Bethesda has something of a history of embracing its modding communities. This has historically included not being aggressive on matters of IP against modders, attempting to build an economy around the modding community itself, and even being quite tolerant of fan-made expansions and the like of the publisher’s titles. This was all well and good until Bethesda was acquired by Microsoft. Straddling the before and after of that acquisition are some ambitious fan-led projects, perhaps none larger than Skyblivion, a project to completely remake The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in the Skyrim engine.

The team behind the project previously indicated that it should be completed at some point this year, but I wondered aloud several months ago whether it would be allowed to move forward, or if this would be one of those fan-made projects that is killed off by the lawyers at the last minute, now that Microsoft is in charge. Complicating this further is the long-rumored remaster of Oblivion from Bethesda itself, released just this week. With what would be a competing project, even though Skyblivion is going to be released for free, what would this mean for the project being able to go forward?

Thankfully, and much to this writer’s surprise, it appears that Microsoft and Bethesda are playing cool with the entire project.

Fortunately for the Skyblivion team, Bethesda has apparently decided there’s room enough in this world for both official and unofficial remakes of Oblivion. The team took to social media Tuesday to thank Bethesda for “their continued support” and for “the generous gift of Oblivion Remastered game keys for our entire modding team.”

“To clear up any confusion Bethesda made it clear that they have no intention of shutting down our project,” the team added in a social media reply.

Now, hopefully, that also means that Microsoft has no intention of shutting this down, either. One would hope that any messaging about this from Bethesda has cleared whatever internal bureaucratic hurdles with the parent company required to make that stance firm.

It’s worth noting several things here. First, this fan project did not make use of any Bethesda assets beyond using Skyrim’s engine. Everything has been recreated from scratch, from what I understand. Second, you can’t play Skyblivion without having bought specific versions of both Oblivion and Skyrim, so there really is no threat to the publisher here. In fact, this should be a boon to them and, if anything, drive more sales for these older titles.

And, finally, these fans have, by all accounts, been very cool and respectful of Bethesda throughout the process.

Earlier this month, when credible rumors of the official Oblivion remaster were running rampant, the Skyblivion team posted that it was “eagerly aniticipating” the official release and that there was “no need for comparisons or a sense of competition between Skyblivion and a potential official remaster.” That’s particularly true, the team wrote, because Skyblivion’s PC mod won’t be available for console players, who will be able to enjoy Bethesda’s official version instead.

And now, Bethesda and Microsoft are being human and cool right back at them. I haven’t spilled much ink praising large companies like Microsoft for being sensible on matters that include their intellectual property, but here we are. When Microsoft does something cool, I suppose we owe it to the universe to say so out loud.

Gavin Newsom’s characterization of the Abrego García deportation as a “distraction” represents a catastrophic failure of moral clarity and constitutional understanding.

This isn’t a distraction. This is the constitutional foundation of our Republic hinging on a single case.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s at stake: The Supreme Court has issued a unanimous 9-0 order demanding that the administration facilitate the return Abrego García to the United States. A 9-0 ruling. In today’s polarized Court. This isn’t partisan; it’s fundamental. The President, bound by oath and the Constitution to “faithfully execute the laws,” is openly defying the highest judicial authority in the land.

If a President can simply ignore a direct, unanimous Supreme Court order with no consequences, then what remains of checks and balances? What remains of the separation of powers? What remains of the rule of law itself? This is not hyperbole—this is the actual constitutional crisis we were warned about, happening in real time.

The so-called “pragmatists” like Newsom who suggest we focus on “kitchen table issues” instead reveal a profound misunderstanding of what’s at stake. They present a false choice between economic concerns and constitutional principles—as if Americans cannot care about both their retirement accounts and whether we still have a functioning constitutional republic.

Perhaps Governor Newsom should visit Abrego García’s children—two with autism, one prone to seizures—and explain to them that their father’s wrongful imprisonment and torture in El Salvador is a “distraction” from more important matters. Perhaps he should tell these American citizens that the erroneous deportation of their father, in direct violation of his legal protections, is less important than poll-tested talking points about tariffs.

This is the Theater of Neutrality in its most shameful form—pretending that constitutional crises are merely political disagreements, that fundamental questions of rule of law are just one “issue” among many. It’s the cowardly posture that treats moral clarity as a political liability rather than a governing necessity.

What’s particularly galling is how Newsom frames this as political strategy: “Are they defending MS-13?” he asks, parroting the administration’s falsehoods even after a federal judge found that the gang allegations against Abrego García were based on a discredited database and testimony from a disgraced detective.

No, Governor. They’re defending the Constitution. They’re defending due process. They’re defending the principle that no one—not even a President—is above the law. They’re defending the idea that when the Supreme Court issues a unanimous order, it must be followed, not mocked or ignored.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And if we cannot summon the moral clarity to stand firmly against a President openly defying a direct Supreme Court order, then we have already surrendered the constitutional republic we claim to cherish.

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold. And holding it requires recognizing that some issues aren’t distractions but foundations. The rule of law isn’t a policy preference. It’s the condition that makes all other governance possible.

The ground approaches. And in this moment of constitutional gravity, those who cannot find their moral compass may find themselves remembered among those who stood aside while the Republic itself was undermined.

At this point, I’m not sure Gavin Newsom remembers what’s real.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

This post is about two things: that it looks like DOGE has violated an injunction, at least in spirit if not letter, and why it matters.

The injunction in question arose in the hybrid case, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO v. Social Security Administration, which named both DOGE and agency officials at the Social Security Administration.  It began as a TRO issued on March 20, which then became a preliminary injunction on April 17. The district court also refused to stay its enforcement.

The injunction does several things, but most notably it keeps DOGE from accessing identifiable personal information held on Social Security Administration systems except if certain conditions are met. See, for example, this part which generally bars DOGE’s access:

[T]he United States Social Security Administration (“SSA”), Leland Dudek, and Michael Russo and/or his successor (collectively, “SSA Defendants”), and any and all of their agents and employees, and any person working in concert with them, directly or indirectly, are ENJOINED and RESTRAINED from granting access to any SSA system of record containing personally identifiable information (“PII”), as defined in paragraph 9 hereof, or PII obtained, derived, copied, or exposed from any SSA system of record, including, but not limited to, records known as the Enterprise Data Warehouse (“EDW”), Numident, Master Beneficiary Record (“MBR”), Supplemental Security Record (“SSR”), and Treasury Payment Files, to the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”); the United States DOGE Service; the United States DOGE Service Temporary Organization; members of the DOGE Team established at the Social Security Administration, as defined in ¶ 11(a); Elon Musk; Amy Gleason; and/or any DOGE Affiliate(s), as defined in ¶ 11(b)[.]

Then this part describes conditions that must be met before any exception can be made:

3. SSA may provide members of the DOGE Team with access to discrete, particularized, and non-anonymized data, in accordance with the Privacy Act, and in accordance with the conditions set forth herein: SSA must first comply with the provisions in ¶ 2 of this Order and, in addition, SSA must first obtain from the DOGE Team member, in writing, and subject to possible review by the Court, a detailed explanation as to the need for the record and why, for said particular and discrete record, an anonymized or redacted record is not suitable for the specified use. The general and conclusory explanation that the information is needed to search for fraud or waste is not sufficient to establish need.

According to a declaration by Leland Dudek and certification by the government, the Social Security Administration and DOGE are complying with the injunction, although the SSA acknowledged what it described as two “inadvertent” violations during the pendency of the TRO.

While the Temporary Restraining Order was in effect, SSA had two occasions where systems access was inadvertently granted to systems containing PII. In one instance, controls were in place so the access permissions could not actually be used. In the other, the access was granted inadvertently and the agency confirmed that the systems were not actually accessed, and prompt action was taken to remove the access permissions.

But it is difficult to square this certification with news that DOGE has apparently altered the status of millions of people to make the living seem dead, or specifically move the 6000+ immigrants to the dead list. Furthermore, according to some reports, DOGE renamed the Death Master File to the “Ineligible Master File.”

It is of course theoretically possible that the status changes for the millions of people was done via a script, and DOGE never saw the individual records it changed. It is also possible that the deliberate placing of the 6000+ people was done at the direction of SSA leadership and not DOGE, to the extent that it is believable that such decisions could be taken independently of DOGE’s influence – we’ve seen this issue before, where the Trump Administration has tried to get his appointed toadies to “ratify” terrible things DOGE demanded to give them a veneer of legitimacy, even though they still are things they never could have lawfully done themselves under the APA or other operable laws.

But the injunction (and the TRO, which, although it might have varied slightly from the more recent injunction, does not seem to be significantly different in general substance) also restrained DOGE from altering any code, which, if they ran a script or converted a database name, these actions would seem to violate:

All DOGE Defendants, as well as all SSA DOGE Team members and DOGE Affiliates, are ENJOINED and RESTRAINED from accessing, altering, or disclosing any SSA computer or software code.

And as for whether they forced SSA staff to do these things themselves, it’s the forcing that is the issue. The court was very careful to make sure that SSA staff could still conduct business as normal – it’s partly why the injunction was deemed proper and staying of it not, because the agency was in no way harmed since it could still do its regular work – it was only the DOGE misadventures that were being delayed.

To avoid confusion or doubt, this Order expressly applies only to SSA employees working on the DOGE agenda. Employees of SSA who are not involved with the DOGE Team or otherwise involved in the work of the DOGE Team are not subject to the Order. Therefore, this Order has no bearing on the ordinary operations of SSA.

Only it turns out they don’t seem to have been delayed at all.

What the news is reporting happened here is very wrong, in multiple ways. Not only does it seemingly violate the injunction (and presumably also the TRO, which was likely in force when much of what happened happened – and although the TRO might differ in small detail from the later formal injunction, it seems to be largely the same in substance), but it is also wrong on its face to do what DOGE has apparently done and cause people to wrongfully, and without due process, be deprived benefits and more.

These sorts of concerns about harm to the public seem to have been on the court’s mind for quite some time. For instance, while this injunction was being litigated the government said that DOGE needed access to personally identifiable information to root out fraud. But to the court it sounded like what DOGE claimed it needed to do was an unconstitutional fishing expedition:

As I understand [it], the Fraud Detection Project appears to amount to an attempt to uncover fraud, without particular, specific grounds that suggest fraud. With the Privacy Act in mind, as addressed in ECF 49, it is unclear to me why there is any need to disclose PII before there is a basis to believe that fraud has occurred. Therefore, the Supplemental Declaration should also clarify the work of the Fraud Detection Project, to include whether there are known, identifiable instances of fraud for which particular PII is sought. And, if there are no such specific, identifiable instances of fraud, then Mr. Dudek should address the need for the disclosure of non-anonymized data before there is a factual basis to support a belief that fraud has occurred or is occurring.

Although this language does not specifically raise the issue of the Fourth Amendment, it echoes it. Per the Constitution people are to be secure in their private matters (“papers and effects”) unless there is probable cause, which would entitle the government to invade their privacy and conduct a search and seizure with sufficient particularity. And here the court appears to be saying, “Where is your probable cause that would entitle you to invade people’s privacy in the information on these systems? Where is the particularity?” The Fourth Amendment says that the government doesn’t get to rummage through people’s private records to look for a crime; it has to already have probable cause to believe there was one and then it can get a warrant allowing it to go find the proof. Whereas here DOGE was saying they had a “need” to conduct a warrantless search, and the court reminded them that no, they don’t.

But the concerns that the court stood up for in ordering its injunction is why all this Privacy Act litigation is so important. One way the Fourth Amendment stops being a barrier to the government getting access to people’s private affairs is if they consent to it. Here, the government has an awful lot of private data people have consented for it to have because it made sense to give that consent in that context. For instance, if people want social security benefits, it makes sense to consent for the Social Security Administration to have enough information about them to provide that benefit.

The point of the Privacy Act is to make that limited consent possible by providing the statutory barriers to make sure it is limited. People don’t consent that “the government” has access to their private information; they consent that the relevant agency has it for the limited purpose that they need it.  The rest of the government doesn’t get to say, “Hey, we don’t need a warrant because look! We already have all the data we need!” The Privacy Act essentially says the government only “has” the data insofar as the public has consented for it to have it for the limited purpose it was needed and makes it illegal for any agency to share it with other parts of the government, even though technically it could.

Here, DOGE (and also the corrupt leadership of the agency) is trying to shatter those statutory barriers preventing that sharing, and for exactly the reason that we have them: to cause harm to the public.  Which is what courts are noticing and why injunctions are being granted in other DOGE Privacy Act cases. Because, as we see with people wrongfully placed on the “dead” list, when the public’s private information is not shielded from unfettered government access, injustice is what follows.

The people most loudly (misleadingly) complaining about censorship just… helped enable actual censorship. Not metaphorical censorship, not “they won’t let me tweet slurs” censorship, but literal “we’re going to stop research into fighting actual government censorship” censorship.

It’s painfully stupid, but that’s just what we get with the folks running the government these days.

This all starts with a fundamental misunderstanding: the belief that any research into “disinformation” must itself be a censorship program. This is a bit like assuming that studying cancer is actually a plot to give people cancer, but this is the state of the crazy world we live in today. It ignores the rather obvious fact that disinformation and foreign influence campaigns do exist, and that studying them usually aims to counter them with more speech, not less.

But you will never get that through to the truly brain-wormed among the MAGA-Musk cinematic universe. Just recently, Elon announced that “several more censorship organizations will be released” after a Steve Bannon acolyte falsely posted to ExTwitter that USAID’s non-classified efforts to fund digital literacy efforts was about censorship (she claimed the programs were “declassified,” as she’s too ignorant to know that the “U” in the description means they were always unclassified).

Of course, digital literacy has nothing to do with “censorship” at all. It’s not about “getting news solely from legacy sources.” It simply is about teaching people how to understand what they’re reading (like knowing when something is unclassified already, rather than declassified) and understanding how to recognize when you’re being lied to.

Either way, in pursuit of dumbing down Americans and making them much more susceptible to foreign influence campaigns, last week the NSF got around to pulling a bunch of grants that were (often loosely) related to mis- and disinformation. NSF put out a statement claiming these cuts are about better aligning their efforts.

Awards that are not aligned with NSF’s priorities have been terminated, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation.

While the targeting of DEI initiatives has received significant attention, the wholesale elimination of mis- and disinformation research represents an equally concerning development.

While apparently 430 such grants have been unceremoniously canceled, one academic forwarded me a spreadsheet listing out about 50 such canceled grants. I don’t want to release the whole thing, but while NSF’s email to academics claimed that each cut was carefully vetted, that’s obviously bullshit.

The most obvious example of how haphazard and stupid these cuts are is that they cut Associate Professor Eric Wustrow’s CAREER grant on “Combating Censorship from Within the Network.” You can kinda tell that some DOGE bro likely did a keyword search on “censorship” and probably just killed all such projects. But if anyone actually read even just the description of the project, they’d realize that this was about countering censorship through technology. You’d think that’s the sort of thing that the DOGE folks would support? Unless of course, they actually support censorship. (Also, canceling CAREER grants is utter bullshit, as they’re specifically designed to help out early career professors, who will be massively harmed by this).

Other canceled grants include one on “empowering fact checkers” because we can’t have that. There’s a canceled grant about “enhancing attribution, detection, and explanation” of foreign influence campaigns (you can see why MAGA might not like that one very much). Also a program on “using markets to address manipulated information online.” You’d think that the “more speech” crew would like that sorta thing, but apparently not.

The impact of these cuts will be profound: reducing America’s ability to counter actual censorship, understand foreign influence operations, and maintain technological leadership in these critical areas.

We will all be dumber because of this nonsense.

The whole thing is so stupid that even the Trump-appointed head of the NSF resigned just after these cuts were announced.

“I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership,” writes Sethuraman Panchanathan, a computer scientist who was nominated to lead NSF by then-President Donald Trump in December 2019 and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2020. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”

Although Panchanathan, known as Panch, didn’t give a reason for his sudden departure, orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the agency’s $9 billion budget next year and fire half its 1700-person staff may have been the final straws in a series of directives Panchanathan felt he could no longer obey.

As Science notes, DOGE showed up in the NSF offices a few weeks ago and basically just started slashing stuff without much concern or understanding. And Panchanathan gives a little nod towards that nonsense in his resignation letter:

Panchanathan refers obliquely to that draconian reduction in his resignation letter. “While NSF has always been an efficient agency,” he writes, “we still took [on] the challenge of identifying other possible efficiencies and reducing our commitments to serve the scientific community even better.”

This is, like so much from this administration, needless destruction of important American infrastructure and knowledge base through ignorance, anger and stupidity. We will all be worse for it, but thank goodness, no one will ever have to face being… digitally literate in the Trump universe.

Get the skills you need to become a software tester with the Ultimate Software Testing Bundle. Software testing is performed to identify differences between given input and expected output and to verify that software products function according to pre-defined requirements. Courses cover the basics, Bugzilla, JIRA, testing techniques, Java TestNG, and more. It’s on sale for $60.

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.

What could possibly go wrong?

Operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumented immigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.

DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants.

That’s the opening of Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott’s report for Wired. Even before you get to the part that indicates this is just a conglomeration of bigots concocting a massive database solely for the purpose of finding foreigners to deport, there’s the fact that this will become one of the most enticing targets for state-sponsored hackers and criminals ever created. Imagine having all of this data in one place and knowing those included in the database are already highly leveraged by their increasingly tenuous living situations. Being merely scammed would be the best possible outcome. Extortion might end up being far more common.

But let’s get back to the, shall we say, more practical aspects of this mass surveillance database. This sort of thing has never been done before for obvious reasons. One of the reasons is listed above. Another reason is that certain information serves certain specific purposes. Putting it all together just makes it more difficult to perform these specific functions. Converting data silos into one giant haystack isn’t necessarily efficient. It’s just something that ignores all the practical reasons data like this is siloed because this current administration is too hateful and stupid to understand the underlying problems or care about the collateral damage.

This is a surveillance state that aspires to be a police state, all while under the nominal “leadership” of a racist billionaire and the terrible person who has now become president twice, despite clearly being unable to do the job the first time around.

While this might look like a cool new way to find brown people, rest assured it will be used to find anyone the Trump administration and its components dislike, as EFF staff attorney Victoria Noble explains in the Wired article:

“When you put all of an agency’s data into a central repository that everyone within an agency or even other agencies can access, you end up dramatically increasing the risk that this information will be accessed by people who don’t need it and are using it for improper reasons or repressive goals, to weaponize the information, use it against people they dislike, dissidents, surveil immigrants or other groups.”

Normal people see bugs. The GOP only sees a list of features. Even when the inevitable data breach occurs, the administration will shrug it off because it mostly affects people it doesn’t consider to be actual people. At best, they’re 3/5ths human and 2/5ths future El Salvadoran prison inmates.

The nastiest part of this “data lake” DOGE is recklessly creating is this: it will be used to find and deport immigrants who are doing everything the government asks them to do to stay on the path to citizenship.

DOGE wants to upload information to the data lake from myUSCIS, the online portal where immigrants can file petitions, communicate with USCIS, view their application history, and respond to requests for evidence supporting their case, two DHS sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED. In combination with IP address information from immigrants that sources tell WIRED that DOGE also wants, this data could be used to aid in geolocating undocumented immigrants, experts say.

This is from an administration that (dishonestly) claims it doesn’t have a problem with migrants who reside in this country legally. These actions say otherwise. This is the administration leveraging data and good faith efforts by immigrants to eject them before they can complete the citizenship process. This is on top of the now-routine revoking of perfectly legal visas and unilateral proclamations that the immigration/visa/temporary residency rules no longer apply.

Attempting to comply just puts immigrants on the DHS radar. A database like this fills in the missing info to allow ICE and others to eject people who are here legally or are doing everything they can to stay here as legal residents. And once this administration feels comfortable doing so, the same pool of information will be used to target immigration lawyers, pro-migrant advocates, and anyone else that has managed to cross-pollinate in the data lake. It might even go after you, Joe Taxpayer and lifetime US citizen.

“As part of their fixation on this conspiracy theory that undocumented people are voting, they’re also pulling in tens of thousands, millions of US citizens who did nothing more than vote or file for Social Security benefits,” Cody Venzke, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union focused on privacy and surveillance, tells WIRED.

It’s stupid and dangerous, which is unsurprising. That’s Trump’s brand. As long as it gives the government enough brown people to go after, Trump and his enablers will shrug off the collateral damage suffered by actual US citizens, much in the way they’ve shrugged off the gutting of social services and setting fire to people’s retirement accounts. In exchange, we’re getting a Gestapo of our own and the opportunity to be on the wrong side of history for the foreseeable future.

A few days ago I talked about how the Trump administration is desperate to present the illusion it still cares about consumer protection and “antitrust reform.” Via executive order, regulatory capture, DOGE cuts, and a rightward-lurching court system, Trump 2.0 really is taking an absolute hatchet to consumer protection, labor rights, corporate oversight, environmental law, and public safety.

It’s really not subtle. It’s also not very populist, or popular, so the Trumplings need to occasionally put on a good face to maintain the ruse they care about “antitrust reform” and consumer protection in what’s looking to be a new golden age of corruption.

Enter the FTC, where Trump just illegally fired the agency’s two Democrat commissioners. The FTC has been maintaining some of Lina Khan’s inquiries into California “big tech” companies. Not because they actually care about corporate power, but because they care about leverage. That leverage, so far, has quite successfully turned most Silicon Valley giants into obedient, authoritarian-coddling invertebrates.

The FTC this week also announced it had sued San Francisco based, Tesla-competitor Uber for deceptive billing practices, stating that the company charged consumers for its Uber One subscription service without their consent, failed to deliver promised savings, and made it difficult for users to cancel the service despite its “cancel anytime” promises. Said FTC boss Andrew Ferguson:

“The Trump-Vance FTC is fighting back on behalf of the American people.”

Indeed. That’s a bummer for Uber and Uber Technologies CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who collectively donated $2 million for the Trump inauguration fund.

Trump has made it clear their regulatory targets will usually be highly selective, and usually chosen for cronyism purposes (like, say a company directly competing with the billionaire running your DOGE department). There’s no limit of dangerous misrepresentation and potential fraud you could target Elon Musk’s companies for, but that’s clearly not happening under Trump 2.0.

Meanwhile most Trump agencies, like the FCC, are openly making it clear they plan to utterly eviscerate consumer protection. All while Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright make it so regulators can’t do much of anything without it being overturned down the road. These are actions that are going to make corporate malfeasance worse, not better.

At the same time, agencies like the FCC are hypocritically claiming to have authority they don’t have to do bizarre and legally incoherent things, like the harassment of companies for not being racist and sexist enough, accurately reporting on the Trump administration, or not going far enough to coddle right wing ideology or protect and nurture right wing online propaganda.

FTC boss Andrew Ferguson’s first act before joining the FTC was to announce he’d leverage the agency’s dwindling authority to do things like “fight back against the trans agenda,” and take aim at the tech industry’s “censorship” (read: refusing to coddle right wing ideology and propaganda).

A lot of gullible press outlets are going to see the cases against Meta, Uber, and Google and proclaim that Trump 2.0 is “perpetuating the antitrust legacy of Lina Khan.” But they’ll downplay the much larger reality that is the complete evisceration of most regulatory agencies and corporate oversight in a way that’s going to make all corporate misbehavior much, much worse.

There’s still a lot of normalization bias among people who don’t want to believe the reality of what’s happening. And a lot of major media outlets that are too afraid of losing money and access to accurately call a duck a duck.

When Trump 2.0 does take consumer-protection action, it’s going to be incredibly important to wait and see what the actual remedies for harm look like (if there are any). And whether any of these efforts survive the Trumplican court system being custom-repurposed to derail reform and corporate accountability of every kind, performative or otherwise.

For example the Trump-stocked Fifth and Sixth circuits have taken an absolute hatchet to efforts like net neutrality or location-data privacy enforcement. Any consumer protection efforts you do see are being taken knowning that they’re likely not going to survive the Trump-stocked court’s assault on regulatory oversight.

Which is to say I think most Trump 2.0 consumer protection efforts are still a sort of performance art, generally designed to trick the press and public into believing that the administration is populist, when on every level beneath that façade, it’s being built to coddle corporate power and a relatively tiny subset of white rich men.

Leaks can be both embarrassing and aggravating for any content producer, though we often see the most anger over this sort of thing coming from large corporate interests. The video game space is lousy with examples of this, but there is perhaps no more notoriously draconian respondent to leaks than Nintendo. The company has unsurprisingly suffered its share of leaked content and its response generally ranges from attempting to DMCA the leaks into oblivion — which never actually works — to unmasking and then bringing down the heaviest legal hammer it can wield upon the leaker. Lost in the sauce in all of this appears to be just how much this keeps those leaks Nintendo wanted to bury in the news, working at a complete cross-purpose to what the company’s stated aims are.

It gets all the more silly when there are months and months in between the initial leak and this sort of legal action. Game Freak announced back in October of last year that it had suffered a breach and that content ranging from internal employee information to unreleased information about past and future Pokémon games had been exfiltrated. Shortly after the announcement, some of the leaked information began appearing on social media sites, including on Discord. There a user going by GameFreakOUT posted a bunch of the leaked content to a Discord Server called FreakLeak.

Again, that was all in October of last year. In April of this year, six months later, Nintendo has petitioned the court to unmask GameFreakOUT.

Nintendo is asking a California court to force Discord to give up the identity of the person behind last year’s massive Pokémon data breach, known among the Pokémon community as the “Teraleak.” It’s called the Teraleak because of just how much information was released online; the leaker claimed to have source code for the upcoming game Pokémon Legends: Z-A (though they did not release it), as well as next-generation Pokémon titles, builds of older games, and loads of concept art and lore documents.

The purpose of the subpoena is “to obtain the identity of the Discord user ‘GameFreakOUT,’ who posted infringing content,” wrote James D. Berkley, an attorney for Nintendo. Alongside the declaration, Nintendo included a partially redacted screenshot of the Discord server, in which the user GameFreakOUT posted a file and told users to “enjoy.”

Can Nintendo do this? Maybe. We’ve made this point before, but the unmasking of anonymous speakers on the internet ought to carry with it a very high bar over which petitioners should have to jump. Unmasking anonymous speech should be done to prevent future or current injury, not merely to punish accused bad actors. That said, that determination will be up to the court to decide.

But the broader point is why Nintendo is doing this now six months after the leak. All this serves to do for the time being is to keep the leak, and the information in the leak, in the news six months after the leak occurred. Nintendo may want to go the punitive litigation route as a deterrence, I suppose, but exactly how productive would that be? Is it really going to stop the next leak from happening? And if the answer to that is “no”, then what the hell is the point?

The answer is probably not that deep. Nintendo is a company with a litigious culture on matters of intellectual property. It may simply be that the questions above were never even asked of itself.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• 4chan is dead. It’s Toxic Legacy is everywhere (Wired)
• Wide-Ranging Decisions Protect Speech and Address Harms (Oversight Board)
• Meta’s oversight board rebukes company over policy overhaul (Reuters)
• Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) (Techdirt)
• Most young Aussie men are turning to masculinity influencers, and it’s impacting their mental health (ABC News)
• Young Men’s Health in a Digital World (Movember)
• Teens, Social Media and Mental Health (Pew Research Center)
• National Science Foundation cancels research grants related to misinformation and disinformation (Nieman Lab)
• Bluesky Is Rolling Out Official Verification (Wired)
• Government censorship comes to Bluesky, but not its third-party apps … yet (TechCrunch)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Another day, another new bit of ugliness from the Trump Administration. What was first reported by MedPage Today appears to be the initial wave of attacks on medical journals for preferring scientific rigor to splashing around in the swampier parts of the marketplace of ideas.

A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.

MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.

The language is coded, but definitely not clever. Composed by a DOJ prosecutor perhaps best known for his hundred-plus appearances on Russian state-owned media outlets, the letter [PDF] is full of phrases that make it clear at least one federal prosecutor is interested in deterring scientific rebuttals to the parade of horrors that will be emanating from RFK Jr.’s Dept. of Health and Humans Services over the next few years.

Martin’s letter claims “more and more” scientific journals and publications are “conceding they are partisans in various scientific debates.” He alludes to possible federal crimes being committed by these journals if they are “advocating due to advertisement” (which Martin links to the postal code) or sponsorship (which Martin pretends might have something to do with federal fraud laws). In order to find targets for his prosecutorial attention, Martin asks every journal receiving this letter to respond to the following questions:

How do you assess your responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation?
How do you clearly articulate to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relationships with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?
Do you accept articles or essays from competing viewpoints?
How do you assess the role played by government officials and funding organizations like the National Insitutes of Health in the development of submitted articles?
How do you handle allegations that authors of your work in your journals may have misled their readers?

I am also interested to now if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints. Are there new norms being developed or authored?

These are pretty weird questions to be asking scientific journal publishers. These are exceptionally weird questions for a federal prosecutor to be asking scientific journal publishers. While there are certainly valid concerns about AI involvement in crafting scientific reports, along with some pay-to-play operations that undermine the scientific community in general, it’s generally accepted that these publishers usually publish work that has been subjected to peer review and scientific method best practices.

What this letter sounds like is a very vague threat that prosecutors will start hassling journals that refuse to publish unscientific garbage that appears to support the multiple conspiracy theories pushed by Trump, RFK Jr., and far too many of their supporters. It also suggests that if journals don’t cozy up to the Trump quacks, whatever NIH funding that still somehow exists post-DOGE will vanish completely. It would be worrying enough if this letter had been issued by the HHS. That it came from a federal prosecutor is legitimately horrifying.

Once again, the party of free speech and alleged participant in the marketplace of ideas is showing that it only thinks speech it agrees with should be “free” and that the marketplace of ideas should only offer up ideas it likes. At the very least, this letter has the chance to push some journals into self-censorship, limiting dissemination of studies and essays publishers know don’t align with the Trump Administration’s deep disdain for established scientific principles. And once that end of the idea marketplace begins to dry up, the administration will do all it can to fill the void in the market with bad science, bad ideas, and children’s corpses.

The Raspberry Pi and Arduino Bootcamp Bundle has 5 courses to help you dive into the world of hands-on programming. Courses cover Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and ROS2. 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.

There are a few ways to think about Elon Musk’s announcement this week that he’s stepping back from DOGE. The first is that he’s leaving a job he officially doesn’t have. The second is that he’s returning to a job (Tesla CEO) that he’s supposedly been doing this whole time. The third, and perhaps most interesting, is that none of this actually makes any sense at all.

The announcement came during Tesla’s latest earnings call (which was, to put it gently, not great). With Tesla’s sales and profits plummeting while Musk has been busy redesigning (read: destroying) the entire US government, you might think focusing more on Tesla would be logical. But that assumes any of this is actually about logic.

Like so many Musk pronouncements, this one’s mostly vaporware. Not only had this “stepping back” been reported weeks ago (though never confirmed), but if you look closely at what he actually said, he’s not really leaving DOGE at all, even as news headlines claimed otherwise. He just claimed he would spend less time on DOGE, giving a bit more time to his many other companies.

He said he’ll continue to spend a “day or two per week” on government issues “for as long as the president would like me to do so.”

But, of course, according to official filings from the US government, Elon Musk isn’t even a part of DOGE, an obvious lie that basically no one (other than the DOJ in sworn statements to a court) pretends are true.

Technically, Musk is a “special government employee” who supposedly can only advise the President, though in practice, we know that’s also not true. He’s basically running big parts of the government. And despite having no constitutionally-required appointment for such authority, he appears to be deciding what things can be cut, and shutting down entire agencies. While some have speculated the supposed “May” step down is because those SGE jobs are only supposed to last 130 days, apparently the government can issue waivers to allow those SGEs to stay on significantly longer.

And, really, Musk has violated a ton of other rules that apply to SGEs, including those around conflicts of interest, impartiality, and a ban on “partisan political activities.” Given how much Musk has done that involves a conflict of interest, and his ongoing partisan political activities, it seems that he doesn’t much care to follow the rules. So, the idea that anyone in this government cares about the supposed 130 day limit is laughable.

A closer reading of Musk’s actual words shows he’s not really going anywhere. He’s just promising not to spend all his time in DC anymore. And even that comes with a rather significant caveat:

“I’ll have to continue doing it for, I think, probably the remainder of the president’s term, just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back, which will do if it has the chance,” Musk said

Let’s talk about those savings Musk is so worried about protecting. There are basically three stories here, each more puzzling than the last.

First, there’s the story of the incredible shrinking savings target. Musk started by promising to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget right before the election. Post-election, perhaps realizing people might actually try to hold him to that number, it suddenly became $1 trillion. A few weeks ago, he lowered expectations again to $150 billion.

If you’re playing at home, the difference between $2 trillion and $150 billion is… just about $2 trillion.

The second story is about what’s actually being cut. Even the $150 billion is nonsense — not only has DOGE failed to demonstrate any actual waste or fraud (certainly no one’s been charged with fraud), but the programs they’re recklessly cutting are likely to cost taxpayers way more than they save.

And the third story? That’s about how DOGE counts its supposed savings. As the NY Times detailed, those numbers look to be pretty much fictional:

One of the group’s largest claims, in fact, involves canceling a contract that did not exist. Although the government says it had merely asked for proposals in that case, and had not settled on a vendor or a price, Mr. Musk’s group ignored that uncertainty and assigned itself a large and very specific amount of credit for canceling it.

It said it had saved exactly $318,310,328.30.

Even as the media keeps fact-checking these claims, DOGE just quietly makes random changes to its website, hoping no one notices. The NY Times caught them deleting entries that triple-counted the same savings, confused “billion” with “million”, and even claimed credit for canceling contracts that ended during the George W. Bush administration.

But the errors keep coming. Their second-biggest claimed savings? A supposedly canceled IRS contract worth $1.9 billion that was actually canceled under Biden. Their third-biggest? A $1.75 billion savings from canceling a vaccine nonprofit grant that had already been paid in full.

This might all be amusing if it weren’t so stupid and causing so much damage. Even as Musk was publicly walking back expectations to $150 billion in savings, DOGE’s own website was still claiming $160 billion. And then there’s the matter of Musk’s Twitter activity, where he seems to have discovered an entirely new category of fictional math, in which he will regularly and repeatedly retweet claims that disagree with his own admission that DOGE will only save $150 billion.

The latest example? Musk enthusiastically amplifying claims about massive Social Security fraud. Here he is, just yesterday, retweeting someone claiming $12.6 billion in monthly savings from supposedly removing “7 million scammers” from the system:

There are several problems here. The first, as Wired detailed, is that not a single part of this claim is true. The Social Security Administration has long had systems to prevent payments to deceased beneficiaries, including (but certainly not limited to) their automated processes to stop anyone over 115 from receiving any payments at all. Which means, rather awkwardly for Musk’s claims, none of these supposedly fraudulent recipients were actually receiving any money to begin with, and even if they were cut from the system, the savings would be $0.

Actually, it would be worse than that, because the SSA had already considered this exact issue. A report shows they deliberately chose not to update death records for these super-elderly non-recipients, because doing so would cost far more than any theoretical fraud it might prevent. The few actual cases of payments to deceased beneficiaries are handled through other means.

More than anyone else in the world, Musk is in a position to find out what’s really happening, but he’s been repeating the false claims about Social Security for months now. And, hell, for a supposed genius, even he should be able to do the basic math and realize that if his SS savings alone were $12.6 billion a month, that alone would basically equal the claimed $150 billion in annual savings.

Even worse, right around the time that Musk was telling the world to maybe expect $150 billion in savings, he retweeted some rando’s account claiming DOGE had already saved nearly twice that:

That retweet claiming $291.6 billion in savings came… three days before Musk announced at a cabinet meeting that savings for the entire fiscal year might reach $150 billion. In a normal world, you might expect his supporters (or the media?) to notice this rather stark contradiction. But this isn’t a normal world. Both numbers are somehow treated as equally valid, equally true, equally worth celebrating.

There’s a pattern here that goes beyond just bad math. Musk leads DOGE while government lawyers swear under oath that he doesn’t. He’s supposedly running Tesla while spending his time dismantling the federal government. He claims massive savings that don’t actually exist. He retweets numbers that directly contradict the numbers he personally announced just days earlier.

The whole thing feels like it should collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. But it doesn’t, because it was never meant to make sense. It’s basically all kayfabe — that peculiar form of theatrical fakery where the audience chooses to believe despite knowing better.

The difference is that unlike wrestling, where the fakery is harmless entertainment, this performance is actively destroying what had been the most amazing democracy and economy on the planet. And that’s a lot less fun to watch.

Gang databases are just handy racism. They’re a way for cops to harass, arrest, or otherwise make minorities’ lives more miserable. Very little in the way of logic or evidence is required to allow officers to add people to these databases. That’s why victims of gang violence and the occasional infant have been labelled “gang members” by deliberately broken processes and systems.

So, it’s no surprise the same faulty logic and “any minority existing in public” attitude is being applied to the mass, forcible exodus of minorities from this country. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act made it clear this was about exiling foreigners, rather than protecting this nation from foreign enemies, because the last time it was used, the US government sent thousands of legal US residents to internment camps.

This time, we’re sending residents and undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons. El Salvador is our new best friend, willing to (inhumanely) house whoever we eject, whether it’s hardened criminals with violent histories or just people who happen to have been born in another country. Trump’s latest hallucination is that the Venezuelan government has sent thousands of Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members to the US for the sole purpose of harming America and Americans in, I guess, a warlike fashion.

The mass ejection is so big it can no longer be handled by the DHS and its components. Since his re-arrival in DC, agencies from the FBI to the IRS to private prison companies have been deputized to assist in multiple unlawful acts that make the US look more like WWII Germany than the alleged 2025 Leader of the Free World.

Private prison companies and the disgraced ex-cops they’re all too willing to hire have helped send possibly innocent people to El Salvador, where they’ll be stacked like cordwood right next to vicious killers with lifelong MS-13 affiliations.

It takes a fucking village to burn this nation down. The all-hands-on-deck approach to cruelty also involves gang databases so toxic, even the cops who created them aren’t allowed to use them anymore. Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a person this administration first admitted was wrongly deported but now claims is actually a violent criminal — was the victim of this gang database, one once relied on by multiple law enforcement agencies.

Here’s the latest on this despicable twist from the Washington Post.

The path to Kilmar Abrego García’s deportation to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador began six years ago, when a suburban Maryland police detective typed a critical allegation into a Gang Interview Field Sheet.

“An active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” wrote the detective in 2019, after detaining Abrego García at a Home Depot in Prince George’s County while he stood in the parking lot looking for construction work.His evidence: an unnamed confidential informant and Abrego García’s Chicago Bulls cap, which the officer wrote in his report was “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture.”

In other words, any “Hispanic” with a sports team’s hat on is probably in a gang. And any Black person as well, for that matter.

More unbelievably, the “this guy is gang member” narrative composed by the so-called “investigator” also made these claims in support of his MS-13 fantasies:

Abrego García, Mendez wrote, had been identified by an unnamed confidential informant as an “active member” of MS-13’s Western clique in Upstate New York — a place he has never lived. Mendez cited Abrego García’s clothes as further proof, including a hooded sweatshirt that featured green bands covering the eyes, ears and mouth of Benjamin Franklin’s face as printed on the $100 bill. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, would later say she bought him the sweatshirt — for sale on FashionNova — because she liked the design.

In other words, only whites are allowed to support sports teams in public. And only white people are allowed to reference fiat currency via outwear. Everyone else is a gang member. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the only honest conclusion that can be drawn from the gang database run by Prince George’s County PD’s “gang unit.”

The gang unit in Prince George’s County, whose residents are majority Black and Latino, stopped using the Gang Field Interview Sheet as a source of intelligence gathering about three years ago, amid a civil lawsuit that alleged young men of color were disproportionately represented in it.

The justifications for “nominating” gang members were so weak and the targeting so prevalent, federal officials in the area decommissioned this database voluntarily during this litigation. One reason for doing so? Hardly anyone was added to the database once courts and plaintiffs started asking questions about the processes used to determine who was or wasn’t a suspected gang member.

In this particular case, a dirty cop dirtied the database with his foregone conclusions about “Hispanics” and their possibly un-gang-related support of the Chicago Bulls. Ivan Mendez — since suspended from the Prince George’s County PD for tipping off a sex worker about an investigation into the brothel she allegedly ran — was one of several members of the PD’s gang unit, a number of which were criminally indicted for charges ranging from gross misconduct to conspiracy to commit criminal acts.

This questionable database, run by and contributed to by even more questionable law enforcement officers, is Donald Trump’s sole basis for the baseless “gang member” accusations he’s been hurling at Abrego Garcia ever since this whole thing blew up in federal court.

To date, the only evidence federal authorities have produced in court to support such allegations is the Maryland police detective’s 2019 gang sheet.

Well, that and a photo of someone’s hand that someone else has Photoshopped to pretend four different images on four fingers adds up to MS-13.

The administration has an obviously faulty report and a hazy image that isn’t the Zapruder freeze frame it seems to think it is. Instead, it’s carrying about the odious byproduct of gang unit officers so inherently untrustworthy, neither they nor their database are still in operation today.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President’s star witnesses!

From 2004 to 2009, the department was placed under federal oversight after the agency was investigated for canine unit brutality and shooting more people than any other police department in the country. A group of Black and Latino officers sued the department in 2018, alleging police leaders discriminated against officers of color and enabled racist behaviors that harmed residents.

Last year, the department was sued again over the gang unit and its use of the GangNET database after community members repeatedly complained that officers were racially profiling young Latino men and incorrectly labeling them as gang members.

On one hand, you want to be shocked that federal officers would use a defunct database and disgraced officers to justify extrajudicial ejections of people from this country. On the other hand, you can see who’s running the country and understand it doesn’t really matter to them whether or not they even possess the shittiest, weakest “evidence” to support deportations. They’re just going to keep doing it because they can.

There’s simply no limit of problems in telecom and media that competent FCC regulators could be taking aim at. Broadband price gouging by monopolies, widespread telecom privacy and security failures, the obvious harm of unchecked media consolidation all come quickly to mind.

Instead of tackling any of this, new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent the lion’s share of his first months in office engaged in erratic authoritarian zealotry, whether it’s abusing FCC authority to harass journalists who refuse to kiss Donald Trump’s ass, or “investigating” Verizon, Comcast, and Disney for not being racist enough.

Now Carr is again taking aim at Comcast, simply because journalists at MSNBC and NBC gave King Donald a sad.

Over at the right wing propaganda website known as X, Carr whined about Comcast over MSNBC and NBC’s coverage of Abrego Garcia, a Maryland dad the government “accidentally” kidnapped, sent to a foreign gulag, and now refuses to return to the U.S.

You’ll notice Carr isn’t actually launching any sort of actual “investigation” into Comcast here because the accusation is baseless bullshit.

There is no evidence that Garcia was a gang member. Garcia’s only arrest was in 2019 for “loitering” in a Home Depot parking lot. Carr is of course mad because NBC and MSNBC told people the truth: that the government fucked up, appear to have falsely and lazily identified a man as a gang member and dangerous career criminal, then “accidentally” shipped him off to a foreign work gulag.

Even if Garcia was a gang member, Brendan Carr is behaving like a foolish clown. The rule he’s trying to leverage here, the FCC’s “distortion rule,” is a very rarely enforced rule that says news outlets can’t suppress important journalism or take cash bribes to modify journalism. It clearly doesn’t apply if NBC and MSNBC were just explaining the situation accurately. And it doesn’t apply to cable news.

Carr, of course, knows this, he’s just hoping that a shitty U.S. press system will help him pretend he’s launching a “serious investigation,” so the accusations get repeated across the media and other news outlets think twice before criticizing Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter if NBC (or anybody else) is guilty, the press will dutifully parrot the accusation far and wide, implying guilt.

Because U.S. consolidated corporate journalism is generally very shitty and concerned about losing access or costly fake investigations, it’s an effective tactic.

If you search through the news wires, most of the reporting on this story parrot Carr’s claims without pointing out he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Or that the rule in question doesn’t apply to cable. Or that Carr’s primary goal is very clearly to bully media companies and suppress journalism, a curious choice for a party that spent the last few years babbling endlessly about their love of free speech.

Again there will never be a case against Comcast here because this is thin bullshit and Carr has absolutely no leg to stand on. The whole point of the tweet was to get the press to parrot the false claims to a broader audience and to soften their criticism of the Trump administration. Most were happy to oblige.

The fear over industry disruptions due to technological advances is so predictable that we have the entire “buggy whip” analogy pre-built to rebut it. For the uninitiated, the analogy harkens back to when the automobile came into wide circulation and the disruption it had on the makers of horse buggy tools, like the whip for the horses, if they didn’t adapt. While some may have argued that the automobile was a danger to those businesses, the truth is that these new vehicles opened up so many other economic opportunities both for newly created jobs opened up by cars and within the transportation industry for those willing to adapt that it was actually a net benefit to jobs and the economy.

It may feel like artificial intelligence is everywhere these days, but the truth is that we’re still in the very early stages when it comes to how this technology will be used in the future and what effects it will have in all kinds of markets. In the video game industry specifically, we already have examples of how generative AI used in gaming isn’t even close yet to the product of human artists, nor a replacement for the gaming output of human beings. But that isn’t stopping some folks from worrying out loud that use of AI in the gaming industry is a threat to industry jobs.

In some cases, it will be, of course. But that should be a temporary concern, just like the buggy whip manufacturers. More important is what the use of AI in gaming can mean for increased output and as another tool for developers to use to create a better industry ecosystem. Industry legend John Carmack recently made this point when responding to some criticism for Microsoft’s recent demo of an AI-generated facsimile of Quake 2.

Carmack’s comments came after an X user with the handle “Quake Dad” called the new demo “disgusting” and claimed it “spits on the work of every developer everywhere.” The critic expressed concern that such technology would eliminate jobs in an industry already facing layoffs, writing: “A fully generative game cuts out the number of jobs necessary for such a project which in turn makes it harder for devs to get jobs.”

Carmack responded directly to these concerns in a lengthy post. “I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is,” he wrote, before addressing the broader concern about “AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers.” Carmack positioned AI as the latest in a long history of technological advancements that have transformed game development.

“My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance,” Carmack explained. “Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers.”

It’s the right argument to make, frankly. We’re a long ways off from AI being able to build entire, quality games from start to finish, as Microsoft’s own tech demo showed. Its output was nowhere close to being a one to one recreation of Quake 2. It was much closer to something like allowing players to experience the AI’s impression of the game. In the immediate, this demonstrates that human beings are still very much needed and that the output of AI is more akin to Carmack’s analogy than a job-stealing dev-bot.

But maybe someday it gets way, way better. In fact, that’s probably nearly an inevitability. There’s no reason to think that the long term is one where AI creates video games all on its own sans human handlers that have no input and therefore no jobs. Instead, it’s far more likely that this will be yet another tool human developers will have to create output faster, to create output better, or to otherwise assist human beings in their work.

Tim Sweeney of Epic Games chimed in on the conversation as well.

Ultimately, Sweeney says not to worry: “There’s always a fear that automation will lead companies to make the same old products while employing fewer people to do it,” Sweeney wrote in a follow-up post on X. “But competition will ultimately lead to companies producing the best work they’re capable of given the new tools, and that tends to mean more jobs.”

And Carmack closed with this: “Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor-saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.”

We have no choice but to progress, in other words. Adapt or die. All the clichés. But we should also have our eyes open to the opportunities AI could create in the gaming industry and others, rather than wallow in doom and gloom.

As Artificial Intelligence reshapes the internet landscape, we’re watching history repeat itself: The same people who fundamentally misunderstood Section 230’s role in enabling the modern internet are now making eerily similar mistakes about how we should approach AI regulation. This week’s episode of Otherwise Objectionable dives into these parallel debates, exploring both how Section 230’s principles might apply to AI and why some continue pushing to dismantle the law entirely.

The timing couldn’t be more relevant. As Congress (less so) and state legislatures (much more so) rush to regulate AI, they seem determined to ignore the lessons learned from decades of internet regulation. The principles that made Section 230 so crucial for the internet’s development — protecting innovation while enabling responsible content moderation — are more relevant than ever in the AI era.

Episode 7: The Future of Speech Online

While previous episodes explored Section 230’s history and the internet it enabled, this week’s discussions tackle two crucial questions: How should Section 230’s principles inform our approach to AI development? And why do some continue insisting the law needs to be dismantled despite its proven importance?

The episode begins with an exploration of how Section 230’s core principles might guide AI development and regulation. Neil Chilson and Dave Willner offer insights into the parallels (and a few differences!) between early internet and today’s AI debates. Just as Section 230 created a framework that both protected innovation and encouraged responsible moderation, we need similar nuanced approaches for AI — not the sledgehammer regulations many states are currently proposing.

Their discussion highlights a crucial point: the same fundamental tensions that Section 230 addressed — balancing innovation with responsibility, enabling filtering without mandating it — are at the heart of current AI policy debates. And just as with Section 230, many proposed AI regulations seem designed to solve problems that don’t actually exist while potentially creating massive new ones.

The episode then shifts to examine ongoing legal challenges to Section 230 itself, featuring interviews with attorneys Carrie Goldberg and Annie McAdams. Both have extensive histories challenging Section 230’s scope in court. While their cases have mostly (though not entirely) been unsuccessful — highlighting the law’s robust protections — it’s still worthwhile to get their perspectives on why they think the law is the problem (even as I disagree).

Perhaps most intriguingly, these two vocal critics of Section 230 ultimately reach different conclusions about the law’s future. Their disagreement underscores a key point: even among those who see problems with Section 230’s current interpretation, there’s no consensus on how to address those issues without undermining the law’s crucial protections.

As this series approaches its conclusion (with just one roundtable discussion remaining next week), these conversations highlight how Section 230’s principles remain vital for addressing new technological challenges. Whether we’re talking about content moderation on social media or the development of AI systems, we need frameworks that encourage innovation while enabling — but not mandating — responsible development practices.