Musk initially supported the DSA out of ignorance. Maybe ignorance is all that’s keeping him from speaking out against SB 7072 and HB 20. If so, here’s hoping he becomes better informed. But it’s at least as likely that he knows about the Florida and Texas laws, and that he knows they’re dangerous, but that, because his first priority is to play political favorites, he doesn’t care—certainly not enough to do anything. Elon Musk is a lot of things; principled is not one of them.
Corbin K. Barthold is Internet Policy Counsel at TechFreedom.
This may not mean much in the grand scheme of things but it’s good to see these objections on the record. It’s incremental, but in these times, every increment helps, especially when the Supreme Court seems actively disinterested in discussing cases in which government officials might be found to be in the wrong.
Cert has been denied to Vicki Baker, a McKinney, Texas resident whose house was basically razed to the ground by police officers looking to arrest a kidnapping suspect. Without a doubt, kidnapping is a serious crime and this incident involved a 15-year-old. But the events that unfolded following a high-speed chase turned Vicki Baker’s home into the PD’s own private Afghanistan as they attempted to smoke out the suspect using a steady stream of escalation.
The kidnapping suspect was known to Baker and her daughter, Deanna Cook. When suspect Wesley Little showed up at her house (a residence known to him because he had worked there as a handyman), Cook recognized him as well as the person he had kidnapped. Making the first inadvertent mistake, Cook told Baker she had to go to the store. Once outside, she called the cops.
The police showed up and talked with Cook. They set up a perimeter and, shortly thereafter, Little released his kidnapping victim. Then the real assault began. This is from the Supreme Court’s denial [PDF] of Baker’s petition — one she engaged in after the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court sided with the police and their destruction of her home.
To resolve the standoff and protect the surrounding community, the police tried to draw Little out by launching dozens of tear gas grenades into the home. When that did not work, the officers detonated explosives to break down the front and garage doors and used a tank-like vehicle to bulldoze the home’s backyard fence. By the time the officers gained entry, Little had taken his own life.
It seems so minimal when reduced to a single, small paragraph. But read those words again. “Dozens” of tear gas grenades were fired into the home. Explosives were used to destroy multiple doors. A goddamn bulldozer was used to destroy the backyard fence. And, in the end, the suspect had killed himself, despite the police making every effort to destroy the house he decided to enter.
Twice, a federal court said this was a plausible violation of the Takings Clause, which limits the government’s ability to seize/destroy property to serve its own ends. Following a December 2021 ruling that the Takings Clause’s limitations applied to this case, at least in terms of Texas state law, a jury decided seven months later, the city owed Baker more than $60,000 in damages.
Baker has sufficiently pleaded a takings claim under the Texas Constitution. The actions taken by the Department officers damaged Baker’s home—that much appears undisputed. Even if the government did not intend to damage Baker’s property to apprehend Little, the City was substantially certain such damage would result. It is unreasonable for the City to suggest the Department officers stormed Baker’s house, broke the windows, knocked down the garage door, rammed down the backyard fence with a tank-like vehicle, and fired dozens of explosive tear gas cannisters into the home without a degree of certainty that such actions would cause damage to the property.
Unfortunately, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court disagreed, at least in terms of the Takings Clause under the US Constitution. It sided with the state and its cops, finding that this clause doesn’t provide protections to homeowners who find themselves the victims of cops determined to get their man by any means necessary.
We conclude that, as a matter of history and precedent, the Takings Clause does not require compensation for damaged or destroyed property when it was objectively necessary for officers to damage or destroy that property in an active emergency to prevent imminent harm to persons.
Baker’s appeal has now been addressed (sort of…) by the US Supreme Court. The majority of justices have decided they don’t care enough about this sort of thing to hear the case and issue an opinion. They’ve simply decided to deny certification and let the chips of Baker’s exploded doors fall where they may.
Fortunately, though, this refusal to address an issue that isn’t simply going to go away hasn’t passed without comment. Two Supreme Court justices — Sotomayor and Gorsuch — have decided to express their opinions [PDF], even as they concur with the nation’s top court’s disinterest in this case. (via FourthAmendment.com)
First, they detail the extent of the damage, which was far more than the destruction of doors and bulldozing of fences. The interior of the house — including another inhabitant who wasn’t the kidnapper the cops wanted to flush out — took the brunt of the attack.
The explosions left Baker’s dog permanently blind and deaf. The toxic gas that permeated the House required the services of a HAZMAT remediation team. Appliances and fabrics were irreparable. Ceiling fans, plumbing, floors (hard surfaces as well as carpet), and bricks needed to be replaced—in addition to the windows, blinds, fence, front door, and garage door. Essentially all of the personal property in the House was destroyed, including an antique doll collection left to Baker by her mother.
If this had been a car, the insurance agency would have had it totaled. But when it comes to houses, it’s far more difficult and expensive to work these things out. Worse, most insurance agencies won’t cover incidents like these, figuring it’s the government’s obligation to cover the cost of damages or (even more shittily) claim this is evidence of illegal activities on the premises, thus instantly negating any attempts to obtain an settlement from the homeowner’s insurance provider.
After making this point, Sotomayor and Gorsuch move on to the larger point: the Takings Clause doesn’t cover this sort of “taking.”
The Court’s denial of certiorari expresses no view on the merits of the decision below. I write separately to emphasize that petitioner raises a serious question: whether the Takings Clause permits the government to destroy private property without paying just compensation, as long as the government had no choice but to do so. Had McKinney razed Baker’s home to build a public park, Baker undoubtedly would be entitled to compensation. Here, the McKinney police destroyed Baker’s home for a different public benefit: to protect local residents and themselves from an armed and dangerous individual. Under the Fifth Circuit’s decision, Baker alone must bear the cost of that public benefit.
The courts continue to pretend every similar case doesn’t give them anything to declare a “bright line” that would set some sort of standard the government might need to comply with. Every court at the appellate level has been willing to kick the can down the road. And, unfortunately, when the can hits the end of the road — the US Supreme Court — the top court just kicks the can back, restarting a cycle of non-resolution that gives governments the power to destroy people’s homes without attaching any sort of responsibility or liability to these actions.
Unfortunately, this mild objection does little more than cite possible circuit splits and suggests the ultimate resolution may arrive an untold number of years from now as more cases (and I’m directly quoting the justices here) “percolate in lower courts.”
I’m not happy with this passing of the buck. But it does serve one purpose: the suggestion from members of the top court in the land that the Takings Clause doesn’t cover destruction of private property by law enforcement. But the suggestion is mild at best. The intellectually honest answer is that, of course, localities are responsible for property damage caused by cops. The flipside of power is responsibility. And if cops can’t figure out how to get someone out of an innocent person’s home without destroying the residence, localities should keep cutting checks until they do.
In the only country in the world where this sort of violence happens frequently enough it’s become a despairing meme, legislators continue to ignore the obvious solutions in favor of throwing money at esoteric options that won’t stop Americans from entering schools to murder children en masse.
In Texas, this problem hits home harder. Not only does the state do everything it can to encourage gun ownership, it is also home to one of the more devastating school shootings in recent history — one in which Uvalde, Texas police officers rushed to the scene of school shooting only to spend nearly 90 minutes doing nothing about it.
The simple answer would be stricter gun control laws. But no Texan legislator is willing to do that, not if they expect to be re-elected. And there are plenty of people who claim the Second Amendment is the best amendment, because arming citizens means the government will be too scared to engage in overreach lest it get [checks notes] shot the fuck up.
In reality, most Second Amendment enthusiasts aren’t arming themselves to prevent the government from being overtaken by authoritarians. After all, they voted for Trump at least twice, and he’s the kind of autocrat their window decals have warned against. Most exercises of the Second Amendment are purely performative — “rolling coal” but it’s dudes in camo walking through Walmarts strapped with AR-15s.
And, given recent election results, perhaps now is not the time to start asking questions about the Second Amendment, not when the inbound president has said stuff that might make us genuinely concerned about our Third Amendment rights.
Texas public schools could be guarded by drones armed with pepper spray or Tasers under a new bill filed in the Texas Legislature meant to beef up school security.
The measure would boost funding for safety upgrades and let schools deploy drones in place of the armed guards that lawmakers required on every campus in response to the Uvalde school shooting. Districts have said they don’t have the money to make those hires, and Hearst Newspaper previously found many haven’t complied or have instead armed teachers.
Normal people will obviously ask questions about this proposal. Non-normal people are the ones who won’t ask questions, because it doesn’t threaten their “right” to own guns. But it is completely asinine for multiple reasons.
First of all, pepper spray is not something that can be safely deployed from a distance. It’s aerosolized, which means anyone in the area can be negatively affected, even if the intent is to disable an armed suspect. It has to be deployed up close and directly at the eyes/nasal passages of the target. Unless the drones are going to zooming down to eye level with incoming school shooters, this method has as much potential to harm innocent students and teachers as it has to incapacitate a threat.
Tasers are no better. Closer is better and even Taser maker Axon — or at least its board of ethics — has already objected to mounting Tasers on drones. Of course, none of that objection really matters. The entire Axon ethics board resigned following the company’s announcement it would pursue this option, only to see the company acquire a drone manufacturer that does frequent business with the US Department of Defense.
But even if the tech aligns, it’s still a bad idea. Tasers are not precision weapons. They do their best at close range and, even then, they’re not guaranteed to incapacitate. Firing Taser darts at a moving target from a moving object isn’t a recipe for success.
All in all, it’s about as stupid as thinking the solution is arming teachers. Teachers should not be expected to do the work of trained law enforcement. And teachers should never be expected to consider trading fire with school shooters a part of their job description. Again, the problem is the easy access to weapons, not the lack of defensive options. If anything, dumbass legislators should be advocating for arming students. After all, there are far more students than teachers and surely the presence of 30 or so “good guys with guns” in any classroom would be a significant deterrent to school shootings.
Despite the absolute lack of anything indicating arming drones this way will result in fewer school shootings, government contractors are encouraged by the willingness of legislators to throw money at bad ideas. Mithril Defense has already posted its own opening for an aspiring person who’s apparently going to get paid only a commission for talking more legislators into buying more drones, Tasers, and drone-mounted pepper sprayers.
This CV (of sorts) is inadvertently hilarious:
Our team includes a former Navy SEAL team SIX Command Master Chief, a serial tech entrepreneur, the #1 American drone pilot on ESPN, and various technical teams.
If there’s anything worse for anything than a “serial tech entrepreneur,” I’ve never met it. And despite the presence of SEAL Team Six and ESPN in the write-up, I’m far more interested in the makeup of the “various technical teams.” Keep in mind, this is an hourly position with “upside based on success.” To those interested, I would assume this means minimum wage and an immediate culling from the “advocacy group” once Mithril Defense secures a government contract.
Perhaps the best slam is inadvertent. Here’s how the San Antonio paper describes the company:
Employees for the company, which appears to be named after a magical silver-colored metal from “Lord of the Rings…”
And it would appear the “serial tech entrepreneur” is its founder, Justin Marston, whose LinkedIn profile shows he’s never been able to make anything go ever.
NONETHELESS, Texas legislators — led by Rep. Ryan Guillen — think this is what will solve our school shooting problem.
Guillen’s bill says the drones would be armed with “less lethal interdiction capability by means of air-based irritant delivery or other mechanisms,” and it would require one drone for every 200 students.
lol
Just flying around in the air dispensing “air-based irritants” like it’s not going to “irritate” the people it’s supposed to be saving far more often than it’s preventing school shootings. And, if I’m doing the math right, this means the state’s educational facilities need to acquire nearly 26,000 drones to comply with the law. And only Guillen knows why one-drone-per-200-students is the appropriate ratio to prevent school shootings, but that’s what he and his supporters are going with.
Not that schools are getting fucked entirely. A state that can’t seem to get behind school funding in any meaningful way will perhaps be talked into funding schools in the most meaningless way. Guillen’s bill amps up per student funding from $10/per to $100/per… but only if that extra money is spent on “hardening campuses, hiring security guards, or starting a drone program.” There will be no educational advantage here. Instead, students will see that extra money being spent on surrounding them with weapons that aren’t actually guns but are allegedly going to protect them from actual guns.
This is dumb stuff that ignores the real issue. It’s not going to save any students from school shooters. But, if implemented, it will cost Texas millions of dollars in the furtherance of nothing more than respecting their right to head out on a shopping trip with a load out that might seem excessive in Call of Duty multi-player. God Bless America.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton loves to preach about “free speech” and “free markets”—except, apparently, when it comes to his political allies. In a stunningly hypocritical and authoritarian move, Paxton has launched an “investigation” to bully advertisers who have chosen not to support Elon Musk’s troubled ExTwitter platform.
This is a chilling attack on both free speech and free markets. Ken Paxton has gone from cosplaying as a free speech warrior to acting as Elon Musk’s personal speech cop, using the power of the state to punish companies who won’t support Musk’s online kingdom. The hypocrisy would be laughable if the authoritarian overtones weren’t so chilling.
Remember, Elon Musk himself told advertisers who disagreed with his position on content moderation to go fuck themselves. And yet, now he’s egging on this sham “investigation.”
Paxton’s actions are part of a disturbing pattern of Republican leaders who claim to be free speech champions, but are quick to use government power to punish speech they dislike. From DeSantis’ attacks on Disney to Trump’s threats against media critics, the right increasingly sees free speech as a one-way street.
Many major advertisers have pulled back spending on ExTwitter due to concerns about an increase in hate speech and misinformation on the platform under Musk’s leadership. This isn’t the result of some coordinated boycott or conspiracy. They are simply making the rational business decision to worry about their ads appearing next to objectionable content and damaging their brands. Choosing where to spend ad dollars based on a media company’s content policies is a normal business decision, not a “conspiracy.”
It really was just a few months ago that Paxton’s similarly cynical, opportunistic sham “investigation” into Media Matters got laughed out of court. That investigation was also on a similar “let’s suck up to Elon” basis, after Elon got mad at a news article published by Media Matters that highlighted how ads for big Fortune 500 companies were showing up next to neo-Nazi content.
In that case, everyone admitted that the ads did show up next to that content, but Elon didn’t like that Media Matters didn’t explain the steps it took to have those ads show up that way. So he not only sued Media Matters directly but also called for state AGs to investigate. Ken Paxton immediately jumped on that.
A judge in DC called out just how problematic Paxton’s “investigation” was, and how it was a clear retaliation against Media Matters for its speech:
Defendant’s investigation of Media Matters is “retaliatory action sufficient to deter a person of ordinary firmness in plaintiff’s position from speaking again[.]” … Defendant makes no contrary argument…
But getting dinged by the court apparently has not stopped Paxton from wanting to launch similarly chilling “investigations” into others for their free market and free speech decisions.
Attorney General Paxton is investigating a possible coordinated plan or conspiracy to withhold advertising dollars from certain social media platforms by pressuring advertisers not to purchase online advertising space. Although companies are free to choose when and where they want to advertise, a conspiracy among companies along these lines can result in harm to competition and may violate the Texas Free Enterprise and Antitrust Act of 1983. The civil investigative demand requests documents and information related to WFA and its sub-organization known as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (“GARM”) organizing their membership to potentially boycott social media platforms that are deemed to violate their “Brand Safety Standards.”
“It is completely unacceptable and un-American that the Department of Justice under the Biden Administration failed to enforce antitrust laws against its perceived political allies,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Trade organizations and companies cannot collude to block advertising revenue from entities they wish to undermine. Today’s document request is part of an ongoing investigation to hold WFA and its members accountable for any attempt to rig the system to harm organizations they might disagree with.”
This is monstrously gross partisan hackery against completely understandable marketplace decisions. But it gives you a good sense of the kind of hackery to expect over the next few years. Daring not to give Trump allies money will be seen as “illegal boycotts.”
By launching this bad-faith investigation into advertisers’ choices, Paxton is wielding the power of the state to bully companies into supporting his political allies. This is a blatant effort to chill the speech of Musk’s critics and coerce businesses into spending money on his platform, even if they object to how it’s being run. It’s an authoritarian tactic masquerading as an antitrust probe.
It’s clear to everyone that this is corrupt. It’s nakedly designed to create chilling effects and pressure companies into giving money to ideological allies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It’s cynical, obnoxious, and an attack on free speech and the rights of companies to choose not to advertise on sites they dislike.
Paxton’s “investigation” is a political stunt with no legal merit. It tramples on the free speech rights of Musk’s critics and the freedom of companies to make their own advertising decisions. This kind of bullying of businesses by the state is a disturbing attack on fundamental liberties, but Paxton seems to be betting on the idea that we’re in an era where “it’s okay to trample on free speech rights, so long as it’s Trump-supporters doing it.”
