With First Choice Women’s Centers V. Davenport, The Supreme Court Managed To Do At Least One Helpful Thing: Further Protect Anonymous Speech

from the a-little-constitutionalism,-as-a-treat dept

Fri, May 1st 2026 11:08am - Cathy Gellis

Shortly before the Supreme Court inflicted enormous damage on the Voting Rights Act, the Reconstruction Amendments of the Constitution, any pretense of constitutionally guaranteed Equal Protection, the civil rights movement, its credibility, and our democracy writ large with its Alito-penned decision in Louisiana v. Callais, it released a separate decision in First Women’s Choice Resource Centers v. Davenport.

In terms of overall substance, this latter case was one where an anti-choice plaintiff got a win, which perhaps is why there was little trouble in the Court reaching a unanimous result in its favor. But it is just a procedural win, allowing its case to go forward, rather than a judicial validation of its actual viewpoint. (“This case presents a narrow question. We are not asked to decide the merits of First Choice’s federal lawsuit, only whether it may proceed.” [p. 5]). And, more importantly, it is a strong First Amendment win, with language that will be useful in later cases, including ones where more liberal positions have been impacted by government overreach. (“We have recognized […] that associational rights carry
special significance for political, social, religious, and other minorities. With the freedom to associate, minorities can ‘show their numerical strength,’ influence policy, and ‘stimulate competition’ in the marketplace of ideas. But take that freedom away and ‘dissident expression’ stands particularly vulnerable to marginalization or outright ‘suppression by the majority,’ leaving all of society poorer for it.” [p. 7]). And it will be useful in cases in federal and state courts all over the country, where it is binding precedent, and not just at the Supreme Court, which can blow with the wind depending on whose case is before it.

In other words, it is a decision that is likely to matter, and in a way that is good news for the First Amendment and the rights it protects, particularly with respect to associative freedom, the anonymity such expressive relationships depend on, and the standing needed to be able to challenge government intrusions on either, including by way of subpoenas.

In this case the plaintiff, First Women’s Choice Resource Centers, Inc., is what is sometimes referred to as a crisis pregnancy center. Despite the plaintiff’s name invoking “choice” such places are not about informing pregnant women about the full range of choices available to them. They instead steer them towards avenues that do not include the medical care needed to potentially terminate their pregnancy. The issue however is not that those running these centers don’t wish to support abortion but that they may be deceptively ensnaring vulnerable women who think they are getting more comprehensive advice about their choices than the limited information these centers offer, which has led some states, like New Jersey, to investigate whether they are indeed duping people.

But in this case New Jersey—the defendant in this case—as part of its investigation tried to subpoena the plaintiff for names of its donors (“Effectively, that demand required First Choice to provide personal information about donors who gave through two other websites, through the group’s various social media pages, by mail, in person, or by any other means.” [p. 2-3]). The stated rationale for seeking this data was to ensure that no donor had similarly been deceived as to the services the plaintiff delivered. [p. 3]. The plaintiff’s attempt to avoid the subpoena led to litigation in both state and federal courts, with the state seeking to enforce the subpoena in the former and the plaintiff bringing a civil rights lawsuit in the latter, alleging that the subpoena violated its First Amendment rights.

A federal law—42 U. S. C. §1983—authorizes suits against any person who, under color of state law, deprives another of his federal constitutional rights. First Choice filed a complaint under that statute, arguing, among other things, that the Attorney General’s demand for information about its donors violated its First Amendment rights. Specifically, First Choice observed that the First Amendment “prohibits the government from discouraging people from associating with others” “in pursuit of many political, social, economic, educational, religious, and cultural ends.” And, First Choice alleged, the Attorney General’s subpoena had just that impermissible effect. For its donors, the group represented, “anonymity is of paramount importance,” and its inability to guarantee that anonymity in the face of the Attorney General’s demands injured the group by discouraging donors from associating with it. [p. 3-4]

The federal district court dismissed the suit, largely on the grounds that because the state litigation had not yet resulted in the subpoena being enforced the plaintiff hadn’t suffered an injury it could sue over, [p. 4-5], and the Third Circuit upheld the dismissal. [p. 5]. With this decision, however, the Supreme Court has now allowed the federal lawsuit to go forward, finding that the plaintiff indeed has the standing to challenge how the subpoena affects its First Amendment rights.

“Standing” has to do with whether a party is eligible to bring a certain lawsuit. Courts can only hear legitimate “cases and controversies,” [p. 5], and standing helps ensure that the litigation put before it meets that criteria by ensuring that the parties bringing it are entitled to. [p. 5-6]. They are only entitled to if they have an “injury in fact,” caused by the defendant, and the litigation is capable of redressing it. [p.5].

This case focused on whether the injury-in-fact element was satisfied. [p. 6]. It can only be satisfied when the litigation involves “an injury that is concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent.” [p. 6]. And here the Court found that there was such an “actual and ongoing” injury, caused by the subpoena itself. [p. 6]. In fact, even though the state litigation had not yet resulted in the subpoena being enforced made no difference; it was the very existence of the subpoena that was so chilling to the plaintiff’s First Amendment rights. (“Even if a subpoena targeting First Amendment activity is never enforced in court, [it] will give its targets a very good reason to clam up [and] give the target organization’s members and supporters a very good reason to abandon the cause.” [p. 12]).

The reason is that the plaintiff is allowed to hold its anti-abortion views. And others who share those views are allowed to associate with the plaintiff, including by giving it support. But if those others had to fear the government showing up at their door to discuss their views, they would be reluctant to continue their association with the plaintiff. And that reluctance would result in harm to the plaintiff, now unable to associate with others as freely as they should have been able to and would have been able to if the subpoena had not given rise to the fear that their donors’ identities would be discoverable by the government.

Finally, consider First Choice’s two unrebutted declarations. In the first, several donors represented that “[e]ach of us would have been less likely to donate to First Choice if we had known information about the donation might be disclosed” to the Attorney General. The donors added that they submitted their declaration anonymously because they feared what they called the Attorney General’s “record of hostility toward pro-life groups.” I the second declaration, First Choice’s executive director stated that the Attorney General’s demand threatened to “weaken [the group’s] ability to recruit new donors . . . as prospective partners would be hesitant to risk the revelation of their personal information through government investigation.” All this is more than enough to establish injury in fact under our precedents. An injury in fact does not arise only when a defendant causes a tangible harm to a plaintiff, like a physical injury or monetary loss. It can also arise when a defendant burdens a plaintiff ’s constitutional rights. […] All this occurs not just when a demand is enforced, but when it is made and for as long as it remains outstanding. [p. 11-12]

As the Court reminded, associative freedom is protected by the First Amendment.

The First Amendment guarantees all Americans the rights to speak, worship, publish, assemble, and petition their government freely. Each of these rights, this Court has “‘long understood,’” necessarily carries with it “‘a corresponding right to associate with others.’” […] Appreciating all this, we have held that government actions tending to “curtai[l] the freedom to associate” warrant “the closest scrutiny” under the First Amendment. […] We have also held that “compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy” can “constitute a[n] effective . . . restraint on freedom of association.” [p. 6-7]

As is the anonymity that expression, including associative expression, often requires.

[In NAACP v. Alabama we observed] the “vital relationship” between “privacy in one’s associations” and the “freedom to associate.” Strip away the ability of individuals to work together free from governmental oversight and intrusion, and the freedom to associate may become no freedom at all—individuals deterred, groups diminished, and their protected advocacy suppressed. [p. 8]

[…]

Since NAACP v. Alabama, we have faced many cases along similar lines. In them, one state authority or another has demanded private donor or member information. And in one case after another we have subjected those demands to heightened First Amendment scrutiny. Throughout, we have emphasized the critical role “‘privacy in . . . associatio[n]’” plays “‘in preserving political and cultural diversity and in shielding dissident expression from suppression.’” We have acknowledged, too, that demands for private donor information “inevitabl[y]” carry with them a “deterrent effect on the exercise of First Amendment rights.” [p. 9]

Yet here was a subpoena now threatening both.

Each of these strands tightens the braid into one conclusion. From its allegations and declarations, and given our many and longstanding precedents in the area and reasonable inferences about third party behavior, First Choice has established that the Attorney General’s demand for private donor information injures the group’s First Amendment associational rights. [p. 13]

It is conceivably possible that on remand the lower courts might find the rationale behind the subpoena “’sufficient to justify the deterrent effect’ associated with the disclosure demand, [p. 8], and narrowly-tailored enough, [p. 10], such that there was in fact no actual intrusion on the plaintiff’s First Amendment rights stemming from its issuance. This decision by the Supreme Court does not resolve the question; it only determined that the question could be brought before the courts. But the same analysis that allowed the Supreme Court to identify a likely constitutional injury, enough for the plaintiff to be able to bring the case before the courts to seek a remedy, may yet be employed to find there indeed was an injury that requires redressing—here, by quashing the subpoena.

But regardless of what ultimately happens to the plaintiff’s case, this decision by the Supreme Court has broader implications. First, it doubles-down on prior precedent protecting freedom of association and the anonymity it depends on, and second—and perhaps more practically—it directly ties these First Amendment interests to the discovery instruments propounded by government actors, often too casually, seeking to unmask people. It makes clear that the intermediaries receiving these unmasking demands have their own cognizable First Amendment rights in being able to preserve the anonymity of those who associate with them, with the standing to challenge when those rights are trampled. And although this case addressed organizations and their donors, it is but a small analytical step to apply the same or similar reasoning to Internet platforms seeking to protect the identities of their users from seeking to unmask anonymous speakers, especially in concert with McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, regarding the First Amendment protection for anonymous speech, and Moody v. NetChoice, regarding the First Amendment’s protection of platforms’ editorial and associative discretion. Per this decision, those unmasking attempts can amount to a constitutional injury to the platforms themselves, which they now have compelling new precedent to use to fight them.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, anonymity, anonymous donors, associational rights, crisis pregnancy centers, donors, free speech, supreme court
Companies: first women's choice resource centers

Daily Deal: The Photography Master Class Bundle

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Fri, May 1st 2026 11:03am - Daily Deal

Capture emotions and tell stories through photography with the Photography Master Class Bundle. Transform your skills with six diverse courses, including Portrait Photography, DSLR Photography, Wedding Photography, Off Camera Flash photography, and more. Whether you’re a beginner or experienced, this bundle offers a wealth of knowledge and techniques to enhance your craft. It’s on sale for $40.

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

Filed Under: daily deal

Appeals Court Hands Roy Moore Another Loss In Yet Another Bogus Libel Lawsuit

Defamation

from the maybe-try-being-less-of-a-perv dept

Fri, May 1st 2026 09:27am - Tim Cushing

Former judge Roy Moore made quite a name for himself while attempting to convert his sketchy judicial career into a presumably equally sketchy career as US senator. Prior to his run for office in the 2018 mid-term election, Moore had already been suspended from the Alabama bench for a long list of violations:

disregarding a federal injunction.
demonstrated unwillingness to follow clear law.
abuse of administrative authority.
substituting his judgment for the judgment of the entire Alabama Supreme Court, including failure to abstain from public comment about a pending proceeding in his own court.
interference with legal process and remedies in the United States District Court and/or Alabama Supreme Court related to proceedings in which Alabama probate judges were involved.
failure to recuse himself from pending proceedings in the Alabama Supreme Court after making public comment and placing his impartiality into question.

A normal person may have decided to recede from the public eye and head to the private sector. But because Trump was now president, Roy Moore decided his past judicial indiscretions made him a perfect GOP candidate for a contested Senate seat.

Then came the steady stream of personal indiscretions, which began shortly after Moore tossed his tainted hat into the ring. The list of sexual misconduct allegations is so voluminous it requires its own Wikipedia page.

Moore’s alleged interactions with females as young as age 14 added to the self-inflicted damage Moore had created while still an Alabama judge.

Multiple entities reported on this. Moore responded by issuing legal threats and filing lawsuits. He also sued comedian Sacha Baron Cohen over being duped into an “interview” with a supposed Israeli newscaster (Baron Cohen) who subjected Moore to a supposed “pedophile detection device” created by the Israeli Army. The “device” lit up when Moore was scanned.

Moore’s cause of action in that case was one of the best worst things I’ve ever seen:

Had Judge Moore and Mrs. Moore known that Defendant Cohen had fraudulently induced Judge Moore into this interview, which as a “set up” to harm and thus damage Plaintiffs and the rest of their entire family, Judge Moore would not have agreed to appear.

Amazing. It’s like arguing in traffic court that if you had known there would be a speed trap set up to catch speeders, you wouldn’t have been speeding when you passed through it.

Suffice to say, Roy Moore has been suing a lot and losing a lot. Somehow, his lawsuit against a political action committee (the Senate Majority PAC) survived several motions to dismiss and was handed over to a jury. This jury awarded Moore $8.2 million in damages because the ad run against Moore’s Senate campaign featured consecutive (sourced!) quotes that may have led viewers to believe he had attempted to talk a 14-year-old “Santa’s helper” into sex while working at a Gadsden, Alabama shopping mall.

While it’s true the consecutive quotes dealt with two separate sets of allegations — the first being Moore’s banishment from the mall for constantly sexually harassing female workers and the second being a separate conversation with the “Santa’s helper” — the jury decided these quotes appeared close enough to each other in the PAC’s ad to infer a connection between these two otherwise unrelated incidents.

In 2019, Moore sued the Senate Majority PAC, claiming that the group libeled him and subjected him to false light invasion of privacy by suggesting that he sought sex from a 14-year-old girl working as a “Santa’s helper” at a shopping mall in Gadsden, Alabama.

At issue was an ad aired by SMP in the closing weeks of the election that included several frames displaying quotes from the news articles about Moore’s alleged conduct. One frame quoted a New American Journal article that reported “Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden Mall . . . for soliciting sex from young girls.” An immediately subsequent frame quoting the same article read “[o]ne he approached ‘was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.’”

While that may have been enough to convince a jury to give Moore an unearned win and $8.2 million in PAC cash, the Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court says [PDF] what’s seen in the ad doesn’t actually add up to a win for Roy Moore.

First off, even Roy Moore admits the quotations used in the ad are factually direct quotes from other sources.

Here, frame 2 of SMP’s ad contained the following quote: “Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden Mall . . . for soliciting sex from young girls.” The frame included a citation for the quote, and Moore admits that this quote is an accurate excerpt from the cited article. Frame 3 contained the following language: “One he approached ‘was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.’” The frame included a citation for the direct quote, and Moore does not dispute that the directly quoted phrase—“was 14 and working as Santa’s helper”—was an accurate excerpt from the AL.com article.

Since Moore has conceded that, all he can argue is that the quotes appearing consecutively in SMP’s ads add up to SMP deliberately creating a narrative that those making the ad absolutely knew wasn’t true (the actual malice standard).

Nope, says the Eleventh:

Lastly, Moore contends that SMP must have intended or recklessly disregarded that the ad conveyed the defamatory implication because SMP vetted or fact-checked the ad before publishing it. Moore asserts that because SMP’s research team “read all of the articles” cited in the ad and attempted to ensure the ad’s accuracy, and none of the articles supported the assertion that Moore solicited a 14-year-old girl working at the mall for sex, it necessarily follows that SMP intended, or recklessly disregarded, the ad’s defamatory implication. We disagree.

Before we get to the conclusion that undoes the jury verdict, let’s pause for a moment to appreciate the fact that Moore’s argument here isn’t that he did not solicit a 14-year-old girl for sex, but that he did not solicit a 14-year-old girl for sex at this particular mall.

Given that it’s come to this, it would have made far more sense for Moore to simply maintain his innocence and hope that his GOP voting bloc would simply issue a “who among us” shrug at the long list of alleged sexual harassment. Instead, Moore’s appears to be trying to line his pockets while being forced to state things like this on the public record, which includes the “had I known I was being tricked, I never would have agreed to be tricked” detailed in the opening of this post.

Anyway, this is how it’s going for Moore:

In sum, Moore points to, and our independent review has revealed, no other evidence in the record showing that SMP intended or recklessly disregarded that its ad implied that Moore solicited sex from Miller when she was 14 and working as Santa’s helper. Because the evidence discussed above is inadequate to support a finding of the necessary intent to defame for purposes of actual malice in a defamation-by-implication case, Moore’s defamation and false-light claims necessarily fail. As a result, the jury verdict cannot stand.

Moore is still out whatever he’s paid to fail repeatedly in US courts. He can, of course, appeal this ruling. But I can’t imagine the Supreme Court cares one way or another about Moore’s attempts to enrich himself by portraying protected speech as defamation. Moore did a considerable amount of damage to his own reputation long before he started suing. Whatever reputational damage has occurred since is so incremental it’s a rounding error. It certainly isn’t $8.2 million.

Filed Under: 11th circuit, 1st amendment, bogus defamation lawsuit, defamation, failure, free speech, roy moore

Brendan Carr ‘Launches’ His Bogus FCC ‘Review’ Of ABC Broadcast Licenses And It’s Just Pathetic And Stupid

Free Speech

from the weak-men-afraid-of-words dept

Fri, May 1st 2026 05:30am - Karl Bode

Brendan Carr’s FCC claims to be moving forward their their plan to “review ABC’s broadcast licenses” because Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the president’s wife. And it’s every bit as dumb and legally baseless as you might expect.

Carr has sent a letter to ABC/Disney saying he’s accelerating the review of their existing broadcast licenses. It’s very clearly because the Trump administration wants to annoy, harass, and pressure ABC into firing Kimmel. But since that’s a direct assault on the First Amendment, they’re trying to do an end around and pretend that the review is because ABC is “violating DEI requirements.”

Carr’s underlying legal argument is genuinely and profoundly stupid. He’s claiming that ABC’s ordinary, modest, and inconsistent corporate diversity practices are racist against white men, and therefore violate the already fairly thin anti-discrimination components of the Communications Act.

It’s absolute fucking gibberish. But you’ll notice that most outlets, including this piece from CNBC, try to make the effort sound like sensible policy being conducted by reasonable adults:

“The letter orders the company to file for early renewal for ABC-owned television stations and notes the action is related to an investigation into Disney’s DEI efforts, which began last year.

Disney confirmed on Tuesday that it received the FCC’s order initiating an accelerated review of its licenses. The FCC said in the letter that Disney now has 30 days — or until May 28 — to file for the renewals.”

As we noted previously, ABC only actually owns about eight licenses to begin with. Most ABC broadcast licenses (230 or so) are actually owned by right-wing friendly local broadcasters already loyal to the president. We’ve noted how these stations routinely air right wing agitprop, and have been rewarded by Trump and Carr with a series of merger approvals that violate existing media consolidation limits.

The actual process of yanking a broadcast license is also a complicated, difficult, and extremely time consuming affair. Were Carr to actually do this (beyond sending Disney a stern letter to put on a show for the press), you’re talking about potentially years of legal wrangling. A fight Carr would very likely lose, because, again, his entire underpinning argument is baseless and stupid.

Carr doesn’t actually want a legal showdown with deep-pocketed Disney over this turd of a case. They’re just hoping to make life so costly and annoying for ABC/Disney that the company not only fires Kimmel, but thinks twice about supporting any journalist, satirist, or comedian who dares challenge the administration. It’s also a message to other networks that host voices critical of the unpopular president.

This is, if the pathetic U.S. press coverage of this FCC inquiry is any indication, already having an effect. A good chunk of the news reports on this inquiry (see: this Semafor piece) can’t be bothered to be honest about the pathetic, baseless nature of this censorship effort. Many outlets seem dedicated to helping Trump and Carr pretend this is any sort of above-board review. They’re enablers.

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic official (because Republicans refuse to fill the other seat), correctly notes that this whole dumb First Amendment violating gambit will fail:

“This is the most egregious action this FCC has taken in violation of the First
Amendment to date. As part of its ongoing campaign of censorship and control, the
White House called publicly for the silencing of a vocal critic, and this FCC has now
answered that call. This is an unprecedented and politically motivated attempt to
interfere with how broadcasters operate, and this unlawful overreach will fail.”

You know it’s bad when even Ted Cruz is blasting your baseless censorship campaign as stupid:

“It is not government’s job to censor speech, and I do not believe the FCC should operate as the speech police.”

You might recall that the last time Disney capitulated to these dim fascists (temporarily suspending Kimmel because he made some jokes about the deceased right wing social media propagandist Charlie Kirk), it resulted in the company losing millions of streaming video customers and amusement park attendees. Hopefully Disney execs learned their lesson from that experience.

The problem for Trump is that as his health, influence, popularity, and political power wane, he and Carr’s threats will carry less and less weight, even among feckless corporations. They’re just weak men afraid of words, ideas, and comedy, desperately trying to pretend that they have power to permanently stifle jokes. It’s foundationally pathetic and embarrassing, something press coverage should make very clear.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, brendan carr, broadcast, broadcast licenses, censorship, comedy, dei, fcc, free speech, jimmy kimmel, licenses
Companies: abc, disney

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Online DRM Or A Bug: Sony’s Silence Adds To Recent PS Update Confusion

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the silent-treatment dept

Thu, Apr 30th 2026 08:06pm - Timothy Geigner

Over a decade ago, Microsoft was getting set to release its new Xbox One console. In the lead-up to launch day, a bunch of rumors began swirling about some of the online requirements the console would come with. Details weren’t to be found, so the public was left to speculate what these requirements would entail. Would the console always need to be online when launching games? Would it need to check in online on a certain cadence for games to work, such as every day? Every 30 days?

Microsoft did very little to calm the waters in all this speculation. Very little came out from the Xbox team prior to launch, and what did come out was often confusing. What became very obvious, however, was that the lack of clear and direct messaging from Microsoft made a bad situation much worse. The backlash to the requirement rumors was severe and Xbox largely ended up scrapping them.

Fast forward to the present and the internet has exploded the past few days with claims that an update pushed to PlayStation consoles has introduced a 30 day online check in requirement for newly purchased games.

Some PlayStation users have noticed a new online DRM policy for digital games purchased on the PlayStation Store: newly purchased digital games now display a “Valid Period” tag showing a start date, an end date, and a countdown timer. If the console does not connect to the internet within 30 days, the game’s license reportedly expires, and the title becomes unplayable until an online connection is restored.

The story broke over the weekend through Lance McDonald, the well-known modder who managed to patch Bloodborne to run at 60 frames per second. He posted on X: “Hugely terrible DRM has now been rolled out to all PS4 and PS5 digital games. Every digital game you buy now requires an online check-in every 30 days. If you buy a digital game and don’t connect your console to the internet for 30 days, your license will be removed.

We thought about reporting this story as soon as McDonald surfaced it. However, several users also swore they saw nothing of the sort in their libraries, so we waited. Thus far, Sony has not made any official public statement, but a few hours ago, a PlayStation Support assistant confirmed to a user that the 30-day timer is not a bug at all.

That support assistant being referenced is a bot, however, not a human being behind a keyboard. You can see the response it gave in the screenshot below.

That is, at the time of this writing, the most that Sony has said about whatever the hell is going on here. As a result, all kinds of people, big and small within the gaming community, are losing their shit over this new “online DRM requirement” for existing consoles that previously didn’t have it. Oh, and it’s a requirement that Sony mocked Microsoft for trying to require way back in 2013 before the backlash.

The silence is, as they say, deafening. Is this fully intentional? Not all the reporting suggests that at all. Other reports indicate that this is just a bug in the update and this was not intended to be rolled out at all.

Shortly after the issue surfaced, video game preservation site Does it play? weighed in on the matter. It reported hearing from an anonymous insider that the timer was actually just a bug. “From what we gathered, Sony accidentally broke something while fixing an exploit. They’ve known about the confusing UI for a while, but didn’t see it as urgent,” their X post read.

However, many noted that an accidental deployment still implies Sony was testing the concept, since the interface had already been built. Throughout the confusion, Sony has yet to provide an official comment regarding the issue.

That last sentence is the most important one. Hey, Sony: what the actual hell is going on here?

The fact that all of this rumor, speculation, and angst has gone on for at least a couple of days now without a single word being uttered directly from Sony is remarkably stupid. The waters need to be calmed and that’s only going to happen by the company speaking up. Was it a bug? Cool, say so and let’s move on. Is the online requirement DRM now a thing? Much less cool, but at least we’ll know where the company stands (though, then we can start talking about Sony changing its policies on consoles after they are sold).

What can’t happen is this vacuum of information because Sony wants to give the public the silent treatment. That’s just bad business.

Filed Under: 30 day timer, drm, playstation, playstation online assistant
Companies: sony

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Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Age Against The Machine

Ctrl-Alt-Speech

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Thu, Apr 30th 2026 03:45pm - Mike Masnick

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

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

In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by Jess Miers, law professor at University of Akron School of Law. Together, they discuss:

Support the podcast by joining our Patreon, with special founder membership available until May 28th.

Filed Under: age verification, ai, artificial intelligence, chatbots, content moderation, education, manitoba, social media, trust and safety, turkey
Companies: openai, youtube

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The GUARD Act Isn’t Targeting Dangerous AI—It’s Blocking Everyday Internet Use

Policy

from the it's-another-surveillance-bill dept

Thu, Apr 30th 2026 12:56pm - Joe Mullin

Lawmakers in Congress are moving quickly on the GUARD Act, an age-gating bill restricting minors’ access to a wide range of online tools, with a key vote expected this week. The proposal is framed as a response to alarming cases involving “AI companions” and vulnerable young users. But the text of the bill goes much further, and could require age gates even for search engines that use AI.

If enacted, the GUARD Act won’t just target a narrow category of risky chatbots. It would require companies to verify the age of every user — then block anyone under 18 from interacting with a huge range of online systems. It would block minors from everyday online tools, undermine parental guidance, and force adults to sacrifice their privacy. In the process, it would require services to implement speech-restricting and privacy-invasive age-verification systems for everyone—not just kids.

Under the GUARD Act’s broad definitions, a high school student could be barred from asking homework help tools questions about algebra problems. A teenager trying to return a product could be kicked out of a standard customer-service chat.

The concerns behind this bill are serious. There have been troubling reports of AI systems engaging in harmful interactions with young users, including cases involving self-harm. Those risks deserve attention. But they call for targeted solutions, like better safeguards and enforcement against bad actors, not sweeping restrictions. The bill’s sponsors say they’re targeting worst-case scenarios — but the bill regulates everyday use.

The GUARD Act’s Broad Definitions Reach Everyday Tools

The problem starts with how the bill defines an “AI chatbot.” It covers any system that generates responses that aren’t fully pre-written by the developer or operator. Such a broad definition sweeps in the basic functionality of all AI-powered tools.

Then there’s the definition of an “AI companion,” which minors are banned from using entirely. An AI companion is any chatbot that produces human-like responses and is designed to “encourage or facilitate” interpersonal or emotional interaction. That may sound aimed at simulated “friends” or therapy chatbots. But in practice, it’s much fuzzier.

Modern chatbots are designed to be conversational and helpful. A homework helper might say “good question” before walking a student through a problem. A customer service chatbot may respond empathetically to a complaint (“I’m sorry you’re having this problem.”) A general-purpose assistant might ask follow-up questions. All of these could be seen as facilitating “interpersonal” interaction — and triggering the GUARD Act.

Faced with steep penalties and unclear boundaries, companies are unlikely to take chances on letting young people use their online tools. They’ll block minors entirely or strip their tools down to something less useful for everyone. The result isn’t a narrow safeguard—it’s a broad restriction on everyday online interactions.

Homework Question? Show ID And Call Your Parents

Start with a student getting help with homework. Under the GUARD Act, the service must verify the user’s age using more than a simple checkbox—it must rely on a “reasonable age verification” measure, which could require a government ID or a third-party age-checking system. If the system decides a user is under 18, the company must decide if its tool qualifies as an “AI Companion.” If there’s any risk it does, the safest move is to block access entirely.

The same logic applies to everyday customer service. A teenager trying to fix an order issue gets routed to a chatbot, and the company faces a choice: build a full age-verification system for a routine interaction, or restrict access to avoid liability. Many will choose the latter.

This isn’t a narrow restriction aimed at a few risky products. It’s a compliance regime that pushes companies to block or limit any product that generates text for minors, across the board.

ID Checks for Everyone

The GUARD Act doesn’t just affect minors. The bill takes a big step towards an internet that only works when users are willing to upload a valid ID or comply with other invasive age-verification schemes. Companies must verify the age of every user—not through a simple self-declaration, but through a “reasonable age verification” system tied to the individual.

In practice, that means collecting sensitive personal information: government IDs, financial data, or biometric identifiers. Companies can outsource verification, but they remain legally responsible. And the law requires ongoing verification, so this isn’t a one-time check. Worse, studies consistently show that millions of people have outdated information on their IDs, such as an old address, or do not have government ID. Should services require ID, many folks without current or any ID will be shut out.

And for those who do have compliant ID, turning over this information repeatedly creates obvious risks. Databases of sensitive identity information become targets for breaches. Anonymous or pseudonymous use of online tools becomes harder or impossible.

To keep minors away from certain chatbots, the GUARD Act would require everyone to prove who they are just to use basic online tools. That’s a steep tradeoff. And it doesn’t actually address the specific harms the bill is supposed to solve.

Vague Definitions, Huge Penalties

The GUARD Act’s broad scope is enforced with steep penalties. Companies can face fines of up to $100,000 per violation, enforced by federal and state officials. At the same time, key terms like “AI companion” rely on vague concepts such as “emotional interaction.” That combination will lead to overblocking. Faced with legal uncertainty and serious liability, companies won’t parse small distinctions. They’ll restrict access, limit features, or block minors entirely.

That is the unfortunate result of the GUARD Act, even though the concerns animating it are worthy of fixing. But the GUARD Act’s broad terms will apply far beyond the concerning scenarios.

In the end, that means a more restricted and more surveilled internet. Teenagers would lose access to tools they rely on for school and everyday tasks. Everyone else faces new barriers, including ID checks. Smaller developers, who aren’t able to absorb compliance costs and legal risk, would be pushed out, leaving the largest companies even more dominant.

Young people — and all people — deserve protection from genuinely harmful products. But this bill doesn’t do that. It trades away privacy, access, and useful technology in exchange for a blunt system that misses the mark.

Congress could act soon. Tell them to reject the GUARD Act.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: age verification, ai, ai chatbots, chatbots, guard act, surveillance

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Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps

Culture

from the hans,-i've-just-noticed-something dept

Thu, Apr 30th 2026 10:59am - Mike Masnick

There’s a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch where two SS officers, mid-conversation on the Eastern Front, suddenly notice something troubling about their uniforms. “Hans,” one asks, peering at his cap, “are we the baddies?” The skulls had been there the whole time. The skulls are kind of a giveaway. But it took a while for the question to surface. You’ve probably seen it:

I thought about that sketch reading Wired’s reporting on the internal turmoil at Palantir, where both current and former employees are starting to ask that question of their own work:

Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”

“That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”

Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

That’s quite a decision for the company, given that Palantir is supposed to be in the business of using technology to predict how strategic decisions will play out.

It turns out a lot of Palantir employees agree that maybe it’s not so good for them or the company to be picking the morally bankrupt, historically unpopular position. Better late than never, I suppose.

There’s a “well, duh” element to all of this that we shouldn’t gloss over. Palantir has been Palantir for two decades. The company is named after the corrupting all-seeing surveillance orb from Lord of the Rings. Its initial venture capital came from the CIA. Peter Thiel co-founded it. The entire pitch has always been mass data aggregation in service of authoritarian state power. If you took a job there at any point in the last twenty years, the skulls were sitting right on top of the cap, plainly visible, and people were pointing at them constantly.

So in one sense, the current employee soul-searching is just the sort of late-to-the-party realization that deserves to be called out. Where, exactly, did people think this was going?

But it’s also a sign of how far Karp is willing to go — stripping away the plausible deniability that let employees tell themselves they were just building tools, not endorsing a worldview. Palantir didn’t just keep doing what it had always been doing. Karp made a deliberate choice to escalate, both in what the company is building and in how openly it’s announcing what it’s building it for.

The Wired piece documents the various moments where things began shifting internally: the deepening ICE deportation infrastructure work, the death of nurse Alex Pretti during anti-ICE protests, the questions about whether Palantir’s Maven targeting system was used in the missile strike on an Iranian elementary school that killed more than 120 children. And then, to top it all off, Karp published a manifesto telling employees and customers and the entire world that the company now believes pluralism itself is a civilizational error.

The most damning revelation in the Wired piece comes from a Palantir privacy and civil liberties (PCL) employee in a recorded internal AMA — and it shows that the entire concept of a PCL team at the company is window dressing, there so Karp and others in management can pretend they’re not quite as authoritarian as they actually are.

At least one of these AMAs was organized independently of PCL leadership by two team leads, including one who worked directly on the ICE contract for a period of time. “This was very rogue,” a PCL employee who worked on the ICE contract said in a February AMA, a recording of which was obtained by WIRED. “Courtney [Bowman, head of the privacy and civil liberties team] doesn’t know that I’m spending three hours this week talking to IMPLs [Palantir terminology for its client-facing product teams], but I think this is the only real way to start going in the right direction.”

Throughout the lengthy call, employees working on a variety of Palantir’s defense projects posed hard questions. Could ICE agents delete audit logs in Palantir’s software? Could agents create harmful workflows on their own without the company’s help? What is the most malicious thing that could come out of this work?

Answering these questions, the PCL employee who worked on the ICE contract said that “a sufficiently malicious customer is, like, basically impossible to prevent at the moment” and could only be controlled through “auditing to prove what happened” and legal action after the fact if the customer breached the company’s contract.

And then the big (if unsurprising) reveal that Karp doesn’t seem to think much of civil liberties and these employees are basically forced to see if they can distract the dictator-wanna-be at the top (does this sound familiar?):

At one point during the call, one of the employees tried to level with the group, explaining that Palantir’s work with ICE was a priority for Karp and something that likely wouldn’t change any time soon.

“Karp really wants to do this and continuously wants this,” they said. “We’re largely at the role of trying to give him suggestions and trying to redirect him, but it was largely unsuccessful and we seem to be on a very sharp path of continuing to expand this workflow.”

So the internal civil liberties function has been reduced to politely suggesting that maybe the CEO not do the worst version of the worst thing, and getting overruled.

Cool cool cool.

What seems to have finally broken the dam, though, was not the deportation work or the missile strike — it was the manifesto. As one employee posted internally after the company published its 22-point screed:

“I’m curious why this had to be posted. Especially on the company account. On the practical level every time stuff like that gets posted it gets harder for us to sell the software outside of the US (for sure in the current political climate), and I doubt we need this in the US?” wrote one frustrated employee. The message received more than 50 “+1” emojis.

The actual harms — the deportations, the surveillance infrastructure, the dead children — generated internal Slack threads and uncomfortable AMAs. The branding embarrassment generated more of a revolt.

The skulls were always on that hat. People only really started pointing at them when management decided to put the hats on billboards.

Two things are worth calling out separately:

Workers who take jobs at companies like Palantir have an obligation to think harder about what they’re building before they build it. The “I was just writing code” defense has always been weak, and it gets weaker the more obvious the application becomes. We wrote recently about how the “bring your whole self to work” era has pretty much ended, and how workers in a tighter labor market are increasingly going to find themselves at companies whose values they can’t fully stomach. That’s part of what’s happening in a labor market where management has way more leverage. But it’s also true that some companies have been waving very large red flags for a very long time, and “hey, I needed a job” excuse only goes so far when the job is building deportation infrastructure and missile targeting software that ends up blowing up schoolchildren. That shit sticks to people. And it should.

The second is that better-late-than-never still matters. The PCL employees pushing back internally, the Slack threads demanding accountability, the rogue AMAs organized without leadership’s blessing — this is the kind of pressure that has, in the past, gotten Google to drop Project Maven (which the amoral Palantir, naturally, swooped in to take over). Internal dissent is one of the only mechanisms that actually constrains what companies like this do. When employees stop accepting the rationalizations, things change. Sometimes the company changes. Sometimes the employees leave and build something better. Either one is better than just letting things continue as they are.

You can argue that Palantir taking on Project Maven when Google dropped it means that internal protest is fruitless, but that’s simply not true. Internal protest makes it more expensive and difficult for companies to get away with doing bad things. It may not stop them all, but it adds real friction. And if, as now, we start to add some real social baggage for being the software devs who were “just coding for a paycheck,” it can definitely make a bigger difference over time.

Which brings us back to why Karp’s manifesto might end up being a strategic disaster even setting aside the moral question. Palantir’s value proposition has always rested on a kind of plausible deniability: yes, we build surveillance tools, but we have a civil liberties team, we care about safeguards, we’re the responsible adults in the room. The manifesto torched that framing on purpose. And now the company’s own engineers are saying, in writing, that the post is making it harder to sell software, harder to recruit, harder to defend the work to friends and family.

These kinds of things should be costly. That’s how society prevents people from just going along with enabling horrendous human rights violations because the pay and perks are decent.

And at Palantir, the skulls are on the cap. Some people are finally noticing.

Hans, are we the baddies? Yeah. You probably are. So, are you going to keep wearing those skulls?

Filed Under: are we the baddies, culture, employment
Companies: palantir

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