We here at Techdirt have longed complained about the DMCA takedown process being wide open for all kinds of fraud and abuse. At one point years ago, Google reported that nearly 100% of the takedown requests it receives are not the sort of targeted takedowns the creators of the DMCA imagined, but rather more of a carpet-bomb approach. Examples of this sort of thing abound, with much of them comprised of companies not taking the process seriously and making all kinds of errors or accusations as a result of not doing their due diligence. The more rare, but more concerning version is when the DMCA takedown process is used fraudulently to exact revenge against an enemy. That this can even be done should highlight the problem with our current process of taking content down first and then asking questions later.
In the last couple of weeks, a video game was released on Steam. Titled No Players Online, it was a horror game and something of a sequel to a freeware game of the same name that was released in 2019. Many of the same folks behind the original, including Adam Pype, produced its successor under the developer name Beeswax Games. And then, shortly after its release on Steam, the game was hit with a DMCA takedown.
According to Beeswax, the game was hit by a Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim filed by a “former friend” who “claimed to be co-author of the game despite not having done anything for it”. Valve then took the game down on 13th November, a week after release. The developers filed a counter-notice, and Valve have now reinstated the Steam release after the complainant neglected to respond to that counter-notice in time.
You can read developer Adam Pype’s full account of events here. It doesn’t name the “former friend”, and I’m not going to speculate about their identity. Pype says the upheaval has cost the project dearly, writing that “we spent 2 and a half years of our lives and a ton of money making this game. we also have a lot of people who believed in us and wanted us to succeed. it’s crazy to me that someone can just take down our game by filling out a simple form, and it’s been tough trying to reconcile with this betrayal from someone i considered a dear friend.”
The takedown effected the ability to list and sell the game a week after release. That is essentially in the prime window for sales for any new game, but it’s a particularly important window for a small indie game that is looking to generate buzz and boost purchases. Beeswax Games missed out on a huge chunk of that, having to instead spend its time navigating the DMCA process to get Steam to relist the game.
And why is all of that how this works? Because the process Steam follows is to takedown the game upon accusation. This appears to be nothing more than a fraudulent takedown by some scorned third party. It worked because Steam took the game down without requiring any proof of the rights the third party asserted. Steam didn’t even ask any questions. It’s as simple as get notice, take game down.
Which makes an entity like Beeswax Games guilty until proven innocent. The onus of evidence is not on the party making the claim initially. It’s on the target of that claim. There is very little else in American law that works anything like this and it’s incredibly frustrating to watch this in action.
Pype continues that “this situation has had a significant impact on us, especially given how crucial the first months after release are for small indies like us. we lost out on much needed momentum and revenue right after the release of our game and we’re unsure if we will be able to recover financially from this given our already thin margins.”
This is a problem worth fixing. Businesses like Beeswax should not face the threat of going under simply because the DMCA allows for this kind of abuse.
Maybe someone can make a horror game about that.
Filed Under: copyfraud, copyright, dmca, no players online, takedowns
Companies: beeswax games, valve
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.
President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.
But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.
In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.
In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.
At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”
Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.
“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”
Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms, like lower interest rates, than mortgages for a second home or an investment rental property. Legal experts said that having more than one primary-residence mortgage can sometimes be legitimate, like when someone has to move for a new job, and other times can be caused by clerical error. Determining ill intent on the part of the borrower is key to proving fraud, and the experts said lenders have significant discretion in what loans they offer clients. (In this case, Trump used the same lender to buy the two Florida homes.)
But in recent months, the Trump administration has asserted that merely having two primary-residence mortgages is evidence of criminality.
Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director who has led the charge, said earlier this year: “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation.”
Trump hung up on a ProPublica reporter after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud.
In response to questions, a White House spokesperson told ProPublica: “President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.”
The spokesperson added, “this is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” and said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”
The White House did not respond to questions about any other documents related to the transactions, such as loan applications, that could shed light on what Trump told the lender or if the lender made any exceptions for him.
At the time Trump bought the two Florida properties, he was dealing with the wreckage of high-profile failures at his casinos and hotels in the early 1990s. (He famously recounted seeing a panhandler on Fifth Avenue around this time and telling his companion: “You know, right now that man is worth $900 million more than I am.”) In December 1993, he married the model Marla Maples in an opulent ceremony at The Plaza Hotel. And in Florida, he was pushing local authorities to let him turn Mar-a-Lago, then a residence, into a private club.
Trump bought the two homes, which both sit on Woodbridge Road directly north of Mar-a-Lago, and got mortgages in quick succession in December 1993 and January 1994. The lender on both mortgages, one for $525,000 and one for $1,200,000, was Merrill Lynch.
Each of the mortgage documents signed by Trump contain the standard occupancy requirement — that he must make the property his principal residence within 60 days and live there for at least a year, unless the lender agreed otherwise or there were extenuating circumstances.
But ProPublica could not find evidence Trump ever lived in either of the properties. Legal documents and federal election records from the period give his address as Trump Tower in Manhattan. (Trump would officially change his permanent residence to Florida only decades later, in 2019.) A Vanity Fair profile published in March 1994 describes Trump spending time in Manhattan and at Mar-a-Lago itself.
Trump’s real estate agent, who told the local press that the plan from the beginning was to rent out the two satellite homes, was quoted as saying, “Mr. Trump, in effect, is in a position to approve who his neighbors are.”
In the ensuing years, listings popped up in local newspapers advertising each of the homes for rent. At one point in 1997, the larger of the two homes, a 7-bedroom, 7-bathroom Mediterranean Revival mansion, was listed for $3,000 per day.
Even if Trump did violate the law with his two primary-residence mortgages in Florida, the loans have since been paid off and the mid-1990s is well outside the statute of limitations for mortgage fraud.
A spokesperson for Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, did not answer questions about the Trump mortgages.
“It’s highly unlikely we would have original documents for a 32-year-old transaction, but generally in private client mortgages the terms of the transactions are based on the overall relationship,” the spokesperson said in a statement, “and the mortgages are not backed by or sold to any government sponsored entity.”
Trump’s two mortgages in Palm Beach bear similarities to the loans taken out by political rivals whom his administration has accused of fraud.
In October, federal prosecutors charged New York Attorney General Letitia James over her mortgage. James has been one of Trump’s top targets since she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022.
A central claim in the case the Trump Justice Department brought against her is that she purchased a house in Virginia, pledging to her lender that it would serve as her second home, then proceeded to use it as an investment property and rent it out. “This misrepresentation allowed James to obtain favorable loan terms not available for investment properties,” according to the indictment.
Trump’s Florida mortgage agreements appear to have made a more significant misrepresentation, as he claimed those homes would be his primary residence, not his secondary home as James did, before proceeding to rent them out.
James has denied the allegations against her, and the case was dismissed last month over procedural issues, though the Justice Department has been trying to reindict her.
The circumstances around Trump’s mortgages are also similar to the case his administration has made against Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Trump declared he was firing Cook earlier this year over her mortgages, as he has sought to bend the traditionally independent agency to his will and force it to lower interest rates. Cook, who denied wrongdoing, has sued to block the termination and continues to serve on the Fed board as that legal fight continues.
In a letter to Cook, Trump specifically noted that she signed two primary residence mortgages within weeks of each other — just as records show he did in Florida.
“You signed one document attesting that a property in Michigan would be your primary residence for the next year. Two weeks later, you signed another document for a property in Georgia stating that it would be your primary residence for the next year,” Trump wrote. “It is inconceivable that you were not aware of your first commitment when making the second.”
He called the loans potentially criminal and wrote, “at a minimum, the conduct at issue exhibits the sort of gross negligence in financial transactions that calls into question your competence and trustworthiness.”
The Trump administration has made similar fraud allegations against other political enemies, including Democrats Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, both of whom have denied wrongdoing.
In September, ProPublica reported that three of Trump’s Cabinet members have called multiple homes their primary residences in mortgage agreements. Bloomberg also reported that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent did something similar. (The Cabinet members have all denied wrongdoing.)
Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency head, has denied his investigations are politically motivated. “If it’s a Republican who’s committing mortgage fraud, we’re going to look at it,” he has said. “If it’s a Democrat, we’re going to look at it.”
Thus far, Pulte has not made any publicly known criminal referrals against Republicans. He did not respond to questions from ProPublica about Trump’s Florida mortgages.
Filed Under: bill pulte, donald trump, hypocrisy, mortgage fraud
Australia’s social media ban for kids is now in effect. As we’ve discussed, this is a monumentally stupid plan that will do real harm to kids. It’s based on a moral panic and a wide variety of faulty assumptions, including that social media websites are inherently bad for kids, something that none of the evidence supports. And, even if there were harms associated with social media, the way you deal with them is teaching people (not just kids!) how to use them in an age appropriate way—meaning understanding the difference between risks and harms—not banning it altogether.
But, Australia has gone in the other direction entirely, and the clusterfuck is just beginning. As with Australia’s link tax (officially: news bargaining code) the folks at The Juice Media have created their “Honest Government Ad” for the social media ban, and it’s just as biting as you’d expect.
Here’s just a snippet…
Regulating billionaires is hard work!
So we said: let’s just ban the kids. So now the billionaires can keep pegging humanity with even less incentive to moderate….
Sure we rushed this law through in just nine days Ignoring hundreds of experts, our Human Rights Commission, and our leading digital rights, Indigenous, and mental health orgs. And sure we’ve created huge privacy and identity theft risks, and taken a big shit on freedom of speech.
But think of the children.
Just not the children being hammered by gambling ads, which we’ve refused to ban. And definitely not the ones saying we need to protect them from climate change. Those children can go and get fucked.
Ok so it won’t be perfect. But, now that it’s happening, here are some tips as we roll out this evidence-free experiment on your kids:
One: look out for your young people, ‘cause some will need help. Like the kid being bullied at school, the kid in an abusive family, and the LGBTQ kid who found support online. All of whom are part of the 73 % of young people using social media for mental health support.
Two: kids who sneak-on to social media may not feel they can ask for help if they’re being bullied, shown harmful content, or groomed by some pedo. So talk to your kids!
And, three, for fucksake maybe spend less time on social media yourself?
Meanwhile, basically every politician in Australian is taking a huge victory lap on this, looking like complete buffoons. Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, who has been pushing for this nonsensical, dangerous, backwards proposal is bursting with glee:
Grant said: “Technology companies are used to moving fast and breaking things. They can certainly move fast and improve things, and that means deactivating these under-16 accounts.”
She acknowledged some nerves over the ban – and the global attention on it. “I’ve aged in dog years,” she told Channel Nine.
But she added: “I’m trying to contain my excitement”.
Imagine being excited about cutting off tons of young people from their support networks while doing nothing about actual problems those kids are facing. But sure, “contain your excitement.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who literally claimed this ban “will save us all,” is taking a censor’s victory lap:
“This is the day when Australian families are taking back power from these big tech companies and they’re asserting the right of kids to be kids and for parents to have greater peace of mind,” Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“This reform will change lives. For Australian kids … allowing them to just have their childhood. For Australian parents, enabling them to have greater peace of mind.”
None of which is happening. Parents don’t see why the government is making this decision for them:
“How about I raise my children, and you run the country.”
Kids are claiming that the whole thing is frustrating… while also totally pointless:
Rima, 14, says she and her friends are “pretty frustrated at first” by the ban and they also don’t think it will work.
“The verification techniques are not very accurate, and there are no penalties enforced on teenagers that get past the ban,” she says, adding that she has already verified herself on Snapchat and also made some new accounts.
She says social media is “not that important” to her but she does use it for “advice, studying and talking to my friends, which is quite integral to my everyday life”.
And the lesson kids are taking from this: the adults are condescending and out of touch with the kids today.
She’s against the ban, saying: “From my perspective, it’s kind of insulting to think that they don’t trust me with the internet.”
And, of course, it’s not working. Kids are always going to figure out ways to get around the ban:
It took 13-year-old Isobel less than five minutes to outsmart Australia’s “world-leading” social media ban for children.
A notification from Snapchat, one of the ten platforms affected, had lit up her screen, warning she’d be booted off when the law kicked in this week – if she couldn’t prove she was over 16.
“I got a photo of my mum, and I stuck it in front of the camera and it just let me through. It said thanks for verifying your age,” Isobel claims. “I’ve heard someone used Beyoncé’s face,” she adds.
“I texted her,” she gestures to her mum Mel, “and I was like, ‘Hey Mummy, I got past the social media ban’ and she was just like, ‘Oh, you monkey’.”
Or how about this “hack”:
Either way, Adams and her friends don’t plan to go quietly. When one app asked them to submit a selfie for an age verification system, they used a photo of a golden retriever they found on Google.
It worked, she said.
So let’s review what Australia’s politicians have actually accomplished here: They’ve alienated parents who don’t appreciate the government deciding how to raise their kids. They’ve taught an entire generation of young people that adults don’t trust them and that circumventing authority is both necessary and easy. They’ve cut off legitimate support networks for vulnerable kids while doing nothing about the actual harms that those same kids face. Indeed, they’ve actually pushed kids towards more dangerous places online while making it more difficult for them to learn to use the internet appropriately. And they’ve created a system so trivially easy to bypass that a golden retriever can pass age verification.
But beyond the immediate disaster, Australia has set a dangerous precedent that moral-panic-driven governments around the world are already eyeing. The message to other countries is clear: you can rush through deeply flawed legislation, ignore all expert advice, create real harms in pursuit of imaginary ones, and still declare victory while the whole thing collapses around you.
The kids, at least, have learned something valuable: when the people in charge respond to complex problems with simplistic bans, you work around them and stop trusting them. Not exactly the lesson Australian politicians were going for, but probably the one they deserve.
Filed Under: age verification, anthony albanese, australia, julie inman grant, moral panic, social media, social media ban, think of the children
The administration that is busy erasing history from any federal entity tasked with preserving it has an additional ally in the burying-the-bad-news business: Donald Trump, the former president.
Yes, it’s all stupid and weird and incredibly dangerous, but the guy who used to be president has been sued by multiple litigants over his tacit involvement (and deliberate encouragement) of the attack on the Capitol building that was intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power to the winner of the 2020 election, Joe Biden.
In perhaps the ultimate affront to the rule of law Trump claims to value, he not only persists in spreading conspiracy theories about the attack, but also pardoned pretty much every one of his supporters who had been charged and/or convicted of federal crimes for their participation in the invasion of the Capitol building immediately after re-taking the Oval Office.
Trump was out of office by the time he was sued, but he’s insisting documents and communications related to an undeniable act of insurrection are protected by his (now-recurring) executive privilege. Trump was sued five years ago by officers injured during the insurrection. The plaintiffs are asking for access to thousands of documents related to the Capitol raid on January 6, 2021. The slowly grinding wheels of the justice system have finally brought us to this point, reported last week by Kyle Cheney for Politico.
President Donald Trump has asserted executive privilege to prevent courtroom adversaries from accessing evidence in a long-running lawsuit that accuses him of stoking violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Justice Department disclosed Trump’s secrecy claim Wednesday in a hearing related to that five-year-old lawsuit, brought by police officers injured while attempting to repel the violent mob that day. The officers say Trump’s incendiary remarks to a crowd of supporters — and his direction that they march on the Capitol — fueled the riot that nearly derailed the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden and left 140 officers injured.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson claims there’s nothing to see here. It’s not a president trying to bury his legacy of violence. It’s just the normal response to a “overly broad request” by the injured cops who understandably would like to see a bit of justice done.
The records sought reside at the National Archives. The National Archives, in response to the request by the plaintiffs, has finally responded with more detail to the September 2024 subpoena, letting the public know that Trump aims to keep every requested document out of the public’s hands.
NARA’s two-page response [PDF] provides two lists of records. The first is the largest: the number of documents Trump says can’t be released at all due to alleged “executive privilege.”
NARA identified 7,397 records responsive to the request. In accordance with 36 C.F.R. § 1270.44(c), on February 3, 2025, the Archivist notified the President of his intent to disclose the records.
On December 1, 2025, the President notified the Acting Archivist that he had determined that 4,152 records are subject to a constitutionally based claim of executive privilege.
So, that’s more than half the records. And Trump insists all of those are covered by his executive privilege. This litigation — combined with Trump’s assertions — has put NARA in a position it’s generally not familiar with, as it points out in its court filing:
The December 1, 2025 notification contains a list of each file the President asserted is subject
to constitutionally based privilege. NARA generally does not otherwise log records that are
subject to a constitutionally based claim of executive privilege.
The log has also been submitted to the court. It means nothing to anyone since it includes nothing more than list items only identifiable by NARA archivists. The only thing anyone outside of NARA can discern from this 53-page filing is that some of the records Trump wishes to keep from being made public are text messages.
And while it’s insane to believe more than half of these documents are covered by executive privilege (a privilege that certainly shouldn’t seem to apply to documents dealing with an insurrection attempt by disgruntled Trump voters), Trump’s not simply satisfied to keep these 4,000+ documents from being handed over to the people suing him.
Trump is also insisting whatever does get handed over can’t be made public, either.
The remaining 3,245 records can be released to the litigants, subject to a protective order prohibiting their use or disclosure outside this litigation.
This means anything reluctantly and begrudgingly turned over to the plaintiffs will be immediately sealed, further separating the public from the facts surrounding Trump’s actions during this insurrection attempt committed by people who are now free to do whatever they want in support of Trump because they know Trump (and the MAGA-cooked GOP) will give them official forgiveness for any crimes they commit out of loyalty to America’s autocrat.
If Trump manages to make all of this happen, he can go right back to his daily gaslighting and conspiracy theorizing. For the moment, however, he needs the courts to agree it’s okay to bury anything that might make him look worse than he already does. And with the Supreme Court majority going all in all of the time for Trump, there’s a good chance he’ll be able to wish his support of insurrection into the legal cornfield and replace the facts with whatever narrative seems to be the most flattering.
Filed Under: donald trump, executive privilege, insurrection, january 6, litigation, national archives, trump administration
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Last week, we launched our monthlong fundraiser with a commemorative Techdirt / 30 years of Section 230 coin for donations of $100 or more. The initial response has been great, but we need more support to hit our targets.
We’re still far below our goal of making Techdirt funded primarily by reader donations. That matters because it’s the only way we can keep doing the kind of coverage that doesn’t exist anywhere else—coverage that refuses to treat this moment as normal, that digs into the details other outlets skip, and that actually understands how technology, policy, and democracy intersect.
(Quick admin notes: yes, we added a $230 donation level after someone pointed out the obvious oversight. Also, a few people have donated $99 because they don’t want a coin — we appreciate any donation of any amount, but we’ll ask everyone before shipping if they actually want the coin and you can just say no, so you can still donate any amount you want!)
For those still thinking about it, here’s what you’re actually supporting — our most important work over the last year:
Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)
This became the most-forwarded piece we published all year. It put a stake in the ground: we’re not going to pretend this is a normal administration making normal policy decisions. While mainstream outlets sanewash every lawless act as just another day in politics, we said it clearly: this is an attack on the institutions that make tech innovation and free speech possible. Democracy isn’t just background context for tech policy. It’s the foundational layer. Without it, nothing else matters.
Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness
Everyone’s stuck “working the refs” — begging governments, platforms, or billionaires to fix things. That’s learned helplessness, and it’s exactly what concentrates power in their hands. This piece broke down why decentralized tools and protocols actually matter: they’re not just technical curiosities, they’re how users take back agency. You don’t need permission from Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk to control your own digital life.
Why Things Are The Way They Are
Tim Cushing took on critics who claimed we’d gotten “too political” by pointing out the obvious: when an administration is openly breaking laws and attacking institutions, pretending it’s normal is taking a political stance. Refusing the frame others try to impose on you is part of the job. This was Tim explaining why we won’t play along with manufactured both-sidesism when one side is actively dismantling rule of law.
Stop Begging Billionaires To Fix Software — Build Your Own
A practical follow-up on taking back agency: how vibe coding tools are making it possible to build your own small, personal tools instead of waiting for some platform to maybe, possibly do what you need. Not giant apps — just software that solves your problem, built by you. Another way to make the internet work for you, rather than the other way around.
A modern update to the classic Dorothy Thompson 1941 Harper’s Essay “Who Goes Nazi?”, the Who Goes MAGA version seems to get discovered by some new pocket of the internet every few weeks and go viral again. It has certainly led to a bunch of discussions about why some people think that making life worse for a huge percentage of the population is a worthwhile price to pay in exchange for not having someone tell them they used an incorrect pronoun.
Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He’s Eager To Be America’s Top Censor
We called this before he even took the job: Brendan Carr would be the most censorial FCC chair in modern history. Turns out that was exactly right. He’s attacked comedians, threatened broadcasters, and openly weaponized government power against speech he dislikes. The mainstream press still covers him like a normal regulator making policy arguments. We don’t, because he’s not.
I Want A New Drug. A Vaccine Even. And A Functioning FDA, CDC, NIH, Etc…
Cathy Gellis, one of our contributors, is fighting cancer. RFK Jr., now in charge of health agencies, is fighting cancer research. This isn’t abstract policy analysis — it’s the direct, personal cost of putting conspiracy theorists in charge of public health. Sometimes the stakes aren’t just democratic principles, they’re whether people live or die.
The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas
Bad-faith actors weaponize “free speech” rhetoric to demand debates that legitimize their nonsense. We broke down the actual grift: these aren’t genuine marketplace-of-ideas participants, they’re trolls gaming the system for attention and legitimacy. Real free speech principles don’t require you to platform and respond to every jackass who demands it.
Fascism For First Time Founders
Silicon Valley’s MAGA converts thought authoritarianism would be good for business. They’re learning the hard way that you can’t have a thriving innovation economy when you’re dismantling the rule of law and institutional stability that makes it possible. The AI bubble is hiding the rot, but the foundation is crumbling. These founders are about to get a very expensive education in why liberal democracy actually matters.
RFK Jr. Reiterates The Same Rhetoric That Made His Own Employees Targets
Someone walked into the CDC and opened fire while spouting the same conspiracy theories RFK Jr. spreads daily. That story got memory-holed fast. RFK Jr. keeps spreading the same dangerous rhetoric. Inflammatory lies have consequences. Most outlets moved on. We haven’t.
Rogan Misses The Mark: How Zuck’s Misdirection On Gov’t Pressure Goes Unchallenged and Hey Zuck, Remember When You Said You’d Never Again Cave To Government Pressure? About That…
That first post is over 10,000 words breaking down how Zuckerberg fed Rogan a misleading narrative about Biden admin “pressure” while admitting repeatedly that Meta said no and felt no coercion. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been making constant threats and demands of Zuck and he’s folded on nearly every one. We called out how the original story was nonsense, and followed up with details of just how willing Zuckerberg is to cave to Trump’s demands, while admitting he never felt compelled to do so under Biden. Seems like a big story that the mainstream media just skipped right over.
The Hallucinating ChatGPT Presidency
Everyone worries about AI hallucinations, but the President does the exact same thing — generating confident bullshit that sounds plausible without any regard for truth. Wind him up and he’ll fabricate entire realities as long as they make him look good. Stop analyzing his words like they contain coherent and consistent policy positions. He’s just probabilistically generating whatever sounds good in the moment.
Because we’d been tracking Carr’s censorial pattern, we immediately recognized his attempt to get Jimmy Kimmel fired for what it was: actual government censorship of speech critical of Trump. Not the imaginary censorship MAGA types complain about — real, unconstitutional use of state power to silence critics. Most outlets covered it as just another political spat.
Forget Whether Or Not DOGE Exists: Will Anyone Be Held Accountable For 600,000 Deaths?
DOGE was never about efficiency. It was about destruction. While mainstream outlets credulously covered Musk’s efficiency theater, we’ve been tracking the actual impacts and exploring whether or not anyone will ever be held accountable for the damage. We’ve been making clear what happens when you treat government like a tech startup you can “disrupt” without consequences. Most media treated it as a legitimate policy experiment.
Take Back Our Digital Infrastructure To Save Democracy
The big-picture argument: democracy and digital infrastructure are inseparable now. If we let tech oligarchs control all our communication tools, we’ve already lost. But we haven’t lost — there are still paths to reclaiming control through decentralized systems. This post connected the dots between technical architecture and democratic survival in ways most political coverage completely misses.
Democrats aren’t just failing to oppose Trump’s authoritarianism — they’re actively collaborating on internet censorship bills that hand more power to the executive branch. It’s political malpractice dressed up as “protecting children” or whatever the excuse du jour is. Someone needs to point out that the opposition party is helping build the surveillance and censorship infrastructure they’ll inevitably face themselves.
Notice a pattern? These aren’t stories you could get anywhere else, because most outlets either don’t understand the technical details, don’t grasp the institutional stakes, or are too busy both-sidesing actual authoritarianism to call it what it is.
We understand how content moderation actually works, so we can explain why Zuck’s narrative to Rogan was bullshit. We’ve been covering the faux “censorship industrial complex” debate for years, so we recognized Carr’s threats immediately. We know how digital infrastructure shapes democracy, so we can connect those dots while political reporters are still figuring out what a protocol is.
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But if you want more of these kinds of stories, we need your ongoing support. We need to prove that Techdirt can stand alone as an independent publication. And that requires users to back it. And through January 5th, if you back us at $100 or more, you’ll get the very first (hopefully of many) commemorative coin from Techdirt, this one honoring Section 230, which is rapidly approaching its 30th anniversary.
Filed Under: fundraising, independent journalism, journalism, support
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Back in 2008, Chattanooga, Tennessee decided to build its own city-owned fiber broadband network on the back of its existing electrical utility, EPB. In the years since, the network has become one of the most popular in the nation, offering affordable, 25 gigabits per second fiber access to local residents.
It almost struggled to be, thanks to the usual bullshit behavior by regional telecom monopolies like Comcast. Comcast tried repeatedly to sue the network out of existence. As we’ve seen elsewhere, they also used co-funded “free market think tanks,” fake consumer groups, and for-hire pundits to seed lies in the local populace about how community broadband was a dangerous, inevitable boondoggle.
Spoiler: it didn’t work.
Years later and Chattanooga isn’t just providing cheap, affordable fiber, it continues to funnel significant financial benefits back into the community. A new study by researchers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has generated $5.3 billion in net community benefits for Hamilton County since 2011.
Benefits range from savings on upgraded smart city meters, local consumer savings on broadband access, free marketing due to the network’s popularity, improved health care outcomes, expanded business and remote work opportunities, improved tourism to revitalized parts of the city, and direct profits from the network itself:
“Since the project was fully completed in 2011, it has returned more than six times the original cost of the investment,” said Bento Lobo, Ph.D., lead author and director of the Department of Finance and Economics at the UTC Rollins College of Business – describing Chattanooga’s fiber network as “one of our community’s most meaningful and impactful investments.”
Telecom monopolies (and the various academics, consultants, lobbyists, and think tankers) spent decades insisting these sorts of networks would be a socialist nightmare and inevitable boondoggle. They did this, because they know that this sort of approach — treating broadband access as a community-owned utility and public good — is extremely effective and extremely popular.
And while telecoms have tried desperately to seed partisan division in the discussions surrounding municipal broadband viability, in reality they see broad, bipartisan support across the electorate. More often than not, they wind up getting built in Conservative cities and counties, thanks in part to frustration with Republican policies on telecom (which almost always involve coddling the regional monopoly).
Republicans and their telecom allies (including fake “taxpayer protection groups”) will breathlessly insist this is all a dangerous waste of taxpayer resources. But if you pay attention, you’ll notice they never have a single bad word to say about the billions taxpayers throw at regional giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon in exchange for broadband networks that are always, curiously, left half-completed.
Open access fiber networks come in a variety of flavors, including directly municipally owned, an extension of the existing city utility, a cooperative, or a public-private partnerships. These creative, locally controlled solutions really do work and are very popular; but routinely get derailed because the U.S., if you hadn’t noticed, is often too corrupt to function in the public interest.
Sixteen states still have laws, ghost written by telecom monopoly lawyers, either banning community owned networks or limiting how they can fund or where they can expand. And at the heat of COVID lockdowns, when these networks were showcasing their significant benefits to local communities, House Republicans responded by trying to ban them country wide.
Filed Under: chattanooga, fiber, gigabit, internet, muni broadband, municipal, telecom, tennessee
Aquarter of a century ago, I wrote a book called “Rebel Code”. It was the first – and is still the only – detailed history of the origins and rise of free software and open source, based on interviews with the gifted and generous hackers who took part. Back then, it was clear that open source represented a powerful alternative to the traditional proprietary approach to software development and distribution. But few could have predicted how completely open source would come to dominate computing. Alongside its role in running every aspect of the Internet, and powering most mobile phones in the form of Android, it has been embraced by startups for its unbeatable combination of power, reliability and low cost. It’s also a natural fit for cloud computing because of its ability to scale. It is no coincidence that for the last ten years, pretty much 100% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers have all run an operating system based on the open source Linux.
More recently, many leading AI systems have been released as open source. That raises the important question of what exactly “open source” means in the context of generative AI software, which involves much more than just code. The Open Source Initiative, which drew up the original definition of open source, has extended this work with its Open Source AI Definition. It is noteworthy that the EU has explicitly recognized the special role of open source in the field of AI. In the EU’s recent Artificial Intelligence Act, open source AI systems are exempt from the potentially onerous obligation to draw up a range of documentation that is generally required.
That could provide a major incentive for AI developers in the EU to take the open source route. European academic researchers working in this area are probably already doing that, not least for reasons of cost. Paul Keller points out in a blog post that another piece of EU legislation, the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSM), offers a further reason for research institutions to release their work as open source:
Article 3 of the CDSM Directive enables these institutions to text and data-mine all “works or other subject matter to which they have lawful access” for scientific research purposes. Text and data mining is understood to cover “any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form in order to generate information, which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations,” which clearly covers the development of AI models (see here or, more recently, here).
Keller’s post goes through the details of how that feeds into AI research, but the end-result is the following:
as long as the model is made available in line with the public-interest research missions of the organisations undertaking the training (for example, by releasing the model, including its weights, under an open-source licence) and is not commercialised by these organisations, this also does not affect the status of the reproductions and extractions made during the training process.
This means that Article 3 does cover the full model-development pathway (from data acquisition to model publication under an open source license) that most non-commercial Public AI model developers pursue.
As that indicates, the use of open source licensing is critical to this application of Article 3 of EU copyright legislation for the purpose of AI research.
What’s noteworthy here is how two different pieces of EU legislation, passed some years apart, work together to create a special category of open source AI systems that avoid most of the legal problems of training AI systems on copyright materials, as well as the bureaucratic overhead imposed by the EU AI Act on commercial systems. Keller calls these “public AI”, which he defines as:
AI systems that are built by organizations acting in the public interest and that focus on creating public value rather than extracting as much value from the information commons as possible.
Public AI systems are important for at least two reasons. First, their mission is to serve the public interest, rather than focusing on profit maximization. That’s obviously crucial at time when today’s AI giants are intent on making as much money as possible, presumably in the hope that they can do so before the AI bubble bursts.
Secondly, public AI systems provide a way for the EU to compete with both US and Chinese AI companies – by not competing with them. It is naive to think that Europe can ever match levels of venture capital investment that big name US AI startups currently enjoy, or that the EU is prepared and able to support local industries for as long and as deeply as the Chinese government evidently plans to do for its home-grown AI firms. But public AI systems, which are fully open source, and which take advantage of the EU right of research institutions to carry out text and data mining, offer a uniquely European take on generative AI that might even make such systems acceptable to those who worry about how they are built, and how they are used.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to the Walled Culture blog.
Filed Under: ai, cdsm, copyright, eu, generative ai, llms, open source, open source ai, public ai, text and data mining
When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE’s databases.
The request for information reads like something out of a cyber thriller: dozens of analysts working in shifts, strict deadlines measured in minutes, a tiered system of prioritizing high-risk individuals, and the latest software keeping constant watch.
I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I believe that the ICE request for information also signals a concerning if logical next step in a longer trend, one that moves the U.S. border from the physical world into the digital.
ICE already searches social media using a service called SocialNet that monitors most major online platforms. The agency has also contracted with Zignal Labs for its AI-powered social media monitoring system.
The Customs and Border Protection agency also searches social media posts on the devices of some travelers at ports of entry, and the U.S. State Department reviews social media posts when foreigners seek visas to enter the United States.
What would change isn’t only the scale of monitoring but its structure. Instead of government agents gathering evidence case by case, ICE is building a public-private surveillance loop that transforms everyday online activity into potential evidence.
Private contractors would be tasked with scraping publicly available data to collecting messages, including posts and other media and data. The contractors would be able to correlate those findings with data in commercial datasets from brokers such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR along with government-owned databases. Analysts would be required to produce dossiers for ICE field offices within tight deadlines – sometimes just 30 minutes for a high-priority case.
Those files don’t exist in isolation. They feed directly into Palantir Technologies’ Investigative Case Management system, the digital backbone of modern immigration enforcement. There, this social media data would join a growing web of license plate scans, utility records, property data and biometrics, creating what is effectively a searchable portrait of a person’s life.
Officially, ICE says its data collection would focus on people who are already linked to ongoing cases or potential threats. In practice, the net is far wider.
The danger here is that when one person is flagged, their friends, relatives, fellow organizers or any of their acquaintances can also become subjects of scrutiny. Previous contracts for facial recognition tools and location tracking have shown how easily these systems expand beyond their original scope. What starts as enforcement can turn into surveillance of entire communities.
ICE frames the project as modernization: a way to identify a target’s location by identifying aliases and detecting patterns that traditional methods might miss. Planning documents say contractors cannot create fake profiles and must store all analysis on ICE servers.
But history suggests these kinds of guardrails often fail. Investigations have revealed how informal data-sharing between local police and federal agents allowed ICE to access systems it wasn’t authorized to use. The agency has repeatedly purchased massive datasets from brokers to sidestep warrant requirements. And despite a White House freeze on spyware procurement, ICE quietly revived a contract with Paragon’s Graphite tool, software reportedly capable of infiltrating encrypted apps such as WhatsApp and Signal.
Meanwhile, ICE’s vendor ecosystem keeps expanding: Clearview AI for face matching, ShadowDragon’s SocialNet for mapping networks, Babel Street’s location history service Locate X, and LexisNexis for looking up people. ICE is also purchasing tools from surveillance firm PenLink that combine location data with social media data. Together, these platforms make continuous, automated monitoring not only possible but routine.
The United States isn’t alone in government monitoring of social media. In the United Kingdom, a new police unit tasked with scanning online discussions about immigration and civil unrest has drawn criticism for blurring the line between public safety and political policing.
Across the globe, spyware scandals have shown how lawful access tools that were initially justified for counterterrorism were later used against journalists and activists. Once these systems exist, mission creep, also known as function creep, becomes the rule rather than the exception.
Around-the-clock surveillance doesn’t just gather information – it also changes behavior.
Research found that visits to Wikipedia articles on terrorism dropped sharply immediately after revelations about the National Security Agency’s global surveillance in June 2013.
For immigrants and activists, the stakes are higher. A post about a protest or a joke can be reinterpreted as “intelligence.” Knowing that federal contractors may be watching in real time encourages self-censorship and discourages civic participation. In this environment, the digital self, an identity composed of biometric markers, algorithmic classifications, risk scores and digital traces, becomes a risk that follows you across platforms and databases.
What is genuinely new is the privatization of interpretation. ICE isn’t just collecting more data, it is outsourcing judgment to private contractors. Private analysts, aided by artificial intelligence, are likely to decide what online behavior signals danger and what doesn’t. That decision-making happens rapidly and across large numbers of people, for the most part beyond public oversight.
At the same time, the consolidation of data means social media content can now sit beside location and biometric information inside Palantir’s hub. Enforcement increasingly happens through data correlations, raising questions about due process.
ICE’s request for information is likely to evolve into a full procurement contract within months, and recent litigation from the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center against the Department of Homeland Security suggests that the oversight is likely to lag far behind the technology. ICE’s plan to maintain permanent watch floors, open indoor spaces equipped with video and computer monitors, that are staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year signals that this likely isn’t a temporary experiment and instead is a new operational norm.
Transparency starts with public disclosure of the algorithms and scoring systems ICE uses. Advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union argue that law enforcement agencies should meet the same warrant standards online that they do in physical spaces. The Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU argue that there should be independent oversight of surveillance systems for accuracy and bias. And several U.S. senators have introduced legislation to limit bulk purchases from data brokers.
Without checks like these, I believe that the boundary between border control and everyday life is likely to keep dissolving. As the digital border expands, it risks ensnaring anyone whose online presence becomes legible to the system.
Nicole M. Bennett is a Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies at Indiana University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Filed Under: cbp, civic participation, ice, mass surveillance, social media, surveillance
The new year is approaching fast, and you know what that means: new material is entering the public domain in the US, and we’ll be celebrating it with the eighth installment of our public domain game jam. What’s more, this is an extra special year because the ever-growing public domain is hitting a new decade: it’s time for Gaming Like It’s 1930!
As in past years, we’re calling on designers of all stripes to create both analog and digital games that build on works entering the public domain. There are plenty of interesting works to draw on, including:
The jam will begin on January 1st and run through the end of the month, accepting submissions of both analog and digital games based on works from 1930. Whether you’ve participated before or not, we encourage everyone to get involved!
Even if you don’t have any experience, it’s never been easier to try your hand at game design. There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.
At the end of the jam we’ll be choosing winners in six categories, and awarding a choice of prizes from Techdirt and Diegetic Games. You can read the full rules and other details, and sign up to participate, on the game jam page over on Itch.io. We’ll be back with more reminder posts as the jam draws nearer, including a look at one card game submission from last year that has since been released for purchase and is getting great reviews (so stay tuned for that!)
Filed Under: copyright, game jam, gaming, gaming like it's 1930, public domain
