#mike-masnick — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #mike-masnick, aggregated by home.social.
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Previously, I wrote:
> Regarding the security clearance revocation, we have only the #DOJ brief, but it reads a bit more seriously than the rest.
But that's because the #Trump DOJ is hammering on the language of Department of Navy v. Egan (1988) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/484/518/ and Lee v. Garland (2024) https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/20-5221/20-5221-2024-10-29.html with all the bluster of a con artist or chat bot in a self-reinforcement loop. But both those cases were predicated on the presumption of regularity — that the appropriate agency, following procedure, undertook a careful determination and the review of which is a nonjusticiable political question. Trump's four #ExecutiveOrders make it clear that none of that happened and all of this is retaliation for not capitulating. And NRA v. Vullo (2024) https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/22-842 seems to say that is coercion in violation of the First Amendment.
So #MikeMasnick argues https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/09/doj-un-drops-its-appeal-against-law-firms-files-brief-that-gets-the-first-amendment-exactly-backwards/
> The brief actually cites NRA v. Vullo, .... The Supreme Court held —unanimously — that government officials using their regulatory authority to punish or suppress disfavored private speech can violate the First Amendment, even if the official frames their actions in terms of legitimate regulatory interests.
...
> Vullo actually undercuts their entire argument. The point of the Vullo framework is that when government speech is coupled with government action designed to punish disfavored private expression, the combination can be unconstitutional coercion. The administration [tries the ruse of] ”Section 1 is just government speech.” That’s precisely the move Vullo says you can’t get away with.
So maybe that security clearance revocation is just as much Jello as Trump's Florida lawsuit against the BBC.
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Is it just me? Ever since Mike Masnick went all-in on Bluesky, I just have no desire whatsoever to read anything at (or from) Techdirt.
It's like, Bluesky is obviously in its "gateway drug" period, but you can already see the enshittification coming (and bits are here, with them welcoming fascism and silencing dissent), and Masnick still cheerleading for it being good and proper and wholesome and just what the 'net needs just fills me with rage.
He's supposed to have more sense than that.
#TechDirt #MikeMasnick #BlueSky #rage #fediverse #mastodon #gateway #GatewayDrug #enshittification #e14n #Masnick #fascism #dissent #rage
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We’re Walling Off The Open Internet To Stop AI—And It May End Up Breaking Everything Else | Techdirt
Masnick again on top form. Also, me, previously.
Consider the broader implications: if we normalize blocking AI tools from accessing web content, where does it end? We’ve talked in the past about how many visually impaired users rely on technological tools to “read” websites for them. If we establish that all technological intermediary tools can be blocked without payment, we’re not just hurting AI companies—we’re potentially breaking accessibility tools that people depend on.
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GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/09/gop-cries-censorship-over-spam-filters-that-work/ #NationalRepublicanCongressionalCommittee #NationalRepublicanSenatorialCommittee #RepublicanNationalCommittee #FederalTradeCommission #RaymondDijkxhoorn #ALittleSunshine #AtroTossavainen #AndrewFerguson #TheNewYorkPost #PekkaJalonen #SundarPichai #Koli-LõksOÜ #MikeMasnick #404Media #Alphabet #Techdirt #ActBlue #WinRed #SURBL
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GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/09/gop-cries-censorship-over-spam-filters-that-work/
#NationalRepublicanCongressionalCommittee #NationalRepublicanSenatorialCommittee #RepublicanNationalCommittee #FederalTradeCommission #RaymondDijkxhoorn #ALittleSunshine #AtroTossavainen #AndrewFerguson #TheNewYorkPost #PekkaJalonen #SundarPichai #Koli-LõksOÜ #MikeMasnick #404Media #Alphabet #Techdirt #ActBlue #WinRed #SURBL
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Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About | Techdirt
Masnick on fire:
A law supposedly designed to protect children now requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities. People struggling with addiction must undergo facial recognition scans to find help quitting drinking or smoking. The UK government has somehow concluded that access to basic health information and peer support networks poses such a grave threat to minors that it justifies creating a comprehensive surveillance infrastructure around it.
#ageVerification #censorship #mikeMasnick #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance #techdirt #VPN
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Mike Masnick on Bluesky Implementing Age Verification: “This is the World That We Live In”
Bluesky is implementing age verification. Mike Masnick has commented on this, seemingly throwing his hands in the air about it.
I'm going to say this right off the top: I am not thrilled about ha
#Censorship #News #Privacy #Security #AgeVerification #Bluesky #MikeMasnick #UK
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DOGE to Fired CISA Staff: Email Us Your Personal Data
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/03/doge-to-fired-cisa-staff-email-us-your-personal-data/
#U.S.Cybersecurity&InfrastructureSecurityAgency #U.S.CitizenshipandImmigrationServices #CentralIntelligenceAgency #nationalsecurityagency #ChristopherStanley #ALittleSunshine #TheNewYorkTimes #TheComingStorm #HunterStrategy #JakeWilliams #MikeMasnick #ShaneHarris #TheAtlantic #FannieMae #KashPatel #RobJoyce #Starlink #Techdirt #NBCNews #DOGE
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DOGE to Fired CISA Staff: Email Us Your Personal Data https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/03/doge-to-fired-cisa-staff-email-us-your-personal-data/ #USCybersecurity&InfrastructureSecurityAgency #USCitizenshipandImmigrationServices #CentralIntelligenceAgency #nationalsecurityagency #ChristopherStanley #ALittleSunshine #TheNewYorkTimes #TheComingStorm #HunterStrategy #JakeWilliams #MikeMasnick #ShaneHarris #TheAtlantic #FannieMae #KashPatel #RobJoyce #Starlink #Techdirt #NBCNews #DOGE
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Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) | Techdirt | …if you are not reading Mike Masnick, you are spectating rather than understanding
So, here’s the bottom line: when WaPo’s opinion pages are being gutted and tech CEOs are seeking pre-approval from authoritarians, the line between “tech coverage” and “saving democracy” has basically disappeared. It’s all the same thing.
We’re going to keep doing this work because someone has to. Because understanding how technology and power interact isn’t just an academic exercise anymore — it’s about whether we’ll have an innovation economy left when this is all over.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-democracy-blog-whether-we-like-it-or-not/
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Why generative AI companies should pay artists to create new works, and give away the results
The latest obsession in the world of copyright is trying to get generative AI companies to pay for using creative material for training purposes. As various posts have noted, this makes no sense, because training is just a matter of analysis, which requires no permission. What the copyright world wants to do is to erect further barriers to accessing knowledge and […]
#ai #artists #blogger #blogs #creativity #generativeAi #google #meta #MikeMasnick #musicIndustry #openai #patronage #simonSchuster #Techdirt #youtube
https://walledculture.org/why-generative-ai-companies-should-pay-artists-to-create-new-works-and-give-away-the-results/
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"Too much of the discussion assumes that there are only two parties who might have a say in the moderation of social media: governments and the platforms. But we want to make the court aware that a new generation of services are focused on enabling the users themselves to make that choice, and if these laws are allowed, it could wipe out that possibility."
#MikeMasnick, 2023
Putting on my tinfoil hat, I suspect this is intentional.
(1/3)
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A lawsuit against OpenAI has mainstream media finally asking if copyright is fit for the digital world
Last year saw great excitement over a new wave of AI services based on large language models (LLMs). That enthusiasm was somewhat overshadowed by a subsequent wave of lawsuits claiming that the LLMs were guilty of copyright infringement because of the training materials they used. Just before the start of 2024, a new lawsuit was filed, this time by The New York Times […]
#andreessenHorowitz #chatgpt #houseOfLords #llms #microsoft #MikeMasnick #newYorkTimes #openai #scotus
https://walledculture.org/a-lawsuit-against-openai-has-mainstream-media-finally-asking-if-copyright-is-fit-for-the-digital-world/
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Mickey Mouse is public domain now, but the battle to prevent copyright term extensions is not over
The beginning of the year is a great time for the public domain, since it sees thousands of copyrighted works released from the intellectual monopoly that prevents their free creative use. Which works enter the public domain depends on the details of local copyright law, which varies around the world. But there’s a liberation that has taken place in the US that is …
#bargain #copyrightExtension #demonetisation #disney #donaldDuck #jamesBond #MickeyMouse #MikeMasnick #pluto #publicDomain #steamboatWillie #superman #Techdirt #tolkien #US #youtube
https://walledculture.org/mickey-mouse-is-public-domain-now-but-the-battle-to-prevent-copyright-term-extensions-is-not-over/
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As someone that now classifies themselves as an optimistic techno realist, because Silicon Valley techbros like Marc Andreesen have propagated a society eating metastic cancer version of it over the 21st century, I found Mike Masnick's year end essay spot on.
"It’s one thing to be a techno optimist. I still very much consider myself to be one. I said years ago that the reason Techdirt exists is to try to advocate against those seeking to hold back innovation, because I believe the advantages of innovation are tremendous. That sounds similar to Marc’s manifesto, but the big difference is that I recognize that part of seeing through to that kind of future, where innovation comes faster and more widely distributed than it would otherwise be, is to not fuck it up in the process...Andreessen’s version is that we should just ignore the bad and the good will magically wipe out all the bad. That’s not just simplistic, it’s ahistorical..."
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Mike Masnick Calls Google Government Deal a Threat to the Open Internet, But is it Really?
The Canada Google deal may wind up being a nothing burger in the end, but Mike Masnick says it's a threat to the open internet.
When the Canadian government ultimately folded to Google
#Copyright #International #BillC18 #Canada #Google #MikeMasnick #OnlineNewsAct #Techdirt
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So #flipboard 's CEO Mike McCue started a podcast about federated social media called #dotsocial , and his first episode includes the ever crescent-fresh #mikemasnick It's pretty good so far
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Stuff To Read: Google Decides To Pull Up The Ladder On The Open Internet, Pushes For Unconstitutional Regulatory Proposals | interesting take from @mmasnick suggesting that Google has caved (?) to age-estimation / child-protection interests in order to shore-up monopoly interest, rather than from fear
But, last week, Google took a big step towards pulling up the open internet ladder behind it, which got almost no coverage (and what coverage it got was misleading). And, for the life of me, I don’t understand why it chose to do this now. It’s one of the dumbest policy moves I’ve seen Google make in ages, and seems like a complete unforced error.
#ageAssurance #ageEstimation #ageVerification #google #mikeMasnick
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Protocols and platforms
Love ’em or hate ’em, big platforms with big collections of people and information about said people are currently ever-present. This deep dive from Masnick has a bias—one which I wholeheartedly endorse—but it is also an excellent description of what does “protocols versus platforms” really mean? What’s a protocol, and what’s a platform? How are they different, and why do they seem to have such different effects on the late-game situation? If you’ve so far avoided this topic, this is a good place to try spending a half an hour to see if it makes more sense.
After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically—now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred. Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints. And that’s not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect.
~ Mike Masnick from, Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech | Knight First Amendment Institute
slip:4ukico1.
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@mmasnick 🥥 I thought that the original #CoryDoctorow article about #Enshittification was one of the best think-pieces I had read in the past 30 years.
This response to it by #MikeMasnick is a close second -- but only because it was written after Doctorow's.
Of course no tech bro is going to give up his venality to follow Masnick's 7 rules, and I wish that Doctorow had spelled it "enshitification," but those 2 things will have to wait until I rule the planet. 🥥 -
"#SubStack has long argued that its more hands-off approach in providing its platform to writers is because it’s more like infrastructure.
But the Notes feature takes the company closer to consumer facing social media..."
#MikeMasnick, 2023
Except it isn't, Mike. Notes is just the existing comments sections, presented in a vaguely microblog-ish format. It lacks the algorithmic timeline and ad funding model that makes an app "#SocialMedia" in the way you're thinking.
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"But I’ve been surprised at how quickly the #fediverse has already been evolving. I’ve certainly run across some trolls and spammers, but often they disappear incredibly quickly. Earlier this week, I even had an instance admin reach out to me to apologize for a troll who had been hassling me, which was a different kind of experience than on any other social media site."
#MikeMasnick, 2022
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If #MikeMasnick weren't still providing free content to the #BorgSite, like many of his colleagues, he might have seen the more interesting question of WHY #Elmo is probably supporting the #Modi Government here in the #Fediverse:
https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/110182221801661823
#ItsAllConnected
#Twitter
#China
#Russia
#FreeSpeech
#Censorship -
"There seems to be more and more wrong stuff being said about Section 230 nearly every day, but hopefully this covers most of the big ones. If you see someone saying something wrong about Section 230, and you don’t feel like going over all of their mistakes, just point them here, and they can be educated."
#MikeMasnick, 2020
#TechRegulation #Section230 #UserGeneratedContent #moderation
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> free for our use case. But that freedom...
The lack of a price is not freedom, it's patronage.
> ... came with a different kind of price
Patronage always does ;)
