Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a hearing all about Section 230, in which they didn’t even attempt to find a witness pointing out its benefits. Among the many organizations that could have provided that vital perspective is the Wikimedia Foundation (as seen in three excellent posts on Medium), and this week we’re joined by Rebecca MacKinnon, Wikimedia’s VP of Global Advocacy and long-time open internet defender, to talk about why the hearing was bad and Section 230 is very, very important.

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bloof, responding to a complaint that our negative coverage of Elon Musk prevents us covering other completely made-up transphobic stuff:

The difference is that the things Elon does is actually happeni9ng, while the things you feel we -should- be concerned about are just 4chan bigot grievance madlibs that have passed through the far right think tank filter. It’s as real as litter trays in school for furries, but boy does it sound good as a thing that is totally happening that people should be mad at… Except whenever people ask for proof, there is none, if there were it would be EVERYWHERE, not just confined to far right blogs, youtube ranters and assholes in comment sections, shithead TERFs at the NYT would be eagerly and thoughtlessly signalboosting it.

There is nothing, you have nothing but insincere shrieks of ‘think of the children’, the same kids you will eagerly see married off to people three times their ages the second they hit puberty should your theocratic dreams ever come to pass. If it ever did, you’d still be a mad incel, angry at some other group because nobody wants to be with a bitter husk, you’d be about as likely to get fucked in that universe as you are to have Elon love you back in this one.

In second place, it’s Strawb responding to the assertion that a content removal demand by a Brazilian Supreme Court justice isn’t a slippery slope:

Yes, it is. Just because you like the outcome doesn’t mean that attempted government censorship is suddenly a good thing.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment about Musk from Strawb, this time reacting to the wild deposition transcript of him and his lawyer:

At this point, I can’t tell if Musk is just sort of a black hole of stupidity, attracting other idiots, or if his own stupidity slowly infects the ones that orbit him.

Next, it’s Cat_Daddy with some clarification on the history of SOPA:

The issue with SOPA wasn’t that it ensured that copyright issues on platforms have to be blocked, it insured that entire websites have to be blocked. That’s like saying YouTube should be blocked because of its copyright infringements. It was a case of copyright maximalism then and it’s a case of copyright maximalism now. And it’s extremely disappointing that Hollywood has learned nothing.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about AI-powered fake copyright trolling threat letters that were actually just an SEO scam:

You people think it’s funny!

But here’s a prime example of AI taking jobs from poor, honest, hardworking, SEO scammers like Jhon Smith!

In second place, it’s an anonymous rejoinder to Musk’s claim that “principles matter more than profit”:

*Offer valid for far-right principles only

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous response to a trollish interloper:

This is Discussion, sir! If you want an argument, please proceed to 12A, down the hall.

Finally, it’s Cat_Daddy again with a comment about the police chief being hailed as a hero for crashing into a car while fleeing a shooting:

He bravely ran away…

That’s all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, Colorado’s net neutrality bill was heading to the governor’s desk while Mitch McConnell was promising a House net neutrality bill would never get past the Senate. The UK proposed a ridiculous plan to fine internet companies for vaguely defined “harmful content” while the European Parliament was moving forward with its regulation of terrorist content (which apparently included much of the Internet Archive). This was also the week that Devin Nunes’s campaign against an internet cow kicked into high gear, followed by him quickly admitting that it was all about fishing for journalists’ sources.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, while Mike Rogers was still pushing the idea that Ed Snowden was a Russian spy, and Michael Hayden was having some anger issues, we learned that the NSA spied on Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and that the agency was (according to Snowden) lying when they say he didn’t try to raise concerns through the proper channels. But the Supreme Court was still not ready to hear a case challenging NSA surveillance. Meanwhile, the MPAA joined the pile-on and sued Megaupload, and their lawsuit was (unsurprisingly) another broadside attack on the internet.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, a dangerous appeals court ruling opened Google up to trademark liability in AdWords, but we also saw a rare example of a sensible AdWords trademark lawsuit. The Associated Press announced plans to sue news aggregators, Senators were looking to ban SMS spam, and Wizards of the Coast got in one of its many conflicts with Dungeons & Dragons fans. U2’s manager was still crusading against the internet, while Sweden’s anti-piracy law boosted the market for encryption technology. And we saw a couple interesting copyright articles, one showing just how ridiculously confusing it can get, and one questioning how it gets around the First Amendment.

One very important thing to understand in the conversation about online speech is that there are many different kinds of online communities, big and small, and they all have their own needs when it comes to rules and governance. This fact is a key element of a new book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life by media studies professor Nathan Schneider, and this week Nathan joins the podcast to talk about how democracy does (and doesn’t) manifest in online communities.

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Jim Jordan demanding major ad companies explain why they won’t advertise on Truth Social:

Far right: we support free speech and free markets!
Businesses: We’ve decided it’s not in our best interest to advertise on this far-right website.
Far right: Advertise there or else!

In second place, it’s That One Guy with an objection to something in our post about Hillary Clinton joining the anti-Section 230 brigade — specifically, our reference to “politicians who don’t understand” the law:

It’s not ‘confusion’ when you’re lying

Once more with emphasis I guess…

Stop. Giving. Politicians. The. Benefit. Of. The. Doubt.

These are people who are either in office or running for it, stop assuming that the reason they keep getting 230 wrong is because they ‘don’t understand’ what might be the simplest law on the books based upon the most basic concept of ‘if you didn’t say if you’re not liable for it’.

There is no chance that they haven’t been corrected repeatedly by actual experts about what the law actually says when they get it wrong and even less chance that they don’t have the ability to get experts on the line within the day if they so desired so if they get something wrong? Make an ‘oopsie’ about what the law says? A tiny little mistake about how the law works?

That’s intentional

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Mamba about the notion that every argument should be debated rather than dismissed or suppressed. It’s a great comment despite a lot of typos:

That is so much bullshit.

Brandolini’s law dictates that you’d have to find a substantially larger number of people to ‘debate’ antivaxers, because one side isn’t ‘arguing’ in good faith. They are willing to outright lie, and when that’s the. And there’s absolutely no reason to engage with them. One doesn’t argue with a fraudster calling on the phone about a Nigerian prince that needs your help. You hang up on them.

Firing others to debate you isn’t a right, but free association is.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment responding to the argument that various existing limitations on the First Amendment suggest other limitations exist or should exist:

Those laws exist because they are exceptions to the default. The reason the laws needed to be passed was because under 1A analysis, corporations could use their right of free association to fire an employee for whistleblowing. So we had to pass laws to advance compelling public interests that were in conflict with 1A. The laws exhibit the default standard for balancing employer/employee 1A conflicts that should apply.

You’ve chosen to assert an exception must exist, but your assertion is just as factually vacuous as the claim that a government can suppress speech because free speech exceptions exist. You are trying to move the point of proving to Mike, and off of Musk, Carano, Et. al.. But they are claiming an exception to 1A ROA exists in conflict with the standard evidenced in law.

Yes, exceptions to the 1A right of association exist. Nothing you have introduced indicates an exception exists in this case. Nor a compelling public policy reason courts should force the AADL to retain Neo-Nazi Skinheads, or the NAACP from retaining an active Klansman.

Over on the funny side, both our winners come in response to the story about Jim Jordan. In first place, it’s a quick anonymous quip:

The advertisers should just hide in a locker room. Gym won’t see anything.

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone passing along a tweet:

Conservatives: LET THE FREE MARKET DECIDE
Free market: decides
Conservatives: this is outRAGEOUS

(All credit to Twitter user @nhbaptiste.)

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with another anonymous comment about Hillary Clinton’s anti-230 comments:

Considering the American popular opinion of her, maybe this will lead to people recognising the importance of Section 230 out of being contrarian.

It’s an idea.

Finally, it’s Nimrod with a joke about the Supreme Court turning down Nick Sandmann’s lawsuit:

Exit Sandmann…

That’s all for this week, folks!

And here we are! We’ve arrived at the end of our series of posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and Deep Cut winner Solar Storm 1928, and Best Digital Game winner Millions of Cats, and today we’re looking at our sixth and final game, Best Analog Game winner Letters To Cthulhu by Lucienne Impala.

A small tabletop roleplaying game is an excellent project to undertake for a jam like this, as putting one together requires nothing more than a clear theme and some written rules, but that doesn’t mean making a good one is easy. To stand out, such a game needs to shine in at least one way whether that’s highly engaging written content for the setting and characters, or rich and interesting rules that suggest gameplay depth, or — as is often the most impressive, and as is the case with Lucienne Impala’s Letters to Cthulhu — a creative and clever core mechanic that brings the entire thing into focus.

The game, which is based on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name and the broader mythos of his works, puts players in the shoes (or robes) of Cthulhu cultists trying to communicate with their dark god. There’s a thematic core that’s essential to this kind of Lovecraftian story and setting: a roiling mixture of ambition, avarice, fear, power, awe, and madness. Lovecraft explored these themes through dozens of stories, while the game takes them on in a mere ten pages of rules.

The game is simple: one player takes on the role of Cthulhu, and will serve as the judge of the outcome, while the rest are tasked with composing the letter that will be judged. The group’s goal is to bring Cthulhu forth into the world, but each cultist is also randomly assigned a secret desire of their own, and each contributes just one sentence to the letter as it’s passed around the group. And there’s a twist: each cultist also has a specific way in which they can alter the previous sentence.

How they use this power (and if they use it at all) is up to them — will they try to manipulate the letter to ensure their own desires are fulfilled, or try to stymie the greed of others and keep the group on track towards its shared goal? Perhaps both, or neither. It becomes a monstrously corrupted game of telephone, where every link in the chain matters. The balance of desires in the final letter will determine the outcome, as the player representing Cthulhu uses a few simple rules (and a lot of freeform narrative creativity) to decide the fate that befalls the group and each individual.

The game is designed to move relatively quickly so it can be played more than once, each time with different players taking on the role of Cthulhu and different desires for all the cultists, and it’s best played with a larger group of 6-8 people. The tense, paranoid, conniving dynamic the game creates is subtle and specific to its source material, and is successfully established by just a few pages of rules that anyone can learn in moments. That kind of design elegance is always worth of note, and earns Letters to Cthulhu the title of Best Analog Game.

Congratulations to Lucienne Impala for the win! You can get everything you need to play Letters to Cthulhu on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut!

And that’s a wrap on this year’s winner spotlights. A huge thanks to everyone who submitted a game this year! We’ll be back next January, as always, with Gaming Like It’s 1929 — and whether you’ve entered the jam before or are thinking about doing it for the first time, it’s never too early to start exploring the many great works that will be entering the public domain in 2025.

We’ve written a lot about the Murthy case at the Supreme Court, and especially how poor of a job the states did in making their argument. Now, as we await the ruling, there are a lot of questions about what it will look like and how consequential it will be. This week, we’re joined by law professor Kate Klonick to discuss what happened, what’s likely to come next, and what kind of impact it will have.

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This week, our first place winner is an anonymous comment invoking a famous quote in response to Missouri suing Media Matters:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

“There must be in-groups whom the law protectes [sic] but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

–Frank Wilhoit

In second place, it’s another anonymous comment, this time about Tennessee’s Senate voting to ban chemtrails:

But if we inject poison into the atmosphere merely as a side effect of making money, that’s still totally cool, right?

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments from the same anonymous commenter, making the same point in response to another commenter whose response to our story about Elon Musk’s latest content moderation escapade was “his site, his rules”. That is of course true, but not the point, as the first comment explained:

Yep. And his rules for his site speak volumes about who he is.

…and as the second comment put even more succinctly:

His bar, his Nazis.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is yet another anonymous comment, this time about a request that right wing trolls show evidence for their bonkers claims:

Dude. Don’t. Last time we asked for evidence, they showed us Hunter Biden’s dick.

In second place, the anonymous streak continues with a comment on our post about the judge slamming Elon Musk for his vexatious SLAPP suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, invoking the record of a certain other commenter:

I’ll just leave this here:

Matthew M Bennett August 1, 2023 at 12:32 pm

You don’t understand the law

If CCDH made substantive claims that were not true, especially if it knew them to be untrue or was doing so with a purpose to hurt Twitter (but neither is required) of course that could be the subject of a defamation claim.

But poor research methodology does not violate the law

Strawman detected. Poor research methodology is not “against the law”, but it doesn’t fucking protect you from a defamation suit, either.

So why is this “clearly” a SLAPP lawsuit? Cuz you really don’t like Musk?

Hey, Twitter lost money over the last 5 years it was public. Not defamation, because truth is an absolute defense.

Do you people think Bratty Matty understands the law better than Mike as he claims?

Well, you can judge for yourself by reading the whole thread the quote above was taken from.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ll throw in one non-anonymous comment this week, with That One Guy offering another response to the call for evidence:

Their girlfriend has all the evidence, you haven’t met her, she goes to another school in Canada.

Last but not least, we’ll let anonymity have the last word with another comment about Elon Musk:

A ten-word short story about this guy’s persecution complex:

I’m being silenced; my merch sales have never been better!

That’s all for this week, folks!

We’re closing in on the end of our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and Deep Cut winner Solar Storm 1928, and today we’re looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: Millions of Cats by Javi Muhrer, Chris Muhrer & McCoy Khamphouy.

Most of the submissions we receive in these jams come from solo designers, but this game is a powerful demonstration of what a small team can accomplish. By splitting up the tasks (Javi Muhrer did the programming, Chris Muhrer designed the levels, and McCoy Khamphouy created the art) were able to achieve something fairly rare in the jam: a complete video game, built from the ground up with all original elements. Based on the early American picture book of the same name by Wanda Gag, Millions of Cats is a classic puzzle platformer that offers everything you’d expect from such a title: a clever core mechanic that’s easy to understand and seems simple at first, but which must be used in increasingly creative and thoughtful ways through a series of increasingly challenging levels.

As the player, you control the character described in the original book only as “the very old man”, who is plagued and/or blessed by avid followers in the form of unlimited cats. With a button press, you can spawn more and more cats to trail behind you and copying your actions, and though you can’t control them directly, with some clever movement you can maneuver them to press buttons and help you reach the end of each level. Your score can be increased by using as few cats as possible, adding a great “find the true solution” challenge that gives puzzle games like this more replay value.

After a couple of levels, it quickly becomes clear how this mechanic can easily serve as the engine for all kinds of puzzles. That alone would be a satisfying prototype and more than enough for a game jam entry — the kind of thing a solo developer could pull off too. But this small team didn’t stop there. By having a dedicated level designer, they were able to include a pretty full slate of levels (I’m not quite sure of the final count, as I didn’t get to the end!) that explore several aspects of the core mechanic. Level design is so critical to puzzle platformers like this, so it really pays off. And while all this could have been presented with placeholder graphics or something generic, instead we get handcrafted original sprites and backgrounds, and even a custom title treatment for the game.

Overall, this is probably the most ambitious video game project we’ve had as an entry in these game jams, and it absolutely lives up to that ambition. That’s a testament not just to the skill and talent of the individual designers, but also to their ability to organize and coordinate a development project like this while each focuses on their area of expertise. It’s no surprise that Millions of Cats is this year’s Best Digital Game.

Congratulations to Javi Muhrer, Chris Muhrer & McCoy Khamphouy for the win! You can play Millions of Cats in your browser on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with the final winner spotlight.

Last year in September, we released a cross-post episode of Mike’s appearance on the DWeb Decoded podcast with Danny O’Brien. If you listened to that episode, you know that Mike and Danny go way back, and Danny played an important role in the founding of Techdirt. This week, we’ve got the inverse counterpart to that episode, with Danny joining Mike here on the Techdirt podcast for a discussion about decentralization and “cognitive liberty” (and a bunch of other topics).

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.