As we mentioned previously, the Stop Killing Games movement has come to America and there is currently an effort to get some legislation based on the movement’s goals on the books in California. The movement hit a snag recently when the written version of the bill failed to make it out of committee on a vote of 4 in favor, 3 against, and 4 abstaining. It’s the abstaining votes that were the problem, resulting in not enough yes votes to move forward. But, importantly, the committee also left the door open to reconsider the bill at a later time.

The committee unanimously voted in favor of granting the bill reconsideration, meaning it could come back before this group of state senators. Assemblymember Chris Ward introduced the bill in February and it passed the California State Assembly 43-16 in late May.

That said, the abstentions prevented the bill’s progression for now. “Not enough yeses means the bill stops here for this session,” a volunteer with the Stop Killing Games campaign (which supported the bill) noted on Reddit. “That is the loss.”

There was active lobbying against the bill in committee hearings, primarily from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). And what is now getting a great deal of attention is the fact that ESA’s lobbyist either lied to the committee in those hearings, or else they have absolutely no fucking clue what they’re talking about. And if you need the prime example of what we’re talking about here, you need only understand that one lobbyist claimed that anyone hosting a private Minecraft server is doing “illegal piracy.” The lobbyist in question would be Jennifer Gibbons, the ESA’s VP for State Govt. Affairs.

Gibbons was responding to a comment made by California state assemblymember Chris Ward—who introduced the bill—regarding the possibility of keeping games alive with private servers. “Minecraft is currently hosted by community servers, Call of Duty [has] community servers, so it’s an option that is out there, in existence here today.”

Gibbons cut in: “They’re illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.”

Asked by California state senator Caroline Menjivar as to whether this was “like the black market of videogames?” Gibbons responded “Yes. In fact, we consider it piracy. We have lawsuits, two pending lawsuits, against private servers right now, and the United States Trade Representative (USTR) in their Notorious Markets Reports on counterfeiting and piracy has named some of these big private servers as a notorious market.” A notorious market refers to a market where intellectual property infringement is rife—think something like The Pirate Bay.

The ignorance here, if that’s what this is, is astounding. As PC Gamer goes on to note, it is true that select private Minecraft and COD servers have been designated as notorious markets by the USTR in some cases. Those are servers that actually do make some games playable without the otherwise required subscription. World of Warcraft servers are a common target for this sort of designation.

But to map that onto Minecraft private servers, which are not only allowed to exist, but actively encouraged in use by Microsoft directly, is insane. The way you host a private Minecraft server, to start, is by going to Microsoft’s own site to get the .jar file you need to run it. The company is making it available, knowingly and on purpose. In no sense is that piracy, copyright infringement, or illegal. Like… at all.

Given the opportunity to correct themselves, however, the ESA doubled down.

In a statement to PC Gamer, the ESA wrote that, so far as it’s concerned, “Private servers infringe on the intellectual property (IP) rights of game publishers. Publishers reserve the right to exercise their rights against them.”

Private servers only infringe on the IP of game publishers if they restrict their use. That’s the entire point that the folks at Stop Killing Games are making. If publishers don’t want to keep their online games available, they could simply allow, or be compelled to allow, private servers to do the job for them. If it’s allowed, it’s not piracy. This really isn’t that hard.

I honestly have no idea whether this is ignorance or malice at work. I find it very hard to believe that someone in Gibbons position could possibly be this confused on a topic she’s been tasked with lobbying against. On the other hand, the claim is so plainly wrong that it’s an incredibly stupid lie if that’s in fact what this is.

Hopefully this sort of thing will be part of the discussion when, or if, the legislation is reconsidered in the future.

Last week marks four years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional protections for people seeking abortion care. Anniversaries are a moment to take stock, and over the last four years, EFF has seen firsthand how digital rights and reproductive rights have become increasingly intertwined. One major way this has happened: the fight over abortion has also become a fight over online speech and government censorship as a steady stream of proposed laws, cease-and-desist letters, lawsuits, and government investigations have targeted the websites and online resources that help people find and learn about reproductive healthcare.

This is an effort by anti-abortion government officials to mold the information ecosystem, restrict what people can read, and cut off the ways people communicate with one another. We’ve watched this build for years, and the encouraging news is that many of these efforts have failed. The worrying news is that they keep coming. And if they’re allowed to succeed, this could have repercussions for freedom of expression online beyond reproductive rights.

Targeting Sites That Just Share Information

The clearest tell that this is also a war on speech is that officials have aimed their efforts not just at abortion providers or the entities that prescribe and sell medication abortion, but also at websites that do nothing more than tell people what their options are, how to find a doctor, and where abortion remains legal.

Cease-and-Desists & Takedown Demands

State attorneys general have been hitting these online information hubs with cease-and-desist letters and takedown demands. Just this month, for example, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall sent cease-and-desist letters to multiple groups with abortion-related websites, including Plan C, a public health campaign that provides educational resources and research on abortion access. Plan C doesn’t sell or ship abortion pills. It simply provides information. Marshall’s office nonetheless claimed Plan C’s website “facilitates, aids, and abets” illegal abortion. The Arkansas attorney general similarly sent out cease-and-desists to several organizations regarding their websites, including Mayday Health, which, like Plan C, provides only information and does not directly prescribe or mail pills.

In another example from earlier this year, North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley threatened legal action and ordered the Prairie Abortion Fund to scrub information off of its website, not because the fund sold pills, but because its site linked to several outside informational resources. The Attorney General primarily focused on the fund’s link to Plan C, meaning the biggest alleged issue was a link to a website that links to other websites where pills can be accessed.

What’s especially concerning is that the state doesn’t have to win, or even file, a lawsuit to get what it wants. Especially for smaller organizations and funds, a letter threatening legal action can be enough to chill their speech, causing them to remove important content and go quiet.

Censorship Mandates

Legislators in multiple states have also attempted to make it illegal to share resources on how to obtain an abortion, including on purely informational websites with a national or global audience. South Dakota recently passed a law making it a felony to “advertise” anything “described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing an abortion.” Language this broad can easily apply to websites that simply engage in First Amendment-protected advocacy or provide educational resources. Mayday Health, which operates one such website, has since sued the state in federal court to block the law. The lawsuit argues the law could reach something as small as wearing a sweatshirt that carries Mayday’s web address.

Other state legislatures have made similar efforts. Last year, for example, Texas introduced a bill that would have made it illegal to “provide information” on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug. If you exchanged emails, had an online chat, or created a website that shared information about legal abortion services in other states, you could have violated this bill. Luckily this particular bill did not pass, but Texas has attempted to pass similar laws for several years now.

Dressing Censorship Up as Consumer Protection

A major way anti-abortion officials are targeting online speech is by weaponizing consumer protection and deceptive advertising laws, claiming that providing information about abortion violates them. This tactic is a threat to free speech rights. The First Amendment protects publishing truthful information on a public issue, and the Supreme Court has expressly said that includes providing information about legal abortion in a state where it is illegal.

Yet states like South Dakota have continued to use deceptive advertising claims to go after abortion speech. Last year, South Dakota sent a cease-and-desist and then filed a lawsuit against Mayday Health for running ads that simply read: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be?” with a link to Mayday’s website. The state claimed the ads were “deceptive.” Mayday then counter-sued in federal court, challenging South Dakota’s actions under the First Amendment. Though the federal judge ultimately declined to step in while the parallel state case was pending, she made a point of saying she believed Mayday’s website constitutes “speech subject to protection under the First Amendment.”

Other states have attempted to run the same play. Missouri sued Planned Parenthood in 2025 under its consumer-protection statute, calling a webpage that says abortion pills are safe an “unfair and deceptive” trade practice. Florida went even further, invoking its RICO law—a law typically used for organized crime—over the same kind of statement. Florida leaned heavily on a single study funded by an anti-abortion think tank, even as major medical organizations and decades of research put the serious-complication rate below half a percent. States should not be able to cherry-pick studies in order to erase online speech.

Going After Intermediaries & Erasing Whole Websites

Some officials aren’t content to restrict only certain abortion-related content—they want the websites gone entirely.

Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters sent by the Arkansas attorney general last year. Letters were sent directly to internet intermediaries (entities that facilitate use of the internet, such as internet service providers, web-hosting providers, or things like search engines and social media platforms). The letters demanded that both a domain registry company and a web host stop supporting a site that discusses abortion drugs. But as we know, if we cut off the host or the domain, the speech disappears for everyone—not just for people in Arkansas.

Likewise, Texas’s 2025 bill would have required intermediaries to take down abortion-related content. It’s worth remembering that the imposition of civil and criminal liability on intermediaries also conflicts with a federal law that protects online intermediaries’ ability to host user-generated speech, 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”), including speech about abortion medication.

The push has gone federal, too. In March 2026, Senator Bill Cassidy and colleagues on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee pressed the FDA to use every tool it has against online sellers, including leaning on the domain registrars that keep these sites online.

Why This Should Worry Everyone

It’s tempting to see this as limited to the fight over reproductive rights. That would be a mistake. For people seeking care, the immediate harm is obvious: the internet is often the only place to find accurate, potentially life-saving information, and every letter, lawsuit, and takedown threat makes that information harder to find and riskier to share.

But the damage doesn’t stop there. We’re witnessing a live experiment in how to use consumer-protection laws, criminal statutes, and pressure on intermediaries to suppress a disfavored viewpoint, pull information offline, and make websites disappear. To think these tactics can only be used against abortion speech would be naïve. 

We hope courts and legislatures will continue to protect free speech online. But the continued drumbeat of threatening letters, lawsuits, and investigations is its own kind of harm. Here at EFF, we’ll keep defending the right to share and read information online—about abortion, and about everything else.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Oh boy do the Nazi-esque dudes running rampant in our country hate being called Nazis. They love the Nazi chic and the Nazi talk about securing the nation for white, blue-eyed males, but they hate being compared to the thing(s) they resemble most, even when they’re promoting people for actively generating these comparisons.

Like any bully, Trump officials and foot soldiers have the thinnest of skin. Trump’s (literal!) [but also figuratively!] skin is so thin he should probably be submerged in liquid until actually needed to rally the troops… or nap through a meeting.

An abusive administration that clearly wants to split the difference between autocracy and fascism somehow finds itself so pervious (is that a word aka the opposite of “impervious”?) to random criticism from random Americans, it can’t help but blow federal money and resources on silencing the few one-offs who have managed to rile low-level managers.

Beset by Nazi accusations, the administration (as expressed by its foot soldiers) decided the best response was to… behave like Nazis. (h/t Adam Steinbaugh)

After two federal law enforcement agents tracked down a Syracuse woman last Tuesday to warn her about a social media post, they went to Rochester to find David Streever.

A picture showed up on his phone from the door camera. Two people stood among the childrens’ toys on his porch. A woman, wearing an ordinary windbreaker and slip-on sneakers, held a bunch of papers.

Streever was not there. He was with his seven-year-old daughter at Moominworld in Finland – an amusement park in the happiest country in the world.

The two federal agents told Streever’s wife they had come Tuesday afternoon to deliver a warning letter about an email Streever had sent in January to Todd Lyons, then the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

That is insanely disturbing, even if you blow past the the first sentence, which makes it clear this isn’t the first time federal agents have hunted down people who have done nothing more than engage in absolutely protected speech.

David Streever sent then-ICE Director Todd Lyons an angry email shortly after federal officers murdered Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti — the second ICE protester the government had killed in during its politically motivated “surge” targeting the state. Here’s what it said, according to its author:

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.

“The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.

“You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”

Todd Lyons left before Trump could turn on him, but signing his name to a memo that told ICE officers to ignore the law and the Constitution when performing arrests or entering houses made it clear he’d eventually be forced out, even if everything he did was exactly what Trump wanted him to do.

But that’s not the end of harassment experienced by Streever as the result of his completely innocuous email. Not only did federal officers visit his house, but they tried to accost him upon his return to the US, somehow managing to locate him in the hotel room where he was (briefly) staying with his daughter.

On Thursday, Streever and daughter Helen flew back to New York’s JFK Airport, sailed through the customs checkpoint and took a shuttle to a hotel, where they immediately crashed with jet lag.

At 9:55 p.m., the front desk rang his hotel room. A special agent named Trevor Pitts had come looking for him, the staff said. The hotel staff did not tell the agent that Streever and his daughter were upstairs, Streever said. The agent left his card.

Streever’s wife also received this completely bogus “Warning Notice” from (allegedly) ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility. (via Adam Steinbaugh)

Note the handwritten “David Streever” on a form that looks like someone just whipped it up at the last minute before heading out to get their government thug on. Note also that no other information was filled in by the “special agent” delivering the threat to prosecute Streever for “[violating] Title 18 of the US Code” with his email to Todd Lyons.

Further down in the completely bogus “WARNING NOTICE,” the people who wrote it claim Streever’s letter was a potentially prosecutable threat against a federal official. It also refers to Title 19 as justifying the OPR’s involvement in this, which Title 19 definitely does not authorize. Title 19 refers only to “Telecommunications Trade” in terms of actual trade (tariffs, trade agreements, taxes, etc.). It doesn’t have anything to say about authorizing investigations of communications ICE might want to pretend are threatening.

On top of that, the OPR has nothing whatsoever to do with external investigations and prosecutions. Its own web page makes that very clear:

The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) upholds the agency’s professional standards through a multi-disciplinary approach of security, inspections and investigations to promote organizational health, integrity, and accountability across the agency. OPR promotes organizational integrity by vigilantly managing ICE’s security programs, conducting independent reviews of ICE programs and operations, and impartially investigating allegations of employee and contractor misconduct.

To promote integrity, mitigate risk and uphold the agency’s professional standards, the OPR-led Integrity Coordination Center receives and assesses information it receives and refers any allegations of employee misconduct to appropriate offices for investigation, if necessary. This process ensures that allegations of criminal or administrative misconduct against ICE personnel are properly assessed and thoroughly investigated.

In other words, this faux-form letter/threat is exactly the sort of thing that should be referred to the OPR office for investigation. Given its purview, there’s no way in hell this letter was actually written by someone in ICE’s OPR. That’s why it’s missing a signature or any other identifying information. Because if someone inside the OPR did decide to write this bogus letter on behalf of DHS personnel looking to get their Gestapo on, they’d be aiding and abetting the stuff the OPR is there to deter.

And that would all be awful enough if it was a one-off. But it isn’t. This was reported by the same news source only four days earlier.

Two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents issued a warning to a Syracuse woman Tuesday to remove a social media account they said threatens federal agents.

PaigeLynne Gonyea said she believes they are referring to a January post where she named the ICE agent who shot protester Renee Good.

[…]

The agents handed Gonyea a form letter that says they were investigating threats made against ICE personnel. The form says the agents had identified an Instagram account they believe breaks federal law. They asked her to remove and discontinue the behavior, according to the unsigned document she shared on Instagram.

Odds are it’s the same bullshit legal threat David Streever’s wife received. Other details in the reporting suggests it contained the same boilerplate about illegal “threats” against “government officials.” More likely than not, this form was unsigned by those delivering it and also missing the signature of the “special agent” from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility. It looks like nothing more than it is: government agents with guns and official paperwork intimidating US citizens for daring to criticize federal officials (in the case of Streever) or simply reposting facts that were already in the public domain (Gonyea’s case).

This reporting also includes disturbing photos of federal officers looming over the election worker as they tried to get her to recant. And we’ll see what happens here, now that one of the New Gestapo has been identified by journalists:

David Brody, one of the two agents, said he could not answer questions from a reporter.

This administration is so stupidly evil that its immediate response to being called Nazis is to literally act like Nazis. Its only defense might be that this pair of vindictive responses seems a bit more KGB than Gestapo, given the reliance on internal tech, rather than a network of informants (that’s Charlie Kirk cancel culture, yo). Either way, it’s fucking horrifying.

For many, many years on Techdirt we’ve bemoaned the fact that federal court documents are not available for free as they should be. Instead, we have PACER, a bloated, expensive, difficult to use system that charges you for every “page” it loads up for you (including search results). The whole thing is a sham. Indeed, the law that allowed PACER to be established was based on the idea that, like photocopies, it cost money to “print” every page of every document. It also said that the fees PACER collected could only be used for… PACER. Instead, the fees far outpaced the actual costs, and the federal judiciary started using them for all sorts of other expenses. Courts have even told their own bosses at the judiciary that they’re overcharging beyond what the law allows.

And, really, it’s not even about the overcharging, though that is problematic. It’s about the freaking principle. Court documents are public documents and there is zero reason — when hosting a PDF costs essentially nothing and a server is not a photocopier — that they are not freely and immediately available to everyone.

The judiciary has claimed, for years, that making PACER free would be way too costly, which was totally undermined by a Congressional Budget Office analysis that said it would… effectively be free (PACER’s payment and user system is costly, ditching it and just making docs available would save money).

This week we were going to run a repost of an EFF blog post supporting a bill that would make PACER free, also known as the Open Courts Act. Of course, similar bills come up almost every year… and… go nowhere. Because Congress does not care. They don’t believe they’re serving the public, so why should they make sure that the public has access to court documents?

Instead… the judiciary has spit in the face of the public and announced it’s actually jacking up the fees:

The U.S. federal judiciary on Friday said it will temporarily hike fees to download documents from its online court records system known as PACER in order to accelerate the development of a new, more secure case management and public ​access system.

The executive committee of the Judicial Conference of the U.S., the judiciary’s top policymaking body, agreed ‌to increase the cost of downloading a court filing to 12 cents per page, up from the current 10 cents, for a five-year period starting January 1.

Let me let you in on a secret that isn’t much of a secret. There’s basically no chance — absent Congress doing what it should and making PACER free — that the judiciary will ever allow the price to go back down from 12 cents a page. Hell, I still remember reporting when the Judicial Conference hiked the price from 8 cents a page to 10 cents. As we noted at the time, this was already an illegal overcharge. Hiking the price to 12 cents per page is an even bigger violation of the law.

There is zero basis for charging 8 cents or 10 cents or 12 cents or any cents a page for a freaking PDF. It may have been more expensive to host PDFs when PACER started, but it’s not now.

The Judicial Conference is simply blowing smoke when they claim this increase is necessary to make PACER secure.

“Unfortunately, without a modest increase in ⁠fees, we will not be able to collect enough money to cover the costs of delivering the case management system that ​the federal courts must have to continue to operate securely,” Judge Robert Conrad, the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. ​Courts, said in a statement.

Or — and this is the part the Judicial Conference doesn’t want to say out loud — if you made the documents publicly available without a login, you wouldn’t have any user data to secure in the first place. The security problem is a direct consequence of the fee system. Eliminate the fee system, eliminate the problem.

As always, the Judiciary pretends to then throw a bone to those who use PACER by saying they’ll up the “free” allocation:

To soften the blow, the judiciary said it would waive fees for users who spend $40 or less per quarter, an increase from the current $30 waiver. It said that will ensure that the vast majority of individual users, as opposed to law firms and other heavy PACER users, can ​avoid paying anything.

How magnanimous: a few extra free documents before the meter starts running — on records that, by every reasonable principle of democratic accountability, belong to the public.

The federal judiciary is now demanding more money for PDF downloads to fix a security problem that is mostly caused because… they’re charging the public money for PDF downloads. There’s a simpler solution and it is: make these public documents public for free.

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Yet another way Trump was going to make America great again was by giving one of his pool boys a no-bid contract to make the Lincoln Reflecting Pool even greater than it always had been. Rather than allow it to remain — at the very least — serviceable, Trump insisted the bottom needed to be “painted” a completely made up shade of “American flag blue” and then refilled to better reflect Trump’s glory upon himself.

What followed this combination of no-bid contracts and Trumpian hubris was completely expected. The redo underperformed while going over budget. And the water piped back into the pool was exactly the color one would expect given the circumstances. It sure as shit wasn’t “American flag blue.” Instead, it was stagnant-hot-water green, thanks to a surplus of algae that drowned out the blue paint/sealant/liner applied to the bottom of the pool.

Having been sufficiently embarrassed by his own actions, Trump decided to blame everyone else. If he had left it at blame, we probably wouldn’t even be writing about it. But he took it further, claiming everything from the peeling liner to the presence of algae itself were the actions of vandals and anti-Trump agitators.

Nobody honestly believes these claims, not even the guy making them. But plenty of people who have hitched their wagon to this childish bully are not only expected to give these wild theories credence, but expand and expound upon them from their federal offices. That’s why Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is debasing himself during interviews:

Speaking to Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Burgum said, “We’ve got all the photographs we can see” to prove that vandals cut portions of the pool bottom.

Not stupid enough? Try this:

“If people are defaming our monuments, they should face the consequences of that,” Burgum said.

Your monument looks like shit and was fucked up by a dipshit who shouldn’t be trusted to fill his own bathtub. That’s “defaming” a monument. It’s not like “defaming” was so close to the correct term that Burgum just accidentally hot-swapped some English while being casually questioned by a member of the press. That’s just the sort of sloppiness that’s to be expected from people who don’t really believe what they’re saying, nor care what anyone thinks about their bogus assertions.

As I said earlier, Trump being mad about not being able to make a pool better despite knowing the best pool guys isn’t news. That’s just Trump being Trump. What makes it news is when the administration threatens journalists for reporting on the pool revamp failure. What makes it fascism is when the administration starts arresting people because Trump refuses to admit some errors might have been made during his command performance of Make America But Especially This Pool American Flag Blue Again (For The First Time) With No Bid Contracts.

In the space of a single, distended paragraph, Trump inflated the size of the “slit” in the pool liner from 150 feet to 350 feet. In the length of a single press conference, the DOJ claimed 14 reports of vandalism had resulted in five arrests.

Arresting five randos for imaginary crimes won’t satisfy Trump’s desire to see his feverish federal crimes dreams made a reality. The administration now has a scapegoat just famous enough to redirect a bit of the spotlight away from its outlandish claims and childish behavior.

U.S. Olympic canoeist David “Davey” Hearn was indicted Thursday on a single count of destruction of property after he was accused of causing more than $1,000 worth of damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Hearn was indicted on the felony charge in D.C. Superior Court.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said National Park Service employees saw Hearn “forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner” of the pool with both hands on June 19.

Whoa smol if true! Here’s what gets you a felony charge if you’re being prosecuted by a Trump puppet who absolutely has to buy into Trump’s pool vandals conspiracy theory:

Pirro alleged that Hearn damaged about 2 square feet of the sealant from the bottom of the pool.

TWO. SQUARE. FEET.

The total square footage of the reflecting pool is ~339,000 square feet. If you choose to believe this allegation, this means Davey Hearn “damaged” 0.00059% of the reflecting pool’s underbelly. You also have to believe Hearn was “forcefully and violently” yanking at this 0.00059%, rather than simply doing what he said he was doing, which was pulling up a floating chunk of separated liner to get a better look at it.

Stupider still:

“A parks employee actually told Hearn to stop, to stop his behavior and stop what he was doing,” Pirro said at a news conference Thursday. “Hearn reacted by shouting at the parks employee, saying that she cared too much about the Reflecting Pool, and why did she even care, since it wasn’t her pool.”

OH MY GOD. The Lincoln Reflecting Pool is our pool. While the Interior Department may oversee it, it belongs to the public. And it seems a lot of Americans care more about this botched makeover than Mr. America himself — someone so narcissistic he demanded it be redone to his specifications. And when those specifications went man-tits up, he decided to pretend vandalism, rather than no-bid contracts handed out to his pool buddies, was to blame for the algae bloom and the refusal of the lining to remain attached to the bottom of the pool.

The Department of the Interior continues to insist the lining was vandalized shortly after the project was completed and refilled. So do Trump and Jeanine Pirro, who will say anything Trump tells her to say. But it’s impossible to believe large-scale vandalism occurred without anyone gathering any supporting evidence, like video recordings or multiple sworn statements by witnesses. This was yet another one of Trump’s self-glorification projects, so of course it was going to be a target. But without more than Trump and his sycophants simply saying something happened, there’s no reason to believe what has been alleged has actually happened.

And in the case of Hearns, someone yanking on a small bit of dislodged lining isn’t anything anyone would seriously consider to be felonious vandalism. I mean, at least not normally. But nothing is normal anymore. This is a government that will destroy citizens’ lives, rather than take any responsibility for its failures.

Earlier this year I noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules that would have made it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after decades of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so you could easily switch to competitors.

Verizon, as I’ve long established, hates competition, and early last year immediately got to work lobbying the Trump administration to destroy the rules (falsely) claiming, without evidence, that the modest phone unlocking requirements were a boon to criminals and scammers. Since the rollback they’ve slowly been making unlocking more annoying, hoping a slowly boiled frog approach would keep it on the down low.

Enter one of Trump Corp’s other biggest constituents: Elon Musk and Space X.

I’ve already explained how the SpaceX IPO includes all sorts of fantastical claims related to Starlink (the only profitable company in the prospectus). Musk Corp insists Starlink will grow extremely quickly from 10 million current subscribers to 300 million. As I explain here that’s simply not happening, for a long list of reasons authoritarian pump and dumpers don’t actually care about.

But there’s an interesting wrinkle: to grow, Musk’s Starlink is hoping to increasingly tether Starlink to existing cellular providers. Starlink has increasingly partnered with companies like T-Mobile to extend connectivity for customers when they’re outside of the range of traditional towers.

So in a filing last month sent to the FCC, SpaceX joined a bunch of other smaller providers in pushing the FCC to adopt a new 180 day phone unlocking rule:

“…we write to urge the Commission to adopt a clear, uniform requirement that mobile devices be automatically unlocked within 180 days after activation. Automatic mobile device unlocking is essential to protecting consumer choice, promoting competition, and lowering costs in the mobile marketplace. Allowing a “lock period” of 180 days gives providers enough time to protect against the significant fraud concerns identified by the FCC and to ensure mobile devices are not exploited for criminal acts.”

So for one thing, the 180 day locked phone rule would be much worse (and far friendlier to giants like Verizon) than the 60 day lock window the Biden FCC proposed (but never actually implemented because our regulatory structures are too corrupted to function). You’d also have to doubt whether Brendan Carr, who largely supports big telecom positions across the board, would ever enforce them.

Another point of note is that the FCC’s claims that they had to destroy unlocking rules to “fight crime” are bullshit. They’ve provided zero hard evidence to support that idea. The destruction of unlocking rules was just blatant regulatory capture in service to Verizon lobbyists, using “crime” as flimsy justification.

Still, it’s interesting to see SpaceX suddenly on the other side of the table to Verizon in support of something that could, for once, actually help people.

Musk Corp appears to also have convinced three Republican Senators (Cynthia Lummis, John N. Kennedy, and Eric S. Schmitt) to send a letter to the FCC also supporting a new 180 day unlocking plan. You’ve also got people traditionally lined up against consumer rights — like former FCC Ajit Pai staffer Evan Swarztrauber — suddenly writing op-eds in favor of phone unlocking.

Swarztrauber crafts a bizarre alternate reality in his op-ed where Brendan Carr didn’t destroy popular unlocking rules, U.S. wireless is hyper cheap and competitive (despite his former boss Pai rubber stamping the Sprint-T-Mobile merger), and Republicans aren’t doing everything in their power to undermine internet access affordability. But he does make the correct point that arbitrary phone locks are anti-competitive:

“But mobile locking weakens all the pressure to reduce prices and improve service—and that’s by design. Reasonable waiting periods for phone unlocking to guard against fraud are fine—no one opposes that. But unlocking should otherwise be automatic once devices are paid off, and customers shouldn’t be forced to pay fees or jump through hoops to take their phones—their own property—to a competitor that could be saving them up to $1,000 annually.”

I think SpaceX simply wants to ensure its path into the cellular market expansion through partnership and acquisition, and knows unlocked phones lead to more competition. I think the sudden flood of Republican interest in phone unlocking comes primarily as a byproduct of SpaceX lobbying. I would not be surprised if SpaceX would consider a T-Mobile acquisition to grow very quickly and keep the valuation hype rolling down the road.

That said, I’d want to see the final, actual unlocking proposal before getting too excited. Republicans have historically opposed nearly every telecom consumer benefit policy that matters, their proposals uniformly include loopholes to ensure the biggest companies are well coddled, and it’s entirely possible that the finished proposal could have more than its share of bad ideas. Stay tuned.

As you will recall, the combination of RFK Jr.’s announcement that he’d find a root cause for all this autism going around combined with Donald Trump’s idiotic claim that there must be some external environmental cause of all this autism going around resulted in both of these clowns telling America that pregnant women taking Tylenol is causing all this autism going around. Never mind how dehumanizing this all is towards the many, many human beings who are on the autism spectrum, nor the other causes RFK Jr. has magically found for autism.

There is no scientific reason to believe that any causal link between autism and prenatal use of Tylenol exists. But that hasn’t stopped people with far too much faith in this particular government from refusing to take Tylenol. It also hasn’t stopped from governmental bootlickers making asses of themselves with lawsuits against Kenvue, makers of Tylenol. Not long after this bullshit announcement, even RFK Jr. acknowledged that there is no proven causal link to be had here.

But if that isn’t good enough for you, quality scientific studies continue to be performed and demonstrate that no link between Tylenol and autism can be found.

Another large study has found no link between autism and Tylenol use during pregnancy, refuting claims by President Trump and anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers analyzed electronic health records from 2001 to 2023 for more than 700,000 pairs of mothers and children in Hong Kong. Of those pairs, about 43 percent of children had exposure to acetaminophen in utero.

The researchers saw no link between prenatal acetaminophen use and either condition. It didn’t matter what dosage of acetaminophen was taken, when it was taken during the pregnancy (which trimester), how often it was taken, or how old the mother was at the time. There was simply no link between acetaminophen and autism or ADHD.

Now, as has been the case with some previous studies, and what RFK Jr. and his cronies point to when they make this dumb claim, you do get some correlative linking if you drop the sibling-matched design and instead just correlate between prenatal Tylenol exposure and a diagnoses of autism. The problem is that if you perform what is called a “negative control” analysis, that link disappears again.

Interestingly, there was a link when the researchers dropped the sibling-matched design and instead compared acetaminophen-exposed with unexposed children, which is a finding that has come up in other studies. But when the researchers performed a “negative control” analysis and compared children whose mothers had taken acetaminophen before ever getting pregnant or after they had given birth compared to mothers who didn’t use the painkiller, they also saw an association—one that is “biologically implausible.”

The idea behind a negative control analysis is to analyze a cohort of conditions that should not produce the experimental result, an autism diagnosis in this case. When it does anyway, you know that the previously perceived link isn’t really there. In this case, instances in which a mother took Tylenol before or after pregnancy and had a child that was diagnosed with autism shows that what could have been thought to be a link between the two is actually more likely exposing family, genetic, or environmental factors that are resulting in both a child with autism and a trigger for the mother, or future mother, to be taking Tylenol.

This is what we mean when we say there is correlation, but not causation. It is still a useful clue, in other words, but not in the way that Trump and Kennedy would have you believe. It indicates that the mothers who have taken Tylenol are experiencing something that is a trigger for doing so and may indicate some associated reason for producing a child with autism.

In other words, just because the paint is peeling off your walls and there is a blaring sound going off in your ears doesn’t mean that the blaring sound caused the paint to peel. Your house is on fire, causing both paint to peel and the smoke alarms to go off.

Which, frankly, happens to be a wonderful analogy for what it’s like to have RFK Jr. in charge of public health.

At some point in a PR crisis, someone decides the solution is to hire a crisis communications person. The corporation behind Bricks & Minifigs (BAM Franchising) is in a bit of a pickle and has apparently reached that point in the Reckless Ben/Bricks & Minifigs saga — and their crisis communications person decided the way to respond to my articles on the saga is… to send me a press release claiming BAM is “determined to find an amicable resolution with the Mansell family.”

This would be more convincing if BAM hadn’t filed a lawsuit a month ago accusing Bryan Mansell of engaging in a RICO conspiracy against them.

But before we get to all that, a (very condensed!) reminder of where things stood last time we covered this story. A guy named Bryan Mansell sought to sell his father’s very large collection of unopened Star Wars Lego kits, and contracted with a Bricks & Minifigs franchise in Oregon, run by Chrystal Law-Gorman and her husband Ben Gorman. At some point the Gormans sought to leave their franchise and perhaps through some shenanigans, some buddies of Bricks & Minifigs Corporate (BAM Franchising) showed up at their store and effectively took it over.

There is video showing Gorman telling the dude taking over the store, Brandon Best, that there are consignment sets in the store that need to be settled up, and being told that they are taking over the consignment as well. Law-Gorman alerts Mansell to all this, and Mansell attempts to trigger a clause to get back the remaining sets and/or get the remaining money owed, which the new franchise owners refuse. They later claim that when they took over the store there was maybe $2k to $5k of Star Wars Lego sets on the premises (though, later reporting shows that there is more).

Eventually Mansell gets a YouTuber named “Reckless Ben” Schneider to try to get back the money owed (exaggerated to an amount of $200k) and then everything goes crazy. Ben goes to extreme (and at times unwise) stunts to try to recover money for Bryan, which does succeed in getting the whole thing to go ridiculously viral, but also leads to a series of potential legal problems for Schneider (and potentially Mansell). You had the Gormans suing BAM and then BAM suing Schneider and Mansell, and various possible criminal charges against Schneider (though this is disputed), most of which appeared to be misdemeanors, but with some possible felony charges as well.

Eventually, another YouTuber (Coffeezilla) was able to get detailed info from most parties, and worked out that the $200k number was bullshit, that many sets were probably already sold, that Law-Gorman likely owed some money to Mansell, but that the McNeff brothers who run BAM (and their friends who took over the franchise, Josh Johnson and Brandon Best) were being sketchy and inaccurate in their claims as well, and likely owed Mansell way more than the $2k to $5k they claimed, but way less than the $200k everyone was talking about.

And I’m not even going to get into all the sketchiness by the American Fork Police Department in Utah (where BAM is headquartered) in how it handled all this, but suffice it to say, the cops were bad and did bad things that cops shouldn’t do.

There’s a lot more in all of this, but my first two posts on the topic go deeper into the weeds.

Anyway… when it was left there were a bunch of court dates coming up, most of them in local Utah courts. Around the time of the last post, BAM was able to get a ridiculously overbroad temporary restraining order (TRO) on Schneider, that clearly violated the First Amendment in all sorts of ways, mainly engaging in clear prior restraint, but also limiting where Schneider could go in very broad terms.

Last week, there was some reporting claiming that “a truce had been reached” between BAM and Schneider. But that kinda overstates things. As Legal Eagle nicely explains in Devin’s recent video, the “truce” was that (1) Schneider and Mansell both finally hired lawyers, and (2) that those lawyers talked to BAM’s lawyers and agreed to a stipulation asking the judge to cut back most of the more insane terms in the TRO, to things that a standard TRO would limit, while saying that the two sides had agreed to go to mediation to try to sort out their differences. Amazingly, the local Utah judge, Tony Graf Jr., seemed to wake up to the constitutional problems with his original TRO, and realized that there were still problems with the newly agreed-on-by-both-sides injunction, and asked for further clarification before signing on, even though that meant the existing problematic TRO remains in effect.

If you want to read through all the documentation on that, here’s a 663-page pdf of the entire docket in the Utah local court. The joint stipulation starts on page 613.

As for why there’s a 663-page PDF of all the local court filings, well, that’s because Schneider’s lawyers (smartly) have removed the case to federal court on diversity grounds, which is exactly what they should be doing. Federal judges can better handle a case like this without issuing a TRO or an injunction that clearly violates the First Amendment, and they should easily qualify here as the defendants and plaintiffs are in different states and the amount at stake is over $75k (BAM claims over $300k in damages). As part of that filing, there’s a single exhibit with all of the 663-pages of filings from the local Utah court in one handy massive PDF.

While the McNeffs can try to stop the removal to federal court, it seems like it should stay there, though if they’re really going through mediation to reach a settlement (as they should), then they can basically put the cases on hold while that’s happening.

All that brings us to… BAM apparently hiring a crisis communications person, who, for some reason, thought it made sense to send me the latest “press release” (it’s just a blog post, folks) from BAM announcing that BAM is “determined to find an amicable resolution with Mansell family.”

As I wrote back to the PR person, this is hard to square with the fact that a month earlier BAM had sued Bryan Mansell, claiming that he was engaged in a RICO conspiracy against them. Also, the same press release sticks by the claim that they only have $2k to $5k worth of his Lego sets, and doubles down on blaming the Gormans for not paying Mansell. This is despite what Coffeezilla found — including in his conversations with the McNeff brothers who run BAM, that they not only have more sets than they initially claimed, but that they had a spreadsheet detailing all of that on their own Google Drive going back to near the beginning of this dispute.

The blog post also claims:

The company has also repeated its good-faith offer to make the Mansell family whole monetarily for anything fairly demonstrated to be unaccounted for, including amounts that may be owed to him without his knowledge. The company is committed to give him every Star Wars LEGO item remaining from the Salem store, whether identified as his or not.

Again, this is very difficult to square with BAM’s actual actions throughout this entire process, including the ongoing lawsuit which accuses him of engaging in a racketeering conspiracy against them. Separately, the “remaining from the Salem store” line is a bit squishy, since the Coffeezilla video showed that Brandon Best showed up with a U-Haul truck and there are reports that he removed a bunch of Lego sets around that time (the McNeffs dispute this, and claim that Best moved a bunch of sets from a different store a month earlier). But if the promise is to give Mansell back the “remaining” sets from the Salem store, that’s not all of his sets that it’s believed someone in the BAM universe possesses.

Either way, I sent BAM’s PR person a list of those inconsistencies and haven’t heard back. Which, honestly, tracks. When you’ve filed a RICO lawsuit against someone while simultaneously issuing press releases about your good-faith commitment to making them whole, there may not be a great answer to the question of how those two things fit together, no matter how experienced you are in crisis comms.

And really, that’s the thing about crisis communications: there’s only so much you can say in a crisis when your own actions have worsened the crisis at nearly every possible turn. When the crisis is that your behavior looks bad, hiring someone to talk about your behavior in a press release tends to make it look worse.

In Larry Sanger’s recent failed attempt to start a “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity”, he tried to recruit his followers to help him change Wikipedia’s rules around representation of viewpoints, religions, parties, and nationalities (a version of his earlier “Nine Theses”). The draft WikiProject was not itself a bannable offense, but his approach broke rules that were designed to foster fair discussions. Wikipedia’s rules really already support creation of balanced and robust articles about controversial topics – it just takes a huge amount of careful research, patience, and cooperation, and there’s no shortcut for that work.

In the first several months of Wikipedia, Sanger’s seriousness about its potential encouraged me to take up the challenge of helping write an encyclopedia that represents the sum of human knowledge. 25 years later, I remain an active editor dedicated to the Wikimedia movement for free and open knowledge, which is basically a fun and oddly serious hobby.

I edit a lot of moderately controversial articles that have glaring gaps in core principles of verifiability and neutral point of view. Many of Wikipedia’s most popular articles, like about politics and philosophy, are very informative and comprehensive, but second-tier articles don’t consistently get robust attention from editors. For example, I’ve recently repaired bias and disinformation in articles about AI regulation, LGBTQ rights in Nigeria, politicians in the Balkans, wealthy businessmen outside the US, influential religious organizations, and people accused of sexual harassment. I routinely fix articles that downplay negative information or present a controversial topic in a flattering way, in the style of Jeffrey Epstein’s ineffective project to get consultants to sanitize his article.

The good thing is that Wikipedia’s established rules already provide robust strategies to improve verifiability and balance in articles. Its principles expect editors to be cooperative and willing to cite a reliable source for nearly every sentence. You have to be up for changing your mind when somebody finds multiple reliable sources that disprove something you assumed, or at least up for slinking away to another article. To help counter bias and conflicts of interest, I apply elaborately layered guidance for evaluating and weighing sources – often citing academic journal articles and books, but not always, because the guidance recognizes that reliability is contextual. The “due weight” policy, part of the neutral point of view policy, pushes editors to search for more and better sources when something gets disputed, which results in a stronger article. I’ve learned that the best way to resolve a content dispute is to cite the best sources, reference the most relevant rules, present evidence calmly, and escalate one step at a time through the dispute resolution forums. Dispute resolution typically uses Wikipedia’s informal decision-making process, which reflects that Wikipedia is a decentralized asynchronous volunteer project, not an adjudicatory body. Wikipedia’s processes already work pretty well, they just take a lot of skill and patience, because collaboration is hard work.

Sanger was banned for off-Wikipedia canvassing and for not being on Wikipedia to build an encyclopedia, but to be clear, trying to start WikiProject Intellectual Diversity was not in itself a bannable offense. Canvassing is against the rules specifically to protect public and open processes that support the development of balanced articles. The canvassing guidelines discourage editors from trying to rig decision-making processes by selectively inviting participants who will take their side. The rules favor public discussions on Wikipedia so that all editors have an equal opportunity to participate. And since all Wikipedia edits are publicly tracked, editors can analyze each other’s contributions to detect biases and conflicts of interest. External invitations both selectively invite participation and prevent editors from exercising oversight. Volunteer administrators routinely block or even ban editors for inappropriate canvassing because this behavior compromises efforts to build a balanced encyclopedia.

Sanger’s recent advocacy reminds me of the pattern that researcher and Wikipedia editor Molly White described in January 2025: “right-wing voices attacking Wikipedia as part of an intensifying campaign against free and open access information.” In October, the Washington Post described Sanger as “fueling the right’s campaign” against Wikipedia. Among other incidents last year, House Republicans demanded disclosure of editor information over coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Sanger’s call to prohibit anonymity for the most dedicated volunteer administrators, one of his Nine Theses, is another one of his takes that would undermine intellectual freedom in the project, in line with the leaked Heritage Foundation plan to dox editors.

My work to counter gaps, bias, and spam in Wikipedia articles gives me proof every day that the project is imperfect. Every active editor has critiques of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Wikimedia movement, and we debate issues and improvements at length. Wikipedia would benefit from additional contributors from any viewpoint or background who want to help build an encyclopedia. But improving Wikipedia requires intellectual honesty, cooperation, and willingness to apply established principles and rules even while critiquing them, not bad-faith publicity stunts.

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Trump-appointed Louisiana federal judge Terry Doughty has spent years bending over backwards trying to help some MAGA faithful manufacture nonsense claims about “censorship” for some grifters getting moderated on social media. As you’ll recall, he issued a bizarrely problematic ruling on July 4th three years ago, in which he said of perfectly reasonable, non-coercive communication between the Biden admin and social media companies “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” He then banned all sorts of perfectly normal and reasonable communications, even between private parties. In order to do that, he literally fabricated quotes or took other quotes entirely out of context (for example, quoting a Biden official sending an expletive-laden email to Instagram officials as proof of coercion, leaving out the email was not about content moderation, but about Biden’s official Instagram account not allowing new followers).

The Fifth Circuit walked back nearly all of Judge Doughty’s injunction soon after, realizing how out of touch with reality it was. Eventually, after the Biden admin finally spoke up about all the false things in the lower court’s fact finding, the Supreme Court threw out the entire thing, noting that Judge Doughty appeared to push “clearly erroneous” facts into his ruling, and repeatedly finding “no evidence” of any actual censorship effort by the Biden administration.

But that was just one case of a bunch along these lines. Another one, filed soon after the Murthy case, also in Judge Doughty’s court, was brought by two of the same plaintiffs in that case, Jill Hines and Jim Hoft, and was filed by Stephen Miller’s “America First Legal.” Rather than being filed against actual government officials, this one directly targeted a variety of academic researchers and their institutions… because they studied disinformation.

The complaint is a complete joke and should have been thrown out the next day.

Instead, the case has gone on for over three years, and in the process many of the researchers have cut back on their research or moved to other jobs, and at least one academic institution, the Stanford Internet Observatory, effectively shut down because it became such a huge target of all this nonsense litigation.

First off: academic researchers are not the government and cannot censor anyone. They cannot violate someone’s First Amendment rights. Indeed, the lawsuit itself is an attack on their First Amendment rights, abusing the judicial process to create chilling effects and silence researchers for their research.

It took over three years (i.e., way longer than it should have), but even Judge Doughty can find no reason to keep that case going, and has dismissed it. Clearly chastised from the Supreme Court’s evisceration of his silly over-the-top ruling in Murthy, here, Doughty admits that (as SCOTUS found in the previous case) there’s no traceability to any suppression and therefore no standing. This is despite Hines and Hoft bending over backwards to pretend that actions taken by social media towards their accounts was somehow the fault of these researchers. But even Doughty can’t manufacture something out of complete nothing:

Here, no one placed anything on Facebook’s radar. Unlike the OEC’s flagging of posts to Twitter through the Portal in O’Handley, Plaintiffs do not provide any evidence that Hines’ post was flagged to Facebook. The subject matter of Hines’ post, political activism to end the public health emergency, is exactly the type of content that is out-of-scope of EIP’s election-related content monitoring. The Jira ticket data confirms the post was out-of-scope and counsel for Defendants, Elisabeth Theodore, testified in a sworn declaration that discovery didn’t reveal any documents of VP or EIP flagging posts from Hines to any social media platforms

Also, Doughty finally acknowledges what the Supreme Court told him in Murthy: that social media platforms have their own reasons and rules for moderating content that are unrelated to whatever a government official tells them (though, in this case, there isn’t even a government official, so none of this should even matter):

Facebook has had “longstanding content-moderation policies” in place for years. Id. at 50. Examples of its policies targeting speech it deems to be false or misleading include but are not limited to: factchecking and demoting posts containing misleading claims about elections beginning in 2016, removing health-related misinformation beginning in 2018, and taking action against users or posts that questioned the integrity of the 2020 Presidential election results. Id. at 50–51. Plaintiffs do not claim Facebook lacked independent incentives to moderate their content; in fact, Hines testified she received Facebook’s own content-policy justification in her notification.26 Absent evidence to the contrary, this notification demonstrates that Facebook acted pursuant to its own “independent incentives to moderate content” rather than Defendants’ coercion. Murthy, 603 U.S. at 61. Accordingly, Plaintiffs have failed to establish traceability from Facebook’s censorship actions to any “coercion” or “significant encouragement” by Defendants necessary under Murthy.

With Hoft and his nonsense-peddling site, Gateway Pundit, Judge Doughty now acknowledges what he refused to acknowledge in the other case: that just because some private researchers flag some content as possibly violating rules, it doesn’t mean that the platforms agree or take action based on those reports, since they review everything under their own rules.

Nineteen tickets from the EIP and the VP involved speech from Hoft’s website, The Gateway Pundit, or posts from The Gateway Pundit’s social-media accounts. On some of the tickets, Defendants made recommendations to social media platforms to remove posts from Hoft. However, none of the tickets reveal what actions the social media platforms took because of Defendants’ flags. Responses from social media platforms to Defendants’ tickets varied among the nineteen tickets. Sometimes the social media platform would simply respond that it was reviewing the content, sometimes it would respond saying the content didn’t violate community standards, sometimes the ticket stated the original post “was actioned” by the social media platform, and sometimes the ticket detailed that the social media platform had “already taken labeling action on the post.”

Defendants admit that some Jira tickets linking Hoft’s The Gateway Pundit were sent to social media platforms. However, Defendants maintain Hoft cannot establish standing as “he cannot plead or show that anyone at EIP or VP ever colluded with the federal government to pressure or coerce any social media platform to moderate his content.” Defendants concede that social media “[p]latforms sometimes took action after EIP sent them information.” Be that as it may, Defendants assert that discovery revealed the EIP’s files did not contain evidence of any communication with Twitter about The Gateway Pundit or Hoft in the lead-up to his account’s alleged suspension on February 6, 2021, “much less a coercive communication of the type that Murthy requires.” They maintain “discovery confirmed that social media companies responded to flagged posts pursuant to their pre-existing policies and independent judgment[,]” not due to coercion by any Defendants.

Doughty goes on to point out how little evidence there is that content flagged to platforms regarding the plaintiffs’ posts resulted in any action. I’m still perplexed as to why that even matters though. Again, the defendants were all private academics exercising their own First Amendment rights to flag content on a social media platforms, saying “hey, we think this violates your rules.” Even if Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and whoever else accepted every single one of those flags… it’s still not the government doing it and the case should have been over immediately.

Either way, here, Doughty still goes through the details and finds that Hines and Hoft simply can’t show any evidence that any of the moderation on their accounts was due to these researchers.

Incredibly, Judge Doughty initially ordered that the case be dismissed with prejudice (meaning it can’t be refiled in an amended form), but then quickly followed that up by issuing a second order saying it was dismissed without prejudice (with no explanation), so unfortunately this might not be over yet.

Two of those targeted by the lawsuit, leading disinformation researchers and experts, Kate Starbird and Renee DiResta, have written threads about the dismissal, noting the impact of the lawsuit on their research and their lives:

This entire lawsuit was a massive attack on the free speech of academic researchers, and on those grounds it succeeded. Many of the researchers named have been forced to move on, and one of the organizations targeted, the Stanford Internet Observatory, has shut down. The chilling effect worked.

And that’s not to mention that these academic researchers, who just wanted to understand the flows of disinformation had to spend the last three years of their lives fighting a clearly bogus lawsuit.

This was always a bad faith attack on academic research, brought by people who peddle disinformation and hate being called out on it. A good and functional judicial system would have (1) thrown out the case much more quickly, (2) forced the plaintiffs to pay the defendants’ legal fees, and (3) sanctioned them for filing frivolous, censorial lawsuits attacking the free speech of the academics.

This is why we need to keep fighting for better and stronger anti-SLAPP laws. This case is a perfect example of where those laws should apply, even outside of the defamation context.

The authoritarianism has been out in the open pretty much since day one with this presidency. Things that leak out around the edges — unaccompanied by official statements, announcements, or randomly-capitalized Truth Social posts — would embarrass any normal administration. But with this administration, new information about new awfulness rarely manages to provoke even a shrug from government officials.

And in this case, why would the administration care that the public now knows who’s been put in charge of carrying out Trump’s plans to see his political opponents and public critics jailed? After all, Trump went on full main with this blast last September with a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), informing Americans that lots of them were now going to be treated as enemies of the state:

His latest “countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence” memorandum is basically him screaming “EVERYONE WHO DOESN’T LIKE ME IS A TERRORIST!” in official government letterhead.

[…]

Supporting immigration reform? Terrorist. LGBTQ+ rights? Terrorist. Criticizing his failures? Terrorist! Calling out his authoritarianism? All terrorism, apparently.

The intent was never in question. What mattered was whether or not the administration could make this a reality. And it did. The Trump DOJ (let’s not pretend it has any independence) managed to secure terrorism convictions against people involved in an anti-ICE protest in Texas. One suspect was charged with providing material support simply because he drove boxes full of “leftwing magazines” from one place to another.

Thanks to Trump unilaterally declaring most forms of opposition to his particular government to be terrorism, the person who transported the anti-fascist, left-leaning magazines in his car has now been sentenced to thirty years in prison, thanks to terrorism sentencing enhancements.

These are charges that have stuck. Most haven’t. And apparently the administration feels it might have the wrong people handling the politically motivated prosecutions of Trump’s opponents. Plenty of turnover has already happened as Trump DOJ appointees find out it’s pretty much impossible to push Trump’s authoritarian desires past grand juries and the criminal courts beyond. High-profile failures in high-profile prosecutions mean Trump constantly has to find someone else willing to throw themselves under the bus, along with whatever integrity or career plans they might have on them.

But Trump also wants the little people punished, even if all he knows about them is that they’re opposed to his practices and policies. Talking Points Memo is naming names, being the first to discover who’s now leading the charge to create a whole new class of political prisoners.

The Department of Justice has tapped two prosecutors with expertise in organized crime and terrorism prosecutions to implement a White House directive to crack down on its political opponents, a department spokesperson confirmed to TPM.

[…]

Brian W. Lynch, a Violent Crime and Racketeering Section prosecutor since 2020 with experience on the Guantanamo prosecution team, and Jason Kellhofer, a longtime counterterrorism prosecutor in Raleigh, North Carolina, are running the initiative as co-directors. They’re likely to bring extensive experience with tools used to take down sophisticated and violent criminal organizations, as well as to nip terrorist plots in the bud: real-time interception of communications, aggressive use of conspiracy statutes, confidential informants. They’re now running a task force whose purpose is to implement NSPM-7, which directed law enforcement to treat beliefs like “anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as warning signs for political violence.

The administration’s willingness to confirm TPM’s information makes it clear it doesn’t care what anyone thinks about its actions or shifting of priorities. Not only does this show that the administration cares more about locking up protesters than going after actually dangerous criminals and terrorists, it also thinks moving these people into these positions will somehow make its bogus prosecutions sustainable. To date — with the notable exception of the terrorist charges discussed earlier — almost every effort to convert arrests of protesters to felony convictions has failed.

“Just following orders,” as they say. Except that’s not what the DOJ is supposed to be doing. But because it’s decided it serves a king, rather than a country, the failures it has repeatedly experienced were always to be expected.

[Trump has] personally directed prosecutors to charge his critics; the DOJ helped deliver a settlement in which the IRS agreed to never audit Trump for any past tax returns. Prosecutors have pursued hundreds of cases against anti-Trump protesters across the country that they were then forced to drop after the evidence failed to sustain the charges in court. 

Of additional interest is the fact that one of the prosecutors elevated to handle Trump’s personal revenge plans (Brian Lynch) spent years contributing to MAGA-adjacent site American Thinker, including engaging in some COVID denialism and claiming the “media” would “stop at nothing” to prevent Trump from being re-elected in 2020. One assumes he will bring this same enthusiasm to his new position, which will allow him to go after Trump critics — a cross-section of America that will likely include members of the press at some point.

These acts endanger the country and democracy itself. And they’re being done by people who have (falsely) claimed for nearly a decade now that loving Trump is the equivalent of loving this country.