Every relevant court that has looked at this question — including the Supreme Court — has agreed: no one can own the law. When private standards get incorporated into binding legal requirements, the public has a right to access them freely. The Fifth Circuit, the DC Circuit, and the First Circuit have all reached the same conclusion through different cases over the past two decades.

So naturally, a bipartisan group of senators has reintroduced a bill to override all of that.

Senators Coons, Cornyn, Hirono, and Tillis have brought back the Pro Codes Act, a bill that would grant copyright protection to standards that have been incorporated by reference into law. That means building codes, fire safety codes, electrical codes, accessibility guidelines — the kind of stuff that governs whether your house is up to code and violations of which can carry civil or criminal penalties — would remain the copyrighted property of the private standards development organizations (SDOs) that wrote them.

That would be really, really bad — and also, according to multiple federal courts, unconstitutional.

The press release from these senators is really something. Tillis says the bill “protects a commonsense system that keeps Americans safe without costing taxpayers a dime.” Coons worries about “a penalty for the non-profit organizations that developed them and stand to lose their intellectual property.” The Copyright Alliance (a copyright maximalist org funded by the usual suspects in Hollywood) CEO calls it “a clear win for public safety, transparency, and economic growth.”

You’d think we were talking about some beleaguered group of nonprofits on the verge of financial collapse, valiantly producing safety standards out of the goodness of their hearts, about to be crushed by pernicious freeloaders daring to read the laws for free. The reality, as Katherine Klosek and Garrett Reynolds detailed here on Techdirt, is rather different. The main SDOs pushing this bill — the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association — are making more money than ever, with CEO salaries upward of $1,000,000, compared to a median nonprofit CEO salary of around $115,682. Their revenues have grown even as organizations like Public.Resource.Org and UpCodes have been providing free, unfettered access to these incorporated standards for years.

As the Fifth Circuit noted way back in 2002:

“It is difficult to imagine an area of creative endeavor in which the copyright incentive is needed less. Trade organizations have powerful reasons stemming from industry standardization, quality control, and self regulation to produce these model codes; it is unlikely that, without copyright, they will cease producing them.”

Twenty-four years later, the prediction holds up perfectly. The SDOs kept producing standards. They kept growing their revenue. They just also want Congress to hand them a monopoly over public law, because the courts wouldn’t.

And the bill is sneaky about it: it includes a provision requiring that incorporated standards be made “publicly accessible online,” which the bill’s supporters point to as proof of their commitment to transparency. But the bill explicitly says this access must be provided “in a manner that does not substantially disrupt the ability of those organizations to earn revenue.” That’s Congress writing profit protection directly into the definition of “public access to the law.” In practice, as Klosek explained last year, this means read-only access where you can’t download, copy, print, or link to the standards. That’s not access to the law. That’s a peek at the law through a keyhole, on terms set by a private corporation.

Meanwhile, the organizations actually providing genuinely useful, free public access to these laws — Public.Resource.Org, UpCodes, and others — would be exposed to copyright liability under this bill. So the Pro Codes Act doesn’t just fail to improve public access to the law. It actively threatens the entities that are already doing a better job of providing that access than the SDOs ever have.

So when the senators pushing this bill talk up the need for “non-profits” to make money, what they’re really doing is choosing which nonprofits deserve to survive — the (already extremely well-resourced) ones that write the standards, rather than ones like Public.Resource.Org that actually make those standards available to the public.

This bill has never received a committee hearing. Not in this Congress. Not in any previous Congress. The last time around, it was brought to the House floor under suspension of the rules — a process reserved for non-controversial legislation — and still couldn’t muster the two-thirds majority needed to pass. A growing coalition of libraries, journalists, civil society organizations, disability rights groups, and the NAACP has lined up against it.

They’ve lined up against this law because it’s bad. It locks up the law behind copyright.

The Supreme Court. Multiple circuit courts. A broad coalition of public interest groups. All saying the same thing: the law belongs to the public. But as long as the SDOs keep spending millions on lobbying, Congress will apparently keep trying to give it away.

You’re never safe when you’re working for Trump. That much was obvious in Trump’s first term, when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and FBI Director James Comey. They were all fired for the same reason: failing to be completely loyal to Trump.

This time around even die-hard MAGA loyalists are being fired. DHS head Kristi Noem was dismissed from her position, despite being the enthusiastic figurehead of anti-migrant cruelty Trump definitely wanted in that position. Now, she’s cooling her heels and watching the dust settle on her political hopes as the doesn’t-sound-made-up-at-all “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.”

Less than a month later, another head has rolled. This time it’s Pam Bondi, who’s getting fired for failing to do the impossible while still remaining fiercely loyal to the Trump’s lost causes.

In recent weeks, Ms. Bondi tried to shore up her position by moving more aggressively against investigative targets singled out by Mr. Trump, including the former Obama official John O. Brennan and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to officials briefed on the effort.

It is not entirely clear if any specific action or event finally tipped the balance for Mr. Trump, who had been reluctant to fire senior officials to avoid reprising the chaotic turnstile personnel turnover of his first administration.

But with the dismissal of Ms. Noem and now Ms. Bondi, that might be changing. His calculus appears to have shifted after the quick confirmation of Markwayne Mullin as Ms. Noem’s replacement.

Bondi’s head may have been destined for the chopping block months ago, when Trump (in what appeared to be a personal message accidentally posted on main) berated Bondi for not doing all the impossible stuff he wanted done right now, like engaging in vindictive prosecutions that were (1) obviously vindictive, and (2) didn’t have enough evidence to support the hallucinatory charges dreamed up by Trump and his DOJ enablers.

Nothing has improved since then. Lots of prosecutors have left the DOJ, refusing to engage in Trump’s overt politicization of the department. Others have been dismissed for the same reason. A handful of handpicked prosecutors have been sidelined by judges because they were never formally appointed. And grand juries are frequently refusing to buy what the government’s selling, terminating prosecutions before they can even get off the ground.

Not that we should expect anything better (or more ethical) from her replacement. Todd Blanche is a true Trump loyalist. But he’s taking over a DOJ that’s short on experience, long on MAGA loyalty, and whose reputation has been completely destroyed by this administration and its actions.

The stuff Bondi failed to get done will continue to not happen. Anyone stepping into this position should know it’s only going to be temporary. The president who thinks he’s a king will continue to see courts stifle his worst impulses. Changing the name on the letterhead isn’t suddenly going to make vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions any more legal or feasible.

But I don’t have any sympathy for anyone being shit-canned for failing to satisfy the whims of a megalomaniac who thinks he’s a king, rather than a temporarily elevated politician. They’re far more than merely complicit. They’re fully supportive of destroying America and its institutions to usher in a new age of white Christian nationalism. So, fuck ’em. They got what they deserved.

The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week’s House of Lords debate on the topic, we’re getting you situated with a primer on what’s been happening and what it all means.

What was the last vote about? 

On 9 March, the House of Commons discussed amendments tabled by the House of Lords in the government’s flagship legislation, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. 

The House of Lords previously tabled an amendment to “prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users” of “all regulated user-to-user services,” to be implemented by “highly-effective age assurance measures,” which effectively banned under-16s from social media. When this proposal came before the House of Commons, MPs defeated it by 307 votes to 173. 

Instead, the Commons proposed its own amendment: enabling the Secretary of State to introduce provisions “requiring providers of specified internet services” to prevent access by children, under age 18 rather than 16, to specified internet services or to specified features; and to restrict access by children to specified internet services which ministers provide. 

Who does this give powers to?

The Commons proposal redirects power from the UK Parliament and the UK’s independent telecom regulator Ofcom to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, currently Liz Kendall, who will be able to restrict internet access for young people and determine what content is considered harmful…just because she can. The amendment also empowers the Secretary of State to limit VPN use for under 18s, as well as restrict access to addictive features and change the age of digital consent in the country; for example, preventing under-18s from playing games online after a certain time.  

Why is this a problem? 

This process is devoid of checks or accountability mechanisms as ministers will not be required to demonstrate specific harms to young people, which essentially unravels years-long efforts by Ofcom to assess online services according to their risks. And given the moment the UK is currently in, such as refusing to protect trans and LGBTQ+ communities and flaming hostile and racist discourses, it is not unlikely that we’ll see ministers start restricting content that they ideologically or morally feel opposed to, rather than because the content is harmful based, as established by evidence and assessed pursuant to established human rights principles. 

We know from other jurisdictions like the United States that legislation seeking to protect young people typically sweeps up a slew of broadly-defined topics. Some block access to websites that contain some “sexual material harmful to minors,” which has historically meant explicit sexual content. But some states are now defining the term more broadly so that “sexual material harmful to minors” could encompass anything like sex education; others simply list a variety of vaguely-defined harms. In either instance, this bill would enable ministers to target LGBTQ+ content online by pushing this behind an under-18s age gate, and this risk is especially clear given what we already know about platform content policies. 

How will this impact young people? 

The internet is an essential resource for young people (and adults) to access information, explore community, and find themselves. Beyond being spaces where people can share funny videos and engage with enjoyable content, social media enables young people to engage with the world in a way that transcends their in-person realm, as well as find information they may not feel safe to access offline, such as about family abuse or their sexuality. In severing this connection to people and information by banning social media, politicians are forcing millions of young people into a dark and censored world. 

How did each party vote? 

The initial push to ban under-16s from social media came from the Conservative Party, who have since accused the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer of “dither and delay” for not committing to the ban. The Liberal Democrats have also called this “not good enough.” The Labour Party itself is split, with 107 Labour Party MPs abstaining in the vote on the House of Lords amendment. 

But we know that the issue of young people’s online safety is a polarizing topic that politicians have—and will continue to—weaponize for public support, regardless of their actual intentions. This is why we will continue to urge policymakers and regulators to protect people’s rights and freedoms online at all moments, and not just take the easy route for a quick boost in the polls.

How does this bill connect to the Online Safety Act?

The draft Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that came from the Lords provided that any regulation pertaining to the well-being of young people on social media “must be treated as an enforceable requirement” with the Online Safety Act. The Commons amendment, however, starts out by inserting a new clause that amends the Online Safety Act. 

For more than six years, we’ve been calling on the UK government to pass better legislation around regulating the internet, and when the Online Safety Act passed we continued to advocate for the rights of people on the internet—including young people—as Ofcom implemented the legislation. This has been a protracted effort by civil society groups, technologists, tech companies, and others participating in Ofcom’s consultation process and urging the regulator to protect internet users in the UK.

The MPs amendment essentially rips this up. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall recently said that ministers intended to go further than the existing Online Safety Act because it was “never meant to be the end point, and we know parents still have serious concerns. That is why I am prepared to take further action.” But when this further action is empowering herself to make arbitrary decisions on content and access, and banning under-18s from social media, this causes much more harm than it solves. 

Is the UK alone in pushing legislation like this? 

Sadly, no. Calls to ban social media access for young people have gained traction since Australia became the first country in the world to enforce one back in December. On 5 March, Indonesia announced a ban on social media and other “high-risk” online platforms for users under 16. A few days later, new measures came into effect in Brazil that restricts social media access for under-16s, who must now have their accounts linked to a legal guardian. Other countries like Spain and the Philippines have this year announced plans to ban social media for under-16s, with legislation currently pending to implement this.

What are the next steps?

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill returns to the House of Lords on 25 March for consideration of the new Commons amendments. The bill will only become law if both Houses agree to the final draft. 

We will continue to stand up against these proposals—not only to young people’ free expression rights, but also to safeguard the free flow of information that is vital to a democratic society. The issue of online safety is not solved through technology alone, especially not through a ban, and young people deserve a more intentional approach to protecting their safety and privacy online, not this lazy strategy that causes more harm than it solves. 

We encourage politicians in the UK to look into what is best, not what is easy, and explore less invasive approaches to protect all people from online harms. 

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Before we get into this, let’s set the scene a little:

The latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted Jan. 20-26, 2026, finds that most White evangelicals (69%) approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president. And a majority (58%) say they support all or most of his plans and policies.

Let that sink in for a bit. The operative term here is probably “white,” but Trump has been embraced by the evangelical community, despite his being about as far removed from the ideals of Christianity as their arch-nemesis, trans people the Devil. (And let’s not forget I’m talking about the ideals, which are often preached but rarely practiced.)

Here’s how Trump handled Easter morning, one of the holiest (no pun intended) holidays observed by the people most likely to support him no matter what:

In Trump’s own words, at 5:03 am on Easter Sunday:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Now, I have to admit that when I first read this, I thought Trump was announcing some new celebration of US infrastructure before derailing his own train of thought. But it’s definitely not that.

It’s the other thing… which turns out to be Trump announcing planned war crimes. Again.

Both sides have threatened and hit civilian targets like oil fields and desalination plants critical for drinking water. Iran’s U.N. mission on social media called Trump’s threat “clear evidence of intent to commit war crime.”

Iran’s military joint command warned of stepped-up retaliatory attacks on regional oil and civilian infrastructure if the U.S. and Israel attack such targets there, according to state television.

The laws of armed conflict allow attacks on civilian infrastructure only if the military advantage outweighs the civilian harm, legal scholars say. It’s considered a high bar to clear, and causing excessive suffering to civilians can constitute a war crime.

While it looks like both sides in this war are willing to strike civilian infrastructure, the United States should be trying to take the high road (the one without war crimes). And if it can’t be bothered to do that, the administration should — at the very least — try to keep the president from publicly saying we’re going to commit war crimes.

But, alas, there’s no one willing to stop him. Pete Hegseth is definitely relishing his unearned role as the Secretary of Defense (“Back to the Stone Age.”) And he appears to be firing anyone who disagrees with things like drone-killing people in international waters and, you know, engaging in war crimes.

Both Trump and Hegseth have publicly claimed they’re doing God’s work by going to war with Iran, something that has been echoed by the same demographic detailed in the Pew Research survey.

Shamefully, they won’t see a drop in support despite Trump threatening war crimes, dropping an F-bomb, and promising to send people halfway around the world to hell, as if he were a god himself. And that’s a damning indictment of an entire segment of Americans who choose to treat their religion as a weapon and want the world to be remade in their own image — something they often accuse Muslims of doing. The irony is lost on them, along with the man they’ve chosen to treat as God’s appointed leader.

We’ve had a lot of low points as a nation, but usually we’ve at least tried to improve. That’s no longer the case. We’re under the rule of people who debase and abuse the nation they claim to love. Happy Fuckin’ Easter, you crazy bastards. Welcome to Hell.

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Fact-checking is not censorship. Asking a publication to correct factual errors is not censorship. Pointing out that someone’s book contains demonstrably false claims is not censorship. None of this should require explanation. And yet here we are, because author Jacob Siegel has decided that Renee DiResta requesting corrections to false statements he made about her — in his book and in reviews of his book — constitutes some kind of sinister suppression campaign. He’s gone as far as writing an article at The Free Press (which I have no intention of linking to and giving more traffic) publicly accusing her of plotting to censor a review of his book published in The Baffler. He spent a morning on Twitter calling her “a figure connected to the US government” (she’s not) who “pressure[d] a publication to remove its review of my book” (she didn’t).

This is all, to put it plainly, absolute nonsense. But it’s a specific strain of “free speech absolutist” nonsense that we keep seeing over and over again. And I say that as someone who has spent decades fighting for free speech, but is pretty damn sick of these free speech tourists, pretending to support free speech when they’re really just trying to protect themselves and their friends from social consequences for saying something stupid, or just something blatantly false.

We’ve seen this playbook before. Six years ago, a group of prominent intellectuals published what became known as the “Harper’s Letter,” ostensibly warning of a rising tide of censorship and illiberalism supposedly threatening free expression. But when you actually looked at the cases they cited, what you mostly found was… people criticizing them (or their friends). Sometimes sharply. Sometimes even unfairly. But the “intolerance” they described was just other people exercising their own free speech to push back on ideas they disagreed with. As we noted at the time, the whole thing amounted to famous people with massive platforms, and little self-awareness, using those very platforms to complain about being silenced.

But the Harper’s Letter crowd, for all their hand-wringing, were at least mostly operating in the realm of opinion and social consequences. They didn’t like that people disagreed with them loudly. Fair enough. It was thin-skinned and cringey, but mostly harmless. Siegel is doing something worse, because he made demonstrable factual errors in his book. Rather than owning them, he’s accusing the person he published false information about of censorship for having the temerity to ask for corrections.

If asking for a correction to a false factual claim counts as censorship, the word has been stretched so far that it no longer means anything. Which is probably the point. The more the term gets diluted, the easier it is to weaponize against anyone who challenges you on the facts.

Some background: Siegel published a book called The Information State, which is basically a book-length expansion of his 2023 Tablet essay about what he and a small group of MAGA-leaning grifters call the “censorship industrial complex.” One of his main arguments centers on the Election Integrity Partnership, an academic research project DiResta worked on during the 2020 election. Siegel’s book says the EIP “classified 21,897,364 tweets” as “misinformation incidents,” and he places this number in a context carefully designed to make readers believe the project flagged 22 million tweets to platforms for removal. As DiResta explains:

A couple of pages before the number appears, Siegel spends a some time on a character sketch establishing me as dishonest. Then he describes me as leading “the Election Integrity Partnership, at the time perhaps the largest public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative in existence.” He then writes that “over a hundred employees in the EIP network maintained nearly round-the-clock coverage of social media” and sent “alerts and takedown requests” that platforms responded to in under an hour. Immediately after that operational framing — the censorious leader, round-the-clock monitoring, the takedown requests, the rapid platform response — he drops the 22 million number: the EIP “reported collecting more than 859 million tweets for analysis and classifying 21,897,364 tweets on ‘tickets’ as unique ‘misinformation incidents’ just between August 15 and December 12, 2020.”

Read in sequence, the clear implication is that this was the scale of the “censorship operation”: a hundred people working around the clock flagged 22 million tweets to platforms, which obediently took them down within the hour. That is how people on Twitter are reading it, too.

That is not what happened.

What actually happened, as we’ve covered in detail before, is that the 22 million figure comes from a post-election academic analysis of how viral election narratives spread across social media — a research dataset, not a list of items flagged for removal. During the actual election, EIP flagged roughly 4,800 URLs total, including 2,890 tweets, to platforms for possible policy violations like impersonating poll workers. As DiResta notes:

Of those, approximately 65 percent received no platform action whatsoever, about 25 percent were labeled, and ~10 percent were removed — by the platforms, under their own policies. No government agency directed or funded any of it. Those are the real numbers. A few hundred tweets came down. This is in the public record, in our publications, in amicus briefs, in legal filings, and in congressional testimony. Every flagging ‘ticket’ we sent to a platform was turned over to Jim Jordan’s Weaponization Subcommittee under subpoena. Even Jordan’s deeply partisan report does not attempt to substantiate the “22 million” framing — because it can’t be substantiated, because it isn’t true.

Because this point apparently can’t be stated enough: the EIP flagged fewer than 3,000 total tweets, essentially asking Twitter: “hey, does this violate your rules?” Many of those reports actually came from local election officials worried about disinformation — things like false information about where and when to vote — who figured that a coordinated flag from a research partnership might get more attention than a single complaint.

But what EIP did was really no different than what ANYONE could do by seeing a piece of content on social media and clicking the ever-available “report” button. I’ll note (because I just checked) even X (the supposed, but not really, free speech platform) still lets anyone report any content, and among the categories you can report content for is… “civic integrity.”

In the case of EIP, it submitted fewer than 5,000 such URLs across multiple platforms and the platforms DID NOTHING in response to the majority of them, finding that they did not, in fact, violate any policies. While they took action on 35%, most of those were “labeling” (i.e., providing more speech) and only 10% involved removals (and most of the ones that were removed involved blatant election disinformation, such as telling people to vote in places that had no polling place).

That’s just a few hundred tweets removed, decided by the private companies based on their own decisions.

The 22 million number, which Matt Taibbi and others pushed for many months was what EIP wrote about months later, when they wrote a report about how misinformation spread. It was not content they asked to be removed. It was not content they alerted platforms to. It was just what their (months later) after report reviewed on the platform, trying to show how misinformation spread.

Siegel, apparently, knows all of this. DiResta claims she told him in person before he published. He published the misleading framing anyway. That’s on him. If that leads others to repeat that false information and later being asked for a correction, that is 100% on Siegel for failing to do his own homework and choosing to publish information he was told, point blank, was false.

So when reviews of his book repeated the 22 million number as if it described the scale of active censorship — because Siegel’s book is designed to make readers draw exactly that conclusion — DiResta contacted three separate publications and asked for corrections. This is the most normal thing a person can do when they’ve been written about inaccurately. It happens every day across every type of journalism. It is, in the most basic sense, counterspeech. “Hey, you published this thing, it got some important facts wrong, here’s what they are, and why they’re wrong. Can you issue a correction?”

In no definition of “censorship” is that censorship.

Of the three publications DiResta alerted that they were repeating false statements, there were three very different responses: The Brownstone Institute did nothing. The Free Beacon issued a correction. The Baffler pulled their review entirely. As DiResta makes clear:

To be unambiguously clear, I did not ask The Baffler to pull their review. I asked for a correction. The fact that they pulled it, though, made Siegel lose his mind.

That last part is key. DiResta asked for a correction. The Baffler, after reviewing the evidence, independently decided to pull the review — presumably because the errors were significant enough that a simple correction wouldn’t suffice. That was the publication’s editorial decision. But Siegel treated it as proof that DiResta was running a censorship operation against him. He falsely accused her of pressuring a publication to remove its review in his Free Press article. On X, he went even further and dropped the “pressuring” qualifier and just flatly accused her of being behind the decision.

Siegel was wrong about the supposed “censorship operation” DiResta supposedly ran during the 2020 election. And now he’s wrong about the “censorship operation” he thinks she’s running against his book now.

Is he ever right about anything?

And the Free Press ran this without anything resembling proper fact-checking. When DiResta asked Bari Weiss’s (and now CBS’s) the Free Press how Siegel’s blatantly false claims made it through editorial review, the answer was remarkable:

When I asked The Free Press how Siegel’s theory made it through fact-checking, they told me that Siegel emailing me to demand my correspondence with The Baffler, The Free Beacon, and The Brownstone Institute was the factcheck.

So to be clear: the “fact-check” on an article accusing someone of orchestrating censorship consisted of the accuser sending his target a hostile email demanding she turn over her correspondence. I know that fact checking is a dead art, but that’s not how fact checking works. For a publication that built its brand on being a corrective to mainstream media sloppiness, it’s embarrassing.

DiResta describes the trap Siegel has constructed:

Siegel’s article is designed so that every possible response feeds his narrative. If I stay quiet, the lies ossify. If I ask for corrections, that’s “suppression.” As I push back publicly here, watch, I’ll become an ‘unhinged woman.’ If a publication independently decides his claims don’t hold up, that’s my fault too.

This is the core of the problem, and it extends well beyond Siegel. This specific rhetorical move has been gaining traction for years: the redefinition of “censorship” to include any form of factual challenge, correction, or even disagreement. We saw it when the NY Post declared that fact-checking was censorship. We’ve seen it when people accused social media of “censorship” for merely adding more speech to a discussion.

And the accusation does double duty as marketing. Every correction request becomes a news hook. Every pushback becomes evidence of the conspiracy described in the book. The victimhood is the product. It drives sales, generates sympathetic coverage in friendly outlets, and turns the factual question — was the book accurate? — into a secondary concern.

DiResta puts it well:

The allegations that I’m debunking here are load-bearing walls in Siegel’s book. If 22 million tweets weren’t flagged — and they weren’t — then “perhaps the largest public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative in existence” shrinks to an academic project in which researchers tagged a few thousand URLs to private platforms, most of which they ignored. That’s why Siegel is so angry. It’s not that I’m “censoring” him. It’s that I was never a government-puppet “censor” at all.

Pull out the load-bearing claims and the whole structure collapses. When the structure is a sweeping conspiracy theory about a “censorship industrial complex,” the author has every incentive to make sure nobody pulls those claims out. Reframing factual corrections as censorship is how you protect a weak foundation — it turns your biggest vulnerability into your biggest rhetorical asset.

Free speech means Siegel can publish his book. He did! It’s out there, for sale, being reviewed, being discussed. Free speech means DiResta can point out that the book contains factually false claims about her. She did that too. Free speech means publications can decide whether to correct, retract, or stand by reviews based on their own editorial judgment. The Baffler made its call. The Free Beacon made a different one.

None of this is censorship. It is the system working as intended. The proverbial “marketplace of ideas” that free speech advocates claim to champion depends on people being able to challenge false claims without being accused of suppression. If “censorship” means “someone publicly disagreed with me and a publication decided my claims didn’t hold up,” then the concept has been gutted.

Siegel published a book making grand claims about a censorship machine. The subject of those claims had the receipts proving those claims false. She asked for corrections through entirely normal channels. One publication issued a correction, one did nothing, and one pulled its review entirely. Siegel’s response was to accuse her of censorship — from his perch at a well-funded publication, with a book on the market and an audience on X hanging on his every word.

Rather than being gagged, he’s simply being corrected. The fact that he can’t tell the difference — or, more likely, that he can tell the difference and has decided that pretending otherwise is more profitable — tells you everything you need to know about how seriously to take his claims.

The Supreme Court’s latest recap of its relative inactivity (Trump administration “emergency” appeals aside) has delivered yet more evidence of this court’s indifference to rights violations committed by the government. Other cases involving alleged rights violations that should have — at the very least — been handed over to jury for further consideration were tacitly blessed by the top court in the land by its refusal to grant certori.

This one — involving the retaliatory arrest of an independent journalists by cops who didn’t like her reporting — is yet another miscarriage of justice by a Supreme Court whose majority simply won’t take cases that might force it to hold the government accountable for its actions.

This case has bounced up and down the judicial ladder for more than a half-decade. Laredo, Texas native/independent journalist Priscilla Villarreal has been live streaming and reporting via Facebook under the name “Lagordiloca” for several years. Laredo PD officers don’t like her because she asks them questions they don’t like answering and films them when they’re performing traffic stops and arrests.

After Villarreal published information about a Border Patrol officer who had committed suicide, the Laredo PD worked with local prosecutors to have her arrested. All Villarreal had done was ask a PD employee to confirm information she’d already obtained. The PD responded by opening an internal investigation to oust the employee that had responded to Villarreal’s queries. Then it decided the only way for justice to be done was to arrest the person who had merely received confirmation (via a law enforcement employee) she already had in her possession.

Prosecutors claimed Villarreal’s acquisition and publication of this information violated a state law forbidding people from profiting from “misuse of official information.” To support this claim, the prosecutors claimed Facebook clicks were a form of “profit.” To date, no other citizen has ever been prosecuted under this law that was clearly written to prevent government employees from profiting from information only government employees might have access to.

The local judge immediately tossed the bullshit charges immediately after they were presented to her in court. Somehow, the district court managed to look past the obvious First Amendment violations to give the officers immunity. The Fifth Circuit’s first pass reversed this, with Judge Ho making it clear there’s no way any reasonable officer would have thought arresting a journalist simply for asking questions didn’t violate the Constitution.

This is not just an obvious constitutional infringement—it’s hard to imagine a more textbook violation of the First Amendment.

Then things got weird. A couple of judges in the minority thought this shouldn’t stand and started making noise. The Fifth Circuit agreed to an en banc hearing and reissued this opinion with a new dissent written by Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, along with some additional commentary by Judge Ho about how far removed from sanity Richman’s dissent was.

Two years later, it handed down its second take. And the majority somehow came to the conclusion that it’s okay to engage in retaliatory arrests as long as you can find any criminal statute at all to support the arrest. According to Judge Jones, Villarreal should have either limited herself to official channels or challenged the law itself in court, rather than ask a government employee to verify information Villarreal already possessed.

This was appealed. Eight months later, the Supreme Court sent it back down to the Fifth Circuit for yet another pass, instructing it to apply the Trevino standard. That standard is fairly simple: if a law is rarely, if ever, enforced but somehow shows up conveniently to do the cops’ dirty work when they want to retaliate against a person they don’t like, there’s a good chance this selective application is an established violation of rights. In this case, prosecutors had never used this law to charge anyone ever.

The Fifth Circuit’s third pass — again written by Judge Edith Jones — said the Trevino factor just didn’t matter. If the law was on the books (even if it had never been enforced), it was justification enough for the arrest. And even if that arrest violated the Constitution, the officers should still be given qualified immunity because how could they have known that arresting the only person ever charged with this crime in its 23 years of existence might somehow be unconstitutionally retaliatory?

Now that we’re caught up, this is how it ends for Priscilla Villarreal:

The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

There’s a dissent written by Justice Sotomayor that’s even lengthier than my preamble. It’s worth reading, though, and it starts with this admonishment of the majority’s refusal to write this obvious wrong:

It should be obvious that this arrest violated the First Amendment. Yet the Fifth Circuit held that the officials were entitled to qualified immunity, and now Villarreal is left without a remedy. The Court today makes a grave error by declining to hear this case.

The nation’s top court has decided the Laredo PD and local prosecutors can walk away cleanly from a series of extremely obvious rights violations. And in doing so, it emboldens them (and others) to engage in future retaliatory arrests of journalists they don’t like.

The Supreme Court majority is apparently willing to pretend rights don’t exist when it’s convenient to do so, just like the officers whose actions it tacitly blesses with this particular inaction. Sotomayor drills down on this, rubbing the majority’s nose in its deliberate dismissal of constitutional rights:

[T]he Fifth Circuit found that the officials reasonably believed that they had probable cause to arrest Villarreal for violating §39.06(c). Id., at 385–390. Not so. Just like an individual cannot be convicted of a crime for engaging in First Amendment activity, it is axiomatic that a probable cause determination cannot be based on such protected activity either.

[…]

It necessarily follows that when an arrest is based on protected First Amendment activity, that activity cannot constitute probable cause and support adverse police action. All reasonable officers know this.

[…]

Here, it is hard to conceive of a more obvious constitutional violation than arresting a journalist who, in searching for corroboration, simply asks a government source for information. That is the essence of many journalists’ jobs. The arrest does not somehow become reasonable, and constitutional, merely because an unconstitutional application of a statute authorizes it.

All we have is the dissent. All Villarreal has is knowledge Laredo PD officers and local prosecutors will be digging through the state statutes to find something else to charge her with the next time her reporting pisses them off. The Supreme Court issued a short, clear instruction to the Fifth Circuit, telling it to apply a specific legal standard. Instead, the Fifth Circuit — led by the consistently awful Judge Edith Jones – sidestepped this instruction on its way towards granting the officers qualified immunity. And that deliberate refusal to engage with the Supreme Court’s specific instructions has now been ignored by the same court that strongly hinted the Fifth Circuit got this wrong. It’s a shrug that lets the general public know exactly where it stands: at the bottom of the national organization chart with no layers of protection between them and government officials who seek to do them harm.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment offering an additional resource on our post about the White House’s new app:

The other half of the story

The analysis by “thereallo” covers the Android version; there’s a dissection of the iOS version at Security Analysis of the Official White House iOS App

It’s just as bad and sheds additional light on why this is a security and privacy disaster.

In second place, it’s a reply from Rocky to a commenter who was angrily getting everything wrong about the Murthy ruling:

What’s pathetic clownboy, is that you think you understand legal matters.

You blather on about merit while totally missing the point why they ruled they way they did and it is just mindboggling that you are unable to connect the dots here. It is very simple, it was concluded the plaintiffs suit had no merit, substance or proof of injury (you know, the part you are desperately ignoring) that would trigger Article III standing.

But keep screaming about lies while we point out your stupid clownishness.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from martin1961 deploying an aphorism in response to Virginia’s legally misguided attempts to compel CSAM scanning:

When you come across a man made obstacle, do you
A) dismantle it and carry on, or
B) find out why it was placed there in the first place ?

Next, it’s Drew Wilson pushing back against a commenter who disputed the comparison of the social media moral panic to previous moral panics:

That would be because the comparisons are justified. Video games were supposedly going to corrupt the youth by turning them into murdering psychopaths who would be deadly effective because they train all day on their “murder simulators”. That never played out no matter how many times the media blamed video games for anything violent.

The same is being done with social media. Social media is corrupting the youth because the youth will become distracted or have no sense of morality because they are seeing easily accessible pornography on platforms like YouTube (something that doesn’t even pass the laugh test in my books).

If there are any fundamental differences between the two, I’m not seeing it. There was never really any evidence that video games were going to turn the youth into murder machines and there was never any evidence to say that social media will inherently destroy the youths moral compass, attentiveness, or whatever else the heck that is being fabricated by politicians and the media.

The irony here is that by making your argument, you proved Masnick’s point about someone always insisting that “this time it’s different”.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Pixelation with a comment about RFK Jr.’s struggle to fill the CDC Director position:

Job ad

Needed: Whipping boy. Experience required:Conspiracy theorist.

In second place, it’s Arianity with a quip (plus a nice note) on last week’s comment post regarding the considerable length of one of the winning comments:

Congrats to Azuaron for getting their first article published on TD!

In all seriousness though, that article’s comment section was one of the best I’ve ever seen in terms of people actually productively trying to work through issues and explain their positions, even if I didn’t agree with everything.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Thad on our post about Pete Hegseth’s war on truth:

It’s not a war, it’s a military operation on truth.

Finally, it’s MrWilson with a good reply to anyone making confidently wrong statements about the law:

Another thorough legal analysis from Trust, Me, Bro, & Associates, all graduates of the Gut Feeling School of Law, magna cum dumbass.

That’s all for this week, folks!

It’s time for the second in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already covered the Best Adaptation winner, and this week we’re looking at the winner of Best Deep Cut: CARAMENTRAN by RedSPINE and poymakes.

Sometimes, we get entries that were designed for more than one game jam, and this is one of them. In this case, the game was also created for the Themed Horror game jam in which one of the themes was “macabre carnival”. CARAMENTRAN delves specifically into a Provençal carnival tradition from France, in which the “King of Carnival” or Caramentran is put on trial for all the year’s ills then burned at the stake in punishment. As the player, you are Caramentran himself, trying to ward off accusations from the villagers while extinguishing the flames at your feet in a grimy, unsettling horror arcade game.

It’s a fitting premise for a horror game, but what makes it special for this game jam is its visual assets, drawn from a variety of public domain sources. The game’s hauntingly hideous aesthetic comes from a collage of archive images and postcards of actual carnivals in Southern France, combined with figures taken from American magazines, ads, and fashion plates.

Many of the materials are from 1930, while many others are from earlier, and the combination of wildly different styles is viscerally jarring in a way that amplifies the horror. There are no widely recognized images or famous works of art here, only fragments of visual language plucked piece by piece from the vast sea of imagery in the public domain, and for that it’s this year’s Best Deep Cut.

Congratulations to RedSPINE and poymakes for the win! You can play CARAMENTRAN in your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1931!