blakestacey 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (300)

• On the post: We Shouldn’t Have To Explain To The FTC Why Content Moderation Is So Crucial To Free Speech, But We Did

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 22 May, 2025 @ 01:39pm

  It remains bizarre to me that, in this much more expansive speech universe, so many people act as though their speech is restricted.

  It's only bizarre if you presume that these people are honest.

• On the post: Why The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA’s Censorship Machine With KOSA?

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 14 May, 2025 @ 11:31am

  Does anyone have a link to the bill text? The couple news stories that have come out so far had some puffery about improvements, which sound like they're just echoing the sales talk of the politicians themselves.

• On the post: The House GOP Quietly Slipped In An AI Law That Would Accidentally Ban GOP’s Favorite ‘Save The Children’ Laws

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 13 May, 2025 @ 05:25pm

  We'll probably see KOSA reintroduced first.

• On the post: Democratic Senators Team Up With MAGA To Hand Trump A Censorship Machine

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2025 @ 04:49pm

  Last year, Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Frank Pallone introduced a similar bill in the House. Like that one, this new plan is essentially legislative extortion: put a sunset date on Section 230 to magically “force big tech to come to the table” to negotiate “something better.”

  Yet another exhibit making the case that the Democrats are completely misreading the moment. This whole stunt is a hold-over from their ignorant "protect the children/stand against Big Tech" grandstanding during the Biden administration. It was a dumbass idea then, for obvious reasons. If you want to hold Big Tech accountable, or if you want to bully them to the negotiating table, how about you propose a law that, and follow me carefully here, actually hurts Big Tech? A strong federal all-ages privacy law would hit 'em right in the pocketbook, for example, without stifling smaller players. But no, instead of doing the right thing last year, or the year before, or the year before that, they fixated on "solutions" that will hurt people — and now they're bringing that fixation forward into what we can charitably describe as a radically changed environment. Terminal goddamn Senate brain, I swear.

• On the post: California’s A.B. 412: A Bill That Could Crush Startups And Cement A Big Tech AI Monopoly

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 18 Mar, 2025 @ 06:05pm

  OK, I will agree with a "regulation will lock in the major players" take in many areas, but here it's like saying California is going to prohibit artisanal, hand-sliced subprime mortgages.

• On the post: Judge Uses D&D’s Failure To Make Him Worship Satan To School Florida On Social Media Moral Panics

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 18 Mar, 2025 @ 03:14pm

  And after all that, the judge dismissed the lawsuit for lack of standing.

• On the post: South Dakota Lawmakers Send Unconstitutional Age-Verification Bill To The Governor’s Desk

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 27 Feb, 2025 @ 03:55pm

  ... A-and the governor has signed it.

• On the post: The Hollow Men Of Silicon Valley

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 25 Feb, 2025 @ 06:41pm

  None of the relevant parties are educated. Virginia is on the cusp of passing a law that, read at face value, would prevent minors from using Wikipedia more than one hour a day. That's not a result you'd see in a healthy system. Everyone is legislating based off a toxic mix of bad information and malicious duplicity.

• On the post: Blumenthal So Eager To Bring Back KOSA, He Admits Its Purpose Is Censorship

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 09 Jan, 2025 @ 03:34pm

  I think there's a good case to be made for Who the Hell knows?! right now regarding KOSA, or Section 230 repeal or anything else in bad-and-scary Internet policy legislation. Tech oligarchs going mask-off with their Trump support could change the political calculus in all sorts of ways. An unknown fraction of Democratic politicians could be reluctant to hand Trump a perceived "win", particularly if the issue isn't one that they feel they lost the election over. I mean, yes, they're a feckless party, but just how feckless remains to be seen, particularly when activists can now easily paint each and every bad idea as giving Elon Musk what he wants.

• On the post: Censorial Citizen Partially Prevails In Lawsuit Against Equally Censorial Gov’t Officials

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 02 Jan, 2025 @ 02:22pm

  The inciting incident really gives "and the whole bus clapped" energy. I mean, "my seven-year-old daughter asked me what polysexual means"? And the name of that daughter was... Albert Einstein!

• On the post: Elon Musk Doesn’t Like Some Headlines. But That Doesn’t Make Them Defamatory

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 02 Jan, 2025 @ 12:05pm

  The replies to posts about Musk suggest that we need a "flag for bootlicking" option.

• On the post: Fifth Circuit: Salesforce Can’t Use Section 230 To Get Out Of Sex Trafficking Case, Because It Only Provided CRM Software, Not Content Moderation

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 20 Dec, 2024 @ 01:03pm

  Salesforce did not have any role in [...] transmitting or hosting third-party content

  OK, how did they argue that?

• On the post: Take It Down Act Has Best Of Intentions, Worst Of Mechanisms

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 19 Dec, 2024 @ 01:42pm

  And it looks like it's not in the text of the current CR, as provided by Punchbowl. How exactly this resolution plays out, nobody knows yet (apparently if it fails to pass under suspension, they have to go back for more committee rigmarole)...

• On the post: Take It Down Act Has Best Of Intentions, Worst Of Mechanisms

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 19 Dec, 2024 @ 01:06pm

  Yes. Or. No?

• On the post: Take It Down Act Has Best Of Intentions, Worst Of Mechanisms

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 19 Dec, 2024 @ 01:05pm

  Do you really want to hand the people who fester at KiwiFarms a tool to harass and even shut down any website they don't like? Which, incidentally, volunteer site operators in the UK are already shutting down their forums over, thanks to their Online Safety Act.

• On the post: NBC News Does Entire Piece Trying To Link CEO Shooting To ‘Violent Video Game’

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 11 Dec, 2024 @ 03:31pm

  Angela Lansbury's last film role was playing Among Us in Glass Onion.

• On the post: What Free Speech? Trump Ramps Up Threats To Sue Publishers Over Their Speech

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 15 Nov, 2024 @ 12:14pm

  "I never thought the leopards would eat our faces," sobbed the editorial board that spent years penning editorials about how the leopards were keeping the woke college kids in check.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2024 @ 06:00pm

  I'm hesitant to try and predict whether they will kill the filibuster. The Senate is a strange place, full of people suffering from terminal Senate brain. Maybe they'll have the votes to do what Sinema and Manchin (and perhaps others behind the scenes) stopped the Democrats from doing. But will Cornyn, Thune, Collins and Murkowski all go along with it? As for Section 230 specifically, well, there's certainly a case for pessimism. Brendan Carr wrote a screed railing against it in Project 2025; Vance talked about removing 230 protection from large platforms. But is the thirst for 230 repeal there? I'm not entirely convinced that it is. A lot of the rhetoric and grandstanding feels like a relic of 2020–21, Trumpists being upset that their conspiracy theories were being moderated. That was the drive behind Trump's anti-230 executive order in May '20. With Twitter now being Party media, is the motivation still there? What they might want most is to shut down criticism of Twitter, get advertising dollars flowing back into it, put the squeeze on its competitors somehow... An assault on Section 230 certainly could factor into all that, but it might not be the path they go down. Without much foundation for my guesses, I'll hazard that the most likely thing we'll see is another Executive Order that's as much about pushing a narrative as it is about having concrete effects, and the least likely is a bill that makes it through Congress thanks to a nuked filibuster.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 10 Nov, 2024 @ 02:26pm

  It's true that everyone from Hawley to Ossoff has been eager to tear down Section 230. A week ago, Wyden might have been the only senator who would have opposed a 230 repeal. But now the game has changed — it's gonna be bad all around, for damn sure, but it's also going to be chaotic. Any bill that makes it to the floor will now be coming right from Elon Musk's vest pocket. Nearly every Dem senator would be on board with 230 "reform" in principle, but under these circumstances? By way of comparison, KOSA passed the Senate by Assad margins, but would a bill that is seen as a tool for Musk to crush his competitors have the same success? We're now in a situation where the courts have been tacking into the "product liability for algorithms" mindset, and suddenly the president's puppetmaster wants his platform to have no liability at all. Shit's gonna get weird.

• On the post: A Win For Press Freedom: Court Allows Reuters To Republish Story On Shady Indian Firm

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 30 Oct, 2024 @ 02:50pm

  Experts in Indian law had told me last year that the kind of injunction that forced Reuters to take down its story were unfortunately common.

  Something similar appears to have taken down the Wikipedia article about Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation (archived copy).

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