Techdirt (original) (raw)
States Need To Mimic Colorado Law Now That HHS Is A Dumpster Fire
from the no-confidence dept
At the beginning of this year, the Colorado state legislature introduced HB25-1097, a state law that updated the state’s disease control statutes. Eventually signed into law by the Governor in April, the bill does a whole bunch of things related to public health: repealed the state’s epidemic response committee, set a schedule for reviewing the state’s emergency plans every three years, and all sorts of things having to do with child immunization rules. Those include things like creating an official school record for immunization after doctor’s records of immunization are received, how camping organizations keep their own records for immunization for out of state campers, and so on. Mostly pretty yawn-inducing stuff.
But it also included this:
Direct the state board of health, in adopting rules establishing immunization requirements, to take into consideration, as appropriate and in addition to the recommendations of the advisory committee on immunization practices, the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American College of Physicians;
That reference to the advisory committee on immunization practices is more commonly known as the CDC’s ACIP. That would be the committee for which RFK Jr. fired all 17 members and replaced them with 8 new members, several of which are vaccine disinformation peddlers.
While this law and this provision of it largely flew under the radar, its purpose is now being shown and highlighted as a way to combat Kennedy and HHS’ nonsense. Other states need to pay attention here.
As the new Health and Human Services secretary makes unprecedented moves to undermine the current U.S. policy on vaccines, Colorado is leading the way in maintaining immunization recommendations, writing some protections into law. Colorado lawmakers saw this conflict coming and started preparing for the change, particularly to this critical national panel of doctors and vaccine experts, during this year’s legislative session.
So they passed a bill along party lines, later signed into law by the governor, which directs the state’s board of health to take into consideration recommendations from other high-profile doctors’ groups, not just the CDC panel.
“I think you could see the writing on the wall, that it was just becoming overly politicized rather than relying on actual science with this new HHS director,” said Sen. Kyle Mullica, a Thornton Democrat and an ER nurse. “We decided to protect Colorado,” said Mullica, who co-sponsored the legislation. He said Democratic lawmakers wanted to ensure “that in Colorado that we were able to rely on other science-based recommendations that potentially wouldn’t be as vulnerable to political upheaval that we’re seeing right now.”
This is a good start. Essentially, Colorado’s legislation presents something of a no-confidence vote in the CDC and HHS, choosing to open up guidance that had previously been limited to those agencies to incorporate NGOs that actually have public health and science in mind. Other states adopting similar laws would be useful both in maintaining good guidance on a state level and in highlighting yet again how much valid distrust of RFK Jr.’s leadership exists.
Ashish Jha, Biden’s COVID response coordinator and the dean of Brown University School of Public Health, highlights that this is about much more than keeping the public supplied with good scientific information. The game Kennedy is really playing isn’t one in which he makes vaccines entirely unauthorized or disappeared. Instead, he’ll just make them so expensive that few people can afford them.
ACIP’s recommendations serve as the backbone of vaccine access in the United States. When the panel endorses a vaccine, that guidance sets off a chain reaction: Insurers are required under the Affordable Care Act to cover it with no cost-sharing. Medicaid programs follow suit. Pediatricians and pharmacies stock vaccines knowing they’ll be reimbursed. And the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program, which provides free immunizations to nearly half of American children, uses ACIP recommendations to determine which vaccines are covered.
If Kennedy’s reconstituted ACIP rolls back key recommendations, as appears likely, the vaccines themselves won’t disappear — but access will erode. Insurers could stop covering them. Clinics might stop offering them. The VFC program could shrink. In effect, millions of children would lose protection against diseases such as measles, polio, meningitis and others we thought were behind us.
Kennedy might argue that he’s not taking anyone’s vaccines away, just giving people choices. But making vaccines costly and inaccessible produces the same result.
As Jha notes further in the post, laws like the Colorado law can only be step 1. Step 2 needs to be state-level regulation of insurance companies in order to ensure the Kennedy’s plan to price vaccines out of reach for most people isn’t successful.
Most important, states must ensure that recommended vaccines remain free and accessible. Legislatures and insurance regulators should require both private insurers and Medicaid programs to cover all vaccines endorsed by medical societies or state advisory boards — with no out-of-pocket costs.
This will help preserve access for millions, especially the most vulnerable.
This is by no means a perfect plan. States will vary in their coverage and their guidance. The residents in some states, particular their children, will live under worse conditions than others. Not all citizens will have the same healthcare available to them. In states where science is sneered at in the same manner as Kennedy’s HHS, some people, including children, will die.
But this is the reality in front of us. If no action is taken and this version of the CDC is allowed to convince the public that vaccines are the devil, or if vaccines are simply made too expensive to be widely adopted, the end result could be just what James Carville recently predicted.
“Bobby Kennedy is going to kill more people than any Cabinet secretary, maybe in history, with his idiotic vaccine policy,” Carville said Wednesday in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “The Will Cain Show.”
If a patchwork of state laws can stave off that nightmare from reality, so be it.
Filed Under: colorado, health and human services, public health, rfk jr., vaccines
AMC’s Latest Innovation: More Ads At The Movie Theater
from the this-one-goes-to-11 dept
Mon, Jun 30th 2025 03:29pm - Karl Bode
During pandemic lockdowns, you might recall how AMC executives threw a temper tantrum because companies like Comcast/NBC began experimenting with more innovative movie release windows. AMC execs were mad because the pandemic highlighted how the 90-day gap between the time a movie appears in theaters and its streaming or DVD release was exposed as both dated and stupid.
Comcast (successfully) experimented with not only shortening the window, but eliminating it entirely. At the time, AMC Theatre CEO Adam Aron pouted incessantly, insisting that Comcast films would never again appear in AMC theaters, before ultimately having to retract the silly threat.
In the years since, AMC execs have had a lot of time to think about how they’d like to adjust to the modern film audience. One big idea was to start charging customers even more money if they wanted better seats. And more recently they’ve taken to pushing even more real-world advertisements on paying customers before the movie starts.
Even before COVID, other major theater companies, like Cinemark Theatres and Regal Cinemas, had been loading up to five minutes of ads ahead of movies. AMC had initially rejected joining the effort, correctly noting that they worried consumers would “react quite negatively to the concept.”
That was then, this is now. AMC, struggling to make as much money as it would like, has reversed course and will be adding more ads. Which is tricky because it already runs 25-30 minutes of trailers, ads, and assorted gibberish before movies begin already:
“The deal takes effect July 1, just in time for Universal’s Jurassic World Rebirth and DC Studios/Warner Bros.’ Superman. AMC is already known for its lengthy preshow time, which runs 25 to 30 minutes, so it will have to reconfigure its lineup — which includes the famous Nicole Kidman spot promoting the “magic” of moviegoing — to allow for the new ads without going over the half-hour mark.”
Annoyed customers are still going to the movies, but they’re showing up later to accommodate for all the ads. One recent industry study found that only 60 percent of moviegoers this year were in their seats when trailers started playing. In NY and LA, 42 percent of moviegoers were in their seats in time to see every trailer.
This is yet another enshittification cycle that shows no sign of relenting. To give Wall Street its expected impossibly growing quarterly returns, AMC can’t afford to actually provide things the audience wants (lower prices, smaller crowds, better quality films and food). So they’re on a path of a sort of brand cannibalization in which annoyances grow as the theater experience quality shrinks, driving annoyed users ultimately to other experiences (like piracy).
Once a company’s on this path there’s really no reversal if they want to avoid an investor revolt, so there’s simply no telling what bad idea (or eroded principle) comes next for AMC.
Filed Under: advertisements, competition, consumers, enshittification, film, innovation, movies, preshow, prices, theater
Companies: amc, cinemark, comcast, regal cinemas
The Supreme Court Just Discovered Nationwide Injunctions Are Bad—Right As Trump Trump Needs Them Gone
from the timing-is-everything dept
The Supreme Court just discovered that nationwide injunctions are problematic. How convenient that this revelation came right as Donald Trump returned to office with plans to rule by executive fiat.
Last week’s big Supreme Court decision in Trump v. CASA was trumpeted in the media as being about birthright citizenship, even though that was only the vehicle with which to actually explore the issue of nationwide injunctions.
The ruling effectively bans (or at least greatly limits) the ability of judges to issue such nationwide or “universal” injunctions, stating that they exceed the power of a district court:
Traditionally, courts issued injunctions prohibiting executive officials from enforcing a challenged law or policy only against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone. These injunctions—known as “universal injunctions”—likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts. We therefore grant the Government’s applications to partially stay the injunctions entered below.
Because of the issue underlying this injunction (the executive order effectively reinterpreting birthright citizenship out of the Constitution), the ruling is being interpreted through deeply partisan eyes. The six Justices who signed onto the majority opinion are those appointed by Republican Presidents, the dissent was from the three Justices appointed by Democratic Presidents.
So, the issue is absolutely partisan, but I’d argue the partisanship is more in the timing and specifics of this, rather than the actual final decision. And that’s because the MAGA/GOP world was more than happy to use such nationwide injunctions against Biden. Indeed, they regularly went forum shopping to specific judges in Texas for exactly that reason.
And, arguably, the Supreme Court decision actually leaves an out to suggest that some nationwide injunctions will still be allowed, which likely means only those against Democratic Presidents. Steve Vladeck explains:
Contra some headlines, Justice Barrett’s majority opinion doesn’t foreclose “universal” injunctions in all cases. Rather, it holds that injunctive relief that directly benefits non-plaintiffs is appropriate only when it’s necessary to ensure that the plaintiffs themselves get “complete” relief. (An illustrative example of when individual plaintiffs will need universal relief is in redistricting cases—where states often need to redraw maps on a statewide basis to redress a successful challenge by even a single plaintiff.) Put another way, if an injunction limited to the plaintiffs in that case will give those plaintiffs all the relief to which they’re entitled, nothing broader is permitted. That’s the holding, in a nutshell.
But here’s the thing: the Supreme Court’s sudden concern about nationwide injunctions rings hollow when you look at the actual data. Just last year, there was a fascinating Harvard Law Review look at nationwide injunctions, and how both sides of the traditional political divide have been using them. When Democrats are in power, Republicans rush to partisan judges to block their actions with nationwide injunctions, and when Republicans are in power, Democrats do the same.
The nationwide injunction increase appears to be a symptom, more than the disease. As Congress has become increasingly unable to function, both parties have been trying to exert greater and greater executive power. The rise in nationwide injunctions appears to mainly be in an attempt to push back on that—though in directly partisan ways, depending on who is in power.
The numbers are damning: of the 78 nationwide injunctions issued during the Trump and Biden Administrations, 93.6% were issued by judges appointed by a president of the opposing political party. That’s not coincidence; that’s weaponization.
As that HLR piece notes:
Notably, nationwide injunctions are not only increasing in frequency but also overwhelmingly issued by judges appointed by Presidents of the opposite party from the administration whose actions the judges are enjoining. Of the 78 nationwide injunctions issued during the Trump and Biden Administrations, 93.6% of injunctions were issued by judges appointed by a President of the opposing political party. Often, it is the policies that relate to politically hot-button issues or a President’s policy priorities that are enjoined: for President Obama, it was LGBTQ+ civil rights; for President Trump, it was immigration; and for President Biden, it was policies combatting the COVID-19 pandemic.
Given all that, you could see how there are actually good reasons why nationwide injunctions might be seen as a problem overall. They’re creating scenarios where not only is there political calculus likely driving some of the judicial decisions, but also it allows plaintiffs to take many shots on goal. Again, the HLR piece describes how many cases may be filed on the same issues in multiple courts, and you just need a single nationwide injunction to “win” the issue:
the asymmetrical effects of preclusion ensure that nationwide injunctions are a powerful tool for political opponents who can challenge the policy in multiple venues. Practically speaking, a successful defense against a nationwide injunction in one court is barely a win for the government at all: because that decision has no preclusive effect on new plaintiffs, other plaintiffs are free to bring the exact same lawsuit elsewhere and “[s]hop ‘til the statute drops.” All it takes is one judge siding with the plaintiffs to enjoin the challenged law. These asymmetric consequences force the federal government to engage in a game of whack-a-mole. If enough plaintiffs sue — and if they can each target the forum most likely to be hostile to the government’s action — it seems almost inevitable that the action will be nationally enjoined. A prominent example is President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates: At least four judges declined to issue nationwide injunctions against Executive Order 14,042, but ultimately one did. One judge declined to issue a nationwide injunction against Executive Order 14,043, but still the policy was enjoined nationally. The same is true for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ vaccine mandate. And at least four different judges declined to issue nationwide injunctions against President Biden’s military vaccine mandate, but, ultimately, two enjoined the policy nationally.
Given all that, there’s a reasonable argument that the Supreme Court’s ruling on nationwide injunctions isn’t inherently bad. They were problematic when Stephen Miller’s org was rushing cases to single-judge districts in Texas, and they continue to be problematic today.
But, what makes last week’s decision so overtly political is the fact that the Supreme Court waited until now to argue that such nationwide injunctions were invalid as a remedy. They’ve had many years to take on the issue and somehow never bothered to call them out until now? That’s the part that seems suspect.
And the timing is especially questionable, given that we’ve just entered the second Trump administration, where he and his regime have made it quite clear they intend to rule almost entirely through executive fiat, with little concern for what Congress does (or is unable to do). And that’s a world in which the judiciary (in theory) plays a much bigger role.
In the end, I think the issue of nationwide injunctions isn’t really an issue of “nationwide injunctions,” but rather what happened that resulted in such injunctions becoming a regularly used political weapon: (1) a massive increase in attempts to rule by executive fiat, and (2) the rise in forum shopping for judges (especially in single judge courts).
Thus, it seems like the structural reform that is better served than simply banning nationwide injunctions is making it clear that we actually do have three co-equal branches of government, rather than a “unitary executive” and also making procedural changes to limit judge shopping.
It seems quite clear that the Supreme Court made this decision for partisan reasons, given the timing, but just the fact that it didn’t do so in conjunction with a strong limit to ruling by executive fiat is equally worrisome. The two need to go hand in hand. Instead, we’re seeing the reverse. The Supreme Court seems willing to bless executive overreach… but only when the Republicans do it. When Trump violates constitutional norms, the Court finds ways to look the other way. When Democrats governed, suddenly every procedural safeguard mattered.
Separately, while some have argued that the nationwide injunction ban might not be as bad as some people fear because plaintiffs can just bring class action lawsuits instead, as Vladeck notes, this Supreme Court has also limited the ability to bring class action lawsuits:
Class actions are harder to bring, at least largely thanks to the Supreme Court—and a series of rulings from the early 2010s that ratcheted up the requirements for certifying nationwide classes. On top of that, states (and organizations like CASA) can’t be class-action plaintiffs (the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure that authorizes class-wide relief requires the plaintiffs to be persons). And even when a district court determines that certification of a nationwide class is appropriate, (1) it often takes some time for the district court to so conclude; and (2) such a ruling is itself subject to an immediate, interlocutory appeal—which can both slow down the litigation and give appellate courts an early opportunity to reject a district court’s decision to certify a nationwide class. So as with the “complete relief” question, the viability of this alternative legal procedure for blocking federal policies on a nationwide basis really depends upon just how available nationwide class actions turn out to be in practice—not just in general, but at the outset of litigation, as well.
As for judge shopping, Chief Justice Roberts had actually spoken out about the problem in the past and last year tried to implement a new rule that would make judge assignments more randomized. But judges on the Fifth Circuit and across Texas — where most of the more significant forum shopping against Biden happened — simply announced that they would ignore the rule, and Roberts effectively backed down.
Some might wonder why the Roberts Court would effectively kneecap the judiciary, of which it’s a key part. But, again, the details suggest that the CASA ruling effectively takes power away from lower courts, but gives it to the Supreme Court, in that there will be a lot more moves to try to get injunctions via the emergency or shadow docket. Vladeck again:
In other words, Kavanaugh is effectively inviting both the government and litigants challenging government policies to use the emergency docket even more—not just in cases in which there is some compelling exigency, but in any case in which there’s a need for that kind of nationwide (interim) uniformity. Depending on what happens with class actions, there could be a lot more of those very soon (e.g., if we start seeing numerous different lawsuits challenging the same policy, and those suits produce inconsistent rulings). As busy as the shadow docket has been this term, apparently, Justice Kavanaugh is cool with it being even busier. But will his colleagues agree?
But the nature of the Supreme Court’s ability to pick and choose which shadow docket issues it will—and will not—take up means that it can continue to be extremely partisan:
One of the central problems with the Court’s approach to emergency applications in recent years has been its seeming inconsistency—granting emergency relief to Republican presidents or governors in very similar contexts to those in which it denied emergency relief to Democratic presidents or governors (in two immigration cases, for instance, the Court ruled for the Biden administration at the merits stage after denying applications to stay universal injunctions against the Biden policies). Do we expect the justices to all of a sudden be consistent when it comes to their resolution of emergency applications—especially if they’re getting more of them? And without written explanations (the norm in such cases), how will we even know?
The end result then appears to be the worst of all worlds. While there are reasonable arguments against nationwide injunctions, this Supreme Court chose to do this in the worst possible way, waiting until there was an extremist Republican in power who was breaking all the norms and rules regarding checks and balances, and refusing to actually deal with the underlying issues. Then, in its place, it puts forth a system which it—the Supreme Court alone—gets to decide which presidents have executive authority, and which ones don’t.
And that, rather than the actual decision, is why this seems like it was a clearly partisan decision, which once again diminishes the legitimacy and respect for the judiciary.
Filed Under: birthright citizenship, class actions, donald trump, emergency docket, executive orders, executive power, judge shopping, judicial power, jurisdiction shopping, nationwide injunctions, shadow docket, supreme court, trump v. casa, universal injunctions
Companies: casa
Surveillance (Against The) State: Doorbell Cam Owners Are Tipping People Off About ICE Raids
from the get-fucked,-ICE dept
The cops certainly had fun partnering with Ring, the surveillance camera company now owned by Amazon. Ring handed out free cameras to cops, who handed out these cameras to citizens with the implicit expectation that they’d have warrantless access to camera footage whenever they wanted it.
It didn’t quite work out that way. Lots of cop shops sold their souls to Ring, only to have Ring limit their access after the company received months of negative press over its incestuous relationship with law enforcement.
Surveillance cameras are cheap and ubiquitous. Law enforcement agencies may have thought they were expanding their surveillance networks for free, but failed to realize a camera on every house means every house has a camera. And that sort of ubiquity doesn’t always work out in law enforcement’s favor, as the FBI pointed out a half-decade ago:
The document describes a 2017 incident in which FBI agents approached a New Orleans home to serve a search warrant and were caught on video. “Through the Wi-Fi doorbell system, the subject of the warrant remotely viewed the activity at his residence from another location and contacted his neighbor and landlord regarding the FBI’s presence there,” it states.
That’s the rub. Cameras installed for the purpose of protecting property from porch thieves and other miscreants are fully capable of capturing law enforcement officers in the act.
The latest spin involves ICE, because nearly everything does these days. Ring owners are utilizing Ring’s tie-in app — one that has a well-deserved reputation for enhancing bigotry — to give people in the area a head’s up on incoming raids, as Thomas Brewster reports for Forbes:
Neighbors, an app for Ring doorbell users, is typically used by people looking for lost pets or missing packages. But last week, horrified by ICE raids in and around Los Angeles, residents started using the Amazon app to alert their communities to immigration agents carrying out searches and arrests.
[…]
While social media sites and Nextdoor have been used to highlight ICE activity across the U.S. in recent days, Neighbors has been especially popular, with dozens of posts reviewed by Forbes over the last week.
Welcome to the surveillance state, surveillance statists. Here’s how it feels to be on the other side of dozens of unblinking eyes. Your movements no longer go unnoticed. And when they are noticed, there are plenty of apps capable of spreading news of your actions instantly.
Even if ICE decides it’s not going to raid people’s houses (which it might, because the likelihood of a mass arrest is much lower there), it can’t escape cameras owned and operated by members of the public. People are looking out for each other now that the government can’t be trusted to obey laws or respect rights.
Some posts had information on ICE agents near stores like Dollar Tree, McDonald’s, Starbucks and Target. Two alerted communities to ICE operation near elementary schools.
If ICE doesn’t like this extra attention, it just needs to limit itself to chasing down actual felons or people suspected of committing serious crimes. But of course it won’t do that — not with an entire administration pushing it to arrest and deport as many foreigners as possible, even if that means arresting the occasional US citizen and/or dumping migrants into foreign concentration camps for the “crime” of being undocumented.
The pushback is only going to increase. And nearly every person in the US is equipped with a camera, whether it’s guarding their front door or held in their hand as they confront this marauding gang of masked officers in unmarked vehicles who invade businesses and homes for the sole purpose of destroying lives.
Filed Under: dhs, donald trump, ice, lol lmao even, mass deportation, neighbors, nextdoor, surveillance
Companies: ring
Musk’s ‘Priority #1’ Disaster: CSAM Problem Worsens While ExTwitter Stiffs Detection Provider
from the not-such-a-priority-apparently dept
One of Elon Musk’s first “promises” upon taking over Twitter was that fighting child exploitation was “priority #1.”
He falsely implied that the former management didn’t take the issue seriously (they did) and insisted that he would make sure it was a solved problem on the platform he now owned. Of course, while he was saying this, he was also firing most of the team that worked on preventing the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the site. Almost every expert in the field noted that it seemed clear that Elon was almost certainly making the problem worse, not better. Some early research supported this, showing that the company was now leaving up a ton of known CSAM (the easiest kind to find and block through photo-matching tools).
A few months later, Elon’s supposed commitment to stomping out CSAM was proven laughable when he apparently personally stepped in to reinstate the account of a mindless conspiracy theorist who had posted a horrific CSAM image.
A new NBC News investigation now reveals just how spectacularly Musk has failed at his self-proclaimed “priority #1.” Not only has the CSAM problem on ExTwitter exploded beyond previous levels, but the company has now been cut off by Thorn—one of the most important providers of CSAM detection technology—after ExTwitter simply stopped paying its bills.
At the same time, Thorn, a California-based nonprofit organization that works with tech companies to provide technology that can detect and address child sexual abuse content, told NBC News that it had terminated its contract with X.
Thorn said that X stopped paying recent invoices for its work, though it declined to provide details about its deal with the company citing legal sensitivities. X said Wednesday that it was moving toward using its own technology to address the spread of child abuse material.
Let’s pause on this corporate-speak for a moment. ExTwitter claims it’s “moving toward using its own technology” to fight CSAM. That’s a fancy way of saying they fired the experts and plan to wing it with some other—likely Grok-powered— nonsense they can cobble together.
Now, to be fair, some platforms do develop effective in-house CSAM detection tools and while Thorn’s tools are widely used, some platforms have complained that the tools are limited. But these types of systems generally work best when operated by specialized third parties who can aggregate data across multiple platforms—exactly what organizations like Thorn (and Microsoft’s PhotoDNA) provide. The idea that a company currently failing to pay its bills to anti-CSAM specialists is simultaneously building superior replacement technology is, shall we say, optimistic.
The reality on the ground tells a very different story than Musk’s PR spin:
The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P), an independent online CSAM watchdog group, reviewed several X accounts and hashtags flagged by NBC News that were promoting the sale of CSAM, and followed links promoted by several of the accounts. The organization said that, within minutes, it was able to identify accounts that posted images of previously identified CSAM victims who were as young as 7. It also found apparent images of CSAM in thumbnail previews populated on X and in links to Telegram channels where CSAM videos were posted. One such channel showed a video of a boy estimated to be as young as 4 being sexually assaulted. NBC News did not view or have in its possession any of the abuse material.
Lloyd Richardson, director of information technology at C3P, said the behavior being exhibited by the X users was “a bit old hat” at this point, and that X’s response “has been woefully insufficient.” “It seems to be a little bit of a game of Whac-A-Mole that goes on,” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be a particular push to really get to the root cause of the issue.”
NBC’s investigation found that Musk’s “priority #1” has become a free-for-all:
A review of many hashtags with terms known to be associated with CSAM shows that the problem is, if anything, worse than when Musk initially took over. What was previously a trickle of posts of fewer than a dozen per hour is now a torrent propelled by accounts that appear to be automated — some posting several times a minute.
Despite the continued flood of posts and sporadic bans of individual accounts, the hashtags observed by NBC News over several weeks remained open and viewable as of Wednesday. And some of the hashtags that were identified in 2023 by NBC News as hosting the child exploitation advertisements are still being used for the same purpose today.
That seems bad! Read it again: hashtags that were flagged as CSAM distribution channels in 2023 are still active and being used for the same purpose today. This isn’t the kind of mistake that happens when you’re overwhelmed by scale—this is what happens when you simply don’t give a shit.
Look, I’m usually willing to defend platforms against unfair criticism about content moderation. The scale makes perfection impossible, and edge cases are genuinely hard. But this isn’t about edge cases or the occasional mistake—this is about leaving up known, previously identified CSAM distribution channels. That’s not a content moderation failure; that’s a policy failure.
As the article also notes, ExTwitter tried to get praised for all the work it was doing with Thorn, in an effort to show how strongly it was fighting CSAM. This post from just last year looks absolutely ridiculous now that they stopped paying Thorn and the org had to cut them off.
But the real kicker comes from Thorn itself, which essentially confirms that ExTwitter was more interested in the PR value of their partnership than actually using the technology:
Pailes Halai, Thorn’s senior manager of accounts and partnerships, who oversaw the X contract, said that some of Thorn’s software was designed to address issues like those posed by the hashtag CSAM posts, but that it wasn’t clear if they ever fully implemented it.
“They took part in the beta with us last year,” he said. “So they helped us test and refine, etc, and essentially be an early adopter of the product. They then subsequently did move on to being a full customer of the product, but it’s not very clear to us at this point how and if they used it.”
So there you have it: ExTwitter signed up for anti-CSAM tools, used the partnership for good PR, then perhaps never bothered to fully implement the system, and finally stopped paying the bills entirely.
This is what “priority #1” looks like in Elon Musk’s world: lots of performative tweets, followed by firing the experts, cutting off the specialized tools, and letting the problem explode while pretending you’re building something better. I’m sure like “full self-driving” and Starships that don’t explode, the tech will be fully deployed any day now.
Filed Under: child safety, csam, elon musk, prevention
Companies: thorn, twitter, x
Daily Deal: The Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Filed Under: daily deal
Whistleblower: DOJ Lawyers Told To Say ‘Fuck You’ To Courts, Ignore Immigration Court Orders
from the party-of-law-and-order dept
Quite obviously, the Trump Administration was never going to respect the law when it came to its mass deportation plans. That much became immediately clear as ICE engaged in raid after raid of neighborhoods and businesses, searching for literally any migrant, rather than just those suspected of or convicted for violent crimes.
As soon as the planes loaded with detainees began landing in countries most of those on board weren’t from, the efficient cruelty of Trump’s anti-migrant actions was exposed. Multiple legal challenges were filed, most of them seeking little more than forcing the government to respect due process rights. As the phrase says, they’re rights, not privileges that can be unilaterally revoked just because the current administration has a hate-on for non-whites.
The administration that has always pretended to be ultra-concerned about “law and order” went rogue. Planes were put in the air after courts ordered them to remain on the ground. People exiled to foreign prisons remained caged while the Trump DOJ dodged court orders and refused to honestly answer questions about why it continued to refuse to right some of its wrongs.
Not that we needed more evidence of this administration’s hatred for the laws that stand in the way of its cruelest urges, but here’s more anyway. Erez Ruveni, a former DOJ lawyer, has filed a whistleblower complaint about the DOJ’s actions since Trump’s return to office. Via the New York Times, here’s why Ruveni is no longer employed by the DOJ:
Mr. Reuveni was a career lawyer at the department for nearly 15 years until April, when he expressed concern in federal court that the administration had mistakenly deported a migrant to a megaprison in El Salvador. Mr. Reuveni was put on administrative leave a day later and ultimately fired.
That public embarrassment of the DOJ, via an open admission that an error was made, was enough to provoke Trump’s DOJ to fire one of its few remaining honest lawyers. Those still working for the DOJ have sold their soul for a handful of future paychecks. Either that or they never had a soul to sell, like senior DOJ official Emil Bove, whose anti-law and order statements are included in Ruveni’s whistleblower report.
Bove told attendees of the March 14 meeting that President Donald Trump would soon be invoking the Alien Enemies Act and that deportations would be carried out that weekend.
[…]
“Bove then made a remark concerning the possibility that a court order would enjoin those removals before they could be effectuated. Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order,” according to the letter.
Incredibly, Ruveni’s letter notes that he thought Bove’s heated comments would be blown off and things would return to their normal, lawful way — something that’s sort of expected at the Department of Justice. Instead, that was apparently the tipping point, not only in terms of his job, but for the DOJ as a whole.
Here’s how things went for Ruveni during the last few weeks of his DOJ career, as recounted in the complaint [PDF] released by his legal reps at the Government Accountability Project:
White House officials have publicly disparaged Mr. Reuveni to justify their refusal to comply with the Constitution and with court orders. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller falsely stated “The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing,” and labeled Mr. Reuveni a “saboteur, a Democrat.” Referring to Mr. Reuveni, President Trump stated, “Well, the lawyer that said it was a mistake was here a long time, was not appointed by us—should not have said that should not have said that.”
What has not been reported to date are Mr. Reuveni’s attempts over the course of three weeks and affecting three separate cases to secure the government’s compliance with court orders and his resistance to the internal efforts of DOJ and White House leadership to defy them through lack of candor, deliberate delay, and disinformation. Discouraging clients from engaging in illegal conduct is an important part of the role of a lawyer. Mr. Reuveni tried to do so and was thwarted, threatened, fired, and publicly disparaged for both doing his job and telling the truth to the court.
Of course, the DOJ and the administration have no real response to these accusations. Instead, the White House has chosen to ignore everything said in the letter and act like it works for Emil Bove, rather than the other way around:
“Emil Bove is an incredibly talented legal mind and a staunch defender of the U.S. Constitution who will make an excellent circuit court judge,” the statement by White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said.
Well, at best, only part of this statement is true. I can only speculate about the Bove’s “talented mind,” but it’s inherently clear he doesn’t give a fuck about the Constitution. That much can easily be seen by his support of Trump’s Alien Enemies Act abuses and the migrant flights he ensured wouldn’t be interrupted by issued court orders. He’s not serving the public. He’s nothing more than another opportunist who has sworn his fealty to a man who sincerely believes the Oval Office is a throne room.
Filed Under: alien enemies act, dhs, doj, emil bove, erez reuveni, mass deportation, trump administration
Companies: government accountability project
Supreme Court Cripples FCC Further, Making Robocall Enforcement Likely Impossible
from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept
Mon, Jun 30th 2025 05:23am - Karl Bode
Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, mindless DOGE cuts, or captured regulators, the U.S. right wing, usually in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and potentially irreversible inroads in destroying all federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental standards, and regulatory autonomy.
I bolded that last bit because it’s not clear the U.S. press and a huge swath of the electorate (or even many people in policy circles) have figured this out yet.
A cornerstone of this effort has been the Supreme Court. Last year’s Loper Bright ruling effectively gutted any remaining independence of expert regulators, ensuring they literally can’t do much of anything without the explicit approval of a Congress too corrupt to function (and sometimes, not even then). If they do try, they’re all but guaranteed to be drowned in legal fights with deep-pocketed corporations for years.
You can easily see the immediate impact at agencies like the FCC. From net neutrality to privacy, the regulatory agency literally can’t accomplish any efforts to protect markets or consumers without being bogged down in endless legal quagmire, quite by design.
When the agency does shake off regulatory capture and actually try to act, Trump-stocked courts quickly kill the effort (see the 5th Circuit recently vacating an AT&T fine for repeatedly lying to customers about spying on their location data). Even basic, historically bipartisan and noncontroversial efforts to do things like help school kids get online are being destroyed by authoritarian Trump zealots.
Last week it got worse, with a new Supreme Court ruling that quietly crippled regulatory independence further, ensuring agencies like the FCC are even less able to do basic aspects of their jobs. The case, McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp., started more than a decade ago after McKesson sent unsolicited ads by fax to class members of the suit, including McLaughlin Chiropractic.
Class action plaintiffs in the case argued that the unsolicited faxes were in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which bans unsolicited communications with consumers without giving them a chance to opt out of the communications.
While the case was stumbling through our already broken court system, the FCC (under the leadership of now cable industry lobbyist Michael Powell) issued a ruling excluding online fax services from the TCPA. It was part of a steady erosion of our already flimsy consumer protections, and part of the reason the FCC already fails utterly to keep robocallers from annoying the shit out of you.
Consumer rights experts have long pointed out that shitheads and scammers have hijacked U.S. voice networks thanks to steady, generational lobbying by debt collectors and the marketing industry, who’ve ensured that oversight no longer functions. Still, every so often, the FCC would at least try to do something about the problem within the ever-shrinking confines of their legal authority.
The McLaughlin case found its way to the Supreme Court because the District Court found that it was required to follow the new FCC order, though it disagreed with the FCC’s interpretation of the TCPA. The District Court also felt constrained by the Hobbs Act, 1950s era legislation long interpreted as barring district courts from meddling with and undermining a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute.
On June 20th, the Supreme Court sided with the District Court by a 6-3 vote. The Supreme Court ruled that “The Hobbs Act does not preclude district courts from independently assessing whether an agency’s interpretation of the relevant statute is correct.”
This is, superficially, so fucking boring I probably lost most readers paragraphs ago. But it’s important and the majority’s convoluted legalese hides a much seedier agenda. Broadband industry consultant Doug Dawson put it this way in his excellent breakdown of what this will ultimately mean for the FCC:
“This is a significant ruling because it gives more explicit power to District Courts to disagree with an administrative ruling of a federal agency. It’s likely that there is a District Court somewhere in the country that will disagree with almost any federal agency ruling, meaning that it will be that much easier to tie up every decision made by the FCC or other federal agency in court.”
Bogging any and all government oversight of corporate power in endless legal hell is, of course, the entire point. But this effort has historically been dressed up by the right wing and “free market” Libertarian folks as some kind of noble rebalancing of constitutional power. The lie is that regulators were “running amok” (a joke if you’ve watched the FCC fail to do basic things), and this somehow “fixed” it.
The route the right wing is taking to effectively lobotomize corporate oversight is brutally efficient, but it’s also ironically so meandering, dull, and jam-packed with convoluted legalese, it barely gets covered by the press. In this case, only a handful of outlets bothered to mention the June 20th ruling.
But the real world harms of this entire movement will be kind of hard for the press and public to ignore. In the case of the FCC, it most assuredly means that the FCC will have even less authority to rein in shitty telecom monopolies. America’s already shitty robocall problem (a direct result of widespread corruption), will also absolutely be getting significantly worse:
“This new ruling also has practical implications since it explicitly weakens FCC enforcement of the TCPA. Among other things, the TCPA rules are the FCC’s primary tool for its effort to restrain the use of autodialers and artificial voices used in spam messages to consumers.”
You can see similar points made in the dissenting opinions. Great stuff! Very much the good faith, blue collar populism Trump is (ignorantly) lauded for.
The FCC’s inability to police scams and fraud is only a small part of the picture. More broadly, regulators that govern every sensitive aspect of your lives — from health insurance to undercooked car automation — are finding themselves literally incapable of standing up to corporate power in the United States. That’s going to have dramatic, often deadly impacts on every last aspect of your lives.
I genuinely don’t know what it takes to get the press and public to truly comprehend what’s happening. We’re going to see a steady parade of concussive, systemic failures to systems people to take for granted everywhere you look. All because rich corporate executives and their proxy “free market innovation” think tanks wanted to dress up unbridled greed as some sort of sophisticated, academic ethos.
The last year has been a brutal, generational win for unchecked corporate power. The check is coming due, and none of it’s going to be subtle.
Filed Under: consumers, corruption, fcc, loper bright, mclaughlin v mckesson, regulators, regulatory independence, robocalls, supreme court
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the slightly-funnier dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment on last week’s post, where I had to forego most of the Funny section due to a lack of candidates:
To be fair, it seems like there’s less and less to be laughing at, except as a gallows humor coping mechanism.
In second place, it’s Thad with a comment about Senator Bill Cassidy criticizing RFK Jr.’s ACIP appointees:
Cassidy voted to confirm RFK Jr. Fuck him and the performative buyer’s remorse he rode in on.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from n00bdragon about ICE’s ongoing claims of a spike in assaults on agents:
I can absolutely believe assaults are up 500%. Just remember kids: When you’re lying face down on the pavement with your hands behind your back, if you breathe too quickly or too slowly or move a single muscle in any way or don’t move a muscle immediately on command or do move on command but don’t follow the correct commands that is assault.
By this logic, the more kidnappings ICE engages in the more assaults they will fall victim to. Honestly, a mere 500% increase sounds like a real lowball.
Next, it’s Heart of Dawn with a comment about the treatment of people crossing the border into the US:
This level of cruelty is going to hurt the country, all so a small group of bigoted, and hateful people can feel better about themselves.
Cities and states that depend on tourism are already feeling the pinch, and it’s going to hurt in other ways too. People aren’t going to bring innovation and investment into a country that might hit them with the door over any perceived infraction.
Fascism only ever ruins a country. It never makes one better.
Over on the funny side, things aren’t much different from last week, but we do have just enough to put together a list, though the top two comments still earned their spot with only a small handful of votes! Both come in response to our post about the Fifth Circuit blocking Louisiana’s law mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in school. In first place, it’s MrWilson again, with a comment about the governor saying kids could simply not look at the posters:
Hey, that’s a great strategy! If you want the ten commandments to be posted wherever you go, just start imagining you see it posted, and leave everyone else alone.
Next, it’s wibblewobble with a rather specific idea for an act of protest:
RIGHT next to every poster should be “the BDSM commandments. we have 11 so we’re better”
- Thou shalt obey the safe word
- Things inserted into thine anus shall be clean and have no sharp bits
- Spanking is optional as is butt-stuff.
- No biting during Oral unless the other person asks for it
- Thou shalt not overtweak other peoples nipples unless it really gets them off….
etc
make the poster 4x bigger than the bible version…
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one last comment from MrWilson, this time in response to the question of whether the “Trump Phone” would be “gold plated, painted or only photoshopped?”:
All three in fact! It’s “gold-plated” for marketing purposes, gold-painted for legal purposes, and photoshopped for practical purposes since it doesn’t actually exist yet.
Finally, it’s Nathan F with a comment about the judge in the Abrego Garcia case recognizing that the DOJ’s evidence is obviously garbage:
I see the judge in this case ran the evidence by their five year old child.
That’s all for this week, folks!
This Week In Techdirt History: June 22nd – 28th
from the so-it-was dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, we published our popular reference post on all the ways people are wrong about Section 230. It was needed because, as we covered in that week’s episode of the podcast, there were a whole lot of attacks on the law, most notably from some of the provisions of the overall-terrible EARN IT Act (which the Senate quickly followed up with another bill declaring all-out war on encryption). Not to be out done, Senator Brian Schatz introduced his own attack on Section 230, followed soon after by yet another attack by Senator Kelly Loeffler. But we also saw a good court ruling on 230, as a judge sided with Twitter in one of Devin Nunes’s lawsuits.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2015, the UK High Court stripped away the short-lived private copying right at the behest of the recording industry, while UK officials were seeking to weaken the country’s freedom of information law. Russia blocked the Wayback Machine over a single page, while Wikileaks revealed that the NSA had been spying on French presidents, and we noted some interesting details about the leak. We also learned that Google had been gagged for four years from talking about fighting the DOJ Wikileaks investigation, and we looked at the ridiculous redactions the DOJ required to try to hide the details of the gag order. We also saw the filing of the first net neutrality complaint, which was both stupid and important.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2010, there was a landmark legal victory when the court ruled in favor of YouTube in its dispute with Viacom, though Viacom was seriously in denial about the loss, and we wondered what the actual impact of the ruling would be. BPI seemed to be trying to set up Google for another copyright lawsuit, while new research showed yet again how weaker copyright has benefited culture and society. We wrote about how the lack of satire coverage in fair use leads to the stifling of speech, and put together a timeline of how the entertainment industry made the issue of file sharing much worse for itself.