At Lulu, we talk a lot about direct sales. A lot. But that isn’t the only way to distribute your work. We like to encourage our authors to consider adding a direct sales method to their distribution lineup because of the unique benefits it offers, like:
Earning more revenue per sale
Collecting customer data
White-label order fulfillment
Customizable book design
However, if you find yourself looking at that list and thinking, “Wtf am I supposed to do with customer data?” or “What does white-label mean?” then it might be better to start with one of our other options. And don’t worry, we have several ways for you to publish, print, and prosper with Lulu.
Which Lulu is Right for You?
There are a few different ways you can use Lulu to reach your goals as an author, publisher, entrepreneur, business owner, or creative. I’ll outline them below, but a few things to keep in mind are that regardless of the platform, you will reap the sweet, sweet Lulu benefits, including:
No order minimums or maximums
No inventory management
Self-serve printing and ordering
Automated print and fulfillment
Over 3k book formats to choose from
Free title uploads and revisions
Place multiple orders at once with our Order Import Tool
High-quality print-on-demand books
Amazing customer support and ecommerce onboarding team
Global retail print network
Working with a certified B Corp!
Using Lulu as a Printer
If you are starting out in your publishing journey, looking for samples for a client or testing a new product for your business, you may just be looking for a way to publish and print copies of your work to try out the process. Perfect—we’ve got you. Since Lulu is powered by print-on-demand technology, you can easily upload your project to our site and simply use our platform to print physical copies of your book. There are no minimums, so you can easily print one copy at a time until you’ve created exactly what you (and your customers) are looking for. And if it isn’t what they’re looking for, Lulu’s platform allows you to easily make changes to your print projects, enabling the agility to be responsive to market trends and get updated materials out quickly. Short run printing can also be a wonderful asset for keeping copies of your books, product guides, workbooks or magazines on hand for events, trade shows or client meetings.
Create Your Book
Use Lulu's free templates to easily create and publish your book today.
We have several tutorials, blogs, and podcasts about this, but all it takes is two PDF files—one for your book’s interior and one for your cover (including front, spine, and back cover). Create a free account at lulu.com, select “My Projects” then “Create a Project” and follow the prompts to upload and order print copies of your book. But before you do, be sure to sign up for our email list so you can use our weekly promo code for your order!
Using Lulu as a printer can be quick and efficient, even if you are placing multiple orders for multiple projects at once. Our Order Import tool is available for all Lulu users, allowing you to upload a CSV file with information for multiple orders to Lulu and place all orders at once. This is a great solution for pre-orders, bulk orders, client gifts, quarterly reports, fulfilling crowdfunding rewards, and more.
I’d also like to mention this is an excellent way to create unique and out of the box gifts for birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries. Have you ever seen the look on someone’s face when they open up a calendar with their beloved sweet angel baby pupper on every page? Or a journal with their name on it that offers daily, weekly, or monthly encouragement to live their best life? Trust me, it beats socks every time.
Using Lulu as a Bookstore
If you’re interested in selling your books with Lulu but aren’t ready to create a full-blown website, that’s great. Get started with the Lulu Bookstore. Our bookstore allows you to sell your books globally, never worry about inventory, and get paid monthly via PayPal or quarterly via check. You can add your book to the Lulu Bookstore instantly upon publishing, but we all know you’re a savvy professional and will be ordering a proof copy first. Once you have received and reviewed your proof, you can choose to list the book on our bookstore via three access levels:
General Access: Anyone who searches for your book in our bookstore can find it.
Select Access: Only the chosen ones with the specific link you provide can find and purchase your book.
Private Access: No one can find this puppy but you.
Share the link to your Lulu Bookstore listing with friends and fans so they can easily purchase your work, or if you’re publishing multiple projects, create an Author Spotlight page to link to all of your books in one place, share a bit about you, and include any other links your readers might find valuable.
All sales made through the Lulu Bookstore will be automatically fulfilled by Lulu, and you can track your orders through the “Sales & Payments” dashboard in your Lulu account.
Using Lulu as a Distributor
You’re selling through the Lulu Bookstore. It’s amazing. You can’t believe how easy and accessible it is. Then one day you go to your local bookstore and would you believe it? They want to sell your book too! But they only carry books they can order from wholesale distributors like Ingram Content Group. What can you do? You can enroll your book in Retail Distribution! Lulu allows you to distribute your books to Ingram's catalog, making it possible for bookstores to order and stock your books.
With Lulu’s Retail Distribution, you can make your book available to over 40,000 retailers. This option can be great for discoverability and reaching more readers. It’s important to note that each retail channel you sell through will want its cut, so when exploring distribution, we recommend checking out our pricing calculator so you can see how much you can make per sale and ensure your book is eligible for Retail Distribution.
Enrolling your books in Retail Distribution can take several weeks, so be sure to plan accordingly. As with the Lulu Bookstore, all of your sales data from each channel will be reported on the “Sales & Payments” dashboard in your Lulu account.
If you have navigated through these options and are ready for more revenue and more visibility over your data and your customers, you, my friend, are ready for Lulu Direct. Or maybe you just skipped the first three options because you’re wild like that. Either way, we’re here now. You can think of Lulu Direct as a fulfillment partner for your book business. Readers will come to your website, order your books, and receive them in the mail without ever having to know Lulu is printing and fulfilling the order.
You will need your own website to get started. Lulu Direct integrates with Wix, WooCommerce, and Shopify. If you have built a website using a different platform, have high order volume or custom workflows, our Print API might be a better option for you.
Once you have your website up and running, you can integrate with Lulu Direct or our Print API for free. These integrations allow you to sell your books directly through your own website to your customers. As I mentioned earlier, this option unlocks additional benefits for you, including:
Earning more revenue per sale
Collecting customer data
White-label order fulfillment
Customizable book design
Earning more revenue per sale might seem like the standout advantage, but personally, I think it’s the customer data. When you’re able to see who is buying your books and collect information like their email, interests, and geographic region, it opens up a whole new world of actionable insights that can help you market smarter and build a sustainable business.
Lulu Direct is the more involved option of the four I’ve listed here, but if you are interested in brand continuity, growing your business, or building a community instead of just a customer base, it’s well worth the effort.
Your Free Lulu Account
Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world
If you are unsure where to start with Lulu, here are a few good questions to ask yourself:
Are you hoping to make money from the project?
Do you already know your target audience?
Is your aim to build a sustainable author business?
If so, then Lulu Direct is probably where you want to end up. If you’re working on a passion project, testing samples for a client, or working on a new print product for your business, using Lulu as a printer is a good start. If you’re just starting out and trying desperately to understand what all this self-publishing stuff is all about, and your company wants to see some proof of concept before going all in, the Lulu Bookstore is a great option, then maybe Retail Distribution when you’re ready.
And if you’re wondering why you can’t find the tab for this season's hottest and most expensive leggings, I can’t help you, but I wish you the best.
A Canadian tribunal’s $72,000 fine against X for refusing to globally remove non-consensual intimate images (NCII) exposes a fundamental tension that courts have been dodging for years: When can one country order worldwide content takedowns, and when should platforms comply regardless of legal compulsion?
Unfortunately, almost all the commentary on the case is ignoring those tensions and going for the easy layup of just framing it as “Elon Musk ignoring the law again.” That’s a fun framing, but it’s too easy for this particular case.
It actually presents two distinct questions that are getting dangerously conflated: whether Canada has jurisdiction to demand global removals, and whether X should remove credibly reported NCII as basic platform governance. Getting this distinction right matters—not just for this case, but for the future of cross-border content regulation.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal apparently ordered X and other platforms to remove an intimate image of a woman identified as “TR” back in March. But X chose to geofence the content rather than delete it entirely—blocking Canadian users from seeing it while leaving it accessible to the rest of the world. The tribunal wasn’t having it:
Regehr dismissed that argument, noting X’s position would call into question whether British Columbia’s law overstepped the province’s authority under Canada’s constitution.
“I have no authority to consider constitutional arguments,” he wrote. “The question about X’s compliance is a very simple one. I ordered internet intermediaries, which includes X, to remove the intimate image. X received the order, but it did not remove the intimate image. Instead, it did something less. X did not comply with the protection order.”
This hits on a fundamental tension that’s been brewing in internet law for decades: can one country’s courts order global takedowns, and when should they?
Canada actually has some history here. In the troubling landmark Equustek case, the Supreme Court of Canada made a radical departure from traditional jurisdictional limits, ruling that BC courts could issue worldwide injunctions against Google, requiring global de-indexing of websites. The Court essentially argued that the borderless nature of the internet justifies borderless judicial authority—a breathtaking expansion of territorial jurisdiction that upended decades of international law principles.
But that decision was controversial precisely because of its extraterritorial reach. Google challenged the order in U.S. courts, where judges found it conflicted with U.S. law and principles of international comity. The result? A jurisdictional standoff that highlighted how messy cross-border enforcement gets when courts start issuing global orders.
The jurisdictional issues the Equustek case raised haven’t been resolved—they’ve just been papered over by companies generally complying rather than fighting every single order. But X’s approach here suggests those tensions are far from settled.
This case actually presents two distinct issues that shouldn’t be conflated:
First, the jurisdictional question: Should a Canadian provincial tribunal be able to order a global takedown? X’s argument that it would comply within Canadian jurisdiction but not globally is actually pretty reasonable from a legal standpoint. Countries generally can’t impose their laws extraterritorially, and expecting every platform to comply with the most restrictive jurisdiction’s rules worldwide creates a race to the bottom for global speech.
Second, the trust and safety question: Separate from what Canada can legally compel, there’s the other issue: should X be taking down credibly reported NCII as part of basic platform governance? Here the answer seems pretty obvious—most platforms do remove NCII when properly reported because it’s harmful, often illegal, and violates their terms of service.
The tribunal seemed to dodge the first question entirely, with the judge explicitly saying, “I have no authority to consider constitutional arguments.” But dismissing jurisdictional concerns doesn’t make them go away—it just kicks the can down the road.
X’s geofencing response was legally defensible but ethically questionable. The tribunal’s global order was ethically motivated but legally problematic. Neither approach really serves the interests of victims or the broader internet ecosystem.
What makes this case particularly notable is how rare such jurisdictional standoffs have become. The shift toward comprehensive regulatory frameworks—from the EU’s Digital Services Act to various national online harms bills—has largely eliminated the need for case-by-case civil litigation. Platforms now face systematic compliance requirements rather than ad hoc court orders.
But X’s willingness to fight this particular battle suggests we may be entering a new phase where at least some platforms are more selective about which jurisdictional claims they’ll accept. The question, though, is where this all ends up. And whether or not the idea of a global, not fractured, internet can survive.
On Monday, I published a two-part blog post about the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement with Aylo, parent company of Pornhub. The FTC’s complaint alleged that Aylo violated federal consumer protection law by allowing child sex abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual pornography (which I’ll call NCII) on its various sites, despite claiming it didn’t. The resulting order, now approved by a Utah federal judge, imposes a bunch of requirements to make Aylo clean up its act.
In part 1, I discussed the lurking Fourth Amendment problem with the “content review” provisions of that order. (Part 2 explained why this isn’t really about fighting CSAM and NCII; it’s a power grab over free speech online by the Trump FTC.) The tl;dr: by forcing Aylo to scan every uploaded file to check if it’s CSAM or NCII, the FTC has turned Aylo into an agent of the government for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, making all those scans warrantless searches.
Warrantless searches are typically considered unreasonable and thus unconstitutional, unless consent or some other exception to the warrant requirement applies. The usual remedy for unconstitutional searches is suppression. Consequently, I said in part 1, any evidence turned up in the scans ought to be inadmissible in any resulting prosecutions of the accused uploaders.
A couple of readers challenged my assumption about the outcome by raising a provocative question: Doesn’t the order also force waiver of the reasonable expectation of privacy in file uploads, dooming any motion to suppress? That is, even if the world’s most popular porn site – one of the world’s most popular websites, period – is now an agent of the U.S. federal government: does it matter?
The FTC Order Purports to Make Aylo Users Waive All Privacy Rights in Uploads
In response to a suppression motion based on the content review mandate I quoted in part 1, prosecutors will point out a different provision that requires Aylo to (1) notify users that uploaded files will be searched for CSAM and NCII, and (2) include a waiver of “any privacy rights” in that notice.
Per the order (at pp. 13-16), for any file uploaded by “Content Partners” (meaning professional porn companies) or “Models” (meaning any other “third-party individual or entity that uploads” content to an Aylo site besides Content Partners), Aylo must not make the content available unless they:
Provide a notice and a consent checkbox for each piece of Content to the uploader of the Content, which the uploader must review and endorse prior to submitting Content for review. The notice and checkbox will inform the uploader that Defendants will review Content prior to its publication and may report actual or suspected CSAM or [NCII] to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or to relevant law enforcement. The notice and consent checkbox will inform the uploader that if the Content is approved for publication it will be made public and that the uploader is waiving any privacy rights they may have previously had in the Content by submitting Content for Defendants’ review…
The FTC is trying to use Aylo to do something the government would have a very hard time doing directly. Via a consent order, it’s making Aylo force its users (models and content partners) to consent to a search of their uploaded files and waive all privacy rights therein. This would allow future prosecutors to invoke either the consent exception to the warrant requirement, or to argue that Aylo’s scans aren’t a Fourth Amendment “search” in the first place, even if there’s no dispute that Aylo is a government agent. (In Fourth Amendment law, a “search” only “occurs when the government infringes upon ‘an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to consider reasonable.’”)
The question, then, is: Can they do that? Will that work? I think there are good arguments for “no,” but the real answer is probably “I guess we’ll find out once CSAM defendants start filing motions to suppress.”
The notice-and-consent language that Aylo ultimately implements will be subject to a fact-specific analysis if it’s ever challenged in court. As the Second Circuit recently noted, courts have shied away from the question of “whether terms of service pertaining to content review might ever be so broadly and emphatically worded as to categorically extinguish internet service users’ reasonable expectations of privacy in the contents of their [files], even as against the government.” “It may well be that such terms, as parts of ‘[p]rivate contracts[,] have little effect in Fourth Amendment law because the nature of those [constitutional] rights is against the government rather than private parties,’” that court continued, quoting from a recent law review article by my Stanford colleague Orin Kerr. But, in the case before it, there was no need for “categorical conclusions,” because the specific terms in question didn’t extinguish the defendant’s “reasonable expectation of privacy in that content as against the government.”
In Kerr’s article, he argues that “Terms of Service can define relationships between private parties, but private contracts cannot define Fourth Amendment rights.” Kerr’s article expresses skepticism that language purporting to authorize a service provider to act as the government’s agent and search the user’s data would be effective, even assuming the user saw and understood that language (and users typically don’t read TOS). He thinks that court decisions to the contrary are wrongly decided.
The Aylo situation has some twists from the cases and hypotheticals Kerr discusses. Which is to say that I don’t think this particular fact pattern has, uh, happened before. (Because, as my first post discussed, the governmentusuallytries very hard to avoid the impression that it’s making platforms scan for CSAM!) What is the result where the private platform is already an agent of the government thanks to the FTC order? What if the user didn’t know that? Does it affect the “reasonableness” analysis if the user thinks they’re giving consent to a private company, not to the government? After all, the “notice and consent” disclosures do not require Aylo to disclose that the company is under an FTC order (which compels the user’s upload to be reviewed) and that’s why the user is being shown the notice and consent flow in the first place.
Is the notice-and-consent language the order requires “emphatically worded” enough to “categorically extinguish” Aylo uploaders’ reasonable expectation of privacy? Does it procure valid consent to an otherwise problematic search? Is the notice-and-consent language’s wording irrelevant, and the dispositive factor is that the uploader intended the file to be publicly viewable on a porn site, not to attach it to a private email message or add it to a private cloud storage account?
This is all complicated. Needlessly complicated. None of this was necessary.
The Aylo Order Will Add Needless Work in Criminal Cases
Maybe a future court will decide that the “make your users waive their privacy rights” language in one part of the Aylo order cures the Fourth Amendment problem created by the content review mandate in another part of the order. Maybe suppression motions will ultimately fail when made by defendants accused of uploading CSAM/NCII to Aylo. But criminal defense lawyers will still file them (as they must, ethically, and should, to make the government meet its burden). Prosecutors will have to make specific arguments in every case for why the defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy. There will probably be arguing over whether the “waiver of privacy” language in the Aylo order actually holds up. There may be discovery involved. Courts will have to decide all those motions.
We can also expect to see suppression motions citing the Aylo order in other CSAM/NCII cases that didn’t originate on Aylo sites. In myprevious blog posts, I talked about how the FTC regulates by consent decree; the Aylo order signals to other platforms (and not just adult sites) that they’d better scan uploads for CSAM/NCII, or they might catch a case too. The Aylo order opens the door for criminal defendants caught by scans on other platforms to argue that those scans aren’t voluntary (even if they used to be), rather they’re induced by the FTC. They’ll try to subpoena documents and witnesses from the platform, looking for proof. And in those cases, there won’t be any order that Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors can cite that purports to make that platform make its users waive their privacy rights. Will those suppression motions work? Maybe, maybe not. But criminal defense attorneys will try, because, god love ‘em, they’ll throw a lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and sometimes, bless them, something does.
All of this is work nobody would need to do if the FTC hadn’t put all this problematic language into the order with Aylo. When drafting the terms of that order, it would have been so easy not to manufacture any Fourth Amendment issues.
Erase the Fourth Amendment Online with This One Weird Trick!
But then, maybe that’s the point. The FTC apparently believes it has the power to enter orders making online platforms search every single file uploaded to the service and report any illegal material that turns up (as per pp. 34-35 of the Aylo order, duplicating what’s statutorily required for CSAM anyway)… and, because they’d also be forced to notify users of the searches and obtain users’ “consent,” that’s A-OK. Government-mandated disclosures would be all that’s needed to wipe away users’ constitutional rights not to be subjected to warrantless surveillance conducted, at the FTC’s behest, by what looks like a private company but is actually an agent of the government (likely unbeknownst to the user).
Having used this theory on a major porn site, the FTC can later apply the same approach the next time they go after a Big Tech company – many of which are already under decades-long consent decrees with the FTC over prior incidents (often alleged privacy or data security issues), making them potentially susceptible to additional enforcement actions. And that’s how the Trump FTC will try to use its orders with companies, not just to control speech online, but to get rid of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights online in an era where the Supreme Court has been deeply skeptical of the third-party doctrine. I sure hope Professor Kerr is right.
Conclusion
Maybe the Aylo order won’t end up letting a bunch of accused CSAM and NCII defendants go free, like I feared. Maybe, instead, it’s how the Trump administration tees up a future court challenge with the goal of getting a ruling that severely harms our Fourth Amendment rights online. If that’s the order’s secret purpose, then the FTC’s power grab is even worse than I thought.
The DOJ has spent years making its “terms of service beat the Fourth Amendment” argument in response to CSAM suppression motions. Hanlon’s Razor says not to ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. That’s what I did in my first blog post, assuming the FTC order was the work of attorneys who know consumer protection law but not the niceties of the Fourth Amendment. But now I wonder whether the DOJ’s fingerprints aren’t actually all over this order. It might be time to grudgingly come around to a remark someone made to me: that the FTC’s order is a work of “evil genius.”
As Mike just got done noting, our major media companies continue to respond to authoritarianism by being pathetic and feckless little shitweasels. First with the ABC and CBS bribery payments to our mad idiot king, and most recently exemplified by ABC’s firing of Jimmy Kimmel because he gave Republicans a sad. Who could have imagined the “free speech” “anti-cancel culture” folks were liars?
Mike mentioned this a bit, but one of the main reasons our major media networks are being extra feckless on free speech is because they’re lobbying the Trump administration to approve a massive new wave of harmful media consolidation. Which will lead to even more of the fecklessness we’re seeing now.
The Ellison family needed Trump FCC approval for its plan to merge Paramount, Skydance, CNN, Time Warner, CBS, Bari Weiss’ Free Press, and TikTok into one giant right wing piece of shit. But ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox have also been lobbying the Trump FCC to eliminate some of the last remaining media consolidation limits Trump hasn’t killed yet: rules prohibiting the “big four” networks from merging.
Their argument in filings at the agency has generally been that the modern media space is just so gosh-darned competitive, that it makes no sense to worry about media consolidation limits. That’s gibberish, in part because as you can see everywhere you look, there are real and very obvious harms in letting giant tech, telecom, and media companies consolidate under the ownership of morally repugnant oligarchs.
It harms the diversity of journalism coverage, it harms competition, and it generally results in a monolithic, shittier culture dominated by white, male, c-tier podcasting comedians. And the consolidated power structure, if you hadn’t noticed, is more easily exploited by authoritarian zealots.
At the same time the big four networks are pushing to merge, what’s left of our local broadcasters are desperately trying to consolidate as well. The right wing affiliate owner of many ABC networks that was first to fold under threats from FCC boss Brendan Carr, Nexstar (who also owns the feckless DC gossip rag The Hill), is currently looking for FCC approval for their $6.2 billion merger with Tegna.
After that deal gets approved, I strongly suspect Nexstar will look to merge with Sinclair Broadcasting, another right wing company that has spent decades dressing up propaganda as local news, made famous by either this John Oliver segment or this seven-year-old Deadspin video:
Their goal really is to consolidate national media as well as what’s left of local broadcast “news” under the ownership of one right wing company. These companies get to dominate local and national media, and Republicans get to leverage that power to spread party propaganda and censor critics. It’s quite the unholy symbiosis.
And this is just the start. I suspect ultimately, as the AI hype bubble pops, tech, media, and telecom companies will look to unprecedented consolidation across industries to drive tax breaks and additional brief stock bumps. And authoritarians are going to exploit all of it to centralize their information warfare and propaganda efforts in a bid to quell public backlash to shitty, unpopular policies.
Understanding this is central to the public understanding why our already pathetic major media institutions are being even more pathetic than usual. Yet if you pluck pretty much any of the major media stories about Kimmel’s firing from the newswires, the consolidation stuff is either buried in a single paragraph halfway down the page or not mentioned at all; itself an indictment of letting major media companies consolidate under the ownership of a handful of rich, right wing billionaires.
I’m beating a dead horse on this but media academics and experts have warned us about this, constantly, for literally the last fifty years. The United States, at every conceivable point, ignored those warnings and did the exact opposite. Now the check is coming due and the folks who could never quite seem to grasp why these sorts of media limits were necessary are getting an ugly crash course on their importance.
Master the most in-demand IT skills with CoursesDigest’s expertly crafted online courses. Whether you’re aiming for industry-recognized certifications or expanding your tech expertise, our structured learning paths are designed to help you succeed. CoursesDigest is an official partner with CompTIA, Microsoft, AWS, Cisco, and others. No matter your professional background, CoursesDigest provides a tailored path to elevate your career in the ever-evolving world of technology. It’s on sale for $30.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Last year, there was some talk about how AI-generated wacky images—summed up generally as “shrimp Jesus” as an example of one of the most bizarre—were taking over Facebook. It was only a matter of time until this sort of AI slop nonsense went political in some form or another.
Starting last Friday, people began to report that Facebook was being overwhelmed with obviously fake reports of famous or semi-famous people making some sort of “heartfelt” announcement regarding the death of Charlie Kirk. The phenomenon represents a perfect storm: a politically divisive event, genuine public emotion, and AI content generation tools all converging into what can only be described as profitable grief porn. Here are a bunch I’ve collected:
These are just the few that people posted in response to my and Seth Cotlar’s (linked above) threads on Bluesky about this.
What’s particularly insidious about this phenomenon is how it represents the natural evolution of engagement farming. These aren’t random trolls—they’re likely monetized operations taking advantage of Facebook’s ad revenue sharing or affiliate marketing programs. Grief and outrage drive engagement, engagement drives ad revenue, and AI tools have made it trivially easy to manufacture both at scale.
The engagement farmers profit. Meta profits. It’s just the public that loses out.
The template is depressingly simple: take a polarizing figure’s death, generate fake statements from celebrities that will appeal to different political tribes, slap together some AI-generated images, and watch the shares roll in. Each fake post becomes a little cash machine, harvesting clicks from people who want to believe their favorite celebrity shares their political views.
This is “engagement hacking” taken to its logical extreme—using AI to manufacture the emotional responses that social media algorithms reward most handsomely.
Gosh, it sure would be nice if Facebook hadn’t decided to seriously dial back its content moderation and fact-checking efforts, huh? Facebook gets flooded with obviously fake political content about a highly politicized event. It’s almost like having systems to identify and label false information might actually serve a purpose beyond alleged political censorship.
Lead Stories, one of the leading fact-checking orgs that Mark Zuckerberg fired earlier this year, has been keeping busy debunking a bunch of these, but the organization admits that there are too many to cover, and it’s mostly targeting “the most viral ones.”
Eliot Higgins, from Bellingcat, indicated that Russian troll farms were a bit slow to react to the Kirk shooting, but after a couple of days, they went all in, though it sounds like a different kind of campaign than the one people said was flooding Facebook.
This uncertainty points to one of the most challenging aspects of the current information environment: the complete inability to distinguish between foreign influence operations and domestic monetization schemes. When the methods, tools, and even content are essentially identical, attribution becomes nearly impossible from the outside.
The Russian campaigns Higgins describes appear to be more sophisticated influence operations aimed at sowing discord. But the Facebook flood looks more like the work of random opportunistic entrepreneurs who’ve discovered that fake celebrity grief statements are a reliable way to generate ad revenue. The end result—massive amounts of false information flooding the information ecosystem—is the same regardless of motivation.
This convergence of foreign influence tactics and domestic profit motives creates a kind of disinformation perfect storm. Bad actors don’t need to coordinate; they just need to follow the same incentive structures that reward viral misinformation.
I’ve seen a few people online refer to it as “agitslop,” which is a fun portmanteau of agitprop and AI slop. The term perfectly captures how political propaganda has merged with algorithmic content farming—it’s agitation optimized for engagement rather than ideology, slop designed to trigger shares rather than change minds.
I have no idea if anyone is actually believing any of this, though it does blend in with real stories like Coldplay’s Chris Martin actually doing something along those lines (though in more limited fashion).
But it should serve as another reminder that the information ecosystem is full of garbage and nonsense, and everyone needs to be skeptical about what they believe—especially when it confirms what we want to hear about celebrities sharing our political views.
How did we meet? What were we doing when we shifted from acquainted to friends? Who else is in our circle? How do we make space for each other and how do we dance together toward our center?
You’ve shown me who you really are, and I trust you enough to share my dreams and fears.
I know the sound of your laugh before you even start laughing and you remember things about me that I sometimes forget about myself. There are inside jokes between us that no one else would understand.
I remember you standing up for me, and I hope I’ve done the same for you. Can you count on me the way I count on you?
I’d miss you if you were gone.
Brands are not our friends. And most of them are simply acquaintances. But the most successful marketers understand how deeply our emotional bond with friends runs, and try to echo some of those feelings. Manipulate the process and you’ll inevitably disappoint the very people you seek to serve.
With their relentless push to humanize, brands have blurred the lines of connection and culture, but they’ve also reminded us that the stories we tell ourselves about our most important people are priceless and irreplaceable.
Authenticity is impossible to measure, and so consistency carries us forward. What do we expect when we hear you knocking? What promises are you here to keep, and how often are they kept?
[Coming in October: Seven years ago, I worked with my friend, bestselling author Bernadette Jiwa to launch The Story Skills Workshop. Bernadette has consistently helped people around the world get clear about the story they tell and the change they seek to make–in all arenas. She’s running it again in October.]
"AI psychosis" is the pop-psych diagnosis in a recent string of horrible and horrifying cases in which vulnerable people were lured by chatbots into harming themselves and others, including a murder-suicide:
AI psychosis is just one of the many delusions inspired by AI, and it's hardly the most prevalent. The most widespread AI delusion is, of course, that an AI can do your job (it can't, but an AI salesman can capitalize on this delusion to convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job):
The AI job delusion has a long lineage. Since the steam-loom, bosses have hyped new technologies as a way to frighten workers into accepting lower wages and worse working conditions, under threat of imminent technological replacement.
Likewise, AI psychosis isn't an entirely new phenomenon, and it has disturbing precedents in our recent past.
In the early 2000s, a community of internet users formed to discuss a new illness they called "Morgellons Disease." Morgellons sufferers believed that they had wires growing in their skin:
Morgellons appears to be a delusion, and the most widely accepted explanation for it is that people whose mental illness compels them to pick at their skin create open sores on their bodies, and then stray blowing fibers adhere to the wet, exposed tissues, which the sufferers believe to be wires.
Morgellons became an internet phenomenon in the early 2000s, but it appears that there were people who suffered from this pathology for a very long time. The name "Morgellons" comes from a 17th century case-report:
The difference between a Morgellons sufferer in the 1680s and a Morgellons sufferer in 2001 is that the latter need not suffer alone. The incredible power of the internet to connect people with rare traits meant that people suffering with Morgellons could coalesce online and egg one another on. They could counter the narratives of concerned family members who insisted that there weren't wires growing under their skin, and upload photos of the "wires" they'd discovered under their own skin.
People have suffered from all kinds of delusions since time immemorial, and while the specifics of the delusion reflect the world of the sufferer (I remember when I stopped hearing from people with radios in their heads and started hearing from people with RFIDs in their heads), the shape of the delusions have been stable over long timescales.
But the internet era has profoundly changed the nature of delusion, by connecting people with the same delusions to one another, in order to reinforce each other.
Take "gang stalking delusion," the traumatic belief that a vast cabal of powerful, coordinated actors have selected a group of "targeted individuals" to harass. People with gang stalking delusion will sometimes insist that passing bus-ads, snatches of overheard music, and other random/ambient details are actually targeted at them, intended to bring them distress:
The "targeted individuals" suffering from gang stalking delusion have formed vast, sprawling communities that are notionally designed to support them through the trauma of being stalked. But the practical function of these communities is to reinforce the delusion and make things much worse for their members: "My psychiatrist said the same thing as yours did – it's proof that they're both in on it!"
Like Morgellons, gang stalking delusion isn't a new phenomenon. It's a subset of "persecutory delusion," another mental illness that we find centuries of evidence for in the record:
But like modern Morgellons sufferers, people today with gang stalking delusion are able to find one another and reinforce and amplify each others' delusions, to their own detriment.
Now, even this isn't new – through the historical record, we find many examples of small groups of people who coalesced around a shared delusion. The difference is that old timey people had to luck into finding someone else who shared their delusion, while modern, internet-enabled people can just use the Reddit search-bar.
There's many examples of harmful delusions being worsened through online community reinforcement: there's pro-anorexia forums, incel forums, bitcoin, and "race realism" and other all-consuming junk science.
That's where LLMs come in. While the internet makes it far easier to find a toxic community of similarly afflicted people struggling with your mental illness, an LLM eliminates the need to find that forum. The LLM can deliver all the reinforcement you demand, produced to order, at any hour, day or night. While posting about a new delusional belief to a forum won't generate responses until other forum members see it and reply to it, an LLM can deliver a response in seconds.
In other words, there's one job that an AI can absolutely do better than a human: it can reinforce our delusions more efficiently, more quickly, and more effectively than a community of sufferers can.
Speed isn't the only reason that LLMs are super efficient delusion-reinforcers. An LLM has no consciousness, it has no desires, and it has nothing it wants to communicate. It has no wants, period. All it can do is transform a prompt into something that seems like the kind of thing that would follow from that prompt. It's a next-word-guessing machine.
This is why AI art is so empty: the only message an AI image generator can convey is the prompt you feed it. That's the only thing a piece of AI art has to "say." But when you dilute a short prompt across a million pixels or a hundred thousand words, the communicative intent in any given sentence or brushstroke is indistinguishable from zero. AI art can be "eerie" (in the sense of seeming to have an intent without there being any intender), and it can be striking, but it's not good:
However, the more communicative intent there is in a prompt, and the more human decision-making there is in the production (whether that's selecting the best work from among many variants or post-processing the work with your own artistic flourishes), the more chances that work has of saying something. That's because you're saying something, every time you re-prompt it, every time you select from among an array of its outputs.
When you repeatedly prompt an LLM over a long timescale – whether you're discussing your delusional beliefs, or pursuing a romantic fantasy ("AI girl/boyfriends") – you are filling it up with your communicative intent. The work that comes out the other side – the transformation of your prompts into a response – is a mirror that you're holding up to your own inputs.
So while a member of a gang stalking forum might have a delusion that is just different enough from yours that they seem foolish, or they accuse you of being paranoid, the chatbot's conception of gang stalking delusion is being informed, tuned and shaped by you. It's an improv partner, "yes-and"ing you into a life of paranoid terror.
In the Greek legend, Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in a stream and is rooted to the spot, captured by his own regard. People who prompt a chatbot to reinforce their delusions are catching sight of their own reflection in the LLM and terrifying themselves into a spiral of self-destruction.
Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice
Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
I was going to write about Kash Patel’s testimony around the Epstein files, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. Instead we need to discuss what happened yesterday with comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who was suspended indefinitely by Disney/ABC.
Photo couresty of Bloomberg
The first thing to understand, without a shadow of a doubt, is that this is not about Charlie Kirk or what Kimmel said about him. This is about Donald Trump wanting to get Kimmel off the air, his cronies doing all they could to make that happen, and a cowardly capitulation, yet again, by a major media company.
Today I want to present the throughline of this narrative clearly and succinctly. Then I want to zoom out and speak about why Trump has targeted comedians like Colbert and Kimmel and who is likely next. Finally, I want to talk about how we respond to this latest blatant attack upon free speech and the march toward authoritarianism.
Trump has wanted Kimmel off the air for some time. He even said so explicitly back in July, following Stephen Colbert’s cancellation.
“The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes,” Trump posted.
The White House wants us to believe Kimmel was fired for insensitive comments about Charlie Kirk. But that narrative has already been debunked.
Per Rolling Stone, senior executives who gathered yesterday at ABC yesterday didn’t think Kimmel had said anything wrong—and he hadn’t. But threats from the White House cowed them into submission:
In the hours leading up to the decision to pull Kimmel, two sources familiar with the matter say, senior executives at ABC, its owner Disney, and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how to minimize the damage. Multiple execs felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line, the two sources say, but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.
“They were pissing themselves all day,” one ABC insider tells Rolling Stone.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr had issued that threat explicitly on Benny Johnson’s podcast yesterday. Carr warned, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” He urged broadcasters to declare, “We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore” because of possible license revocation.
In short, “Nice network there, would be a shame if anything happened to it.”
ABC affiliates Nexstar and Sinclair, which both need FCC approval for mergers, answered Carr by saying they would be preempting Kimmel on all their local stations. Then Bob Iger of Disney, which owns ABC, made the call to suspend Kimmel.
Johnson celebrated Kimmel’s cancellation, making no secret that it was a joint and possibly even planned effort, saying in part:
[W]e ended Jimmy Kimmel’s career today.
We had FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on the show to announce investigations into ABC and Disney…
Trump also celebrated the news, but he wasn’t satisfied. He’s now set his sights on Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.
This was not about Charlie Kirk
As discussed above, many executives at ABC did not believe that Jimmy Kimmel had said anything wrong. For the record, here is the part of Kimmel’s monologue from earlier this week that the right claimed required him to be cancelled.
It’s important to hear the whole statement in context. First, Kimmel doesn’t say anything that others were not also saying, including the governor of Utah who was disappointed that Kirk’s killer was not an immigrant from a foreign country but was rather “one of us.”
It’s also important to hear that, during that same minute or so, Kimmel had also mocked Trump for displaying zero remorse or grief for Kirk and instead pivoting immediately to talk about his ballroom. That made Trump look very bad to Kirk’s base.
For wider context, in a different monologue from Tuesday night, a day before Kimmel was cancelled, he also skewered Trump on a number of issues. Trump was likely furious at Kimmel for, among other things
showing footage of a giant banner unfurled in the U.K. displaying Trump and Epstein together;
pointing out the man who helped plan Trump’s trip to the U.K. actually wrote one of the letters in the Epstein birthday book;
calling Trump a “little tattletale” after Trump threatened to tell on a reporter to the Australian prime minister;
mocking his “gift” of an extravagant ballroom to the American people that we’ll never get to be inside;
saying his $15 billion defamation suit was like a number Kimmel’s children make up;
playing footage of Eric Trump saying Charlie Kirk was like a second son to Trump (even though Eric is the second son);
calling out the fact that Kash Patel had no credible explanation for why Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a minimum security prison; and
running a humorous fake digital ad about Patel selling pages of the Epstein files.
You can enjoy the whole monologue here, as it may be his final one.
If Trump was listening or watching clips of it, he likely badly wanted the mocking and the criticism to stop. This is especially true for anything mentioning Jeffrey Epstein while Trump was on his state visit in the U.K.
It’s likely to my mind that the White House sicced the FCC Chair on Disney and decided to exploit the Kirk killing to justify silencing Kimmel.
The authoritarian playbook: silence the comedians
Authoritarians come for comedians because they are singularly effective at revealing such leaders to be fundamentally weak or absurd. Fascists require a populace that is cowed and fearful, so satire and comedy that generates laughter and derision cannot be long tolerated.
As Stanford professor of political science and former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted, Vladimir Putin also came for comedians back in 2002. He silenced a popular puppet that regularly mocked him on television.
“In the early Putin years, banning comedy shows was also a thing,” Prof. McFaul wrote. “Kukli on NTV was one of the most famous comedy shows to get cancelled in 2002. Putin apologists at the time called it a ‘business decision.’”
The satirist who lampooned Putin as a “poison dwarf” eventually had to flee the country in fear of his life.
Trump isn’t in a position, at least not yet, to threaten the lives of comedians who mock him and his cronies. Instead he’s using the full power of the federal government to go after their platforms and exploiting the weakness of corporate leaders to achieve his ends.
How should we the public respond?
Christopher Armitage of the Existential Republic wrote a useful piece today on what we can each do, as consumers and as citizens, in response to Disney’s capitulation. You can read the full piece here. But the primary point is, corporations only understand when their money is at risk.
That means we aren’t powerless. We can do at least four things to hurt them where it matters:
1. Cancel Disney+ and tell them why.
2. Call/email/mail those companies to complain.
3. Screenshot and tag advertisers asking why they support censorship.
4. Share this playbook with others.
Beyond direct action, there remains a larger strategic question. By shifting the national conversation away from Kirk and toward the censorship of Trump’s opponents, the right may have badly miscalculated. In a comment to Heather Cox Richardson’s post on social media, I wrote these words early this morning, and I want to share them here.
There often comes a point where those in power become cocky and badly overreach, misreading the room and handing the opposition an opportunity. When voices from all sides of the political spectrum come together in condemnation, we know we have hit such a point.
Wading into the culture wars with full-on censorship and cancellations will backfire. Comedians like Kimmel and Colbert are beloved figures who speak hard truths in entertaining, accessible ways to millions. The fascist right has nothing like their star power, and it has no sense of irony or comedy, which is why it is so threatened by such figures.
Our job as citizens is to keep the truth tellers in the spotlight, to amplify their voices, to support whatever independent platforms they go to, and to push back against censorship by talking with our families, friends and colleagues about the importance of free speech—something Charlie Kirk even claimed to champion.
Politics is downstream of culture. What that means is that those who best speak to culture sway our politics the most. I can tell you, the “manosphere” isn’t going to like this either. Neither will the South Park guys or other outspoken political commentators. Uplift their responses across your own networks in the coming days.
The right has managed to take a national conversation about Kirk’s murder and turn it into one about authoritarian censorship. That’s a huge unforced error, and we should exploit it.
It is now up to us to seize upon that overreach and make the Trump regime pay a big price for it.
The national conversation—which they have just changed on all of us through their own actions—is now about authoritarian attacks on free speech. It is not just about Charlie Kirk’s murder, but also the cynical exploitation of his death as a transparently false justification for censorship.
You might recall that one of the conditions of the FCC’s approval of The Ellison family’s $8 billion acquisition of CBS was that the agency would install a “ombudsman” at the network to ensure CBS journalism was appropriately feckless and deferential to our mad, idiot king.
This was particularly ironic given decades of whining by Republicans about stuff like the “fairness doctrine,” and other short-lived government attempts to set acceptable contours for journalistic speech. But it probably also wasn’t necessary: there’s every indication that CBS under the Ellison “leadership” is going to be repurposed by folks like Bari Weiss to be right wing propaganda.
After some delays, CBS recently hired Kenneth Weinstein to be the “ombudsman.” Weinstein had been the head of the faux-academic right wing Hudson Institute “think tank,” and has absolutely no experience in journalism whatsoever. He’ll report to Paramount President Jeff Shell, who was fired by Comcast back in 2023 for sexual harassment:
“Mr. Weinstein, who has no experience overseeing news coverage, was an unexpected choice for the role. He will report to Jeff Shell, the new president of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, which recently merged with the Hollywood studio Skydance.”
Of course Weinstein isn’t supposed to have any expertise in journalism. His expertise is bullshit and the flimsy veneer of intellectual credibility; pretending that the installation of a truth nanny at CBS has anything to do with journalism, and isn’t just a flimsy ploy by authoritarians to trample free speech and the First Amendment under the pretense that they just really care a whole lot about free speech.
The CBS government nanny exists to ensure that no actual journalists remaining at CBS News don’t get any crazy ideas and try to do actual journalism. Jedd Legum at Popular Information dissected Weinstein’s past online comments and found him to be an unsurprising Trump apologist. Like Bari Weiss, Weinstein’s there, in part, to ensure CBS goes soft on coverage of Netanyahu’s ongoing industrialized slaughter of toddlers.
Again though, I suspect Weinstein won’t have much actual work to do; CBS ownership and management are clearly, unabashedly pro-Trump. Weinstein’s only real function will be to provide a flimsy veneer of legitimacy to the firing of any employees who try to actually do journalism critical of the duo. And because he has no actual legitimacy, I suspect he won’t even do that well.
Repurposing CBS for use as right wing information warfare machine is one part of a much broader, pathetic failure by major media institutions in response to authoritarianism, which, this week, also involved the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post firing its last black female columnist simply for quoting Charlie Kirk’s claims that black females are inferior beings.
Countless mainstream media outlets, like the LA Times, CNN, NYT, and ABC (who paid Trump and gave in to his admin’s threats over Jimmy Kimmel) have met the moment with utter fecklessness. It’s been so pathetic it almost feels satirical. (As an aside, people of ethics should stop funding these outlets and give their money to reputable, independent journalists).
Wealthy, (usually right wing) media owners like tax cuts, mindless deregulation, and the government rubber stamping of shitty mergers. Despite decades of furrowed-brow protestations that this doesn’t impact U.S. journalism or editorial independence, you can very clearly see with your own eyes how, when push comes to shove, that’s usually an obvious lie.
Consolidated corporate media was always going to fail us in precisely this way at the worst possible time. Media academics spent more than fifty years warning us. Advice that American media policymakers (across both sides of the aisle) ignored every single step of the way.
We are very excited to present you Tails 7.0, the first version of Tails based
on Debian 13 (Trixie) and GNOME 48 (Bengaluru). Tails 7.0 brings new versions
of many applications included in Tails.
Dedication
Tails 7.0 is dedicated to the memory of Lunar (1982–2024). Lunar was a
traveling companion for Tails, a Tor volunteer, Free Software hacker, and
community organizer.
Lunar has always been by our side throughout Tails' history. From the first
baby steps of the project that eventually became Tails, to the merge with Tor,
he's provided sensible technical suggestions, out-of-the-box product design
ideas, outreach support, and caring organizational advice.
Outside of Tor, Lunar worked on highly successful Free Software projects such
as the Debian project, the Linux distribution on
which Tails is based, and the Reproducible Builds project, which helps us verify the integrity of Tails
releases.
Lunar will be deeply missed, both in our community and in the many other
communities he participated in.
Tails 7.0 starts 10–15 seconds faster on most computers.
We achieve this by changing the compression algorithm of the Tails USB and ISO
images from xz to zstd. As a consequence, the image is 10% bigger than it
would be with the previous algorithm.
While testing this change, we noticed that Tails on USB sticks of poor quality
can also start 20 seconds slower than on quality USB sticks.
If you are in a place where counterfeit electronics are common, we recommend
that you buy your USB stick from an international supermarket chain, which
should have a more reliable supply chain.
Law enforcement operations against pirate IPTV networks are now a regular occurrence, particularly inside the EU. Yet those that manage to physically take down or seriously disrupt an entire supply chain are very rare indeed and in practical terms, increasingly unlikely to happen.
The fact that international law enforcement collaboration can be very effective is undisputed, with the caveat that success often extends only as far as borders and politics allow. One of the most obvious signs that shutting down sources remains a problem is the constant calls for site blocking measures; questionably effective, perhaps, but easier to control than sources in far-away lands.
Italy Punishes Those Closer to Home
With transparency still an obstacle, measuring the effect of Italy’s Piracy Shield blocking initiative is difficult. Increasing legal pressure on internet intermediaries and even its own citizens may suggest that alternatives are thin on the ground.
An announcement this week by the Guardia di Finanza, revealing a multi-location operation targeting a pirate IPTV network, is the latest in a series of similar operations over several years. Targeting those who can be reached on home soil, not necessarily the sources who supply them, is a common limitation of national borders; this time around, however, the dynamics of the game may be about to change.
It Began With a Pizza
Without reference to specific dates, on Wednesday the Provincial Command of the Guardia di Finanza of Cagliari reported a series of search and seizure operations in various Italian regions. The trigger was an inspection by the Guardia di Finanza’s 2nd Metropolitan Operations Unit of a “public establishment” in the Cagliari region; a pizzeria according to unofficial sources.
The pizzeria allegedly screened PPV events on-site via illegal set-top boxes, which didn’t go unnoticed by GdF investigators who took a keen interest in the IPTV network supplying the content.
“Preliminary investigations subsequently uncovered a complex network, identifying a series of actors involved along the piracy chain, including content providers, distribution networks, and servers,” the GdF said in a statement.
“Given that initial evidence suggests that the criminal organization operates on a transnational scale, investigative activities are now continuing to reconstruct the entire supply chain and acquire additional sources of evidence, with the involvement of the U.S. and Dutch authorities.”
Local Targets
With at least some international assistance, reports indicate that operations were launched in at least four regions of Italy; Sicily, Puglia, Sardinia, and Lombardy in the north. Unofficial sources claim that 10 people are now under investigation following the search and seizure operations.
A video released by GdF (below) shows officers in what appears to be a private home. At one point an officer stacks what appears to be IPTV-type set-top boxes onto a table, while another collects unidentified evidence from a shelf in another room. At face value this is most likely the home of a lower-tier reseller and if the network remains intact, he or she will be easily and quickly replaced.
Indeed, of the ten people said to be under investigation, reports suggest that as many as nine could be resellers. Traditionally that has led to the shrugging of customers’ shoulders and a few minutes spent finding a new supplier.
Busted Resellers Could Become Settlement Fuel
In this case, things may go a little differently. The Guardia di Finanza describes an initiative of “strategic importance” due to a new approach and new set of targets.
“This operation represents a crucial step in the fight against audiovisual piracy. The strong synergy between the Cagliari Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Guardia di Finanza allows us, on the one hand, to dismantle the criminal organizations operating in this sector and, on the other, to impose criminal and administrative sanctions on all potential buyers upon identification,” Wednesday’s statement reads.
Raids on resellers are now the means through which IPTV subscribers’ identities are obtained by the authorities, with one reseller’s records potentially exposing thousands of customers. Over 2,500 subscribers have been fined already this year, authorities say, but that may not be the end of the matter, or the financial consequences.
DAZN, SKY and Serie A and the Big PR Gamble
DAZN, SKY and Serie A recently announced that they have obtained the identities of those fined by the police from the prosecutor’s office. So, on top of a relatively small fine of roughly €150, rightsholders say they’re preparing legal action in which they will demand “thousands of euros” from each person as compensation for their losses.
How much of this claim is set in stone is unknown. It might be a strategic bluff, or it might not. It certainly has the potential to be a PR disaster, or depending on how things play out, it may not. Interestingly, commentary from regulator AGCOM appears to be absent, but when it comes to predicting the future, a comment wouldn’t help in any way.
Despite the success of the operation, the flow of pirate streams will most likely continue, many from overseas. The question is whether the appetite to consume them will continue in the wake of a promised assault by rightsholders’ on their prospective customers.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Attorney General Pam Bondi needs to brush up on the First Amendment. She doesn’t seem to grasp some very basic tenets of freedom of speech. Indeed, three times this week, Bondi stepped in it so badly that even MAGA sharpened its knives for her.
The first time happened on Monday. On Sean Hannity’s show on Fox, Bondi claimed that her office was looking into prosecuting people for refusing service to Charlie Kirk supporters. Hannity had asked about an incident in Michigan where an Office Depot clerk had refused to print pro-Kirk signs.
So, let me get this straight: Companies can refuse to provide cakes and website services for a gay couple’s wedding, but they have to print posters of Charlie Kirk. Got it. Totally consistent.
On Tuesday, Bondi claimed that “Hate Speech” is unprotected, making a distinction between “free speech” and “hate speech” while vowing to “target” anyone engaging in hate speech.
Hoo boy. Every first year law student knows that there’s no such thing as a “hate speech exception” to the First Amendment.
She then tried to walk back this statement, saying she was only talking about speech that promotes violence. But even that remains protected speech except in narrow instances.
Today, let’s dig into what Bondi said, the context around her statements, and the very angry reaction from MAGA to them.
Emotions have been running high across the nation, with Kirk’s fans and detractors staking out extreme positions, saying heated things, and even sometimes, as I wrote about earlier, getting cancelled for them.
This played out in Portage, Michigan, where an Office Depot clerk refused to print posters of Kirk for an upcoming vigil. The moment went viral after it was shared by Kelly Sackett, chair of the Kalamazoo GOP, and the company scrambled to do damage control.
“Upon learning of the incident, we immediately reached out to the customer to address their concerns and seek to fulfill their order to their satisfaction,” Office Depot tweeted in a statement. “We have also launched an immediate internal review and, as a result, the associate involved is no longer with the organization.”
A lawsuit may be coming. Matthew DePerno, a lawyer representing the customer, said it was “outrageous” that a major chain would refuse to print a simple poster featuring Kirk’s name and date of birth apparently because a clerk disagreed with Kirk’s politics.
But Bondi wasn’t satisfied with the private action taken by the company to address a private customer’s concerns. She decided to involve the government. Bondi told Hannity,
“Employers, you have to have an obligation to get rid of people. You need to look at people who are saying horrible things. And they shouldn’t be working with you. Businesses cannot discriminate. If you wanna go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.”
She added,
“I have Harmeet Dhillon right now in our Civil Rights Unit looking at that immediately, that Office Depot had done that. We’re looking it up.”
The double standard here was glaring. As former White House Deputy Press Secretary under Trump and self-described “Republican in Exile” Sarah Matthews noted,
“For so long conservatives fought for the right of freedom of speech, or freedom to refuse service… And then you have Pam Bondi going on TV and saying she’s going to go after [Office] Depot…
It just flies in the face of… what it means to be a conservative. And it shows how much Trump has eroded American conservatism.”
Let’s not forget: Conservatives believed they had finally won this battle in 2023. In a landmark ruling that eroded the right of same-sex couples to participate on an equal basis in society, the conservative Supreme Court majority greenlit the right of a business owner to discriminate against them because the state impermissibly “compelled” speech in violation of the First Amendment.
The case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, held that Colorado could not enforce its anti-discrimination law against a Christian website designer who didn’t want to create wedding sites for same-sex couples sometime in the hypothetical future because it would violate her First Amendment right to free speech. Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the state cannot “force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.”
Five years earlier, the Court had ruled in favor of a baker who had challenged Colorado’s anti-discrimination law requiring equal treatment of same-sex customers, including when they ordered cakes for their weddings. But it had done so on very narrow grounds that limited the impact of the case. Presumably, a homophobic baker today would prevail under Gorsuch’s reasoning.
Bondi’s statement on Monday turned 303 Creative on its head. She claimed that “businesses cannot discriminate”—which is precisely the law Colorado had tried to enforce. She said they “have to let them” get their Kirk posters printed, even though this would, as Gorsuch wrote, force businesses to speak in ways that defy their conscience “about a matter of major significance.”
Moreover, printing a poster with an image of a political commentator who espoused racist, misogynistic and homo- and transphobic views is arguably a far greater imposition and instance of compelled speech than baking a basic cake or making a website.
Nevertheless, Bondi thinks you can’t discriminate against Kirk fans. You have to print his image. She has yet to explain what she meant, to distinguish 303 Creative, or to retract her statement. As things are, we’re left collectively wondering if Bondi really means businesses must serve only conservative customers whenever demanded.
Yes, Pam, hate speech is protected speech
Bondi dug a deeper legal hole for herself on Tuesday. She went on a show hosted by Katie Miller (the wife of Deputy White House Chief of Staff and white nationalist Stephen Miller) to declare something that is definitely not the law:
“There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech. And there is no place [for it], especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.”
Bondi added,
“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, and that’s across the aisle.”
But the distinction Bondi drew between “free speech” and “hate speech” is non-existent under the First Amendment. As Joyce Vance noted in her Civil Discourse newsletter,
The First Amendment matters the most when it comes to the speech we like the least, protecting people’s right to air their views, no matter how extreme, because in this country, we make decisions in a free marketplace of ideas, and not one where the morality police get to decide what is and isn’t acceptable. We tolerate speech we disagree with, even speech that we find horrific, in order to protect our own right to speak.
Nowhere was the cost of this tolerance clearer than in Skokie, Illinois, whose longtime residents will remember when the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that Nazis had a free speech right to hold a rally there, despite their hateful language.
It’s been interesting to witness the fury of the MAGA right descend like so many birds to feast on Bondi for her very hot yet very wrong take. The New Republic assembled some of the angriest responses:
“There obviously shouldn’t be any legal repercussions for ‘hate speech,’ which is not even a valid or coherent concept,” wrote podcaster Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire on X—though he said those who celebrate Kirk’s death should face social consequences. “We don’t need Pam Bondi swooping in to throw the entire conversation off the rails by completely missing our point,” he continued. “And having a ‘hate speech’ crackdown in the name of Charlie Kirk—a man who absolutely rejected ‘hate speech’ laws—is especially grotesque.”
Right-wing commentator Savannah Hernandez called Bondi’s sentiment “destructive,” adding, “She needs to be removed as attorney general now.” Talk show host Dave Rubin similarly called for Bondi’s “immediate resignation,” describing her statement as an “unbelievably bad take.” Provocateur Mike Cernovich tweeted that the “hate speech” claim, paired with Bondi’s mishandling of the case of Jeffrey Epstein, shows that the attorney general “really isn’t ready for this moment.”
“Our Attorney General is apparently a moron,” wrote conservative radio host Erick Erickson.
Even Charlie Kirk, whose reputation Bondi was trying to protect, would have taken issue with her. “Hate speech does not exist legally in America,” he tweeted in May of 2024.
Sensing she was now on the menu, Bondi attempted some clean up on the MAGA aisle. Yesterday, she tweeted that the distinction she was referring to for “hate speech” was with respect to violent speech:
Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.
Still no, but thank you for playing!
As any lawyer worth her salt knows, even speech that promotes violence is generally protected by the First Amendment, with exceptions only where the speech comprises a direct threat or incites imminent unlawful action.
The controlling authority is Brandenburg v. Ohio, a famous 1969 opinion. The defendant was a KKK member who gave a speech on a remote location calling generally for “revengeance” against Blacks and Jews. He was prosecuted and convicted in Ohio, but SCOTUS overturned it, holding that speech can only be prohibited if it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
Incitement is a very high bar, as we learned on January 6, 2021, with Trump’s speech, which prosecutors were concerned would not have qualified.
With her ignorance of what actually comprises prohibited violent speech, Bondi once again has ignored direct Supreme Court precedent. The Justice Department has no legal basis to crack down on any parties for “violent” hate speech that does not risk inciting or producing imminent unlawful action.
If you’re counting, that’s three major SCOTUS opinions in two days that the Attorney General got wrong: Creative 303, Village of Skokie and Brandenburg.
If I were her Con Law professor, I’d fail her hard.
There are multiple ways into this story, but almost all of the reporting on what’s happened claims that Disney pulled talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” over comments that Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk. But that leads most people to assume that Kimmel said something unkind about Kirk or in some way celebrated his death. But he did not. You can see the segment here (assuming Disney doesn’t pull it):
Here’s the full transcript of the relevant section, which is just a few seconds:
We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
He also made fun of the clip of Trump being asked how he was grieving, to which Trump responded:
I think very good, and by the way you can see over there all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House which is something they’ve been trying to get for 150 years and it’s gonna be a beauty.
They also showed a clip of Trump on Fox News being asked about “revenge” and somehow twisting that to the false claim that California has no ballot boxes, and another clip about Kash Patel trying to claim he was doing a good job with the investigation into Kirk’s killing.
Literally nothing in there is celebrating Kirk’s death or speaking ill of Kirk in any way.
But the thing that the MAGA world is really desperate to avoid is having anyone suggest that Robinson might not have been indoctrinated by “leftists.” They are so desperate to blame the attack on “the left,” (despite little evidence to support that) that they decided to attack Kimmel for even pointing out that MAGA was bending over backwards to deny that the shooter was “one of them.”
In the wake of the shooting, both ends of the political spectrum rushed (in an unhealthy way) to look for evidence that the shooter was “radicalized” by extremists at the other end of the political spectrum. This often included doctored evidence. But what evidence was obtained suggested that neither story was accurate and (as is so often the case with lone shooters) his agenda had no deep political component to it, and was just deeply steeped in online meme culture. Robinson himself admitted in messages later released that he basically put meme text on bullet casings for the joke of it all.
In context, Kimmel’s statements were quite benign.
But that didn’t stop FCC boss Brendan Carr—who spent years pretending to be a “First Amendment warrior”—from going on yet another MAGA podcast and claiming that Disney could “lose its license” over this. Carr claimed that there was a “concerted effort to lie” about the shooter, which is just a total misrepresentation of reality.
There were, as in any chaotic breaking news story, attempts to understand what little information is revealed, and which people try to fit into the larger story. In this case, some people interpreted information that was coming out in one way, in some cases, they interpreted it a different way. And yes, confirmation bias and preconceived notions could have played into that, but that’s how breaking news always works and it’s 100% protected by the First Amendment.
Carr then suggests that the FCC can use the “public interest” obligation of public spectrum (TV and radio broadcasters, but not internet or cable TV) to threaten to pull licenses for airing Kimmel’s segment. This is beyond nonsense. As FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) noted in a statement:
The FCC has no authority to control what a late night TV host can say, and the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to speculate on current events even if those speculations later turn out to be incorrect. Subjecting broadcasters to regulatory liability when anyone on their network gets something wrong would turn the FCC into an arbiter of truth and cast an intolerable chill over the airwaves.
Carr’s threat was pretty explicit:
I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
That’s a pretty direct threat to intermediaries to punish Kimmel for obviously First Amendment protected speech.
A government official can share her views freely and criticize particular beliefs, and she can do so forcefully in the hopes of persuading others to follow her lead. In doing so, she can rely on the merits and force of her ideas, the strength of her convictions, and her ability to inspire others. What she cannot do, however, is use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression….
And, more explicitly:
The Court explained that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from relying on the “threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression” of disfavored speech.
While Carr initially appeared to threaten Disney/ABC’s “licenses,” he knows full well that (other than a small number of owned and operated affiliates) ABC doesn’t actually have most of the licenses. Instead, it’s the local affiliates that do. But Carr directly targeted them with a threat:
There’s action we can take on licensed broadcasters. And, frankly, it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast or Disney and say, listen, we are going to preempt, we’re not going to run Kimmel any more until you straighten this out because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.
This is a not so subtle threat to affiliates to drop Kimmel or face fines or have their licenses pulled.
And, not surprisingly, this threat worked. Hours later, Nexstar, the largest owner of local TV stations in the US which has been sucking up to Trump to try to buy out even more TV stations, announced that it would not run Kimmel’s show on their stations, and shortly after that Disney announced that it was pulling Kimmel’s show “indefinitely.”
Nexstar’s statement was utter nonsense:
“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse,” said Andrew Alford, president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division.
Except he didn’t say anything offensive or insensitive. Literally the only thing he did was point out that Trump was fairly insensitive.
So here we have a government official coercing private parties to punish or suppress disfavored speech. This is literally what the (again, unanimous) Supreme Court, just months ago, said was a clear First Amendment violation:
… a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly: A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf
Yet that is exactly what Brendan Carr just did today. Indeed, this case presents an even clearer First Amendment violation than Vullo in multiple ways. Where Vullo required the Court to analyze implicit threats, Carr’s threat was explicit: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Where Vullo involved regulatory pressure on financial intermediaries over business practices, this directly targets editorial speech—the core of First Amendment protection. And where Vullo’s coercive effect had to be inferred, here we have immediate, documented capitulation by both Nexstar and Disney.
Even if you want to claim that (laughably) Carr’s threats weren’t that explicit, in Vullo the court stated directly that the “threat need not be explicit.” But again, it was pretty explicit.
Also in Vullo, the Court finds that the reaction of the intermediaries can “confirm the communications’ coercive nature.” The fact that Nexstar immediately did what Carr suggested they should do again reinforces what everyone knows is happening here.
And even if you were to argue (ridiculously, laughably) that something Kimmel did actually does violate the law in some way that allows Carr and the FCC to take action, the Supreme Court insisted that the underlying legality of the targeted actions does not matter to the question of whether or not the coercive threats targeted speech:
Moreover, the conceded illegality of the NRA-endorsed insurance programs does not insulate Vullo from First Amendment scrutiny under the Bantam Books framework. Indeed, the commission in that case targeted the distribution and display of material that, in its view, violated the State’s obscenity laws.Nothing in that case turned on the distributor’s compliance with state law.On the contrary, Bantam Books held that the commission violated the First Amendment by invoking legal sanctions to suppress disfavored publications, some of which may or may not contain protected speech (i.e., nonobscene material). … Here, too,although Vullo can pursue violations of state insurance law, she cannot do so in order to punish or suppress the NRA’s protected expression.
But that’s what Carr clearly did here. He threatened action in order to punish or suppress (incredibly benign) speech.
To be clear, even if one believed Kimmel’s speculation about the shooter’s motivations was somehow problematic, that wouldn’t justify Carr’s response. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the remedy for “bad” speech is more speech, not government censorship. The FCC’s “public interest” obligations have never been interpreted to give commissioners the power to police late-night comedy commentary on breaking news.
It’s no secret that Jimmy Kimmel has long been a thorn in Donald Trump’s side. His job is to mock and satirize the news, and he has been making fun of Donald Trump for years.
And yet, will we see the “comedy is legal again” and “free speech absolutists” speak out against Carr’s actions here? I doubt it. Will we see the people who insisted in the past that they can mock and joke about their political opponents without punishment speak up here? Seems unlikely.
We warned that Brendan Carr was eagerly looking to become America’s top censor, and he has succeeded in that. But never let it be said that he is a defender of free speech. He is the exact opposite. He has violated his oath to defend the Constitution and he has infringed upon the First Amendment rights of Americans.
Disney’s decision to cave here is stupid, but predictable. Carr leveraged these bogus threats to get Nexstar to damage Disney, and so Disney caved. It likely decided it doesn’t need another one of these stupid culture war battles that the MAGA crowd has thrust its way over and over again over the past decade.
But this capitulation sets a dangerous precedent. If government officials can successfully threaten broadcast licenses over protected commentary, every late-night host, news anchor, and talk radio personality becomes subject to regulatory retaliation for speech that displeases those in power. Today it’s Kimmel’s mild commentary about political spin; tomorrow it could be any criticism of government officials.
The speed with which Disney folded—within hours of the threat—shows how effectively this censorship-by-proxy operates. No formal proceedings, no due process, no appeals. Just a government official making threats and corporations immediately complying to avoid regulatory harassment. This is precisely the “heckler’s veto by government proxy” that the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
As the Supreme Court ruling closed with in the Vullo case, while government officials can express their opinions, there are limits to their ability to coerce:
Yet where, as here, a government official makes coercive threats in a private meeting behind closed doors, the “ballot box” is an especially poor check on that official’s authority. Ultimately, the critical takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries.
There was a time and a place where Brendan Carr agreed with that sentiment, but apparently it’s not when he’s in power and when the speech criticizes his boss.
It appears that the illiberal, transphobic pipe dream of banning all pornography has reached an enterprising group of far-right Christian nationalist Republicans in Michigan who want to impose the moralistic agendas of a small few on the overwhelming majority of the people.
The Anticorruption of Public Morals Act is as bad as it sounds. If adopted by the legislature, the bill would prohibit the distribution of depictions of sexual acts that are “real, animated, digitally generated, written, or auditory” in nature. These acts include consensual depictions of sexual behavior among one or more adults, including all forms of protected consensual expression.
This means an individual or entity that violates the provisions of the bill would be charged with a felony offense punishable by up to 20 years in prison, a fine of $100,000, or a mixture of both. Individuals and organizations that violate the bill’s language that involves more than 100 pieces of “prohibited material” are guilty of the felony charge and are punishable by 25 years in prison or $125,000.
A provision in HB 4938 also restricts internet service providers in the state from implementing mandatory filtering technology to prevent all residents from accessing said “prohibited material.”
This language was added to build on their definition of “circumvention tools.” Rep. Schriver defines “circumvention tools” as any form of software or service designed to bypass censorship provisions. The bill explicitly highlights virtual private networks, proxy servers, or other forms of secure encryption tunneling as these “circumvention tools.” Using VPNs to access prohibited material is a no-go under HB 4938.
Consider how the lawmakers define “prohibited material,” too. According to the draft language, prohibited material is a form of expression, “that at common law was not protected by adoption of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States respecting laws abridging freedom of speech or the press.” Further, these “prohibited materials” under the bill are defined:
“[As] depiction, description, or simulation, whether real, animated, digitally generated, written, or auditory, of sexual acts, that includes any of the following:…vaginal or anal intercourse;…fellatio or cunnilingus;…masturbation;…ejaculation or orgasm;…penetration with sexual devices;…group sex;…bondage, domination, or sadomasochism;…acts involving bodily fluids for sexual arousal;…erotic autonomous sensory meridian response content, moaning, or sensual voice content;…animated, virtual, or sexual activity generated by artificial intelligence;…depictions of characters acting or resembling minors in sexual contextsl;…[and] any other pornographic material.”
Other forms of expression that are considered “prohibited material” include:
“[A] depiction, description, or simulation, whether real, animated, digitally generated, written, or auditory, that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by an individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex by means of a combination of attire, cosmetology, or prosthetics, or as having a reproductive nature contrary to the individual’s biological sex.”
The only exceptions include “scientific and medical research or instruction” or “peer-reviewed academic content.” Not only does Rep. Schriver attempt to define entire categories of speech as obscene and criminal, but he goes the extra step of attempting to criminalize and written or audiovisual existence of transgender, gender non-conforming, and/or gender diverse people.
He wants to criminalize forms of expression that affirm and contribute to the basic humanity of transgender people by saying that gender affirmation, socialization, and any other material related to the subject is pornographic, while also conflating such material with actual sexually explicit content that is produced for private use by adults and is widely considered legal.
What kind of backward ass thinking is that? Rep. Schriver is pitching a worldview so extreme that it calls for criminalizing protected forms of expression, while also wanting to institute an entire offense for speech that deals with transgender and queer subject matter.
Instead of using a position in the state legislature to accomplish something reasonable and bipartisan, Schriver’s cabal intends to force further harm onto the national conversation against a class of people who are entitled to the same First Amendment rights he proudly utilizes as a member of the rising postliberal Catholic and Catholic integralism movements that feature prominent neo-fascists and (wink) J.D. Vance.
State Sen. Dusty Deevers of Oklahoma is the other high-profile case of a lawmaker wanting to upend the First Amendment in their state to ban pornography. Note that Deevers is an author of “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel.” In this statement, Sen. Deevers calls for the abolishment of divorce, abortion, non-traditionalist culture, and “evils” like pornography.
Schriver publicly joined Deevers’ fan club in early 2024 when the porn ban in Oklahoma was first put to pen and paper. It hasn’t passed the legislature.
Rep. Schriver quoted a Rolling Stone post on X criticizing Deevers, saying that “abortion is murder, porn is cancer, [and] divorce is a plague.” If bills like HB 4938 are the future of the conservative movement, then the true obscenity isn’t pornography—it’s the authoritarian urge to strip people of their rights under the guise of protecting morality: No one is protected; everyone is a criminal.
Let’s just hope this bill dies in committee and Schriver and his colleagues are reminded of how willfully ignorant they truly are.
Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.
It’s probably too much to ask, but I hope California law enforcement agencies will remember who to direct their hate at if this bill becomes law. It’s not the “liberals” running the state. It’s the Trump administration and its mass deportation efforts. ICE and its actions have always been controversial, but it took a group of bigots serving non-consecutive terms to really unleash its inherent ugliness.
What we’ve been seeing since Trump’s return to office has been ICE and anti-brown people sentiment at its worst. ICE raids Home Deport parking lots, neighborhoods, and swap meets, rather than performing targeted arrests of truly dangerous undocumented immigrants. But this insistence on masking officers and hiding outward designations of their originating agency is something specifically tied to Trump’s second administration.
Lawmakers in California passed a bill on Thursday banning most local and federal law enforcement officers from covering their faces during operations, including immigration enforcement.
Senate Bill 627, known as the No Secret Police Act, was introduced by Democratic state Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco and Jesse Arreguin of Berkeley in June after immigration operations ramped up across the state as part of President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The bill will now head to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk for final approval.
The bill [PDF] opens up with the legislators’ refusal to allow law enforcement to take advantage of preexisting double-standard:
Existing law makes it a misdemeanor to wear a mask, false whiskers, or any personal disguise, as specified, with the purpose of evading or escaping discovery, recognition, or identification while committing a public offense, or for concealment, flight, evasion, or escape from arrest or conviction for any public offense.
This bill would make it a crime for a law enforcement officer to wear a facial covering in the performance of their duties, except as specified. The bill would define law enforcement officer as anyone designated by California law as a peace officer who is employed by a city, county, or other local agency, and any officer or agent of a federal law enforcement agency or law enforcement agency of another state, or any person acting on behalf of a federal law enforcement agency or agency of another state. The bill would make a violation of these provisions punishable as an infraction or a misdemeanor, as specified. By creating a new crime, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program.
This won’t stop ICE and other federal officers from wearing masks while terrorizing the populace, of course. But it will at least prevent local law enforcement from blending in with Trump’s masked goon squads, which might discourage them from pitching in with questionable “round up all the brown people” raids performed by ICE and its federal partners.
Added to the bill are a lot of official legislative declarations — ones that point out the numerous problems created by officers who choose to disguise themselves when performing their public duties.
(a)[T]he routine use of facial coverings by law enforcement officers has significant implications for public perception, officer-community interactions, and accountability.
(b) Whether intentional intended or not, members of the public may experience fear or intimidation when approached by officers whose faces are obscured. This perception can heighten defensive behaviors and unnecessarily escalate situations.
(c) Facial coverings limit the visibility of facial expressions, which are essential components of nonverbal communication. In high-stress or emotionally charged interactions, the inability to read an officer’s expression may lead to misinterpretation of tone or intent, increasing the risk of conflict escalation.
(d) The visibility of an officer’s face is vital for promoting transparency, facilitating communication, and building trust between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.
(e) When officers are not readily identifiable, it increases the risk of impersonation by unauthorized individuals, which further undermines public trust, endangers public safety, and hinders legitimate law enforcement operations.
This exposes the lie that is used most frequently by law enforcement: that masking up makes officers “safer.” It doesn’t. It creates a ton of negative side effects, many of which endanger people on both sides of the law enforcement equation. What it definitely does not do is make officers “safer.”
On top of that, there’s the damage done to the public’s relationship with law enforcement, which has never been great. Destroying trust only takes a few self-serving actions by cops who’d rather have their power completely decoupled from any responsibility. Rebuilding this trust takes maximum effort and years of work — something almost no law enforcement agency (federal or local) is willing to do. So, the baseline is trust that has likely been irreparably damaged. And now, law enforcement seems to think the best way to do cop business is by destroying what little trust remains by dressing up like cartel death squads while enforcing civil laws pertaining to citizenship.
Cops will no doubt complain about this new mandate if it’s codified. Fuck them. They had all the time in the world to repair their relationship with the public. And if they’ve chosen to be more like ICE in its current iteration, they absolutely need to have this dubious privilege taken out of their hands.
Donald Trump has successfully used xenophobia and fake concerns about propaganda and national security to get what he’s long wanted: TikTok (and its fat ad revenues) are poised to be sold off to his right wing billionaire buddies and, inevitably, slowly converted into a right wing propaganda safe space.
Andreessen and Ellison are, to be clear, technofascists who don’t believe in democracy, regulatory oversight, or basic privacy protections for consumers. The remaining 20 percent would remain in the hands of Chinese ownership and the Chinese government, which still has to finalize the deal. This is not, contrary to what you’ll read in the pages of WAPO or CNN, a net improvement.
Oh, and Donald Trump will get to appoint a board member. Remember when Republicans were against government interference in private businesses?
Trump still didn’t truly get what he really wanted: reporting in the Financial Times suggests that China will still technically own and control the algorithm used to power TikTok, something Trump had previously said was essential to any deal. Early reporting by the Wall Street Journal also indicates that existing TikTok users will have to migrate to a new app.
“Come join an app majority owned by Donald Trump’s unhinged right wing billionaire friends where there’s no competent hate speech and right wing propaganda safeguards” is going to be a tricky selling point that could ultimately throw sand in the gears, and create the potential for another (hopefully better?) company to disrupt their plans.
Now is the time for Silicon Valley to engage in that boundless innovation we’ve all heard so much about.
It WasNever About Privacy And National Security
I’ve noted more times than I can count that the push to ban TikTok was never really about protecting American privacy. If that were true, we would pass a real privacy law and craft serious penalties for companies and executives that play fast and loose with sensitive American data, be it TikTok or the myriad of super dodgy apps, telecoms, and hardware vendors monetizing your phone usage.
It was never really about propaganda. If that were true, we’d take aim at the extremely well funded authoritarian propaganda machine and engage in content moderation of race-baiting political propaganda that’s filling the brains of young American men with pudding and hate. We’d push for education media literacy reforms common in countries like Finland.
TikTok’s Chinese ownership did pose some very real legitimate security, privacy, and NatSec concerns, but the MAGA folks “fixing” the problem were never competent or good faith actors, and the push to ban hijack TikTok was always about ego, money, and information control.
American authoritarians are following the same playbook we’ve seen in countries like Hungary, where new and old media and journalism is either destroyed or hijacked in service to authoritarian leadership. It’s happening here, now, and the very least ethical people can do is recognize it and put up a fight.
Step into the world of cyber defense with the Advanced Cybersecurity Master Class Bundle from Eduonix. With over 16 hours of hands-on training across 5 in-depth courses, you’ll gain the skills to detect threats, and secure systems. From mastering AI-driven threat intelligence and Zero Trust models to exploring the Dark Web with Maltego and locking down IoT devices, this bundle is packed with real-world content. Whether you’re a beginner or looking to level up, no experience is needed. It’s on sale for $20.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Even by Donald Trump’s standards for frivolous defamation lawsuits, this one is impressively stupid. On Monday, the president filed yet another lawsuit against the NY Times—this time seeking $15 billion over a book that claims he’s not quite as successful a businessman as he pretends to be.
The timing is almost comically bad. Trump is suing over allegations that he’s not actually that successful… right after winning the presidency in a landslide and making absolute bank while doing it. Has there ever been a sorer winner in the history of politics? You’re the fucking President. Get over the fact that some people criticize you already.
Trump has a decently long history of suing media outlets over unflattering coverage, including multiple failed attempts against the Times. Just last year, he had to pay nearly $400k in legal fees after another bogus lawsuit against the Times failed. But why let past failures slow you down when you can file an even dumber one?
The lawsuit is against the NY Times and book publisher Penguin Random House, along with some reporters at the NY Times. The complaint is… well… it is not the most organized or professional of complaints. It is, as so many Donald Trump lawsuits seem to be, political documents designed to please Donald Trump and his legally ignorant MAGA base, rather than convincing judges.
The complaint reads more like a press release than a legal document, packed with ego-stroking passages that reveal just how pathetically thin-skinned Trump remains. Consider this actual paragraph from a federal lawsuit:
Thanks solely to President Trump’s sui generis charisma and unique business acumen, “The Apprentice” generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and remained on television for over thirteen years, with nearly 200 episodes. “The Apprentice” represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time.
And, yes, that picture is included.
The complaint starts out by claiming that the NY Times endorsing Kamala Harris was a form of “election interference” which is not how anything works.
President Trump trounced Harris with 312 electoral votes and a sweep of all seven “battleground” states. This victory was remarkable for many historic reasons, including because President Trump had to overcome persistent election interference from the legacy media, led most notoriously by the New York Times.
That’s literally in the first paragraph of the complaint (though the claims themselves do not revolve around election interference, but even weaker claims of defamation). But, admitting that you won the election already undermines the idea that there was any damage done to Trump’s reputation from [checks notes] political reporting on him (historically some of the most protected of speech under the First Amendment.)
Indeed, Trump is going to have a pretty difficult time showing “damage” done to his reputation here. He claims that the NY Times tried to do three things:
Defendants’ pre-election goal was to kill three birds with one stone: (a) damage President Trump’s hard-earned and world-renowned reputation for business success, (b) in the process, sabotage his 2024 candidacy for President of the United States, and (c) prejudice judges and juries in the unlawful cases brought against President Trump, his family, and his businesses by his political opponents for purposes of election interference.
If that were true (and it isn’t) then they failed on all three counts. Trump won the election easily in 2024, he’s making absolute bank while being President (perhaps more than doubling his wealth) and all of the lawsuits against him have basically been shut down with Trump coming out on top.
Also, for anyone who has followed the NY Times’ repeated (and somewhat pathetic) attempts to bend over backwards to appease Trump and sanewash his attempt to bring fascism to America by pretending it’s politics-as-normal, this following sentence is ridiculous:
Today, the Times is a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.
There is no one who has followed the NY Times’ willingness to “both sides” every crazy thing Trump does who actually believes that.
Then, after nearly five pages of screaming about how liberal the NY Times is, the lawsuit finally says that this lawsuit is not really about the NY Times at all, but rather a book written by two of its reporters (hence the Penguin Random House inclusion on the defendants list).
The subject matter of this action—a malicious, defamatory, and disparaging book written by two of its reporters and three false, malicious, defamatory, and disparaging articles, all carefully crafted by Defendants, with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump, and all published during the height of a Presidential Election that became the most consequential in American history—represent a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished “Gray Lady.” Defendants’ pre-election goal was to kill three birds with one stone: (a) damage President Trump’s hard-earned and world-renowned reputation for business success, (b) in the process, sabotage his 2024 candidacy for President of the United States, and (c) prejudice judges and juries in the unlawful cases brought against President Trump, his family, and his businesses by his political opponents for purposes of election interference. With President Trump having won the Presidency, Defendants’ goals remain similar and unlawful: tarnish his legacy of achievement, destroy his reputation as a successful businessman, and subject him to humiliation and ridicule.
Specifically, on September 17, 2024, Penguin published a false, malicious, and defamatory book titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” (the “Book”), authored by Craig and Buettner.
Dude. You won! Has there ever been a sorer winner in the history of politics? My goodness.
Before diving deeper into this mess, it’s crucial to understand what Trump actually needs to prove. As a public figure, he must show “actual malice”—and despite what Trump’s lawyers seem to think, that’s not about being mean to him.
Actual malice requires proving the defendants published something they knew was false or with reckless disregard for the truth (and reckless disregard also means something different than most people assume: it means you have to have ignored evidence that what you were publishing was false). It’s an extremely high bar, deliberately designed to protect robust debate about public figures. It has absolutely nothing to do with being angry or hostile—which is what Trump’s very bad lawyers seem to think it means.
Defendants each desire for President Trump fail politically and financially. Each feels actual malice towards President Trump in the colloquial sense: that is, each—Craig, Buettner, Baker, and Schmidt, as individuals, and the Times and Penguin’s relevant executives as corporations—subjectively wishes to harm President Trump, and each wish to manipulate public opinion to President Trump’s disadvantage to worsen his current and future political and economic prospects. Put bluntly, Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.
That final sentence—”Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way”—reads like it was written by a sixth grader having a tantrum, not a lawyer filing a federal lawsuit. More importantly, nowhere in this 85-page screed do Trump’s lawyers actually demonstrate the knowing falsity or reckless disregard that the law requires.
They describe completely typical best practices in reporting as if they’re nefarious, such as the following:
Likewise, the Times and its reporters, including Craig, Buettner, Baker, and Schmidt, have a pattern and practice of contacting President Trump and his team regarding negative stories on a short timeline so as to be able to state that they sought comment—in order to preserve a scintilla of the pretense of neutrality—while making it functionally impossible for President Trump to comment on stories with factual errors, correct those errors, or provide a responsive quote before publication. This policy further enables the Times and its reporters to publish negative assertions about President Trump about which they subjectively harbor doubts as to their truthfulness by permitting them to claim that they sought factual confirmation or denial regarding their stories, even when they subjectively realize that they did not do so in good faith.
Again, that’s not how any of this works, and it’s certainly not how the NY Times’ reporting works. I have plenty of criticisms about the NY Times and its coverage, but the idea that they do this for the reasons stated is ludicrous.
The incredibly weak attempt to argue for reckless disregard… is to claim that because they didn’t interview producer Mark Burnett about Trump’s time on The Apprentice, that’s a form of ignoring counter evidence.
For non-exhaustive examples, and as detailed supra, Defendants published numerous statements regarding President Trump’s role in “The Apprentice” without first securing an interview from primary sources senior to the production of The Apprentice, such as Burnett. Defendants knew that Burnett would likely have contradicted numerous specific false, malicious, and defamatory purported statements of fact that they made regarding President Trump’s role in “The Apprentice” as well as their general narrative regarding President Trump’s role in the show’s success. Defendants therefore did not sufficiently pursue speaking with Burnett even after he did not grant an interview, did not sufficiently seek to obtain his original notes or records, and otherwise failed to engage with Burnett and other potential insiders with “The Apprentice” because they subjectively believed that these sources would have tended to contradict the defamatory lies that they wished to publish about President Trump.
Again, this is not how the NY Times works. If Burnett would have spoken to them (and historically he has refused to talk to the media about Trump beyond a single press statement he made before the 2016 election), the NY Times would have loved it and would have quoted him extensively, as that would be a huge scoop, given how often Burnett has refused to comment on Trump.
There’s also a whole tangent building off of Tulsi Gabbard’s ridiculously misleading statements earlier this year, falsely claiming that the Obama administration tried to fake Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, even though multiple investigations (including those led by Republicans) have found that Russia absolutely tried to influence the 2016 election, even if it didn’t have much actual success.
The lawsuit then asks for… $15 billion dollars. How very Dr. Evil. The NY Times, for what it’s worth, is currently valued at less than $10 billion.
A lot of people discussing this lawsuit are claiming two things: that it’s really all about getting a settlement out of the NY Times like he’s been getting out of others, and second that it’s an attempt to get NYT v. Sullivan (the key case that established the actual malice standard) overturned.
While that may be the intent behind this lawsuit, I find both unlikely. Yes, in the lawsuit, Trump lists out a bunch of those corrupt settlements, as if they’re somehow relevant here. But plenty of people have observed that those settlements had nothing to do with the merits of the cases, but rather were entirely about capitulating to a bully and trying to get him off their backs. And, in the case of CBS, it seemed quite clear that the settlement was so that Shari Redstone could get her deal to sell Paramount/CBS to Larry Ellison’s son.
And, when it comes to the NY Times, they have a very good legal team that tends to relish taking on bad faith, bullshit SLAPP style lawsuits. They have a very good track record on those, and don’t often roll over. I would imagine that the legal team feels pretty strongly about defending this case rather than settling.
As for the attack on the actual malice standard, that’s the same thing people claimed about the last Trump lawsuit against the NY Times and it went up in smoke. It’s what people seem to want to claim about a bunch of frivolous defamation claims lately, and while it may be what the lawyers want, they seem like really bad cases to make these arguments. Because the underlying facts are so silly and so obviously bullshit, that the facts make for really bad cases to argue that the NYT v. Sullivan standard is somehow unfair.
Honestly, this just feels like so many of Trump’s lawsuits: engaging in pointless vexatious SLAPP lawfare just to punish media properties that publish negative stories about him. He has long admitted that he enjoys filing such lawsuits. Famously, he once said:
“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”
That’s the very definition of a SLAPP suit. And, if you’re wondering, Florida does have an anti-SLAPP law, though it’s a bit quirky compared to other states. Also (more importantly) the Eleventh Circuit (which covers Florida) has said that you can’t use anti-SLAPP laws in federal court.
But, really, if you want proof that this is just Trump trying to punish those who dare to report on him accurately, just witness how he responded to a question about how he felt about Pam Bondi’s unconstitutional claims of punishing people for hate speech, by immediately threatening to go after the journalist who asked the question.
JON KARL: What do you make of Pam Bondi saying she's gonna go after hate speech? A lot of your allies say hate speech is free speechTRUMP: We'll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. You have a lot of hate in your hate. Maybe they'll have to go after you.
Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I’ve seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to “those who disagree with him” as a sign that he was engaging in good faith. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Ezra Klein’s silly eulogy claiming that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” because he would debate students who disagreed with him.
Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.
There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”
Klein is eulogizing not a practitioner of good-faith political discourse, but one of the most successful architects of “debate me bro” culture—a particularly toxic form of intellectual harassment that has become endemic to our political discourse. And by praising Kirk as practicing “politics the right way,” Klein is inadvertently endorsing a grift that actively undermines the kind of thoughtful engagement our democracy desperately needs.
The “debate me bro” playbook is simple and effective: demand that serious people engage with your conspiracy theories or extremist talking points. If they decline, cry “censorship!” and claim they’re “afraid of the truth.” If they accept, turn the interaction into a performance designed to generate viral clips and false legitimacy. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition that has nothing to do with genuine intellectual discourse.
The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.
This is exactly backwards from how the actual “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work. Ideas don’t deserve platforms simply because someone is willing to argue for them loudly. They earn legitimacy through evidence, peer review, and sustained engagement with reality. Many of the ideas promoted in these viral “debates” have already been thoroughly debunked and rejected by that marketplace—but the “debate me bro” format resurrects them as if they’re still worth serious consideration.
Perhaps most insidiously, these aren’t actually debates at all. They’re performances designed to generate specific emotional reactions for viral distribution. Participants aren’t trying to persuade anyone or genuinely engage with opposing viewpoints. They’re trying to create moments that will get clipped, shared, and monetized across social media.
Kirk perfected this grift. As a recent detailed analysis of one of Kirk’s debates demonstrates, when a student showed up prepared with nuanced, well-researched arguments, Kirk immediately tried pivoting to culture war talking points and deflection tactics. When debaters tried to use Kirk’s own standards against him, he shifted subjects entirely. The goal was never understanding or persuasion—it was generating content for social media distribution.
And, of course, this broader “debate me bro” culture has become so commonplace and expected online that it has now been fully industrialized into content farming.
The most toxic evolution of this grift is Jubilee Media’s “Surrounded” series on YouTube (on which Kirk once appeared, because of course he did), which The New Yorker’s Brady Brickner-Wood aptly describes as an attempt to “anthropomorphize the internet, turning incendiary discourse into live-action role-play.” The format is simple: put one public figure in a room with 20 ideologically opposed people and let them duke it out in rapid-fire rounds designed for maximum conflict and viral potential.
As Brickner-Wood notes, these aren’t actual debates in the classical sense of trying to persuade, they’re spectacles designed to set up bad faith dipshits with the opportunity to dunk on others for social media clout.
“Surrounded” videos are a dizzying and bewildering watch, as gruelling as they are compelling. The participants who fare best seem to be familiar with the conventions of interscholastic debate, spouting off statistics and logic puzzles with the alacrity of an extemporaneous-speaking champion. To win an argument in such a condensed amount of time, debaters attempt to short-circuit their opponent’s claim as swiftly and harshly as possible, treating their few minutes of airtime as a domination game rather than, say, a path toward truth or understanding.The goal here is not to inform or educate, to listen or process, to build or intellectualize but to win, to own, to dunk on, to break the opponent’s brain, to spawn an argument of such devastating definitiveness that the matter can be considered, once and for all, closed. Wave the flag, run the clock out—next.
But Surrounded is just the most recent manifestation of a much older problem. We’ve seen multiple bad faith trolls, beyond just Kirk, turn the “debate me bro” model into large media empires. When people point out their bad faith nonsense, we’re told “what are you complaining about, they’re doing things the ‘right way’ by debating with those they disagree with.”
There are, of course, times and places where actual debates can be valuable. I’ve been involved in many debates over the years with people who vehemently disagreed with me. But I think it’s important for people to recognize that, in the same way not all information is equally valuable, not all debates are equally productive.
There’s nothing in how Charlie Kirk “debated” that aimed to get at nuances or understanding. They were entirely designed to seek to humiliate his opponent. They’re full of red herrings, lies, and attempts to deflect from any actual logic, as the video link above showed.
The point is not about getting to any level of understanding. It’s to try to quip and dunk in the manner most likely to go viral when shared on social media in 20-second snippets.
The format actively discourages the kind of thoughtful, nuanced discussion that might actually change minds—the kind actually designed for persuasion. Instead, it rewards the most inflammatory takes, the most emotionally manipulative tactics, and the most viral-ready soundbites. Anyone going into these situations with good faith gets steamrolled by participants who understand they’re playing a different game entirely.
When trolls demand debates, they’re not interested in having their minds changed or genuinely testing their ideas. They want one of two outcomes: either you decline and they get to claim victory by default, or you accept and they get to use your credibility to legitimize their nonsense while farming viral moments.
None of this means we should avoid authentically engaging with different viewpoints or challenging ideas. But there’s a crucial difference between good-faith intellectual engagement and feeding trolls who are just looking for their next viral moment.
Real intellectual discourse happens in contexts where participants are genuinely interested in truth-seeking rather than performance. It requires shared standards of evidence, mutual respect, and actual expertise on the topics being discussed. It takes time, nuance, and careful consideration—all things that are antithetical to the “debate me bro” format.
Klein’s eulogy of Kirk represents a broader failure to understand what’s happening to our discourse. When we praise bad-faith performers for “engaging” with their critics, we’re not celebrating democratic norms—we’re rewarding those who exploit them.
Law enforcement operations against pirate IPTV networks are now a regular occurrence, particularly inside the EU. Yet those that manage to physically take down or seriously disrupt an entire supply chain are very rare indeed and in practical terms, increasingly unlikely to happen.
