Today, Rockstar is under threat of a similar leak. The company has acknowledged that hacking group ShinyHunters gained access to Rockstar information through a third-party data breach, namely that of Anodot, and has threatened to leak all that data if it isn’t paid by Rockstar.

ShinyHunters claim to have breached Rockstar’s outsourced Snowflake cloud storage system by way of a third-party analytics tool, Anodot, which reportedly suffered its own breach recently. With authentication tokens from Anodot, ShinyHunters would not have needed to crack Snowflake’s security directly⁠. They would have just been recognized as an authorized party and let in through the front door, like Agent 47 in a security guard outfit. ShinyHunters claims to have had access to Rockstar’s database for a significant amount of time before it was realized anything was amiss.

“Your Snowflake instances were compromised thanks to Anodot.com. Pay or leak,” ShinyHunters wrote in a post on their site. “This is a final warning to reach out by 14 Apr 2026 before we leak along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way. Make the right decision, don’t be the next headline.”

Unlike the previous hack and threat of a leak, however, Rockstar appears to be taking a completely different tactic. In addition to once again refusing to pay any ransom, which is absolutely the correct course of action, the company has also basically shrugged its shoulders over this entire situation.

Rockstar quickly responded to Kotaku saying that while “a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed,” the incursion would have “no impact on our organization or our players.”

There’s still no clear idea of what data has been taken, but Rockstar is certainly playing it very cool. ShinyHunters, should it go through with plans to publish the information, will likely post it to its dark web pages from which it’ll eventually filter to the wider public.

Now, I want to be careful to not give Rockstar any undue credit here. As discussed below, the type of data that was gained in this particular breach is far more banal than the previous one, which included actual unfinished game footage, and perhaps it’s that which explains this change in stance.

But I would argue that this is mostly the right course even if that weren’t the case. You can’t bottle up the genie once the leak is out there, so you might as well put your PR hat on and engage with the public in a way that puts the company and the product in the best light, while also acknowledging the thirst for more information on the unreleased game.

This is something we’ve advocated for for years now. It’s a simple as putting out a statement roughly like:

Hey, everyone! We know there might be a leak about our company and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto title coming out soon and we know you’re interested in anything you can get your hands on about the game. We are too! We want you to see the game, but we do prefer you see it in its finished state. But if you can’t wait that long, we understand. Please just also understand that we are something of a victim in all of this. It kind of hurts and is frustrating to have our plans for this release get derailed by this kind of criminal activity, but all we ultimately care about is making sure you know just how awesome the next GTA is going to be!

Good will would abound, the hackers wouldn’t get the payout that wished for, and the company could appear awesome, and, more importantly, human. I very much hope that this response from Rockstar thus far is an indication that that’s where the company is headed with all of this.

In this case, ShinyHunters did eventually release the leaked info, and you can see why Rockstar didn’t care:

Looking at the structure of the data, it does appear to come from automated exports generated by analytics pipelines. The files are compressed CSV outputs, commonly used for batch reporting in cloud data platforms like Snowflake. This supports earlier reporting that the access point was not Rockstar’s core network but a third-party analytics integration, believed to involve Anodot.

Some of the files also reference internal monitoring and testing. For example, dataset names linked to cheat detection models and platform-level revenue mismatches suggest the data includes operational insights used by Rockstar teams to manage gameplay balance and detect abuse. There are also references to Zendesk ticket metrics and customer support reporting, indicating visibility into service operations rather than individual player accounts.

What is not present in the leaked material is just as important. There are no player credentials, account data, or unreleased game assets such as GTA VI content. That aligns with Rockstar’s earlier statement that the breach involved limited company information and did not impact players.

So perhaps Rockstar’s reaction is more explained by the lack of any really problematic content in the leak. But, still, it is a reminder that you don’t have to completely freak out over every leak.

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 round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• The Darkest Web (BBC)
• Federal agencies skirt Trump’s Anthropic ban to test its advanced AI model (Politico)
• Anthropic Opposes the Extreme AI Liability Bill That OpenAI Backed (Wired)
• Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media, Estonia says (Politico EU)
• Statement by President von der Leyen with Executive Vice-President Virkkunen on the digital age verification app (European Commission)
• Apple threatened to remove Grok from the App Store over sexualized deepfakes, letter says (NBC News)
• A fake Ledger app on the Apple App Store drained $9.5 million in crypto (Coindesk)
• India’s Decentralized System of Internet Censorship (Tech Policy Press)
• As Social Media Tears Society Apart, a New Crop of Scary Movies Focuses on the Horror of Content Moderation (Variety)

We’re still yet to find a Ctrl-Alt-Speech 2026 Bingo Card winner — could this week be your lucky day? Play along!

People will point to the bipartisan nature of many of these current laws to push back on the idea that it’s truly a right wing effort. Australia’s monstrosity of age-gating laws was adopted by the collective efforts of center-left and left-wing political parties part of the ruling government. The Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom was the brainchild of Conservative Party MPs under former Prime Minister Theresa May, but the Labour government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now carrying out the policies of the sweeping digital regulatory measures in national law.

But age verification laws, today, originate from right-wing and far-right efforts to restrict access to porn and other content that could be classified as “harmful to minors.” As documented extensively by academics, cybersecurity experts, folks here at Techdirt, and in my own investigative journalism, these laws define content as “pornographic” or “harmful to minors” under such broad definitions.

For example, the age verification law in Kansas defines the material on the internet covered by the harmful classification to include “acts of homosexuality.” That terminology is a clear nod to the not-too-long-ago era of unconstitutional state sodomy laws that made it a criminal offense to have same-sex sexual activity. The Texas age verification law intended to compel online adult entertainment platforms to plaster public health warnings about the ostensibly addictive nature of watching pornography. There is no accepted evidence of this.

It is also worth noting that out of the 26 U.S. states with age verification laws that explicitly target pornography and adult content on the books, are regarded as “red” states with Republican-controlled state legislatures. Many have a one-party rule in both the legislative and executive branches, such as in Missouri, where I am based. All 26 states that enacted porn age-verification laws as of 2026 voted Republican in the 2024 presidential election, indicating a strong geographic overlap with red states. While I do hold that this doesn’t suggest strong ideological clustering, it shows a strong partisan alignment.

Many of the age verification laws that cover pornography originated in Republican-controlled legislatures, but a few Democratic governors — including the one who signed the first such law in Louisiana — approved them. This reflects bipartisan expansion in some capacity, but this is certainly not a consistent statement of bipartisan effort. Rather, it is partisan pressure patterns. If you consider the bipartisan adoption of age verification laws, this could reflect a familiar pattern of support during the passage of the FOSTA-SESTA statute.  Early religious conservative and right-wing efforts to curtail sex trafficking on the internet built up broader support as political pressures mounted on left-wing politicians by organizations like SWERF feminist groups to be early supporters to the law as well (e.g. Richard Blumenthal). While this does not prove that Democratic officials supported such measures because of clear pressure, the political pressure dynamics rely on the framing that age verification laws should be a no-brainer in “protecting kids” across the internet.

The simple reality is that the right wing strongly backs age-verification laws in the United States. It is a major enterprise dominated by social conservatives, MAGA supporters, Christian nationalists, and anti-LGBTQ+ activists, among others. Yes, they have convinced some centrists and progressives to join in, but it’s difficult to ignore where this entire push came from and who supported it initially.

Case in point: Project 2025 and the coalition of organizations tied to the Heritage Foundation-led effort. Much has been written on the Project 2025 and its so-called “proposals” to outlaw online pornography and deprive such speech of First Amendment protections. One of the architects of Project 2025, Russ Vought, was caught on hidden camera explaining how age verification laws could be used as a “backdoor” to adopt the demanded porn prohibitions nationally. Through this lens, the backdoor approach seems to be working, and those on the left wing further advance the efforts by further encompassing entire swaths of the internet that aren’t even remotely classified as pornographic and “adults-only.” The trade group representing many of these age verification companies has openly lobbied alongside many of these groups in favor of age verification laws.

And the efforts are now proving successful, despite the clear implications on freedom of speech, especially for individuals who are a part of the LGBTQ+ community. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is openly endorsing an Australia-style social media ban for individuals under the age of 16. Evidence continues to grow that Aussie-style bans can easily be circumvented, proving age gating is still not a “settled” tech. It is not “settled,” despite what proponents of these laws and the companies that develop this technology continue to claim. Congressional proposals like the Kids Online Safety Act were introduced with bipartisan co-sponsorship led by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. Blackburn, specifically, began courting anti-LGBTQ+ groups to back the Kids Online Safety Act by presenting the proposal as a means to block forms of LGBTQ+ speech—all expression with First Amendment protections.

And once these types of frameworks exist, the history suggests they rarely remain limited to their original targets. Obviously, not every supporter of age verification laws shares the same goals and ideology. But it does mean we should be honest about where these laws came from and who built the playbook that others are now following. Bipartisan support doesn’t erase these glaring origins and how right wing religious groups have laundered this into more progressive spaces by claiming it’s all about protecting children. Is it currently and exclusively right-wing? No. Is it right-wing in nature and origin? Yes. If these policies do carry the DNA of earlier right-wing efforts to regulate sexuality and expression, then we should not be surprised when they expand beyond pornography and into other forms of the lawful speech we all consume. There is a real danger here—not just who supports these laws today, but what they are capable of becoming tomorrow. Bipartisan support may change the optics, but it does not change the reality: this is still, at its core, a right-wing effort. Nothing changes that.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

The Trump administration has no problem with embracing bigotry. That much has been made clear by the guy at the top of the org chart.

While most presidents — no matter how racist — would at least try to present something “statesmanlike” when talking to the public, Trump has delivered his hatred of non-whites in press conferences and social media tweets. He has frequently referred to non-white countries as “shitholes” and their citizens as “low IQ.” He has claimed Latin America and South America are “sending” the US nothing but terrorists, drug dealers, and rapists.

He has also asked publicly why we can’t get more immigrants from predominantly white countries, like Switzerland, Norway, and other countries where blue eyes and blond hair are commonplace. (The answer, of course, is that citizens of those countries actually like the nations they reside in, what with their sensible governments, the prioritization of social safety nets over golden parachutes, and affordable health care. They also prefer their government not be run by criminals and rapists, nor overly forgiving of certain terrorists.)

In hopes of replacing the browner people he’s actively displacing in his War on Migrants, Trump reached out to the supposedly persecuted white people of South Africa, which has only recently made steps towards treating Black people like human beings, rather than possessions or low-level subordinates. Having seen some out-of-context viral video, Trump was convinced white South Africans were being oppressed by Black South Africans, much in the same way he became convinced Haitian refugees were eating people’s pets and/or local water fowl.

All of this racism is now traceable. It’s in the official numbers, as Alex Ip pointed out on Bluesky. The latest refugee numbers compiled [PDF] by the State Department (and released every month) show there’s a new replacement theory in operation here — one that hopes to fill the US with as many white people as possible.

Between October 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, 4,499 refugees were admitted to the US. All five pages (10 states each) tell the same story: every single refugee admitted during this six-month period was from South Africa. The only exception? Three Afghan refugees who are now residing in Colorado and who arrived here last November.

Since last November, every refugee has been from South Africa. While it may be presumptive to assume that every South African admitted was white, it’s the kind of assumption that’s safe to make because this administration publicly stated it’s only interested in rescuing white South Africans from largely imagined “racial violence.”

The state-by-state breakdown makes it clear the South Africans who have taken advantage of this refugee status are there because Trump rolled out the white carpet for them. The two states with by far the largest numbers of South African refugees are Texas (551) and Florida (331) — both deeply red states that are fully MAGA cooked. California runs a close third with 316, but that’s because California has always attracted arrivals from foreign countries, much in the same way it has attracted US citizens from all over the nation, with its promises of beaches, warm weather, and plenty of places to work while you wait for your script to be optioned.

The only thing working against the administration is all the efforts it’s made to prevent non-citizens from having any rights, much less an opportunity to vote. I’m sure the White House’s finest legal minds (smash cut to a million monkeys with typewriters and Trump U law degrees) are busy finding a way to speed run the naturalization process, but only for refugees admitted to this country since last November. The other irony is some South Africans who’ve taken advantage of this are now claiming they’d rather go back to living in the country they “fled” from because it seems far less dangerous than remaining in a country run by people who prefer fascism to democracy.

This is about as openly racist as it gets. And yet, it’s just going to end up being more bigoted flotsam that will be pushed aside by the next burst of awfulness by this administration. There will be more where this came from. Sooner or later, some of it will manage to break the surface.

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

That means every single one of the five major advertising agency holding companies in the United States has now been successfully pressured by the federal government to stop using NewsGuard’s ratings. All of them. Entirely because NewsGuard expressed opinions about conservative news outlets that some powerful people found inconvenient.

I seem to recall some fairly dramatic freakouts from supposed ‘free speech absolutists’ about government pressure on media organizations constituting a massive First Amendment crisis. Strange that none of those people are speaking up about this. Many seem downright supportive.

I also seem to recall that in NRA v. Vullo, just two years ago, the Supreme Court said that government employees are not allowed to threaten companies not to do business with others because of disfavored opinions. The MAGA crowd celebrated that ruling. And now they’re doing the exact same thing that Vullo was accused of, except even more directly.

The United States government has successfully prevented a private journalism organization from doing business with the entire major advertising industry. All because NewsGuard expressed opinions about the reliability of news sources, and some of those opinions hurt the feelings of conservative media outlets — most notably Newsmax.

The FTC is leaning hard on an extraordinarily stretched interpretation of antitrust law to pull this off. The FTC’s complaint alleges that the three remaining major ad agencies — WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu — colluded through trade associations to establish common “brand safety” standards, and that this collusion constituted an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman Act. Since they’d already gotten the other two, Omnicom and IPG, to agree to stop using NewsGuard as a condition of their merger approval, the full set is covered.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who promised when he took the job to “end politically motivated investigations” (he meant Lina Khan’s, not his own), offered some truly rich language in the press release:

“The ad agencies’ brand-safety conspiracy turned competition in the market for ad-buying services on its head,” said Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson. “The antitrust laws guarantee participation in a market free from conduct, such as economic boycotts, that distort the fundamental competitive pressures that promote lower prices, higher quality products and increased innovation.

“As we explain in our complaint, the brand-safety agreement limited competition in the market for ad-buying services and deprived advertisers of the benefits of differentiated brand-safety standards that could be tailored to their unique advertising inventory,” he continued. “This unlawful collusion not only damaged our marketplace, but also distorted the marketplace of ideas by discriminating against speech and ideas that fell below the unlawfully agreed-upon floor. The proposed order remedies the dangers inherent to collusive practices and restores competition to the digital news ecosystem.”

The ‘marketplace of ideas’ — that’s a fun phrase to invoke while using government regulatory power to prevent private companies from subscribing to a journalism ratings service because you don’t like what the ratings say. Ferguson is claiming to restore the marketplace of ideas by directly removing a participant from it.

Strip away the out-of-context, ominous-sounding internal email quotes, and the complaint describes something far less scandalous than the FTC wants you to believe.

The advertising industry, through trade associations (the 4As’ Advertiser Protection Bureau and the World Federation of Advertisers’ GARM initiative), developed common standards for what kinds of content advertisers might not want their brands associated with. This is a practice that has existed in advertising forever — brands don’t want their logos next to terrorist recruitment content, pornography, or content promoting illegal activity. That’s what “brand safety” means. The industry then expanded those standards over time to include categories like “misinformation” — and, in doing so, some individual agencies chose to use NewsGuard’s ratings, among other tools, to help implement those standards.

The complaint makes this sound terrifying through selective quoting. The most dramatic bit is this, from GARM, cautioning participants about discussing their coordination publicly:

The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.

That’s a colorful quote! But it’s also a joke. Fairly obviously. What it describes — trade associations encouraging discretion about internal industry discussions — is routine. What matters is whether the underlying conduct is actually anticompetitive in a way the Sherman Act cares about. And that’s where the complaint falls apart. This was about setting brand safety standards. Not about preventing competition.

In a real antitrust case involving a cartel, you’d see competitors agreeing to fix prices, divide markets, or restrict output to inflate profits at consumers’ expense. What the FTC describes here is companies subscribing to the same third-party ratings service and incorporating it into their own, independent brand safety strategies. That’s like saying five banks are running an illegal conspiracy because they all use FICO scores and independently decided not to lend to borrowers with scores below 600. Common inputs don’t equal coordinated outputs. The FTC’s own complaint includes evidence of the agencies competing on brand safety — a Publicis executive explicitly strategized about creating a better brand safety guide than WPP’s, and recommended distributing it only internally to maintain competitive advantage:

She further recommended, with emphasis, “only distribut[ing] this internally and for clients,” not putting it “publically on our website as GroupM [WPP] did.”

That’s competition. That’s exactly what a market without collusion looks like. Companies see what their rivals are doing, and try to do it better.

The complaint acknowledges that the Interactive Advertising Bureau itself recognized that “Advertising quality is in the eye of the beholder” and recommended “a nuanced approach rather than blocking entire content categories or keywords.” The agencies were, in fact, trying to develop exactly such nuanced approaches — and the evidence the FTC presents shows them debating and disagreeing about how to handle “misinformation” as a category. One agency executive described the topic as “complicated and important” and suggested tabling it. Others had “a ton of back and forth discussion” and were “close, but not 100% there.” This is just what happens when industry participants work through a difficult issue. It can look an awful lot like what the FTC calls conspiracy if you strip away enough context and squint hard enough.

The real tell, however, is the remedy. If the FTC genuinely believed the problem was anticompetitive coordination between ad agencies, the remedy would be straightforward — “stop coordinating and compete independently on brand safety standards.” Make your own decisions. Develop your own tools. Compete.

That’s not what the consent decree says. Instead, the order will “ensure that each of the biggest U.S. advertising agencies are prevented from engaging in agreements that would set common brand safety standards or restrict advertising based on biased and politically motivated criteria.” And in the Omnicom/IPG merger conditions, the language was even more explicit: The merged company was prohibited from using any service that “reflects viewpoints as to the veracity of news reporting and adherence to journalistic standards or ethics.”

That is entirely about punishing companies that ranked conservative news sources as untrustworthy. It’s about punishing speech.

The government is prohibiting private companies from using services that express viewpoints about the veracity of news reporting. That’s a content-based restriction on speech, imposed through regulatory coercion, targeting specific viewpoints the government disfavors. In any other context, the people pushing this would call it censorship — because that’s exactly what it is.

And we know this remedy was specifically tailored to target NewsGuard because Newsmax told us so. As we covered when NewsGuard filed its lawsuit against the FTC, when the original Omnicom/IPG merger conditions didn’t quite capture NewsGuard, Newsmax swooped in to fix that. As detailed in the lawsuit:

Newsmax was not subtle about its aim. Its fourteen-page letter mentioned NewsGuard more than a dozen times. Newsmax echoed Chairman Ferguson’s repeated statements that NewsGuard’s reviews and ratings of news sources based on journalistic standards were “biased” because some conservative­-leaning websites and publications scored poorly.

Not content to rely on the official FTC comment process, Newsmax took to the internet to lobby Chairman Ferguson, members of Congress, and the President. In posts on X directed to Chairman Ferguson, Newsmax asserted the FTC’s proposed order was inadequate because it “makes no mention of ‘censorship’ or ‘targeting conservatives’ and ‘[f]ully allows Omnicom to use left-wing NewsGuard.”

The FTC, in its own press release, stated that it revised the order “in response to public comments,” though the only significant revision that matched a public comment was that one from Newsmax about NewsGuard. They didn’t revise the order in response to the First Amendment scholars and free speech organizations who submitted comments pointing out the obvious constitutional problems. Only in response to Newsmax whining about NewsGuard calling out their failures in journalistic behavior.

The government regulatory agency changed its order at the direction of a media company that was mad about its review score. And now has applied the same framework across the entire industry.

This whole pattern — the origin story of this campaign — deserves emphasis because it exposes the mechanism. NewsGuard, founded by Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz (the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, which makes the “woke leftist” framing particularly absurd), rates news sources based on disclosed journalistic criteria. Even if you disagree with NewsGuard’s criteria, it’s still just… their opinion. Their speech. Some conservative outlets scored poorly. Those outlets complained to sympathetic politicians. Those politicians launched investigations. The FTC chair, who had already publicly stated he intended to use the FTC’s “tremendous array of investigative tools” and “coercive power” to make companies “Do what we say,” sent NewsGuard a sweeping subpoena for essentially every document the company had ever produced — including reporters’ notes and sources — while refusing to even tell NewsGuard what law it allegedly violated. Then the FTC used its merger review authority to ban NewsGuard’s biggest potential customers from doing business with it. And now, with this latest action, the ban extends to every major ad agency in the country.

As NewsGuard’s lawsuit put it:

By accusing NewsGuard of providing “biased” evaluations of news sites, Chairman Ferguson has inverted the relationship between the government and the First Amendment. NewsGuard is a private business that offers assessments of the quality of news sites based on disclosed journalistic criteria. As a matter of law, NewsGuard cannot be a censor. But by asserting FTC control over the market for NewsGuard’s services, Chairman Ferguson has embraced the censor’s role.

This claim that critical speech of favored individuals or organizations is “censorship” is at the heart of the modern GOP’s entire approach to “free speech.” Private companies expressing opinions they don’t like? Censorship. The government using regulatory power to punish private companies for expressing those opinions? Restoring the marketplace of ideas. Up is down. Speech is censorship. Censorship is freedom.

And just to put a final bow on the cynicism here: this complaint was filed in the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division. If that court sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the favored venue for conservative forum-shopping, home to Judge Reed O’Connor, who has been the go-to jurist for everything from challenges to the ACA to Elon Musk’s SLAPP suit against Media Matters. The FTC almost certainly chose this seemingly random venue because they know exactly what kind of judicial scrutiny they’ll face, which is to say: none worth worrying about.

The Commission vote on this action was 1-0-1. Because, remember, Donald Trump illegally fired the two Democratic FTC members and has made no real move to replace them. All that’s left is Chairman Ferguson and the also problematic Mark Meador, who recused himself from this vote. In other words, this “vote” was simply Ferguson agreeing with himself, approving what amounts to a government-imposed blacklist of a journalism company, backed by the attorneys general of eight states, all for the offense of expressing opinions about news quality that some powerful people found inconvenient.

For the record: I’ve been somewhat critical of NewsGuard’s methodology in the past. To me, their rating system has real limitations, and I think people should take any individual rating with appropriate skepticism. In response to me saying that, some at the company have expressed their own displeasure about my criticism of their methodology. But that’s kind of the whole point. My criticism of NewsGuard is more speech. NewsGuard’s ratings are more speech. Advertisers choosing whether or not to use those ratings are exercising their own rights. Every layer of this is speech and association, all the way down. The one layer that has no business being here is the federal government deciding which speech-about-speech private companies are allowed to subscribe to.

The party that spent years screaming about the “censorship industrial complex” — a supposed conspiracy between government and private entities to suppress disfavored speech — just built an actual censorship apparatus targeting a journalism organization. They used a tortured antitrust theory as the weapon, out-of-context trade association emails as the pretext, and a hand-picked court as the rubber stamp.

And they did it all while claiming to defend free speech.

The Biden administration, for its faults, at least tried to tackle some of this. The Biden FTC considered new and popular rules outlawing “junk fees”. The Biden FCC also implemented rules that didn’t ban sleazy fees (unfortunately), but forced broadband ISPs to clearly list them out at the point of sale (something recently dismantled by the Trump administration).

The Trump administration (and its courts) has taken an absolute hatchet to U.S. consumer protection on regulatory autonomy, ensuring that the problem of predatory fees is much worse across every sector you interface with. So it was funny to see Wall Street Journal reporters recently openly wondering why there are so many shitty fees all of a sudden (non-paywalled alternative):

“An extra 3% for paying with a credit card. A 5% involuntary contribution to a restaurant’s employee wellness fund. $25 a month in addition to rent for trash collection.  

Consumers already weary of rising inflation are now contending with a new crop of costs that are hidden in plain sight. New fees or surcharges are popping up everywhere as companies search for ways to recoup their own rising costs while blaming outside pressures.”

The WSJ reporters and editors decided to cover soaring sleazy fees, but at no point in the article do they mention (even in passing) that Trump has dismantled most of the (already fleeting) efforts to rein in such predation. Or that the Trump Supreme Court has issued numerous rulings effectively making it almost impossible for regulators to fine corporations or hold them accountable for bad behavior.

The article mentions that the Trump FTC did grudgingly implement the Biden-era plan to ban junk fees, but they don’t think it’s worth mentioning that the Trump administration refuses to enforce it:

“The Federal Trade Commission banned drip pricing in short-term lodging and live-event ticketing in 2025, citing research showing that consumers were manipulated by low initial prices even when the full cost was eventually disclosed.”

They also don’t think it’s worth mentioning that the worst offenders of this kind of stuff, like Ticketmaster, were recently let off the hook by the Trump FTC via a piddly settlement (that left states, which had partnered with the FTC legally, high and dry). They’ve chosen to cover consumer protection, but not really. Not with any sort of interest in full, contextual reality.

While this particular instance is the Wall Street Journal, you’ll notice this same habit across most of corporate media. They’re dedicated to an alternate reality where Trump isn’t historically corrupt, and the regulators you’ve historically trusted to be at least semi-present to police the worst offenses are still dutifully on the beat protecting the public interest.

It’s of course a reflection of ownership bias seeping into editorial (most media owners are affluent Conservatives or Libertarians who like tax cuts, rubber stamped merger approvals, and mindless deregulation). But it’s also a form of weird normalization bias, where the reporters assume that because regulators have always been there (with natural partisan ebb and flow) they’ll always be there.

But they’re not there anymore. The damage will likely be deadly and permanent, impacting far more than just shitty, sneaky fees. And the press is doing a terrible job informing the public of that fact.

This is particularly amusing because the Wall Street Journal’s own reporting recently highlighted how even the semi-consistent folks within MAGA who sometimes supported things like functional antitrust reform have been easily ousted by lobbyists, but the reporters exploring “why are we getting ripped off more than ever by predatory corporations” aren’t willing to make the obvious connection.

But when that same ecosystem is setup in a way that is wide open to abuse, the fun really begins. That appears to be what is happening right now as Nintendo is removing hundreds of Mario Maker 2 levels made by fans.

The common denominator for these level deletions appears to be the inclusion of a hashtag for “TeamShell,” which is a Discord server dedicated to sharing codes for levels made within the game. Notices about the removal from Nintendo indicate that they were deleted for including “advertising”, which is against Nintendo’s terms of service.

There is no indication that any money is changing hands here. Calling a hashtag to denote that a level was made with a specific Discord server in mind “advertising” is stretching the definition to the point of absurdity. On top of all of this, many of these levels are years old, causing the community to wonder why in the world this was suddenly happening now.

Then someone found this on another Discord server dedicated to the Mario Maker games.

So, who is LMT?

Turns out, the YouTube account linked to LMT’s Discord profile bears the pseudonym of someone called MT94. As explained in a post on AtWiki, MT94 was, at one point, the second-highest-rated Super Mario Maker player in the world.

Turns out that MT94 cheated their way to that ranking, and they achieved this by using three separate Nintendo Switch consoles. By consistently challenging their own accounts to co-op battles in the game, they managed to boost themselves up the rankings. After the community found out and reported them, MT94’s accounts were banned.

Now, I’ve seen some content out there indicating it was TeamShell that had a hand in exposing MT94’s alleged cheating, but nothing solid enough that I consider firm ground. But it’s clear that there is some kind of vendetta at work here. And, while most of you probably view the deletion of some Mario Maker levels as a tame story at most, it is having very real consequences due to how Nintendo conducts it business.

The truly sad thing is that Super Mario Maker users are also reporting that their Nintendo Switch accounts are being suspended as well, as there seems to be a sort of automatic system in place that suspends a Nintendo Switch account if it’s been associated with a certain number of reports.

Nintendo has a choice. It can remain heavy-handed in this manner when it comes to account suspensions for takedowns, but then it needs to actually investigate claims like this to ensure they aren’t falling for abusive takedown requests. Or it can ease up on the severity of its actions and allow for a counternotice system, or another manner for those falsely accused to avoid consequences.

What it should not be allowed to do is continue to let its own customers suffer severe consequences merely because the system it set up is so wide open for this kind of gleeful abuse.

When governments invoke “misinformation” during wartime, they often mean something simpler: speech they do not control. Since the escalation of conflict between the United States, Israel, Iran, and related spillover attacks in the Gulf, several governments have intensified efforts to silence dissent and restrict the flow of information.

Journalism under pressure

For journalists, the space to operate—already constrained in much of the Gulf—is narrowing further. Across the region, several countries (including the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan) have restricted access to conflict areas, warned of legal consequences for publishing footage, and drawn red lines around wartime reporting. These measures weaken independent coverage, elevate official narratives, and make it harder for the public to get an accurate account of events on the ground.

Reporters Without Borders has documented an intensifying crackdown on journalists across Gulf countries and Jordan, including restrictions on reporting, legal threats, and heightened risks for those who deviate from official narratives. This aligns with the broader warning from the UN that repression of civic space and freedom of expression has significantly deepened across the region during the war.

Criminalizing speech, one post at a time

For ordinary internet users, the restrictions are just as severe. Since February, hundreds of people have reportedly been arrested across the region for social media activity linked to the war. In many Gulf states, the legal infrastructure enabling this is already well-established: expansive cybercrime and media laws criminalize vaguely defined offenses such as “spreading rumors,” “undermining public order,” or “insulting the state”. In wartime, these provisions become catch-all tools: flexible enough to apply to nearly any form of dissent.

In Bahrain, authorities have reportedly cracked down on people who protested or shared footage of the conflict online. The Gulf Centre for Human Rights has reported 168 arrests in the country tied to protests and online expression, with defendants potentially facing serious prison terms if convicted.

In the UAE, authorities have arrested nearly 400 people for recording events related to the conflict and for circulating information they described as misleading or fabricated. Police have claimed this material could stir public anxiety and spread rumors, and state-linked reporting has described the crackdown as part of a broader effort to defend the country from digital misinformation.

Saudi Arabia has also intensified restrictions, issuing a statement on March 2 banning the sharing of rumors or videos of unknown origin, and issuing a campaign discouraging residents from taking or posting photos. The campaign included a hashtag that reads “photography serves the enemy.” Journalists have been prevented from documenting the aftermath of airstrikes on the country. Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan have adopted similar restrictions on wartime imagery and reporting.

Qatar’s Interior Ministry has arrested more than 300 people for filming, circulating, or publishing what the ministry deemed to be misleading information. Taken together, these measures show how quickly wartime speech is being folded into existing legal systems designed to punish dissent.

The regional playbook

What’s striking is how consistent these measures are across different countries. As we recently wrote, governments across the broader region have enacted sweeping cybercrime and media laws over the past fifteen years, which they are now putting to use. Across different countries, the same tools are being used: existing laws, fresh bans on sharing wartime imagery, and tighter restrictions on journalists and reporting. The vocabulary changes slightly from place to place, but the logic is the same: national security, public order, rumors, and social stability are justifications for control.

This is not just a series of isolated incidents. It is a regional playbook for silencing critics and narrowing the public record. Gulf states have long relied on censorship and surveillance; the war has simply made those methods easier to justify and harder to challenge.

From “digital hopes” to digital control

As we’ve documented in our ongoing blog series, digital platforms were once seen—at least in part—as spaces that could expand public discourse in the region. But as we’ve also argued, those early “digital hopes” have given way to systems of regulation and control. 

The current crackdown is a continuation of that trajectory, not a temporary departure from it. States are not just reacting to the war; they are leveraging it to consolidate long-standing ambitions to dominate the digital public sphere.

It may be tempting to see these measures as temporary, but emergency powers—like the one enacted in Egypt following the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat that lasted for more than three decades—have a way of sticking around. Legal precedents that are set during wartime often become normalized—or reinvoked during times of crisis, as occurred in 2015, when France brought back a 1955 law related to the Algerian War of Independence amidst the Paris attacks.

And the stakes are high. As we’ve seen in Syria and Ukraine, regulations and platform policies can cause wartime human rights documentation to disappear. When journalists are constrained and eyewitness footage is criminalized, accountability is weakened. And when arrests become widespread, people learn to self-censor.

Protecting freedom of expression in times of conflict is a requirement for accountability, not a concession to disorder. When people can document, report, and share information freely, it becomes harder for abuses to be hidden behind official narratives. Even in wartime, the public interest is best served by defending the space to tell the truth, not by silencing speech.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Law enforcement is self-selecting. The people who feel drawn to law enforcement are generally the last people you would want to become law enforcement officers. It’s rarely about being given the chance to serve, protect, and be an active part of your community. It’s almost always about having a badge, a gun, and accountability that’s inversely proportional to the amount of power you immediately obtain.

So, it comes as no surprise that cops who shouldn’t have any skin in the anti-ICE game are stepping up to punish people for daring to criticize the actions of those federal officers. And there’s probably a bit of backlash involved here as well, as this following report details the actions of California law enforcement officers who (one assumes) aren’t thrilled the state’s residents have managed to reclaim much of the power that has always been owed to the people.

Despite the administration’s on/off surges in “blue” states, the furor over ICE and its actions hasn’t died down, not even in California, where the administration rolled out its martial law beta test. At first, it was easy to pretend people protesting ICE were “woke radicals” or “antifa” or “paid organizers” or “lazy trans everywhere college students” or whatever. But it just kept going and expanding, clearly demonstrating a significant portion of the population wasn’t on board with roving kidnapping squads and murders of activists by jumpy recruits recently introduced to the wholly domestic War on Migrants.

Now that it’s everyone rather than just the usual left-wing agitprop cliches federal and local officers expected to confront during protests, cops in California are deciding it’s time to start arresting everyone.

The Clovis Police Department on Tuesday referred Alfred Aldrete, 41, for one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for his role in a February high school student walkout. 

“During the investigation, Aldrete was identified as being present during the walkout and allegedly involved in directing student activity and entering the roadway, which impacted traffic flow,” Clovis police said in a press release. “Investigators also identified Aldrete as being present during a separate student gathering in Clovis on Feb. 5 that occurred outside of school hours.”

Yep, that’s what the Clovis PD actually did: it equated an adult ensuring students made it to their planned protest safely with the sort of horrors — harboring runaways, providing drugs and alcohol to minors, etc. — people usually associate with the crime of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Those would be the sorts of crimes actually prosecuted by county prosecutors under this statute.

This stat may explain why the Clovis PD thought it should explore the fringes of this statute for the sole purpose of punishing someone for speech they (and they people they serve, apparently) don’t care for:

[C]lovis, population 128,000, where Donald Trump won every precinct in the 2024 presidential election — some with more than 70% of the vote. 

That tracks. Fortunately, it doesn’t track as far as the District Attorney’s office:

A representative for Fresno County District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp in a written statement said prosecutors would not file charges against Aldrete.

Hooray for prosecutorial discretion, but in the non-pejorative sense! It’s an unexpected twist that only makes this further twist even more inexplicable:

Within a day of the walkout, Clovis police said they were considering charges against up to six adults under Section 272 of the California Penal Code, which is most often used to prevent chronic truancy. The Los Angeles Police Department has also said it’s considering charges against people who joined immigration-related protests under the same penal code section. 

At the beginning of Trump’s first martial law-esque surge, the LAPD (and the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department) were opposed to the insertion of National Guard units and other federal officers into the mix. Stating that they were capable of handling whatever minimal “violent protests” they had actually encountered, law enforcement officials made it clear that this federal interloping would only make a manageable problem unmanageable.

More than a year later, the LAPD has flipped the script from blue to red, declaring it’s willing to charge students for truancy (along with the adults who assist them) for participating in walkout that, at best, lasts a few hours. It’s not like these kids are quitting school to pursue a career in protesting. And it’s not like these adults are harming kids by helping them engage fully with their First Amendment rights.

It’s one thing to be the main characters in a pro-Trump town. It’s quite another to be part of the second-largest police force in the United States and decide it’s worth your time, money, and attention to punish people for peacefully protesting. Fuck right off, LAPD. And take the Clovis PD with you.