[A long riff on book publishing with (perhaps) wide applicability to your work as well.]
Publishing is different from writing—it’s the hard work of creating the conditions to help people get in sync, move forward, and get to where they’re headed.
The best reason to publish a non-fiction business or how-to book in 2026 is to change lives. Transformation is possible.
Transformation can happen, but only if the book ends up in the right hands for the right reasons.
Today, it’s harder than ever to pull that off. Tim Ferriss shares the numbers. We have a glut of information, but not nearly enough action. I’ve been at this for forty years, but the change this time is significant.
The number of books in this category continues to expand, but their total impact has not. At the same time, more books are being purchased by more people—the long tail is real. Publishing a book is super easy now, but publishing one that works is harder than ever.
Authors and publishers get stuck on the gap between interest and action. Too often, we don’t act until it’s too late in the process.
The author’s job in publishing begins long before pub day.
There are three pillars:
Promotion
Activation
Conversation
The first one gets way too much discussion, energy, and noise. Promotion gets the word out. Promotion can easily become all-consuming, and it can also become selfish. The promotion part of the equation asks, “have you seen my new book?” Promotion is everywhere, so we come to believe that it matters.
Activation creates the tension that answers the promotion question with, “I’ll go grab a copy.”
And conversation is the unsung part of every single hit book in this genre: “I need my friends to read this.”
Successful publishing, then, looks like this: Generate awareness. Create tension that leads to engagement with the work. Deliver an idea that works better for the reader when it’s shared and discussed. Reader traction leads to the network effect. The transformations compound, and the book becomes a foundation of culture and alignment.
That’s the work of publishing. Each component matters, not just the first one.
I’d break promotion into a few components:
Permission: When you can deliver anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to the people who want to get them, you’ve earned attention, not stolen it. Letting people who read your blog or listen to your podcast know about your new book is mutually beneficial. This is a trust that’s not to be taken lightly.
Shared permission: When you appear on someone else’s podcast or in the media, you’re bringing the message of your book to people who trust the host. The paradox is that the more trusted the media channel, the more difficult it is for you to appear when it suits you.
Buzz: This is a side effect of a good story and a medium that wants to carry it. In the hyper-parallel world of social media, there are an infinite number of tiny media outlets, and when they start to vibrate at the same frequency, buzz occurs. This is 5% preparation and 95% luck.
Hustle and Hype: Burning bridges and crossing lines just because it’s important to you. Please don’t. No one ever ends up glad they did this. It might not feel like hustle to the hustler, but if the person you’re targeting with your hype feels hustled, then that’s what’s happening.
But promotion is not worth much if it doesn’t translate into people actually purchasing and reading your book. Activation overcomes inertia, fear, and inconvenience. Activation energy leads to someone not only buying a book, but reading it.
Most publishers have someone who does publicity and promotion. Most marketers think about their job in the same way. Where are the teams that focus on activation?
In two recent book launches, I worked to create awareness with a record-breaking podcast tour. Each time I appeared on more than fiftypodcasts on launch day. It took months of recording sessions and the kind support of some of the best podcasters in the world to pull this off.
Together we reached millions of people in just a few days. And yet, very few of these listeners bought a book as a result of a podcast. The math might be 1,000,000 YouTube interview views equals a hundred books sold.
Estimated growth in hours spent (billions!) listening to podcasts or other forms of online productivity/business learning
The common-sense math is simple: Over the last two decades, hours spent listening to podcasts, blog posts and videos about non-fiction topics is exponentially higher than it was, but sales in the category are flat or down.
Podcast appearances often solve the problem of what’s in the book (“oh, I heard it, I get it”) as opposed to creating useful and generous tension that leads to a read.
[Let me pause for a second here and clarify: If you can effectively give your idea away without writing and publishing a book, please do! Most of my blog posts reach more people than my books do, and I keep them as posts because that’s the best way to get my point across. But if it’s worth publishing a book around a set of ideas, it’s probably not easily translated into a thirty-minute podcast. Buying, reading, holding, shelving, sharing–these are opportunities the book has to amplify its impact.]
Now, consider the idea of a knock-knock book. This is a book with a secret. The world asks about it (knock knock) and the answer is, “buy the book.” This was a big part of publishing for a long time—if you want to know, you needed to read the book. But now that the answer is free, online, there’s not a lot of reason left to buy this sort of book… If all a book has is a secret, it won’t have the secret for long. TLDR.
Instead, the most resilient books in this category serve a different purpose. They’re shareable. They amplify a network. They serve as an instigator and a totem, a device that allows one reader to share insights with another, all in service of getting in sync. Books are souvenirs for some purchasers, but tools for most of us.
The step after activation is the one with the highest leverage: Conversation.
Successful books in this category don’t sell by the copy; they sell by the carton.
How will my organization, my team or my relationships improve if we all read this book? Can we talk about these ideas and put them to work together?
This is why Purple Cow and The Dip were two of my bestselling books.
When David and Brian wrote The Dip into Billions, they were using it as a shorthand. The judge was saying, “we need to talk about this nuanced idea, here’s an anchor.” The book becomes the foundation for a conversation that needed to happen.
Books that matter over time almost always fit this description: Atomic Habits, In Search of Excellence, Grit, The War of Art, The Let Them Theory, Mindset, and Big Magic… practical books that stand for something and offer a foundation for shared exploration and possibility.
You can do all the promotion and activation you want, but if your book doesn’t support conversation, it will soon fade away.
Have you seen my book? →
I’ll grab a copy →
I need my friends to read this →
My circle is using this as a tool.
Don’t tell me about your promotional strategy. Talk to me about activation and build conversation into your work from the start.
“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Stewart Brand, 1984.
The two ideas don’t have to fight with each other. Information isn’t enough. It’s transformation and conversation that fuel our future.
For a long time organizations like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s xAI data center in Memphis disproportionately pollutes the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t even bother to get the necessary permits to run the turbines at its xAI’s Colossus 2 data center.
The lawsuit also notes how these 27 turbines (which has ballooned to 57 turbines since the lawsuit was filed) belch all manner of contaminants, including formaldehyde, into minority neighborhoods already seeing some of the highest asthma rates in the country, violating the Clean Air Act.
But this being Elon Musk, he apparently has been able to leverage the presidency he helped purchase to get those pesky Memphis minorities off of his back. In a filing this week obtained by Wired, the DOJ is trying to claim the lawsuit can’t proceed because xAI and Grok are highly tethered to the country’s national security efforts:
“In a filing, the agency sided with Elon Musk’s company, saying attempts to stop xAI from running the natural gas turbines “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”
Musk and his friends at the DOJ are asking the courts to dismiss the lawsuit. In May, the NAACP filed a request for a preliminary injunction, stating that the climbing rates of environmental pollution “increases risks of asthma attacks and heart disease” in communities that already face significant pollution thanks to regulatory capture and systemic racism.
Over on Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Marc Andreessen pretended to not understand why a civil rights group might be upset that unregulated data centers are pumping pollution into minority Memphis neighborhoods:
It’s worth noting that when Musk built the Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, he promised that the facility would largely re-use water via a next-generation water-recycling plant as to not strain the area water supply. But curiously, construction of that part of the project has stalled out completely. Musk says the company needs to focus on finishing their other data center in the region, then will finish construction. But, well, it’s Musk. The guy always saying we’re *this close* to settling Mars.
The youth movement has tethered AI to the country’s growing fascist, racist corruption and income inequality (and the tech sector that openly embraced it at almost every turn), and it’s going to take a lot more than sloppy CBS propaganda and new software updates to shift the perception. I’m not sure the tech sector truly groks what their enthusiastic support of Trumpism will ultimately reap them.
This is the future we’ve built in a country too corrupt to have functional regulatory oversight of obscenely rich men and corporate power. Without a meaningful ethical renaissance and profound political sea change, it only gets uglier and more violent from here.
This week, the same publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, filed a new complaint at the same court, this time with the relatively young pirate library WeLib as the target.
Again, the stakes are substantial, with the publishers seeking up to $19.5 million in potential damages for direct copyright infringement.
A New Entrant
The similarities don’t stop at the legal arguments and stakes. Anna’s Archive already highlighted the newcomer in a blog post last year, describing WeLib as a “new entrant” in the space that had copied both its collection and its code.
“They appear to have mirrored most of our collection, and use a fork of our codebase,” Anna’s Archive noted.
The same blog post was also critical of WeLib for not contributing back to the ecosystem and recommended that people avoid using the site.
From Anna’s blog post
This week, the publishers also warn against using the site, albeit for different reasons. Their complaint accuses WeLib’s unnamed and anonymous operators of widespread copyright infringement, while also confirming that connection to Anna’s Archive.
“Defendants’ entire business is the illegal copying and distribution of literary works,” the complaint notes, adding that “WeLib was created after its operators copied the source code and most of the contents of the Notorious Pirate Site, Anna’s Archive.”
Not a Library
WeLib describes itself as an “endless library” founded on the principle that “education and literature belong to everyone.” The publishers, however, clearly don’t agree with the library framing, noting libraries can be trusted; pirate sites not.
“Libraries are trusted institutions that serve the communities that fund them by lending books and other publications they have lawfully acquired. Using this label for WeLib explicitly misleads the public and allows WeLib to hijack the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.”
“WeLib is no more than a pirate website that reproduces and distributes works of authorship owned by others to users for a profit, without authorization from or compensation to the copyright owners,” the complaint adds.
WeLib.org
The complaint notes that WeLib’s operators made efforts to keep their identities hidden. However, the site itself quickly became a go-to portal for many book pirates.
The complaint notes that, by WeLib’s own account, its collection includes 43 million books and 98 million articles. The site reportedly has over 80,000 active monthly users who accessed more than 51.7 million books and downloaded 14.5 million files last month.
While the site can be used for free, users can pay for fast downloads and to skip the queue. Subscriptions start at $7 per month for 25 fast downloads and 25 fast reads per day; while the top tier costs $90 a month for 1,000 daily downloads.
Staggering Scale
These payments, or “donations” as WeLib calls them, can be made through cryptocurrency, WeChat, and Alipay. They are allegedly processed through a company called Malum.co, which offers payment services to high-risk vendors, without the need for any KYC identity checks.
Damages and Domain Seizures
The complaint lists a sample of 130 copyrighted works as evidence. This mirrors the Anna’s Archive lawsuit, where the court awarded $150,000 per work, which is the statutory maximum, resulting in a total of $19.5 million.
In addition to the monetary damages, the publishers are also seeking a permanent injunction that aims to take the site offline. They ask the court to order third-party registries, registrars, and hosting providers to disable WeLib’s domains and render them untransferable.
Domain Names Targeted
This also includes a specific request to disable the authoritative nameserver for the .st domain, registered through Njalla, a Costa Rica-based registrar that is not necessarily responsive to U.S. court orders.
The AI Training Conundrum
As with other recent publisher lawsuits, the complaint also mentions AI training. Specifically, it alleges that WeLib supplies copyright infringing data to AI companies.
“WeLib has also been an illegal supplier of stolen content to the AI industry. In a recent lawsuit, publishers alleged that Meta utilized WeLib to train their Llama models,” the complaint reads.
The recent lawsuit they refer to is Elsevier Inc. v. Meta Platforms which is filed by several of the same publishers through the same law firm, Oppenheim + Zebrak. However, what that complaint actually says about WeLib is more specific and not in line with the current case.
The Elsevier v. Meta complaint describes WeLib as a source found within C4 training dataset Meta used, but identifies it as “formerly known as PDF Drive.” This dataset was built years ago from a Common Crawl snapshot and predates WeLib and even Anna’s Archive.
From Elsevier v. Meta
More confusingly, the complaint against WeLib that was filed this week makes no mention of it formerly being known as “PDF Drive”, or the C4 dataset for that matter.
According to our knowledge, there is no evidence that content hosted by WeLib was included in the C4 database. All we can confirm is that the database does include “PDF Drive” data and that the pdfdrive.com domain redirected to the new WeLib site at some point.
PDF Drive is a long-running PDF hosting site that has operated for years, predating Anna’s Archive entirely. It has no documented connection to Anna’s Archive’s codebase or collection. Whether it shares more than a domain redirect with the WeLib now being sued is unclear.
The publishers’ framing of WeLib as an active AI training pipeline may be backed up with further evidence later, or not. For now, WeLib has yet to respond. However, since anonymous operators typically don’t show up in court, this case may also copy Anna’s Archive’s path, heading to a default judgment.
—
A copy of the complaint, filed by Oppenheim + Zebrak on behalf of the thirteen plaintiff publishers, is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
We were just talking about how angry RFK Jr. was at a report that he’s been out to lunch on most of what HHS’ work entails, choosing instead to focus his time and attention on his own pet interests, like curtailing vaccine programs in America, chasing chemtrails, and a newfound love for snake-handling. Kennedy denied all of this of course, commenting that everyone was freaking out just because he missed “a couple” of meetings. He then suggested that real journalists would check his public calendar to see how busy he’s been, despite his calendar apparently not being in any way public.
The question that leaps to mind in all of this is where the rest of Kennedy’s time is going, if not spent on HHS’ core functions. The answer appears in part to be demanding that scientific journals explain their decisions to retract articles, so long as they were articles that fit Kennedy’s agenda.
In a letter dated June 11, Kennedy wrote to Toxicology Reports Editor-in-Chief Lawrence H. Lash concerning a 2021 study titled “Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature.”
The study in question was authored solely by Neil Z. Miller and was among those cited by Kennedy’s former personal lawyer Aaron Siri in a presentation he gave before a federal vaccine panel in support of altering the childhood immunization schedule. Those alterations to the vaccine schedule, and the panel that approved them, have since been blocked by a federal judge.
Miller, who identifies as a “medical research journalist” in his author biography, is a prominent vaccine skeptic, having published numerous books questioning the safety and efficacy of immunizations.
Now, a couple of things to note here. First, Toxicology Reports has a bit of a reputation problem that arose during the COVID era. It is considered a generally reputable outlet, to be clear, but it had several controversies that arose in 2020 and 2021. Lash is actually the founding editor of the journal, but he had stepped away during this controversial period, during which the journal published articles of a conspiratorial nature around COVID and 5G technology. Lash returned as Editor in Chief of the journal in late 2021.
Importantly, that happened after the article in question was published. Lash has apparently been attempting to reestablish the reputation of Toxicology Reports and has, on occasion, gone back and retracted articles that don’t meet his renewed standards. That’s, you know, the work an Editor-in-Chief does. Kennedy’s demands for an explanation why an article he liked was retracted is particularly odd, since the retraction came along with the journal’s justification.
The article was about research the author had done in correlating data in the VAERS database with vaccine injury and infant death. A large problem with such research is, as was detailed often during the height of the pandemic, that VAERS is largely a self-reporting system. Claims of vaccine injury that are reported are not verified. If you try to get at the data yourself, you will first see a disclaimer you have to acknowledge that includes the following text:
Key considerations and limitations of VAERS data:
The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted as evidence of a causal association between a vaccine and an adverse event, or as evidence about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines.
Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, and unverified information.
VAERS does not obtain follow up records on every report. If a report is classified as serious, VAERS requests additional information, such as health records, to further evaluate the report.
VAERS data are limited to vaccine adverse event reports received between 1990 and the most recent date for which data are available.
VAERS data do not represent all known safety information for a vaccine and should be interpreted in the context of other scientific information.
And the justification for the retraction follows along those lines.
In its removal notice, Elsevier, the publisher of Toxicology Reports, stated, “Given the inherent limitations of passive reporting systems, including the expected temporal clustering of events independent of causality, the conclusions presented in the article are not supported by the methodology employed.”
“In light of these concerns, and given the potential implications for medical practice, the Editor-in-Chief has decided that the article should be removed. The author disagrees with this decision and disputes the grounds for removal,” the publisher added.
That’s really all you need to know. The dataset the study was built on is unreliable when it comes to the conclusions the research attempted to draw. And that’s before we get into the inappropriate nature of the sitting Secretary of HHS reaching out to scientific journals to demand explanations on matters of medicine and science when he is neither a doctor nor a scientist. I’ll note that the editorial board for Toxicology Reports is chockablock full of PHDs and MDs.
If Kennedy finds the real work at HHS boring, then he should quit and go back to advocating for people to be less healthy from infectious diseases for which we have vaccines. Otherwise, there are about a half a dozen health crises going on right now that he could work on instead of harassing the editors of science journals about their independent editorial decisions.
On the morning of June 16, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen—a Trump appointee confirmed on a party-line Senate vote—stood before cameras at the federal courthouse in Minneapolis to announce what his office called a sweeping conspiracy to undermine federal law enforcement. His office had obtained an eight-count felony indictment against 15 people connected to anti-ICE organizing in the Twin Cities.
The lead charge was conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer. Rosen described the defendants as participants in a left-wing coalition called Direct Action Minnesota, which he accused of “surveillance, operational planning, and rapid mobilization against law enforcement actions.”
Behind him, on a monitor, was the evidence he had chosen to lead with: a screenshot of a social media post. “You see here a Facebook post from one of the defendants writing, quote: ‘We need to become ungovernable. We need to resist any way we can to materially stop the Nazi occupation,’” Rosen read aloud.
Twelve of the 15 defendants had already been arrested that morning. Two remained at large. Rosen closed with a warning: “If you are actively conspiring to impede law enforcement … you ought to assume that we’re watching you and that we will get you.”
But the unusual charges have already led to many questions.
Rosen had told MPR News reporter Matt Sepic that the people were “charged not for what they said but what they did.”But he led his presentation with a defendant’s thoughts posted publicly online.
A defense attorney in attendance, Bruce Nestor, called the presser a “propaganda show” and zeroed in on this central contradiction. Then he asked what we were all thinking: “What’s wrong with being ungovernable by a fascist government?”
Minnesota Reformer reporter Madison McVan noted that more than a third of the individuals charged during the earlier federal crackdown on Minnesota protesters had already had their cases dismissed or failed in some way. If that’s the case, why was this case different?
“I don’t think any cases have failed in any way,” Rosen replied.
A second reporter immediately bodychecked him with facts. Prosecutors had in fact dropped 18 of the 36 prior cases entirely, with non-prosecution agreements in at least 11 more.
Rosen was also asked directly whether any federal officers had actually been harmed. He declined to say. “Whether or not they actually at the end of the day caused bodily harm,” Rosen argued, “is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime.”
Minneapolis in the spotlight again
In Season Two, the federal government has chosen to put Minneapolis back in the news, so it’s helpful to review what happened in Season One.
Operation Metro Surge launched in December 2025, flooding the Twin Cities and surrounding areas with federal immigration agents. At its peak, roughly 4,000 officers from ICE and Customs and Border Protection had been deployed across the state, ultimately making more than 3,700 arrests. Federal agents killed two U.S. citizens in incidents caught on camera—Renée Good on January 7, and Alex Pretti on January 24—bringing the number of people shot across the country between September 2025 and February 2026 to 13, with four fatalities.
Residents of Minneapolis organized in response to the surge and the killings. Community members filmed federal agents during enforcement actions, a practice former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem characterized as a form of violence against officers. Hundreds, and eventually thousands, of Twin Cities residents joined community patrol networks, monitoring ICE movements and bearing witness to arrests.
On January 23, the day before CBP agents killed Pretti, Minneapolis saw a general strike. Schools and businesses shut down as workers marched under the banner of “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” Over 50,000 people marched through downtown in subzero temperatures, with hundreds of businesses closing their doors, in a shutdown endorsed by the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, which represents more than 80,000 workers across 175 unions.
One coalition that emerged from this moment was Direct Action Minnesota. The people now facing federal felony charges were organizing during, and in direct response to, all of it.
The charges
The indictment unsealed Tuesday runs 94 pages. The bulk of it is devoted to a single charge applied to all 15 defendants: conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer under 18 U.S.C. § 372. The statute was first enacted in 1861, and the Justice Department’s own Office of Legal Counsel, in a 1977 memorandum, noted it had historically been charged only alongside substantive offenses like assault, and had rarely stood alone.
It appeared most recently in a handful of January 6 prosecutions. Before that, its most notable use was against a pair of tax protesters who retreated to their New Hampshire home with a cache of weapons in 2007. The Justice Department is now applying it to nonviolent protest organizers in Minnesota.
To establish the conspiracy, the indictment leans heavily on the group’s internal communications and organizational activity. These include
conducting Signal chats in which members expressed frustration with non-violent tactics;
holding planning sessions for blockades around the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling;
creating a GoFundMe account;
organizing training sessions for new members;
attendingworker assemblies held at the United Labor Centre in Minneapolis, cited in the indictment as evidence of criminal coordination;
and holding an “Anarchist Speaking Tour” in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Seattle in April, where members allegedly shared tactics with other groups.
And of course, that Facebook post.
As Talking Points Memo noted, beyond the base conspiracy charge, some individual defendants face additional counts. Kyle Wagner, who had previously been arrested in February on federal threat and cyberstalking charges, faces counts of solicitation to commit a crime of violence and interstate threats, based on social media posts urging followers to abandon peaceful protest.
Isaac Auman Sant faces an interstate stalking charge for following a federal officer from the Whipple Building across state lines to Hudson, Wisconsin. William Morgan faces the same stalking charge, plus assault on a federal officer and destruction of government property, after he allegedly knocked an agent’s notes from his hand, kicked a government vehicle and placed sandbags under its tires.
Natasha Rakotz faces a single count of assault on a federal officer.
Courts should proceed very skeptically
Tuesday’s indictment didn’t arrive in a vacuum. It was delivered by a Justice Department whose record of prosecuting anti-ICE demonstrators in Minnesota has been spotty, and whose record elsewhere has drawn allegations of gross misconduct.
Of the 36 people federally charged with assaulting or impeding federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, prosecutors have since dropped 18 cases entirely and resolved 11 more through non-prosecution agreements, meaning they were dismissed for reasons including a lack of probable cause and evidence that directly contradicted law enforcement’s own claims. Several others were quietly downgraded from felonies to misdemeanors.
The case of Nasra Ahmed is illustrative. At the height of the surge, federal officers arrested Ahmed, a 23-year-old U.S.-born citizen, posted her booking photo on social media, and named her in a news release alleging that 16 Minnesotans had assaulted immigration agents. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi called her a “rioter” in a post that drew 3.3 million views. The Department of Homeland Security amplified it, calling the defendants “violent anti-ICE anarchists.”Four months later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office asked to drop the charges. A federal judge lambasted the office for prosecutorial harassment, finding that the government’s conduct had violated a court order, likely violated the Justice Department’s own policies, and undermined the presumption of innocence. The charges were dismissed with prejudice.
Defense attorney Bruce Nestor, who has followed these cases closely, said the pattern is consistent. The prior Metro Surge charges, he said, “were based on lies. They were based on false information, they were based on violation of judicial orders. And now today, 15 more people are going to go through that process, and the same thing will be true of the charges.”
The Minnesota dismissals are part of a broader national pattern. In Chicago, the Justice Department brought a conspiracy prosecution against six people who had demonstrated outside the Broadview ICE detention facility. It was a case that included a progressive congressional candidate, Kat Abughazaleh, and it became a national flashpoint. The case collapsed in May when U.S. District Judge April Perry reviewed grand jury transcripts and found prosecutorial misconduct so severe she described it as unlike anything she had seen in hundreds of such transcripts over her career. The U.S. Attorney dismissed all remaining charges with prejudice and took responsibility before the court. Sanctions against the prosecutors involved may follow.
Chris Parente, a former federal prosecutor who represented one of the Broadview defendants, was unsparing in his condemnation. “This DOJ has completely corrupted the grand jury process. When they decide that they want to get a political indictment through, they will do whatever it takes, even acting in an unethical way.”
Abughazaleh, whose own charges were dismissed after the grand jury misconduct came to light, drew the connection between the Broadview Six and the charges announced on June 16. “As the government raids ‘antifa groups’ in Minneapolis with the SAME charges levied against myself and the rest of the Broadview Six,” she wrote on Bluesky, “we need to be asking how they got this indictment. And as charges (hopefully) get dropped, we must remember the process is the punishment.”
The question of how the Minnesota grand jury was conducted, and what a judge might find if she looked at those transcripts, too, remains unanswered but may come to light.
What This Means
The statute at issue, 18 U.S.C. § 372, was written in 1861 to protect federal officers from organized interference at a moment when the authority of the federal government itself was under armed challenge. The Justice Department is now applying it to people who organized blockades, attended union hall meetings, monitored ICE vehicles on public streets, and posted on Facebook.
Among the indicted are leaders of Minnesota’s labor movement, who received the George Meany–Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award from the AFL-CIO at its national convention in Minneapolis on June 7.
Conduct that would be entirely unremarkable in any other civic context—coordinating volunteers, raising money, holding meetings and traveling to share information—has been reframed as overt acts of a criminal conspiracy, all because the object was to resist federal immigration enforcement.
The Trump administration has been explicit about its intent. An executive order signed by Trump titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” directed the Justice Department to treat left-wing activism as an organized terrorist conspiracy. It declared that political violence “does not emerge organically” but is instead “a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns.”
The label of “conspiracy” is now being attached to any left-leaning group engaged in direct action. The Brennan Center for Justice, analyzing NSPM-7 shortly after its release, concluded that the directive was “ungrounded in fact and law” and that acting on it would threaten “any person or group holding any one of a broad array of disfavored views with investigation and prosecution.” The 15 Minnesotans charged Tuesday are the latest proof of concept, meant to chill organizing against the federal government across the country.
Minnesota’s labor movement built one of the most robust and celebrated civic responses to a federal enforcement action in recent memory. It developed food distribution networks, stood up a rapid response system, and held a general strike that shut down a major American city for a day in negative-30-degree windchill. That is a real threat to the White House’s authoritarian goals and, seen in that light, the charges, while deplorable, are unsurprising.
Whether the charges survive judicial scrutiny is a separate question. Given the record of the prior prosecutions, there is ample reason for skepticism and a clear need for close scrutiny.
Survival in court may not be the White House’s primary objective. The legal process itself, as these defendants and the Broadview Six before them have learned, is the punishment. Arrests, bail conditions, legal fees and public branding as “antifa”—all of it accrues before a single day of trial, and all of it is meant to deter others from attempting the same resistance.
But there is a high cost to the White House, too. By filing these charges and reopening the wound of Minneapolis, the Justice Department is reminding Americans of the brutality and fascism of this regime at a time when Trump’s popularity is at a nadir. And for a party that has long railed against censorship and thought policing, there is the strong stench of hypocrisy.
As historian Heather Cox Richardson noted in her newsletter, the government’s highlighting of the words “Become Ungovernable” in a Facebook post bears an inconvenient backdrop. “Trump attended the Libertarian National Convention in 2024 when its theme was ‘Become Ungovernable,’ and stood in front of the banner bearing that slogan,” Richardson observed, “so the idea that the phrase is part of a criminal conspiracy will be awkward to argue.”
The internet is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves—both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth proposals to ban social media for younger users.
In late 2025, Australia’s government rolled out the first complete ban on users under 16 from having social media accounts. In this sweeping regime, platforms are required to introduce age assurance tools to block under-16s, demonstrate that they have taken “reasonable steps” to deactivate accounts used by under-16s, and prevent any new accounts being created, or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32 million USD). The 10 banned platforms—Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, Kick, Reddit, Twitch, and X—have each said they’ll comply with the legislation, which led to young people losing access to their accounts overnight. Reddit is currently challenging the law in Australian courts on constitutional grounds. Recent research notes how the ban is preventing teenagers from accessing news in the country.
In the United Kingdom, rules took effect in mid-2025 under the Online Safety Act that require all online services available in the country to assess whether they host content considered harmful to children; if so, these services must introduce age checks to prevent children from accessing such content. Online services are also required to change their algorithms and moderation systems to ensure that content defined as harmful, like violent imagery, is not shown to young people.
This approach is reckless, short-sighted, and we’ve already seen it introduce more harm to the young people that it is trying to protect. The UK’s scramble to find an effective age verification method shows us that there isn’t one, and we’ve spent years urging UK politicians to abandon any measures that require platforms to collect data or remove privacy protections around users’ identities.
Earlier this year, Indonesia’s Communications and Digital Affairs Minister, Meutya Hafid, announced that users under 16 would have their accounts on “high risk” platforms deactivated from 28 March. The platforms subject to this ban are YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live, and Roblox; with Hafid noting how this policy would make Indonesia “the first non-Western country to delay children’s access to digital spaces according to age.”
Similarly, the Malaysian government has recently pushed forward with plans to ban users under 16 from having accounts on social media platforms with at least 8 million users in Malaysia, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Users under the age of 16 are being told to download or transfer their data from these platforms in one month before the restrictions are applied. Platforms failing to comply with the ban may face penalties of up to $2.5 million USD.
In Latin America, Brazilapproved a new law in 2025 establishing that providers of information technology products and services directed to children and teenagers, or likely to be accessed by them, must conduct age checks when their products and services offer risks to underage users. Regulation requires age assurance for products and services that are not allowed for children and adolescents in accordance with Brazilian legislation. App stores and operating systems are required to provide age signals for other providers.
While the law is already in force, full compliance with its obligations is expected for early 2027, after the approval of further regulations and a transition period, and the authority responsible for enforcing the law is the Brazilian National Data Protection Agency. The list of concerns regarding the implementation of the law include: the wide scope of products and services that may fall within age-check obligations, how these obligations can affect non-proprietary operating systems and free software projects, and how effective the law’s crucial data protection safeguards will be in a context of likely widespread age checks for accessing content online.
Similarly, the European Union has taken large steps towards mandatory age verification that could undermine privacy, expression, and participation rights for everyone. Politicians are promoting an EU-wide approach to age verification through its age verification “app,” which will be fully interoperable with the Digital Identity Wallet. While this mini-app has been announced as technically ready to be rolled out “for citizens to use,” it comes with its own realm of potential privacy and security concerns, such as long-term identifiers (which could result in tracking) and over-exposure of personal information.
The European Commission also supports age verification in various legislative initiatives, from proposals that would allow or mandate companies to scan our communication (“Chat Control”) to non-binding guidelines of existing laws, such as the Digital Services Act. The EU Parliament, too, has proposed an EU digital minimum age of 16 for access to social media, a move that aligns with EU Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen’s recent public support for measures inspired by Australia’s model. To all these initiatives EFF has provided one consistent response: mandatory age verification measures are not the right way to protect young people.
These proposals restrict the fundamental rights of young people to speak to each other and to access information. They also force all internet users, not just those under a certain age, to upload private data—like a face scan or passport—in order to access a website or service. In considering the vast scope of privacy issues pertaining to the collection, storage, and sharing of this personal information, the problems of age verification in restricting free speech are compounded by these reckless and harmful approaches to verification.
The problem of censorship and surveillance goes far beyond the borders of the internet. EFF continues to explore support for legislative and litigation challenges that recognize how these laws harm everyone’s rights to privacy, free expression and due process.
You have less than a week to weigh in on Brendan Carr’s obviously bullshit retaliatory censorial attack on Disney. While it’s quite clear that Carr is likely to ignore the comments, they still very much matter. It needs to be in the public record that the public is against this attack on free speech and fundamental rights, rather than letting MAGA chuds stuff the comment box with nonsense.
Karl and I have detailed much of the history of how we got here. For many years, Carr has presented himself as a true defender of free speech and the First Amendment, but his actions made clear long ago that he only meant when Democrats were in the White House. During the first Trump administration, Trump demanded that his FCC support his plan to wreck Section 230 and enable greater censorship online. When one of the three GOP FCC commissioners — staunch Republican Mike O’Rielly — made a few tepid comments about how the FCC shouldn’t be in the business of messing with 230, Trump pulled his renomination. Carr, however, made it clear he’d be Trump’s little censorial lapdog.
He then spent the four Biden years once again pretending to care about free speech, but the second Trump was elected, Carr made it abundantly clear that if Trump made him chair of the FCC he’d be Trump’s loyal censor in chief. Since then he’s lived up to that promise and more. He’s launched a series of bogus investigations, always into perceived ideological enemies of Trump and MAGA, always pretending that he just has to do this. He held up the Ellisons’ takeover of Paramount and CBS until CBS agreed to pay Trump a bribe. And, most famously, he briefly got Jimmy Kimmel kicked off of TV for making a joke that Carr didn’t like.
His latest move, as we’ve covered, was to go after ABC’s The View for having Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on their show. It was yet another in Carr’s long line of bullshit, censorial investigations designed to intimidate broadcasters (but only those he deems too woke — if you’re MAGA, you get a total free pass) into only letting MAGA and MAGA-supportive guests on the air. This time, though, Disney fought back.
Rather than pathetically caving like CBS, Disney filed a petition for declaratory ruling that The View had done nothing wrong in having Talarico on as a guest. They even hired some big time litigators in Paul Clement and Jennifer Tatel to file the petition.
The underlying issue is the “equal time rule,” which was barely discussed for decades. But Carr has glommed onto it as his tool for attacking ABC for not being obsequious enough to Trump. The rule, which only applies to broadcast license holders, says that they have to provide equal time to competing candidates for public office. But there’s a clear exemption for a “bona fide newscast” or a “bona fide news interview.”
All the way back in 2002, the FCC made it clear that The View, and plenty of other shows like it, qualified for the “bona fide news exemption,” and it has been operating accordingly, as have many right-leaning radio and TV programs. Indeed, most local TV station affiliates (which these rules technically apply to) are owned by MAGA friendly media giants like Sinclair and Nexstar. Did Carr go after any of them? Of course not.
Instead, he manufactured a fake controversy. Most broadcaster affiliates (including Disney’s owned and operated affiliates) didn’t bother to file any paperwork regarding Talarico’s appearance because they (like everyone else) had been relying on the FCC’s granted exemption as a bona fide news interview. But Carr then got a few non-Disney owned affiliates (i.e., those owned by Trump-friendly media conglomerates) to file some paperwork in order to pretend that Disney’s owned and operated affiliates were somehow bucking the normal way of operating. As Disney noted in its filing, the whole thing was manufactured by Carr:
“The Bureau neglected to note, however, that while certain ABC affiliates documented Talarico’s appearance in their online public inspection files, the filings were made more than two weeks after Talarico’s appearance and apparently at the request of the FCC, which reportedly promised to eschew enforcement for the late filing. KTRK Television received no such request and no such offer, despite the Bureau specifically contacting it about the Talarico appearance less than 10 days after it occurred.”
With Disney filing its petition, Carr recognized he basically had to open a public comment period, even though he clearly has no intention of admitting that his entire investigation is bullshit.
But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it. As Karl noted, it’s quite likely that MAGA folks are spinning up their usual fake-comment-orama-generator, which Carr will undoubtedly use to claim there’s widespread public support for him punishing Disney.
But having comments on the record calling out how this is censorial nonsense, a massive abuse of Carr’s power, and blatantly unconstitutional still matter. The record is public, and it will be helpful to make it clear that Carr knows exactly what he’s doing and for whose benefit he’s doing this little charade. MAGA folks won’t be in charge forever, and dismantling the corrupt censorial rot represented by the likes of Brendan Carr needs to start with the basics: getting it on the record that we all know and see what he’s doing.
The first round of comments are due on June 22nd. It’s a simple form and you can just fill it out. Or if you’d prefer, write out a document, save it as a PDF, and attach it via that form as well. Just get it on the record that you don’t support Carr’s censorial retaliation campaign. There will also be a second round of comments due July 6th, but it would be nice to get more people to file in this first round and make it clear that the public knows what Carr is up to.
For what it’s worth, in any such filing, I would recommend making your arguments as clearly and compellingly as possible. I know that sometimes people just file pure angry screeds but those are less effective than a few paragraphs explaining why you don’t support Carr’s censorial campaign and asking the FCC to knock it off.
The US military has engaged in extrajudicial killings via drone strikes since it was first shown this tech could be used to murder people. The War on Terror has given us more than two decades of drone strikes — all of which have used war-related justifications to excuse them without the actual authorization of Congress.
The War Powers Act was written specifically to prevent presidents from doing what they have done pretty much since its passage: engage in foreign military actions without seeking approval from Congress. If we were actually engaged in declared wars, these drone strikes would still be problematic, but possibly supported by law. But since every president has routed around this act, the killings of people in foreign lands and foreign waters looks a lot more like murder than the justifiable defense of the nation against foreign threats.
We’ve moved on from double-tap strikes targeting Yemeni wedding parties to sinking pretty much any non-commercial vessels spotted heading from South America in the general direction of the United States. The administration’s Office of Legal Counsel says this is all very legal, even as it struggles to explain how targeting boats allegedly loaded with drugs is something the military should be handling with deadly force, rather than the way this has been handled for decades: with law enforcement interception of drug traffickers.
This administration doesn’t care. Trump likes seeing stuff get blown up and Defense Department secretary Pete Hegseth likes being crassly violent. What already looked like murder now looks a whole lot like war crimes. The military isn’t content to disable boats containing alleged drug merchants. It keeps firing until boats are sunk, even though it’s legally obligated to rescue people who refused to immediately die after being hit with a drone strike.
We’re now killing nearly a person a day in international waters near South America. And it’s up to journalists to figure out who’s being killed because we certainly can’t trust the government to care enough about the targets of its drone strikes to perform this minor due diligence.
But there are also admissions by government officials that make it clear the boat strikes are wandering past the vaguely-defined limits of the administration’s horrific new twist on the Drug War. In testimony that has yet to officially be made public, a military official admitted one of Trump’s first boat strikes likely killed more crime victims than alleged criminals.
In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.
“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”
It’s a good question. But that answer is only surfacing now, despite being given months ago. According to this report by The Intercept, the truth was told by military official in a closed-door meeting with congressional oversight.
During a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last fall, Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett — a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff — was asked if any of the people aboard the boat on September 2 could have been human trafficking victims. “They could be,” Bennett replied, according to two people present at the briefing.
The government refuses to officially discuss this likely possibility. In the run-up to publication, The Intercept made multiple efforts to obtain comment from Bennett, as well as from the Defense Department itself. These requests were refused.
Meanwhile, the commander who authorized the second strike that killed the survivors of the first strike — Admiral Frank Bradley — continues to claim the US government identified all eleven people aboard the boat before initiating the first strike. But that seems incredibly unlikely, given what’s known about the “intelligence” the DoD relied on to engage in this strike.
JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] did not know the names or supposed affiliations of all persons aboard the vessel struck on September 2, numerous government sources told The Intercept.
Two sources specifically mentioned that some passengers were identified only by an obvious nom de guerre. “I don’t think we knew the identities of any of the people in the boat. We might have known one or two. … But we certainly didn’t know the identities of all 11,” Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said in December. “I don’t think we have any idea, who precisely, any of the individuals in these boats are.”
That’s not acceptable, not when you’re killing people. While it’s impossible to be 100% accurate in all cases, the rule should be to not pull the trigger unless you’re absolutely sure. And since drug interdiction efforts that involve seized and boarded boats are wrong 20% of the time, the standard should be even higher when it involves trying to straight-up kill people. But this is a shoot-first, ask questions never administration. It is an inarguable fact that innocent people are being killed in these boat strikes. And we can be doubly-sure of that because this administration has never expressed any concern whatsoever about collateral damage or shown any restraint when it comes to engaging in extrajudicial killings.
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Section 702 was one of the surveillance programs Ed Snowden exposed in 2013 — and even after the exposure, the NSA has continued abusing it to spy on Americans.
It’s the tool that lets the NSA collect communications to and from foreign “targets” — including any American on the other end of those communications, who the NSA is technically not supposed to surveil. It used to be worse. It used to include any communications “about” those targets (which made it very broad) but that was stripped out a few years ago, thankfully. Still, a ton of communications are collected under this program, including communications by and to Americans. The NSA then keeps all those communications, and so-called “backdoor searches” allowed the FBI to query those communications, meaning that even though the NSA has no authority to spy on Americans, the tool is used all the time to spy on Americans.
There was a brief period when Republicans were against it, when they thought that Democrats were using the authority to spy on them, but they quickly seemed to forget that once Trump was back in power, because of course they did.
Every single time it comes up for renewal, Congress dithers and frets, and we hear from the authoritarians in the government (across both parties) about how absolutely necessary it is to keep you safe from terrorists. That’s never been true. They never present any actual evidence for that claim. Just a lot of “trust us or you’ll be sorry.” And every time it comes up for renewal, and reformers push for a discussion on stopping its abuses, we’re told “no time for that, we must renew it, and we can debate reforms afterwards.” But no debate ever comes. They just wait until the next renewal, and we go through the same dance all over again.
But on Friday… the 702 authority expired. And the world hasn’t ended. Amusingly, this is almost entirely Trump’s own doing. It started with his decision to put Bill Pulte (who has zero experience in intelligence and is most famous for abusing his authority to go after Trump’s enemies) as the acting Director of National Intelligence. That caused Democrats to realize that if Pulte was abusing his position as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to investigate anyone he pleased, imagine what shenanigans he’d pull off with 702 powers. And so they blocked any further discussion on 702, and even got a few Republicans to go along with them. Hell, even Senate Majority Leader John Thune worried about how Pulte would “weaponize” 702.
That’s Trump posting to his personal emo blog Truth Social:
A few Dumocrats are against FISA, with or without Bill Pulte going to DNI, as Acting. What kind of deal is that. Besides, I’m against FISA if it doesn’t come with The Save America Act (Full version!) firmly attached to it. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Except the SAVE America Act, which serves no purpose other than to suppress voting, just doesn’t have the votes. So tying it to FISA renewal, which was already on shaky grounds, means they don’t have the votes for either.
The self-proclaimed ultimate dealmaker managed to kill the surveillance program his allies love by overplaying a weak hand. The intel community’s sky-is-falling routine has been exposed as the theater it’s always been. Congress should leave this one expired.
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But that's not the fun fact; this is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI":
Quiggin declares that this is the era in which "financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately," and "the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying." Nor did this start with the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it cryptocurrency because no one is even pretending that it's a form of money. It's a tradeable collectible, not even particularly useful for paying for crimes or laundering money.
Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things:
That's the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world's money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in their faces, saying we don't need cancer research because "GAI" is almost here and it will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down real cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer.
Today, Goldman Sachs isn't merely all-in on crypto – it's all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk's claim that "Musk's ragbag of assets" will grow one hundredfold in the next 40 months.
Quiggin's short essay has been rolling around in my mind since I read it a couple days ago. Then, yesterday, I spotted this essay by Owen McGrann entitled "The Dead Economy Theory":
The perfect name for this phenomenon! Or so I thought. Then I read McGrann's article, and discovered that it's yet another piece asking how the economy will work after AI takes all of our jobs because AI is absolutely going to do that and there's no point in even questioning whether that will happen.
Look, thought experiments about how to deal equitably with labor displacement in the face of automation are all well and good. I'm a science fiction writer, that stuff is my bread and butter.
But applying "dead economy theory" to the blithe acceptance of the claims of AI pitchmen is a terrible waste of a killer coinage. The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that can't do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."
By the same token: the real "dead economy" risk isn't that all the productive labor will be done by chatbots owned by a habitual liar and eminently guillotineable billionaire like Sam Altman. The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.
We could do "AI cancer research" by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we're actually doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into "systemic" cancer because studying systemic things is "woke") to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.
That's not just a dead economy – it's one that'll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.
Virtual: The future of world governance, with Kim Stanley Robinson (UN Independent Expert on International Order), Jun 19 https://www.youtube.com/live/wJvBvYdaAMY
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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In a complaint filed at a Nashville federal court in 2023, Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI and others, accused X Corp of “breeding” mass copyright infringement.
The social media company allegedly failed to respond adequately to takedown notices and lacks a proper termination policy.
In addition to the alleged legal shortcomings, public comments by X Corp’s boss Elon Musk were also referenced. Specifically, the complaint mentioned that Musk described the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a “plague on humanity.”
X Corp Books Early Victories
With hundreds of millions in damages on the line, X Corp fought the lawsuit tooth and nail. This resulted in an early win in 2024, when the court dismissed the music companies’ direct and vicarious copyright infringement claims.
The labels’ contributory infringement claims were partially dismissed, but Judge Trauger allowed the music companies to continue the case based on this remaining claim.
After the Cox ruling, the music publishers filed a Second Amended Complaint under seal. While this copy remains outside the public eye today, X Corp filed a motion to dismiss it this week, which partly lifts the veil.
As expected, the music companies are trying to keep their case alive by reframing it as an “inducement” claim. That is the only surviving contributory liability claim in this case under the new standard.
X Corp clearly disagrees and the company filed a motion to dismiss the amended complaint a few days ago. The company notes that the music publishers’ attempt to “retrofit” an inducement claim is simply not supported by the provided evidence.
“Plaintiffs’ attempt to retrofit an inducement theory fails as a matter of law because the allegations suggest only insufficient action to prevent infringement, which Cox and other cases have held cannot support an inducement claim,” X Corp writes.
“[Truncated] DMCA Is a Plague On Humanity”
The music publishers’ inducement theory partly relies on a handful of public statements by Elon Musk, which they argue demonstrate that X encouraged its users to infringe. This includes the “DMCA plague” tweet.
While we don’t have access to the sealed complaint, X says that the music companies have included a truncated version of the tweet, which misses key context.
Musk was responding to reporting about Senator Hawley’s bill to cap copyright duration at 56 years, and expressing a political opinion that current copyright protection terms are too long.
“Plaintiffs truncate one of Mr. Musk’s posts to pretend that he called “the DMCA” itself a ‘plague on humanity.’ In fact, he said that “Overzealous DMCA is a plague on humanity”,” X writes.
“Plaintiffs’ excision is telling. No reasonable observer could read Mr. Musk’s full comment and think he was inciting infringement. Instead, he was expressing a political opinion – responding to reporting about Senator Hawley’s bill to retroactively cap copyright duration at 56 years.”
‘DMCA Plague’ Context
X further clarifies that Musk wasn’t flatly against all copyright protection. In a tweet posted a few months later he stressed that reasonable takedown requests are appropriate and will always be supported.
Understandable Frustration
The motion to dismiss adds more context than these tweets alone. It also references the music industry’s alleged threat to start a “massive” takedown notice campaign following a disagreement over licensing.
This is the same dispute that resulted in X’s antitrust complaint against the NMPA, Sony, Universal, and other major music publishers, claiming that they “weaponized” the DMCA to force licensing deals.
“Mr. Musk’s understandable frustration with such tactics was not inducement,” X writes.
Understandable
No Inducement
The Musk tweet argument is colorful, but X’s motion to dismiss cites more arguments. For example, it counters the music publishers’ allegation that X’s platform features including display algorithms, and subscription and advertising systems, showed that X depends on infringing music.
X notes the court already dismissed this argument, noting that general platform features benefit all users equally and say nothing about intent to promote infringement specifically.
The publishers’ failure-to-stop-infringement allegations are not convincing either, X argues.
Much of the amended complaint allegedly returns to the original criticism that X was too slow to remove infringing content and too lenient with repeat infringers. The Cox ruling took away that argument.
As the Supreme Court made clear, contributory liability cannot rest on a provider’s knowledge of infringement and insufficient action to prevent it. That doesn’t qualify as inducement.
After 18 months of discovery, including the production of 150,000 pages and 21 depositions, X says the publishers found nothing that meets the inducement standard. As a result, they want the complaint dismissed.
For now, the motion sits with Judge Trauger. The music publishers will file their response, and the court will decide whether the Second Amended Complaint survives or whether Cox will effectively end this case.
—
X Corp’s motion to dismiss and supporting memorandum, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, are available here (pdf) and here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
CNN brass have been waiting to get federal approval of their problematic $111 billion merger with Paramount. As we’ve detailed exhaustively, the high debt load from the CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers merges is going to result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and sagging quality control at the resulting company. It’s what always happens. It’s not really a debate.
“In late February, Daniel Dale appeared on CNN to dismantle the more than 20 false or misleading claims that he identified during Donald Trump’sState of the Union address…But that appearance, more than three months ago, marked the last time Dale was seen on CNN’s air for his trademark rapid-fire fact checks.”
Shortly after the Status story popped up, Dale just as curiously appeared on air again. Along with a statement of denial from CNN that they’d ever try to court regulatory favoritism by dampening their journalism:
“There is no truth to this. Daniel is a multiplatform reporter whose regular fact checks of the President are an important part of CNN’s political coverage. Like all CNN reporters, his on-air appearances are determined by the news of the day — any suggestion otherwise is false.”
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. Nothing we’ve seen from major corporate media outlets during Trump’s tenure should indicate they’re deserving of any benefit of the doubt. Last Friday the Trump DOJ approved the deal, falsely claiming it will be great for competition and labor. CNN brass almost certainly already knew approval was coming before they put Dale back on the air.
One thing of note. There’s been a lot of hushed reverential commentary about what’s potentially happening to CBS and CNN. As if these corporate journalism outlets hadn’t been steadily degraded for years by corporate ownership. As if CNN and CBS didn’t go well out of their way to hire more lying on-air authoritarians as a direct act of appeasement to Trumpism even before the mergers.
That said terrible U.S. media can always get worse; and recall the reporting from last fall that Larry Ellison personally met with Trump to carve out which CNN analysts they’d have fired post-acquisition.
Like the CBS Ellison acquisition (where we saw Skydance execs making management decisions before the ink was dry), not yet having a signed deal won’t prevent companies like this — in a country with no working regulators — from getting a running head start on their ambitious censorship plans.
There’s something going on over in Microsoft’s Xbox division and it isn’t good. Don’t take my word on that. Apparently the bosses over there are circulating an email to staff talking about how properly fucked everyone is if something doesn’t change soon.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty just sent an email out to all Xbox employees with a clear, yet terrifying message: “this cannot continue.”
Shared publicly via Xbox Wire, the email paints a picture of a broken division, bogged down by the weight of both years of unsuccessful investments and unchecked excess, and battered by the winds of outside economic forces. Sharma, now having been in charge for 100 days, has made it clear that what she is spearheading is indeed going to be a hard reset, complete with hard decisions that will make or break the division and ripple out through the lives of its thousands of employees.
The letter itself attempts to paint a rosy picture at the outset, but then lays out the challenges. The Xbox division has a 3% margin, which is laughably low. The crises in pricing and availability of computer component parts is out of control and likely to get much worse, thanks in no small part to the bumbling buffoons who currently run the country. Complex internal and vendor relationships have led to communication issues and speed-to-market deficiencies throughout the division. Pretty much everyone agrees that there are mass layoffs coming to the Xbox division as a result of the above. And then there’s this:
We expanded our studio system when we needed a pipeline of content to meet multiple strategies across subscription, streaming, and devices. In the process, we have found ourselves over extended as we executed on changing strategies in a landscape of more readily available content. We are the fortunate stewards of industry-defining franchises that have enormous potential and player demand, but we have not adequately funded them to compete and win. At the same time, as we saw this past weekend at Showcase, a reliable pipeline of first- and third-party exclusives and new IP are critical to our success. We need to reassess the balance between these and our investment priorities for the next 5 years.
There are two, separate things being stated here. Let’s take them in order, because both are important.
The expansion of the studio system being a problem is absolutely hysterical. Xbox does indeed have a hefty portfolio of studios operating under its ownership. More than half of those studios came over to Microsoft in the Zenimax and Activision Blizzard acquisitions. Both acquisitions came with regulatory challenges, the latter being far more involved from the FTC. Both acquisitions also got past regulators in the courts specifically by being positioned as vertical acquisitions rather than horizontal acquisitions, meaning that there wouldn’t be “efficiency layoffs” as a result of bringing them on board, and that the acquisition would lead to lower prices, better games, and faster development for the gaming public.
Here is the Xbox people themselves saying that it isn’t working and that the sprawl of the studio system itself is having a negative effect on game production.
Oh, and about those layoffs that wouldn’t happen? They began happening in January of ’24, leading the FTC to point out to the court that it had been lied to. Then came the Zenimax studio layoffs in May of ’24 and more Xbox layoffs in July of ’25. All while the current, new Xbox bosses complain that they are overextended in terms of their studio sprawl? Cool.
Then there’s the second half of the quote, in which it appears that the Xbox strategy will return once more to a strategy built in part of stupid, dumbass console exclusives to try to entice people to buy Xbox devices. Matt Booty, Xbox Chief Content Officer, elaborated on this recently in an interview.
“[We] want people to have a reason to get on board with Xbox,” Booty said. “We want them to have a reason to buy an Xbox reason to be an Xbox fan. At the same time we want to reward all our players that have been with us for a long time. We know that exclusives are important. That’s why we got Gears coming in 2026, Clockwork in 2027.”
He continued, “We also want to be clear, our big multiplayer games, live service, games are going to continue to be multiplatform. If we’ve promised something to players already, we’re going to honor that promise, right? And then we’re going to really, I think Asha said it, we’re going to make the right decision, not the fast decision.”
The Xbox team has never been able to get its story straight on console exclusives. But when you’re clearly running in third place in a console war that consists of 3 consoles, and you’re not particularly competitive at that, trying to coerce your way into console success by holding games hostage to your platform is a recipe for destroying gaming franchises and still losing the console wars.
There’s a very good reason that the trend over the past decade or so has been one of less exclusivity, not more. Getting games out there, particularly when you’re directly publishing a bunch of games because of that same studio sprawl we talked about earlier, is the most important thing for the bottom line. Xbox should want all the games it publishes itself to be on every platform everywhere, in order to maximize sales. Spending money on third-party exclusives makes little sense, either, particularly when you clearly have a console series in decline.
I imagine it must be a very uncomfortable time to be an Xbox employee. And that’s too bad. I have no doubt there are a ton of good people working there and at their studios. But I’m not going to pretend to be surprised that Xbox overall as a platform is not doing well, considering all the lies, the acquisitions that probably shouldn’t have been allowed, and the chaos in messaging that has come out of that group.
Of course, that discomfort apparently applies directly to some of the top execs who reported directly to Booty, who have started to get out before the situation gets even worse.
稼働 (かどう) — operation (of a machine) 稼ぎ (かせぎ) — earnings 稼ぐ (かせぐ) — to earn (income) 稼げる (かせげる) — to work 稼動 (かどう) — operation (of a machine) 共稼ぎ (ともかせぎ) — earning a living together 出稼ぎ (でかせぎ) — working away from home (esp. abroad) 稼働率 (かどうりつ) — operating rate 時間稼ぎ (じかんかせぎ) — gaining time 稼働中 (かどうちゅう) — working
A lot has been written in the past days about the Iran “peace deal” and why it’s such a loser for the U.S. Today in The Big Picture, I want to expose the real playbook and fake-out Trump is running, comparing it to two others instances we have seen before. The “Art of the Deal” is actually a total scam, and I have the receipts.
If you’re already a subscriber to The Big Picture, look for my piece in your inboxes later today. If you’re not yet subscribed, click the box below and sign up. It’s free of charge to read all my content there, but if you want to support my team and me through these challenging times (Meta still isn’t allowing us to monetize our content after cutting it off suddenly…) we could sure use a few new paid supporters to stay healthy and growing and keep the publication free for those on fixed income and disability.
Wow! After my plea went out Sunday night asking for support for U.S. Senate hopeful James Talarico of Texas, people here responded with amazing energy and generosity. So far we have raised $43,281 for the Talarico campaign! Woohoo!
Now, you know me. I’m always Asian parenting for an even better number. I would LOVE to see us cross the $50K mark. Maybe it’s doable?
If you want to be a part of the historic moment we flip Texas blue, donate any amount at the box below! (Choose OTHER if you want to give a personalized amount, whether it’s $10 or $100!) Let’s get to $50K!
You are all making me so happy. I’m grinning ear to ear at how people from all parts of the country have stepped up for our democracy at this crucial moment.
The disturbing incident reflects the broader ascendance of the “great replacement theory,” the xenophobic conspiracy theory asserting that shadowy elites are embracing permissive immigration policies to replace native-born white Americans with immigrants of color.
But are the xenophobic ideas recently expressed at Nationals Park limited to a small number of extremists, or are they also endorsed by the broader public? If the latter, how do political and media elites contribute to their spread?
To answer these questions, our team has conducted several nationally representative surveys that ask Americans about their support for key tenets of the great replacement theory.
New immigrants as a threat
We consistently found that a substantial minority of Americans agree with the sentiment that new immigrants threaten the political, cultural and economic power of white Americans. In our latest poll of 1,000 Americans fielded in March 2026, 36% agreed with the statement: “Native-born Americans are losing their economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants.”
A notable number of Americans – 26% – also believed political elites are trying to “replace” the existing white population, agreeing with the statement: “There are people who secretly work to make sure immigrants will eventually replace real Americans.”
Support for these beliefs is concentrated most heavily among white Americans, Republicans, conservatives and self-identifying members of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Indeed, more than 3 in 4 members of the MAGA movement and close to 6 in 10 Republicans agreed with the statement: “Immigrants invade and colonize the United States.”
But what explains this spread of the great replacement theory?
We found that white Americans who identified as Republican, who are conservatives and who have negative views of people from other racial backgrounds are all more likely to express support for key tenets of the great replacement theory. Moreover, we uncovered clear evidence that white Americans who watch Fox News are also more likely to agree with the conspiracy theory.
Given the popularity of Fox News, we believe this latter point deserved further investigation. As detailed in our paper, while 39% of all white Americans agree that immigrants invade and colonize the U.S., 61% of white Americans who watch Fox News agree with this view. Even when taking into account partisan identification, ideology, racial attitudes and demographic characteristics, Fox News viewership remains significantly associated with more support for the great replacement theory.
Additionally, because we tracked white Americans over time, we could observe changes in their support for the conspiracy theory in response to variations in their viewership of Fox News. Simply put, the more Fox News programming that a white American watches, the more likely they are to adopt the conspiracy theory.
Links to political violence
Our research builds on decades of work showing that public opinion is strongly influenced by media consumption. Recent scholarship, in particular, highlights the influence of Fox News on public opinion. It shows how exposure to Fox News leads Americans to express more conservative attitudes about the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration policies and criminal justice issues.
Given the attention that Fox News hosts, elected officials and pundits dedicate to the great replacement theory, our results suggest that this coverage has indeed influenced the views of white Americans. The great replacement theory is no longer purely on the fringes of society.
In our view, this is troubling, not only because the conspiracy theory treats immigration as an existential issue — where the stakes are framed as the very preservation of one’s self and country — but also because the theory is also linked to numerous instances of political violence directed at people of color and religious minorities.
As America approaches its 250th birthday, the nation will no doubt continue to grapple with the topic of immigration, race and what it means to be an American.
While there’s plenty of room for disagreement over immigration policy, conspiracy theories make it much harder to find common ground or craft political compromises. What we’ve found is that when prominent media embrace conspiracy theorizing, increased public endorsement of conspiracies will follow.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is not having a particularly good time of being the UK’s leader. Basically everyone thinks he’s doing a terrible job and it seems unlikely that he’ll be in the role much longer. Apparently desperate to turn the tide on being historically disliked, he’s decided to grab the most reliable life preserver in modern politics: the techlash. Over the last few weeks, everything he’s done can be summarized in a single sentence: “let’s blame the internet for everything bad.”
It started a week ago with an announcement that if internet social media companies didn’t wave a magic wand and make all sexting disappear… he would start putting tech execs in prison.
“Today I’m calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce device controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images,” Starmer said in a speech at London Tech Week. “This is not an impossible challenge.”
Under the new plans, firms like Apple and Google would have to build or activate technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children. Adults would still be able to take, share or view nude content through an age verification process.
If companies did not act within three months, the government said it would bring forward legislation to force them to do so or risk facing fines or, as a last resort, the threat of criminal liability for bosses.
This is very much the magical “nerd harder” thinking by a technologically clueless bureaucrat who thinks that societal problems can be solved by making tech companies do the impossible: stopping humans from doing stupid things.
The U.K. plans to follow the same model for a social media ban as Australia, which last year became the first country to bar under-16s from holding social media accounts. Platforms that fail to take reasonable steps to exclude children younger than 16 could be punished with multimillion-dollar fines.
The U.K. said its ban will apply to platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, but not YouTube Kids or messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. Starmer stressed that enforcement action will target tech companies, not children.
The prime minister also said he will go further than Australia’s measures.
He said the government will act to prevent strangers from contacting children on gaming and livestreaming platforms. Authorities are also considering additional measures including overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for those under 18. More details are expected next month.
This is more nerd harder nonsense. Again, Australia’s ban has been a total joke, with the vast majority of kids figuring out how to get around the ban, and the ones most hurt by the ban being teens who have lost access to the communities that were most important to them. Again, every detailed study on the subject has found that the number of teenagers who have negative experiences on social media is tiny.
But the media and politicians absolutely love to blame the internet for any sort of societal problem, and it makes a wonderful scapegoat for their own policy failures.
Even Ian Russell — a prominent UK child safety activist who has spent years blaming social media for anything bad that happens to children — finds this whole thing particularly pointless. Russell, who became an activist after his daughter died by suicide (which he blames on her social media experience), has pointed out that these kinds of teen bans are the kinds of headline grabbing measures politicians love, but do nothing to actually help kids.
Starmer also promised me personally that he would implement effective measures to strengthen regulation and finally address the harm caused by social media. He has failed to keep either promise.
He also promised bereaved parents after the recent consultation on children’s social media use that he would follow the evidence and take the time to consider his response then act decisively. Instead, he has rushed out a ban.
Indeed, the evidence has long suggested that these kinds of bans actually can make things worse by isolating kids who are at most at risk and who need support. At a time when fear mongering and moral panics have cut off basically everywhere that kids can be kids with each other and without adults hovering over them at every moment, social media became that kind of digital third space. Social media didn’t become the default digital third space because it’s uniquely ‘addictive’ — it became the default because adults have spent decades overreacting and shutting down every other place kids could gather and communicate without supervision.
And that’s not even getting into the fact that pretty much all experts agree that age verification technology itself makes kids way less safe online.
But, even more to the point, the UK spent years supposedly crafting what they insisted was a very balanced policy in the Online Safety Act. We always found those claims to be ridiculous as the bill seemed bad from the very start, but if they spent all these years crafting this policy, which only just went into effect, it seems pretty ridiculous to then immediately jump to a way more extreme and less carefully thought out plan.
However, that’s what we should expect for every single nonsense bit of internet regulation that is being pushed for by a political class “for the children.” Because the bills misrepresent the real problems they do nothing to solve them. Rather than admit that their policies were misguided and a kneejerk reaction to a moral panic, politicians will always blame others: in this case the tech companies, and immediately come up with more draconian regulations that serve no purpose other than to get flailing politicians headlines for “doing something.”
Perhaps the perfect encapsulation of how stupid all this is was the question of how Bluesky would be handled (disclaimer: I am on the board of Bluesky). When the ban was first announced, the government had said it would apply to sites that meet the following description:
This would capture user-to-user platforms, whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside algorithms. The ban will therefore include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban.
Some right wing nonsense peddler sites absolutely lost their shit at the lack of Bluesky being mentioned, claiming that the extremely centrist Starmer was somehow creating an exemption for the supposedly “left-leaning” Bluesky. However, when asked about it, the UK government apparently said that Bluesky was covered and would be required to ban teens like those other platforms.
But does that even make sense? If the supposed problem with all these sites is that they allow for the sharing of content “alongside algorithms,” Bluesky doesn’t actually do that. There are recommendation algorithms, but they are totally in the control of users themselves. They don’t need to use them. Or they can use one of the over 100k feeds that others have created. Or they can easily create their own feeds. It’s wholly different than all the other platforms named, which focus on telling you what they think you’ll want to see (or what maximizes their own profits).
Either way, this shows how random this policy is. Bluesky either does or doesn’t meet the requirements (depending on how you read “alongside algorithms” which is already painfully vague), but as soon as there was a right wing freakout about it, the UK government said “oh, yeah, sure, them too.”
This is not thoughtful policy. This is not considered policy. This is not protecting children. This is a desperate politician with no clue how any of this works announcing nonsense to grab headlines.
Yesterday we wrote about the Trump administration forcing Anthropic to shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The short version: dumb. Today, Axios got White House officials on the record, and it turns out the real reason is even dumber than we thought. In that original piece, we had pointed out that cybersecurity expert Katie Moussouris had been able to review the jailbreak and found that it was actually a useful way for cybersecurity defenders to fix and patch cybersecurity flaws, rather than a tool to be weaponized.
As we noted in that piece, it’s entirely possible that there was some real danger involved in the jailbreak, but we doubted that the administration would be honest about it. And it sounds like we were right to be suspicious. Axios got White House officials on record with the actual reason: Anthropic had asked Moussouris to review the jailbreak, and the administration decided she was a “radical Democrat.” That’s it. That’s the reason the models are offline.
“We never wanted this to happen. Our number one priority is innovation but our hands were tied,” the White House official said.
The optics added fuel to the fire. Anthropic came out with a blog post dismissing the Amazon report. Then the company enlisted a cybersecurity expert viewed by the administration as a “radical Democrat,” who was then celebrated by Chris Krebs, who Trump just fired.
First off, Krebs wasn’t “just fired.” Krebs was fired (somewhat famously) all the way back in 2020, and not because he’s some sort of “radical Democrat,” but because he pointed out that the 2020 election was shown to have been quite secure. And since that ruined Trump’s big lie that he had really won the election, he had to fire Krebs (whom he had hired in the first place).
So… it appears that the Trump admin shut down the most advanced versions of Anthropic’s AI tools not because they posed a serious risk… but because Anthropic asked someone to review the supposed threat, and that person got a shout-out from someone Trump hates for once telling the truth about election cybersecurity.
As promised, this story just keeps getting stupider.
Axios, as it’s known to do, doesn’t emphasize how absolutely fucking bonkers all of this is, but does its usual horse race nonsense, suggesting that if only Anthropic had sucked up to Trump’s ego more, all of this mess could have been avoided:
“Anthropic has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences,” one source familiar with the administration’s thinking said.
“It’s like they just speak in different languages,” the source said, adding that the company has simply not figured out how to communicate with this administration.
Oh come on. This is the presidential administration of the most powerful country on earth, and we’re supposed to accept that companies need to tiptoe around “appreciating ideological differences” or face having their entire service banned? Who in their right mind would think that’s reasonable?
The Axios piece concludes with the dumbest suggestion on this entire thing: that it’s somehow Anthropic that needs “an attitude fix.”
Absent that, a source familiar with the administration’s thinking said it may simply come down to an attitude fix where, instead of feeling dismissed, “everyone feels safe, secure and happy.”
Anyone who thinks it’s Anthropic’s fault for not hiring a MAGA chud to lobby on their behalf is simply endorsing blatant corruption. But in this era of cowed political journalists, apparently framing capitulation to that corruption as savvy PR advice is the only thing they can think of.
In the meantime, dozens of the biggest names in cybersecurity have signed onto a “Free Fable” letter, telling the administration how incredibly counterproductive all of this is:
It is our understanding that underlying model capabilities in the original research that triggered this action:
Were focused on determining whether a human-prompted section of code was insecure. This is a necessary capability in any model that is intended to write secure code and should not be considered an offensive capability.
Can be replicated on GPT-5.5, Opus, Sonnet and even Chinese models like Kimi 2.7. The justification for this unprecedented action was that Fable provides a unique “uplift” of capabilities beyond other AI models, but AI has been finding bugs and generating working exploits at superhuman levels since last year.
Anthropic is addressing the research. As security professionals, we recognize that our work does not lead to a simple end-state where a system is fully safe, and the purpose of research like this is to enable continuous improvement, not to ban the technology.
As a result, this action has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America’s AI leadership without any real risk to justify it.
Yeah, sure, but did you see that Anthropic hired someone who got a thumbs-up from someone Trump fired six years ago! In the MAGA universe, that’s all that actually matters.
So we have dozens of the top cybersecurity professionals around saying that this administration just deliberately weakened American defenses, handing an advantage to adversaries… all because of some weird partisan freakout. And the administration’s response is that it’s Anthropic that needs an “attitude fix”?
In May, thirteen major publishers won a 
In a complaint filed at a Nashville federal court in 2023, Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI and others, accused X Corp of “breeding” 
