This is not a unique or new observation, but so many MAGA attacks on others are projection, claiming that Democrats were doing the very things that MAGA always knew they would do if they were in charge. We’ve certainly spent plenty of time talking about Donald Trump’s myriad and non-stop attacks on free speech, and just recently I wrote about how Trump has turned his FCC into the very “ministry of truth” that Fox News falsely claimed Biden had created. But two recent articles show how MAGA has gone all in on doing the two things it most loudly (and falsely) accused the other side of: suppressing free speech on campus, and running a “censorship industrial complex” to coerce private companies into silencing speech it doesn’t like.

On the “free speech on campus” thing, we already know that the Trump admin has disappeared students for their speech. But Adam Serwer, over at The Atlantic, has an incredible story on how MAGA officials in Texas have effectively silenced all kinds of speech across universities in Texas.

At Texas Tech, medical students no longer learn about racial disparities in medical care. Faculty at the university’s medical center in Lubbock were advised to “refrain from treating transgender patients, for any medical condition, if a medical student was present,” according to a lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors. (When asked for comment, a spokesperson said that the university’s “written guidance is publicly available and expressly protects instruction necessary for licensure and patient care.”) According to the same lawsuit, the censorship bot—officially known as the Course Content Review Process—ordered a Tech philosophy professor to remove Plato’s Republic from a syllabus because “it references Plato’s beliefs concerning gender roles and homosexuality.”

Professors in the Texas A&M system have had to strip their syllabi too. According to an ACLU lawsuit, last January, Aaron George, a professor at Tarleton State University, was told by administrators to remove A Gay Manifesto, a Stonewall-era LGBTQ-rights pamphlet, and White Flight, a history of urban segregation, from his American-political-history course. After a student complained that a different class the professor taught violated university policy, George was informed by administrators that it would be canceled if he did not make “necessary” (but unspecified) changes. He cut a reference in the course description to the significance of the Fourteenth Amendment for LGBTQ rights, and the class was allowed to proceed.

The University of Texas at Austin, the flagship school of the UT system, announced last month that it was eliminating majors in Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies. More than 100 courses have been flagged for removal from the core curriculum, primarily ones relating to slavery, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. Consolidating majors isn’t necessarily nefarious, nor is rethinking a core curriculum (a central group of courses from which students must take a certain number to graduate). But these changes are happening, Lauren Gutterman, an American studies professor at UT, told me, “entirely because of the political context.”

Where are all the folks who spent years screaming about “academic freedom” and insisting that colleges were censoring conservative speech? Remember how Bari Weiss and Joe Lonsdale created their “University of Austin” because (they falsely claimed) there were no universities where people could speak freely — and then they fired someone for suggesting that there might be some value in thinking about the importance of diversity.

Hilariously, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had signed a bill back in 2019 guaranteeing “free speech on campus.” But as Serwer’s piece details, these days there are all sorts of banned topics on Texas college campuses, and basically none of free speech grifters who spent years crying crocodile tears over supposed attacks on “campus speech” seem to have anything to say about it.

Even more ridiculous, Serwer details how Texas Tech is using AI to scan syllabi for wrongthink, with predictably stupid results:

Alan Barenberg, a history professor who specializes in the Soviet Union, was told to remove readings by the Princeton historian Joan Scott and the French philosopher Michel Foucault from his Ph.D.-level historiography class, after they were flagged by the AI—whose assessments he described to me as “completely inaccurate.” It also seemed to have mixed his course up with a different one. The texts were part of a unit of the class related to how treatment of gender in historical research has changed over time. “These things have been taught in classes for a long time,” Barenberg told me. The material is controversial, he said, only “in the eyes of a few people who aren’t even actually on campus.”

“The fact that the system AI doesn’t work, that it makes inaccurate pronouncements—that’s a feature, not a bug. They don’t care if it’s accurate or not. They just want to be able to say, Look, we’re making sure that your children are not being exposed to these horrible ideas from these radical professors,” Barenberg said. “A key part of how authoritarian systems often work is that, through the vagueness and sending up signals and vibes, they’re essentially saying, You know what not to do, but being deliberately vague about it.”

Although the AI is now reviewing only some courses, the university could extend the process to more.  For now, professors are the ones responsible for volunteering whether their own materials may be considered controversial. Many, unsure of what might trigger the bot, told me that they had private conversations with administrators who told them to simply self-censor and remove materials from their courses in advance, so as not to draw the wrath of leadership or lawmakers.

So the “free speech on campus” crowd is now actively censoring speech on campus because a computer program told them it was woke. What could go wrong?

Now, the other story: Anthony Fisher, at MS Now, is pointing out how Donald Trump has absolutely created the “censorship industrial complex” that a bunch of factually challenged “free speech” grifters insisted the Biden admin had built.

MAGA-adjacent journalists, one of whom now runs CBS News, have claimed there was a vast “censorship industrial complex” — run exclusively by Democrats, of course. In 2022, they peddled Elon Musk’s nothingburger “Twitter Files” as the free speech scandal of the century. It was, in fact, a fake controversy driven by politically motivated reasoning and faux-journalistic laziness, and none of them ever had the integrity to admit they were led by the nose by the world’s richest man or that they got the story completely wrong.

But the Trump Censorship Industrial Complex is very real. It is chilling speech in the media, academia and everyday life.

“Over the last two years, there’s been escalating threats against ABC,” Wilkinson said in court Tuesday. She added that the president “has control over vast regulatory powers that he’s willing to use against those he does not like” and “has put in place a chairman at the FCC who understands his marching orders and is not shy about saying so. These are blatant violations of the U.S. Constitution.”

You can follow the links there to get more details, but the most important detail is that when some individuals and two MAGA-run states sued the Biden admin over the supposed “censorship industrial complex,” it was two Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justices — Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who pointed out how wrong they were.

During oral arguments Kavanaugh practically laughed at the lawyer making these claims, pointing out that government officials merely pressing their side of the story with no associated threats or coercion happens every damn day in the government, and is not even remotely close to censorship. Then Coney Barrett wrote the decision of the court, noting the complete lack of evidence tying any government outreach to actual moderation decisions, and called the lower court judge’s factual findings “clearly erroneous.” That resulted in the case being sent back for lack of standing due to the fact that there was zero evidence presented of any coercive behavior.

So there was no Biden “censorship industrial complex,” but there absolutely is a Trump one. As Fisher notes:

The Trump administration’s juvenile bullying has already restricted The Associated Press’ White House access for more than a year over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And those efforts have now bled over into MAGA Republican-dominated states, like Alabama, where a new law requires “all state and local entities and their employees” to refer to the body of water as the Gulf of America. That means public schools, colleges and even the state’s NPR affiliate have to abide by Trump’s embarrassing attempt at patriotic virtue signaling.

Carr has threatened broadcasters’ licenses for reporting accurately on Trump’s asinine and failing war on Iran. The administration is still in a legal battle with MS NOW, CNN and Politico, as it preposterously claims its ban on the three news organizations is a national security issue. And the administration has been siccing its secret police force on private citizens who’ve written social media posts criticizing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s brutal crackdown on immigrants — and U.S. citizens caught in their lawless dragnets.

And not a peep from those who falsely argued that it existed under Biden. How strange.

Once again, those complaints were all lies and projection. Richard Hanania, the far right commentator who spent years spreading hate and white supremacy online and now pretends to have turned against the very MAGA Trumpism he long supported, at least admitted clearly, back before Elon Musk took over Twitter, that right wingers like himself only scream about “censorship” because they want to do it themselves. This was in response to him getting banned from (again, pre-Elon) Twitter for violating its rules against hateful conduct. At the time, he said:

I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.

But that kind of honesty about how much MAGA authoritarians want to censor people while screaming about non-existent “censorship” from the other side is rare.

Still, it would be nice if everyone stopped pretending that Greg Abbott, Donald Trump, or Elon Musk ever stood for free speech at all. They all whined about free speech solely as a means to make sure that they were in charge of censoring those they disliked.

The Academy of Game Art Bundle teaches you the basics of how to create video game art. You’ll learn how to use Inkscape to create logos, 2D backgrounds, pre-defined modules, UI designs, and characters. A course on using DragonBones will teach you how to animate your characters as well. The bundle is on sale for $25.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

More evidence is piling up that contradicts the almost-but-not-quite denials given by administration officials in response to allegations about the DHS compiling a database to keep tabs on protesters.

Just a few months ago, “Immigration Czar” Todd Lyons was trying to turn credible accusations into a nothingburger by deploying a few vague and trite statements that didn’t actually add up to real denial. Protesters were reporting that immigration officers were taking photos of protesters, trying to gather other identifying info from them when accosting them, and then doing truly nasty stuff plainly meant to deter them from engaging in further protests or simply trying to document what ICE officers were doing out in the field.

Protesters and observers who have encountered ICE officers have reported multiple drive-bys by ICE officers at their personal homes, calls from unidentified officers containing veiled threats of punishment, and other forms of intimidation that are reliant on having enough collected data to locate people’s homes, phone numbers, places of business, etc.

If this database of protesters and other ICE opponents doesn’t actually exist, it would seem unlikely that any immigration officer would refer to it. But that has happened and that’s what drew the questions from congressional reps that Lyons then attempted to dance around.

Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., cited a well-circulated clip of an ICE agent in Portland, Maine, telling a person videotaping that she would be added to a “nice little database.” 

“I can’t speak for that individual,” said Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE. “But I can assure you that there is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”

Lyons doubled down on his denials about the database’s existence during a Senate hearing Thursday. When asked if ICE is giving protester information to any other agency, Lyons said: “We do not.” 

In his official response to congressional oversight, Lyons went a bit further… which only made things worse.

If individuals who interact with ICE officers are not arrested or detained, any information collected during those encounters is maintained consistent with applicable law and DHS and ICE policies and is treated as an official government record.

That’s the information-gathering side of things, which clearly states that ICE is collecting information on more than just the people it arrests. And since it’s collecting this information on non-arrestees in the normal course of business, the compilation is undeniably happening. Whether or not this information is segregated from the rest of the stuff ICE gathers is hardly consequential, which makes this statement from Lyons especially meaningless.

DHS is not creating or maintaining a separate, standalone database for individuals encountered that haven’t been arrested or detained.

You don’t have to create a new database. You don’t even have to silo it off. You can just dump this info in with the rest of the stuff and let those with access use this info to track down protesters in order to intimidate them.

A recent court filing in a lawsuit against the DHS brought by anti-ICE protesters in Maine (one that alleges a lot of truly troubling behavior by ICE officers) says ICE is shoving this info into Palantir’s gaping data maw, presumably to expedite future threats, intimidation, and retaliation against First Amendment-protected activity.

An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers—including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information—and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir.

[…]

Plaintiffs allege in the filing, which is heavily based on documents produced by the government and depositions of DHS agents, that agents had a practice of intimidating protesters and observers. They did this, the filing says, by doing drive-bys of the observers’ homes and, in the case of at least one observer, requiring that she be referred to secondary inspection any time she tries to cross the border until at least January 2027.

The allegations are only going to get more serious the further this case proceeds. The plaintiffs are still operating with limited information, but what little they have already suggests ICE officers routinely engage in retaliatory acts against protesters and observers. From the filing [PDF]:

While the case is still in its preliminary stage, with only limited discovery, the record demonstrates that agents routinely collect images of observers’ faces and license plates, and have created retaliatory investigative records about their protected activity. Agents also threatened multiple observers with being placed on watchlists, and have continued their practice of intimidating drive-bys: in June of this year, an agent led Plaintiff Hilton to the address on her driver’s license and conspicuously stopped in front of the house. Other Mainers have experienced the same. All Plaintiffs have experienced concrete harm and have been chilled in the exercise of their First Amendment rights: Williams and Pantos have stopped all observation activity entirely, and Hilton and Fagan have reduced their protected activity or taken other precautions while doing so.

Whatever guidelines ICE may have in place (if any) to prevent ICE officers from gathering info on protesters and observers clearly isn’t working. The filing mentions multiple times where ICE officers have directly told the people they’re accosting that they would be adding them to the ICM (ICE’s case management system) or, worse, a “domestic terrorism watchlist.”

These are credible allegations, especially since some of these threats from officers have been recorded. The plaintiff who’s allegedly now facing mandatory secondary inspection at all border crossings for the next six months lends a lot of credence to claims about being added to terrorism watchlists.

DHS’s denial is hardly worth noting.

A spokesperson for DHS calls the case “meritless” and says that “the underlying lawsuit is based on the lie that there is a database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”

All this says is that the DHS doesn’t “run” the “domestic terrorists” database. While that is true (the Terrorist Screening Dataset is overseen by the DOJ and “run” by the FBI), the Terrorist Screening Center is a multi-agency operation (including the DHS and its components) that “manages” (direct quote here) its operations. Furthermore, the DHS and its components are designated “nominators,” which means exactly what’s being denied by DHS spokespeople: officers do have the power to put people on “terrorist watchlists.”

Whether or not this lawsuit leads to more discovery, there’s no reason to give the DHS the benefit of a doubt while waiting for more information to roll in. It has already shown it’s willing to violate rights, ignore court orders, and pretend existing immigration laws don’t actually say what they say. The mass deportation machinery deployed by the Trump administration is in a state of constant acceleration. Anything that might reduce a bit of the friction — even if it’s clearly unconstitutional acts of intimidation — will be deployed until a court tells it to stop… and then for awhile after that, if recent history is any indication. And it’s all being aided by a company that’s collecting tens of millions of dollars to, basically, help ICE agents connect these dots faster.

Remember how the Trump administration — and folks like Brendan Carr — spent four straight years fear-mongering about China’s purported control over TikTok and its owner, ByteDance? And remember how the Trump administration (with incompetent Democratic lawmaker help) “fixed” the problem by offloading Tiktok to Trump’s billionaire buddies while still maintaining co-ownership with the Chinese?

It was basically a five-year xenophobic fear campaign designed to steal the revenues of a top short-form video company that U.S. giants like Meta were struggling to compete with. And it was propped up by endless empty lip service to propaganda, consumer privacy, and national security; in turn propped up by a tech press that struggled to explain how silly and corruption-fueled it all was.

After the Trump deal, U.S. operations of TikTok now had three “managing investors” that collectively owned 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation (Larry Ellison), Silver Lake, and MGX. Another 5 percent is owned by other new investors, 30.1 percent is “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 20 percent was retained by ByteDance.

The Trump administration offloaded most of TikTok’s infrastructure to Oracle — a company with a long list of privacy violations — so they could pretend they “fixed privacy issues” with the app. They also set up a bunch of “safeguards” designed to pretend they’d cut off Chinese influence, without actually doing so.

Unsurprisingly, a deep dive by Politico found that little has actually changed in terms of Chinese access to some of the core components of the app and user data. And there’s little to no indication the Trump administration is doing anything to ensure adherence to the deal. Employees are still using AI and internal chat systems built by ByteDance, which would likely make Chinese data collection trivial:

“Employees at the new company, officially named TikTok USDS Joint Venture, still work regularly with the global TikTok organization, according to current and former employees, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, and internal communications reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. That includes coordinating over new features, sharing information about dangerous trends on the app and collaborating over policies. U.S. employees also still use an internal chat system called Lark, which was built by TikTok’s former Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to communicate and share information with both their U.S. and global counterparts.”

Great stuff. There are other instances of largely performative attempts to keep Chinese and U.S. TikTok employees separated, but there’s no real indication this is working or being overseen by anybody competent in the U.S. government:

“At TikTok office buildings, U.S. employees can go to TikTok global offices on different floors but are required to get a chaperone, an employee said, and are prohibited from bringing laptops. Prior to the deal, U.S. employees could mostly move freely between the U.S. and global offices.”

It’s equally murky as to whether “the algorithm” (a subject of endless debate during the fearmongering campaign) is still maintained and updated by ByteDance engineers.

Again, there’s no real indication that this was ever about anything but Trump and his allies hijacking the revenues of a profitable short-form video company under the pretense of national security. You could also easily argue that under Byetance ownership the company was at least incentivized to behave to remain in the U.S.; guys like Larry Ellison — with a long history of ethical and privacy “lapses” — really has no worries that the government will ever hold him accountable for much of anything.

As we noted early on, the Chinese really don’t need TikTok to spy on Americans or funnel propaganda to the electorate. Because we’re too corrupt to regulate data brokers or pass a privacy law, most U.S. consumer data is openly accessible via the public market to anybody — including Chinese intelligence.

The Trump administration is still facing a lawsuit alleging the deal is illegal. And Democrats continue to look positively feckless and ignorant for helping the Trump administration hijack an app (popular with young voters) during a presidential election season where the youth vote mattered more than ever.

The apocryphal quote supposedly from Mark Twain is one of my favorites: “History does not repeat, but it does often rhyme.” Now, there is no evidence that Twain ever actually authored these words, but it’s incredible how true they tend to be regardless. And when it comes to the current measles outbreak that is ravaging the country, and the Northeast in particular, they seem incredibly apropos.

We’re suffering this outbreak for many reasons: the anti-vaxxer agenda being rendered directly into the federal government, the distrust in medical professionals and science that has been purposefully fostered by bad actors, and a general apathy for vaccinations. But if you want to know why it’s gotten worse and not better, the answer to that is singular: inaction by the federal government.

And if you go back to 1991, the last time the country suffered a measles epidemic this significant, you can read news stories that don’t exactly mirror our current situation, but they do rhyme.

A breakdown in the vaccination system caused the nation’s worst measles epidemic in decades, and more epidemics may occur unless the system is changed, a Federal advisory panel said today.

The panel, the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, said in a report, “The principal cause for the epidemic is failure to deliver vaccine to vulnerable preschool children on schedule.” It said the health care system created “barriers to obtaining immunization and fails to take advantage of many opportunities to provide vaccines to children.”

It’s a similar story today, of course. Though, unlike today, I don’t have any reason to believe that governmental failures in 1991 that led to the measles epidemic at the time were purposeful. In fact, federal officials at the time responded to this report not by lambasting state officials with conspiracy theories and political attacks, but by acknowledging the report’s accuracy and promising to do better. There’s no indication that the federal government at the time attempted to hide cases and deaths from measles, unlike the current administration under RFK Jr.

No, this was federal advisors and federal officials working off the same set of facts and combining their efforts to make things better. And better things actually got. This was, by the way, a time when the Executive Branch was also Republican.

Dr. Bart, director of the National Vaccine Program Office of the Department of Health and Human Services, said the Bush Administration had been waiting for the report and would quickly plan to follow as many of the panel’s recommendations as possible.

“We have a huge increases and deaths due to measles for the first time in two decades,” he said. “We also think there is some acute deterioration of the health care system, and we fear that this may be a warning flag for other problems to come.”

Dr. Henderson said that immunization “is the simplest procedure in the entire medical armamentarium, and is by far the most cost effective of all the medical interventions we have.” If we cannot provide the simplest and most cost effective thing we have, he said, “what does that say about our health system? It is clear that we have a problem.”

Well, then at present we have a problem. A bigger one, actually. The story at present isn’t one of government bureaucracy failing simply because big governmental systems are slow and lethargic generally. In this case, the causes of vaccine hesitancy and under-vaccination is the plan. It’s what the leadership of our health agencies are striving for.

There is no argument otherwise. Kennedy has said the government is doing a great job on the measles question, even as thousands are infected and people are dying. We’ll get into this more separately, but Kennedy also has, in the middle of this outbreak, created a federal program to financially incentivize the reporting of vaccine injuries.

If disease is the enemy of Americans, then Kennedy is a traitor. He’s giving aid and comfort to that enemy, plain and simple. It’s why the measles outbreak is getting worse, not better. It’s why other health conditions are on the rise, such as pertussis and mumps.

What is happening right now is insane. What makes it more insane is that the lessons we learned from the last time we engaged with this enemy are barely 35 years old. Universe willing, November will pave the way for Congress to actually do something about it all.

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part VII: The End of the Universal Internet
Part VI examined the limits of what platforms can know about us. This part widens the lens again, looking at what happens when the supposedly universal internet collides with geopolitics, national interests and the return of sovereignty.

Every age constructs its own myths. The Industrial Revolution gave us the myth of endless progress: the conviction that scientific discovery and economic growth would move steadily, almost mechanically, towards a more prosperous future. The twentieth century inherited the myth of globalization, imagining that the increasing movement of goods, capital, and people would gradually soften political boundaries and render old rivalries economically irrational. The internet age produced its own variation on the same theme. Technology, we were told, would become the first truly global language. Networks would succeed where diplomacy often failed. Code would travel more easily than ideology. Connectivity would create constituencies for cooperation that governments could neither manufacture nor easily disrupt.

Silicon Valley became the principal narrator of that story. Its ambitions were never presented as merely commercial. They were civilizational. Google did not simply index websites; it sought to organize the world’s information. Facebook did not describe itself as a social network so much as an instrument for making the world “more open and connected.” The rhetoric mattered because it invited users to think of these companies not as corporations competing for market share but as custodians of a new global infrastructure. They increasingly resembled institutions whose legitimacy derived from serving humanity rather than shareholders alone. And, for a remarkably long time, much of the world accepted that proposition.

The claim was not entirely unreasonable. The internet had always been unusual in the way it blurred geography. An email ignored borders. A website became available almost everywhere simultaneously. Engineers from countries with profoundly different political systems collaborated through common technical standards. Open-source software demonstrated that voluntary cooperation across cultures could produce systems of astonishing sophistication. The internet did not abolish the nation-state, but it often operated according to a logic that transcended it.

Many of the major technology companies genuinely believed they were extending that tradition. Their work forces became international and they acquired global user communities. Product launches were increasingly discussed as worldwide events rather than national ones. Executives frequently spoke in the language of humanity rather than citizenship, presenting their platforms as shared spaces that belonged, in some broader cultural sense, to everyone who used them. The distinction between an American company and a global institution became deliberately blurred. History, however, has a way of reintroducing distinctions that periods of optimism encourage us to overlook.

The return of geopolitics over the past decade has been one of the defining developments of the twenty-first century. Strategic competition between major powers has expanded far beyond military capability to encompass semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, undersea cables, quantum research and digital infrastructure. Technologies that were once understood primarily as commercial products have become matters of national security. Supply chains are scrutinized through strategic rather than economic lenses. Investment decisions increasingly reflect geopolitical calculations. Even the language has changed. Governments now speak of technological sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and digital resilience with a confidence that would have seemed unusual only a decade ago.

The internet did not escape this transformation. For the technology companies themselves, this represented an unusually difficult moment. They had spent decades cultivating identities that rested upon universality. Their products connected families, businesses, and communities across political boundaries. Their legitimacy depended, at least in part, upon the perception that they served users rather than governments. Yet the world around them increasingly demanded choices that universal institutions rarely have the luxury of making.

Those choices did not always arrive dramatically. Sometimes they appeared in export controls on advanced semiconductors. Sometimes in legal obligations to remove applications from national app stores. Sometimes in debates over encryption, data localization, or cloud infrastructure. Sometimes in public appearances alongside political leaders announcing industrial strategies designed explicitly to strengthen national technological advantage. Each individual decision could be justified on pragmatic grounds. Taken together, however, they revealed that the age of the post-national technology company had come to an end.

This is not a moral criticism. No corporation exists outside the legal and political framework of the state in which it is incorporated. Governments possess legitimate security interests. Companies have legal obligations. In periods of geopolitical stability, these realities often remain comfortably in the background; during periods of strategic competition though, they become impossible to ignore. What changed was not simply the relationship between governments and technology companies. It was the relationship between technology companies and the stories they had long told about themselves.

The promise of universality became increasingly difficult to sustain once digital infrastructure itself became a strategic asset. A platform cannot simultaneously present itself as belonging equally to everyone while operating within a world that increasingly expects technological capability to serve national interests. The contradiction is not necessarily the fault of the companies involved; it is a consequence of history changing around them.

There is a revealing parallel with another great infrastructure of modernity. For much of the twentieth century, commercial aviation cultivated an image of cosmopolitanism. Air travel compressed distance, encouraged cultural exchange, and embodied the optimism of an increasingly interconnected world. Yet no one seriously imagined that airlines existed independently of states. Routes reflected diplomacy. Airspace reflected sovereignty. Aircraft manufacturing reflected industrial strategy. The industry remained deeply international while never ceasing to be profoundly geopolitical.

Digital platforms are discovering a similar reality. The internet encouraged us to believe that information could flow independently of power. For a time, perhaps it did. Today, information infrastructure has become power. Artificial intelligence depends upon computational capacity. Computational capacity depends upon semiconductor supply chains. Cloud services depend upon data centers, energy grids and legal jurisdictions. Networks remain global, but they are no longer politically weightless.

This shift has consequences that extend well beyond geopolitics. For users around the world, one of the most striking aspects of the early internet was the feeling that participation itself conferred a kind of equality. A student in Addis Ababa, an entrepreneur in Mexico City, and a researcher in Helsinki entered the same digital spaces and, at least in principle, encountered the same opportunities to create, publish, and collaborate. The internet’s openness did not eliminate global inequalities, but it fostered the belief that the network itself belonged to no single political center.

That belief has become harder to sustain. Increasingly, the largest digital platforms appear not simply as global companies headquartered in the United States, but as organizations whose strategic interests inevitably intersect with those of their home state. Again, this is not unusual in historical terms. It is precisely how most industries have always functioned. The novelty lies elsewhere. For perhaps the first time since the commercial internet emerged, the mythology of technological universalism has given way to the more familiar realities of geography, sovereignty, and power.

The consequences are likely to endure long after today’s geopolitical tensions have evolved into new forms. Once users begin to see platforms not as neutral environments but as actors embedded within particular political and economic systems, trust acquires a different character. Questions that once appeared purely technical become constitutional. Who governs digital space? Whose values shape its rules? Whose interests ultimately prevail when cooperation gives way to strategic competition?

These are not questions that engineers alone can answer. Nor, for that matter, are they questions that any platform can resolve through better product design. They belong to a different historical moment altogether.

The great irony is that the internet has arrived at precisely the moment when the world is rediscovering the enduring importance of political boundaries. The dream that networks might quietly dissolve geopolitics has not survived contact with the twenty-first century. It is not the internet that failed but the assumption that technology could ever remain separate from history.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

In 2023, Mozilla released a report noting that modern U.S. cars had the worst security and privacy standards of any major technology industry the organization tracks. That was followed by a major NYT report in 2024 showing how automakers routinely hoover up oodles of consumer driving and phone info, then sell access to that data to auto insurance companies looking to justify rate hikes.

Despite a lot of noise and fury, the U.S. doesn’t do anything about this for the same reason we refuse to pass a modern privacy law or regulate data brokers: “we” (more accurately the people who purportedly democratically represent us) have repeatedly decided that making gobs of money is significantly more important that human lives, public safety, consumer privacy, or even national security.

Consumer Reports is conducting a more recent follow up study in collaboration with Northeastern University. The full study will arrive next week, but their breakdown of what they’ve found indicates the problem hasn’t gotten better — and in some cases may have gotten worse.

The researchers tested 21 vehicles and their companion mobile apps at CR’s Connecticut auto testing facility using a faraday cage to isolate and analyze vehicle communications. They found they all funneled oceans of behavioral, driving, browsing, location, and other data to a long list of industries and companies. Often without fully informing consumers:

“…almost a quarter of the vehicle apps were found to be sending out personally identifiable information, including vehicle owners’ names, vehicle identification numbers (VINs), and precise geographic locations. That information can make it easy for companies to link driving behavior to personal data profiles created by data brokers and marketers. Such profiles are routinely sold to banks, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, lenders, and retailers, who can use it for personalized loan terms and filtered bank and insurance offers, a CR and CalMatters investigation found.”

Car makers, as they’ve always done, often blame third parties for any “data leakage” and act surprised when provided details on the width and depth of the data transfer. One company, Honda, claims it put an end to the problem immediately (which in a working country, regulators would independently confirm):

“General Motors, Honda, Nissan, and Stellantis (which owns 14 auto brands, including Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, and Jeep), said some recipients of driver data were prohibited from independently using or selling any data they are provided. But the Northeastern researchers found those restrictions aren’t necessarily effective: After they showed their findings to Honda, the company instructed one of its vendors, Amplitude, to delete all of the location data it had received and stopped sending it going forward.”

In a lot of instances (much like the “smart TV” and other markets), if consumers try to take informed action to opt out of collection and protect themselves, they lose vehicle functionality.

Again, carmakers do this because they know the federal U.S. government won’t meaningfully hold them accountable. And the government won’t hold them accountable because the current U.S. government is too corrupt to function in the public interest — and incentivized toward apathy because it unconstitutionally exploits this dysfunction to buy data and avoid warrants.

Despite their own products lacking privacy and security standards, these same automakers are intensely lobbying the government to ban Chinese vehicles from the U.S. market, usually under the pretense that they’re just really worried about U.S. privacy and security (Dem lawmakers in Michigan want to ban Chinese EVs from even visiting the state).

But as we saw with the “TikTok ban,” this is all annoyingly performative. China doesn’t need TikTok, EVs, or Chinese-made drones to collect sensitive U.S. consumer data because they can already buy most of it on the open and largely unregulated market. And they can buy most of it on the open market because the U.S. Congress is too corrupt to function in the public interest, despite ample pretense to the contrary.

Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck themselves… and then sued them (unsuccessfully) for not advertising on his personal propaganda and manipulation site? Well, it appears that Donald Trump is trying a government-backed variation on that abusive power play: claiming that news networks choosing not to cover him after he announced he was initiating a “free press ban” in the White House… is somehow an antitrust violation.

The Justice Department is investigating whether the major television networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News — violated federal antitrust laws when the group briefly suspended their pooled coverage of President Trump, according to six people with knowledge of the department’s action.

Officials from the Justice Department contacted networks on Friday and demanded communications and materials related to the White House TV pool, the people said. The pool is a longstanding system where the networks share the responsibility of providing footage of the president and distributing it to other news outlets.

So, before we get into the details here, let’s just do a quick refresher of the same “antitrust 101” lesson I suggested for Elon Musk two years ago during his lawsuit. While there can be antitrust concerns when a group of businesses get together to engage in a boycott, that only applies to situations where that boycott is focused on actual harms to consumers or competition. A boycott with political and expressive aims is protected under the First Amendment, and publicity campaigns aimed at influencing government are not an antitrust violation. This has been established over and over again at the Supreme Court and beyond.

Indeed, as former FTC chair William Kovacic tells the NY Times, the biggest missing factor here is that for there to be antitrust, there needs to be a commercial motive:

“The critical ingredient in successful antitrust cases is to demonstrate that there is unmistakably a commercial motive and that the commercial motive predominates,” Mr. Kovacic said. “And I don’t think they would ever be able to do that here.”

So this “investigation” is little more than fan service for the MAGA faithful in an attempt to create chilling effects on the media after Trump threw a hissy fit that the media wasn’t covering his every damn word as closely as before. The White House TV “pool” reporting involves a rotating group of media entities which share their work with others so that not every journalism org has to have their own camera crew (there are separate pools for radio and print, again to avoid overlap and crowding).

As a reminder, on Friday, September 18th, Donald Trump announced that he was “banning the free press” from the White House, specifically in the form of pulling the press passes from CNN, Politico, and MSNow reporters. On Monday the 21st of September, CNN had been scheduled to handle the TV pool that day, but since it was barred, it didn’t do so. And the other members of the TV pool — ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News — all agreed they would not step in to cover for the White House’s clearly unconstitutional attack on CNN and the other media entities barred from the White House.

Thus, for a few days there wasn’t TV pool coverage, which seemed to piss off Trump, even though it was all in response to his own First Amendment-violating censorial actions. He took to his own personal pinboard, Truth Social, to whine about the lack of coverage of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit:

CNN and MSDNC, to show you how fake they are, today refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years, the arrival at the White House of the Highly Respected President of China, Xi Jinping, and his beautiful wife, Madam Peng. The event was magnificent—Actually made for Television but, because they’re Fake News, and because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to ‘TRUMP,’ they refused to be there. That’s why they have such poor Ratings.

Yes, that’s Donald Trump literally complaining that CNN and MSNow “refused to cover” an event days after he had personally banned them from the White House where the event was happening.

The MAGA base, of course, quickly spun up nonsense claims about how not covering the president was clearly an antitrust violation (it’s not) with Laura Loomer attacking the current boss of the DOJ’s antitrust division, Stanley Woodward, as secretly a “Democrat.”

This is all kinds of stupid, given that Woodward has been a MAGA faithful Trump supporter for years. He represented January 6th rioters, and a whole bunch of people in and around Donald Trump, including Peter Navarro, Dan Scavino, and Kash Patel, among others. Politico even dubbed him “the legal nerd who MAGA bigwigs” turn to when they need help. Woodward was also involved in the ridiculous, illegal $1.776 billion slush fund Trump tried to create as part of a “settlement” with himself over his fight with the IRS.

Meanwhile, back in the actual story, by Thursday of that week a judge had granted a temporary restraining order against the White House, telling the White House to let the reporters back in. It took some time to do so, but eventually CNN, MS Now, and Politico reporters were given their WH press passes back, at least while the TRO remains in effect. And by Friday morning, September 25th, after just four days of no TV pool coverage, the networks restarted the press pool.

The White House almost immediately tested the boundaries of the TRO by blocking CNN from Air Force One (claiming the TRO only applied to the White House itself) the very next day. CNN was scheduled to handle the TV pool for that Trump trip to Tennessee, so the pool went dark again directly because the White House barred CNN from the flight. That same day, however, the networks announced they would restart the TV pool coverage, just without CNN, effectively caving to the Trump White House.

So, to sum up, the non-banned networks stood firm to boycott Trump’s TV pool for… five whole days (Monday through Thursday, and then Saturday) before totally caving and continuing to provide Trump pool coverage.

But Laura Loomer called Stanley Woodward the worst insult you can imagine for a MAGA cultist: “a Democrat.” And thus there must be action to feed the culture war beasts. Hence… an investigation into the networks for refusing to run the TV pool for less than a week in response to Trump illegally banning one member of the pool, that, Trump complained, wasn’t covering him even after he had banned them.

In a statement on Saturday, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, described the five networks as having “proudly boycotted covering White House events.”

“Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” a core antitrust law, Ms. Covington wrote. “The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws.”

Again, as discussed above, that’s not at all how the Sherman Act works. And everyone involved knows that full well. The only purpose of this is to (once again) punish the press for its editorial choices — and possibly to get private insight into the networks’ editorial decision-making process as part of the investigation.

I mean, it really needs to be emphasized here that the DOJ is investigating CNN for “boycotting” pool coverage it was literally banned from providing. In the MAGA cultist worldview, Donald Trump can ban whoever he wants from the “free press” but those he does not ban are absolutely required to cover him and spread his conspiracy theories and bullshit to the world.

It’s just a continuation of FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threatened investigation into networks that didn’t broadcast Trump’s conspiracy theory-laden speech about China’s supposed interference in the 2020 election (where the documents he declassified actually showed Russia interfered, not China).

But these stories are all the same basic story: Trump has such a fragile but inflated ego that he believes news networks are required to cover him positively, and that he can punish news orgs that (1) don’t cover him positively or (2) don’t cover him at all.

That’s not how the First Amendment works, but it is how the MAGA Trump world punishes news organizations for their editorial choices. But, of course, all the people who spent years screaming about “Biden admin censorship” are suddenly very, very quiet.

The Complete CompTIA and IT Exam Training Bundle offers access to multi-platform IT training courses, practice exam simulators, and hands-on labs such as CramWise, LinuxPath, DojoLab, CodeDirect, and ExamsDigest. These help prepare you for exams like CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, Cloud+, Server+, and PenTest+, alongside cloud and networking credentials. It’s on sale for $40.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

In today’s episode of “wtf,” we have a jury deciding a local blogger is a criminal because a local politician didn’t appreciate being sent a Shrek bereft of clothes to his cell phone. Morgan Trau of the Ohio Capital Journal has the (pathetic) details on this particular miscarriage of justice.

An Ohio political blogger let out a surprised laugh as he was found guilty of harassment after he sent an explicit digitally altered image of the cartoon character Shrek to a powerful lawmaker.

After just thirty minutes, eight Lake County jurors decided D.J. Byrnes was guilty of telecommunications harassment against state Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), after he sent him two taunting messages and a meme of Shrek holding his genitals.

Laugh he should, although we both certainly wish the laugh had been provoked by the judicial dismissal of plainly vindictive prosecution. The alleged crime has real consequences: up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Fortunately (I guess) for Byrnes (who runs a popular local-focused blog that routinely criticizes local MAGA-leaning officials), the judge only ordered him to pay court costs and a $200 fine.

But that shouldn’t let State Senator Jerry Cirino off the hook. After all, he conjured all of this into existence by using his power and political connections to turn a naked Shrek jpeg into a criminal conviction.

The lawmaker testified he directly called the local police chief, saying he wanted charges to be filed. Public records show Cirino called the judge who signed Byrnes’ arrest warrant a “good friend” in late April and donated at least $2,500 to her political campaign in 2016. 

It’s impossible to say whether a different judge would have handled this arrest warrant differently, but it’s certainly easy to assume there was some grease on the wheels when this judge was given the chance to review the affidavit.

Cirino is not to be trusted. Not only did he use his connections to turn an unwanted text message into a criminal act, but he pretended (in court!) that this was harassment because Byrnes sent the naked Shrek to his personal cell phone.

Just because he is a politician doesn’t mean he deserves that on his private cell phone, Cirino added.

Whether or not Cirino “deserves” to receive taunting messages and dick-stroking Shrek pics is a question that isn’t really answered by this verdict. But what’s no longer open for debate is whether or not Cirino has a “private” phone that’s more deserving of protections not normally afforded to public figures, like local politicians. He doesn’t. The state may not be paying for his cell service contract, but the number is anything but “private.”

One of the main arguments the defense brought up was that this was official political business and free speech, citing examples of Cirino using his cell phone for public business, even allowing local newspapers to publish his number for constituents to reach him.

It seems Cirino only likes to receive supportive messages from right-wing locals. What he doesn’t care for is criticism, taunts, and naked Shreks sent to him by people who don’t agree with his political actions or views. Since he’s already handed it out to the locals, I’m sure any enterprising search engine user should be able to find this supposedly “private” number.

But I’m sure people aligned with Cirino’s right-wing views will find Byrne first, and engage in similar harassment in response to previous “crimes” that embarrassed GOP figures and the people they love. Here’s a choice bit from Byrne/The Rooster’s CV:

He helped unearth a scandalous cell phone video that brought down former Ohio State and NFL football coach Urban Meyer. He catfished Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, posing as an Ohio State football coach. And he was present when an Ohio State professor tackled a cameraman who was trying to cajole former OSU President Gordon Gee into an interview. 

And that’s really why Cirino went after Byrne. He could have done nothing more than block Byrne’s number to end the alleged “harassment.” But he didn’t. He made a personal call to the police chief and somehow managed to get his criminal accusations presented to a “good friend” who also happened to be a local judge.

Politicians like Cirino consider corruption to be a feature of government, rather than a bug directly related to citizens trusting their fellow Americans to serve their interests, rather than their own. Hopefully, the end result of this will be Cirino being voted out of office and those who aided and abetted his petty quest for revenge coughing up a settlement to Byrne for violating his rights.

Last week, the DNC sued the Trump administration for using $20 million in taxpayer money on strange and ineffective midterm ads. The use of taxpayer money technically violates multiple laws (remember those?), including the Hatch Act and Federal Appropriations Laws restricting taxpayer-funded propaganda.

Trump’s now been ordered to stop airing the ads entirely courtesy of a temporary restraining order issued by U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon. The TRO was requested by nonprofit government watchdog group Common Cause which is leading a lawsuit against the propaganda spots.

Advertising data indicates that Trump administration ignored the judge and ran several of the ads on Monday anyway, something the latest filing by Common Cause and allies was quick to point out:

1. On October 12, at 1:31 p.m. Eastern, the Washington Post reported that two ads continued airing after the Court issued the Order and into the early hours of Monday, October 12, on multiple programs, including “60 Minutes,” “ABC World News Tonight,” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Ex. A.

2. According to AdImpact data retrieved at 2:45 p.m. Eastern today, Defendants’ ads ran in nearly 400 spots on programs that began airing at 7 p.m. Eastern last night—that is, after this Court’s order was in effect. Ex. B

The Trump administration says it has already spent $19 of the $20 million allotted for the ads. In an attempt to pretend they weren’t breaking the law, the Trump administration falsely claimed that the propaganda efforts were “public service announcements” from US Customs and Border Protection — despite the fact that no government service or program was being advertised.

On October 5 Trump responded to backlash by insisting he’d stop using taxpayer money for the ads and instead fund them via his SuperPAC. But not only is it not legal for Trump to direct his SuperPAC in such a fashion, he clearly lied and never actually stopped using taxpayer money to fund the ads, which continued to air.

The TRO is scheduled to remain in effect for 14 days, and is “subject to an extension,” Rochon said.

“Taking $20 million from a fund that Congress voted to use on border patrol, then spending it on vanity ads for an unpopular president, breaks the checks and balances set in the Constitution,” Common Cause said in statement. “If the Trump administration wanted to use money on personal promotional ads, they should have asked Congress to pass a bill to do so.”

The grand irony is despite illegally stealing taxpayer money to fund the midterm ads, the ads themselves (several of which are just rehashed version of 2024 ads) are only likely to harm vulnerable Republicans now tethered to a disastrous war and Trump’s sinking health, polling, and political power.